Married Dads are Hot Now

For the good of the human species, the sexiest women all need to fuck dads

The following is the transcript of my troop deployment (i.e. ending rant) from episode 107 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

Episode 107 - Congress is Doing Things for Once

The most recent Bayesian Conspiracy episode is about pronatalism. Malcolm and Simone Collins were on, talking about how if we’re going to save the future, we need to form an extremely fertile subculture where it’s common to have upwards of 8 children.

There’s been a lot of talk about why fertility is falling, and lots of theories, and I’m not sure of the root causes here, but what I am confident of is that people are having fewer children because having children isn’t high-status enough. In most social circles, having children isn’t cool. And if you want people to do anything, they need to see it as a way of achieving status in their peer group. The Collinses are trying to brute-force this by essentially breeding their own culture with high fertility built in, and I wish them luck, but some of us aren’t willing to give up on our current subcultures.

I’ve lived through a few cultural shifts, and here’s my main takeaway: in the modern world, cultural shifts are driven by women because men will adopt whatever beliefs get them laid. I hate to be gender-essentialist about this, but we’re talking about large-scale culture, and unfortunately, despite plenty of exceptions, these dynamics are gendered in the aggregate. Much has been written about how our culture has been essentially feminized over the last 70 years or so, and it’s true! Our mainstream cultural values have shifted over time to be much more in line with the average woman than the average man. And it’s largely because women somehow managed to coordinate well enough to communicate to men that these were the values that would get them attention. True to form, the men adopted those values. I certainly got the message, in my teen years, that women weren’t interested in sleeping with conservative men, and by god I make sure to develop a healthy appreciation for feminism. 

So if we’re going to shift the culture to encourage people to have more children, then beautiful women: it’s up to you! We need all the hottest women to set their sights on fucking dads. If all the sexiest women get together and start putting out the message that childless men are unattractive, you’ll see the culture shift immediately. Men will be falling all over themselves to see who can have more kids. And once men desperately want to be fathers, the status of mothers and potential mothers will rise, since that will be the bottleneck.

Which brings us to why you need polyamory. Ideally, fathers aren’t single. You don’t want to promote an incentive structure where the high-status move for men is to father children but leave the home. You want to encourage fathers to raise their children along with the mother. But in monogamous relationships, that means fathers can’t enjoy the fruits of their new high status. And if dads aren’t actually getting laid, it won’t be high status for long. Either there is rampant cheating, rampant nonmonogamy, or else you’re never going to make being a parent cool. 

So sorry monogamists, but this is for the good of the human species. If you want us to survive, we all have to agree that married dads are hot now. I don’t make the rules.