In this episode of the Quillette Podcast, host Zoe Booth speaks with Dr Dani Sulikowski, an evolutionary behavioural scientist and senior lecturer at Charles Sturt University.

They discuss the sociocultural and evolutionary forces driving the collapse in fertility across Western societies. Dr Sulikowski examines how intrasexual competition among women, declining testosterone in men, and shifting norms around gender and motherhood may be suppressing reproduction—often unconsciously.

The conversation also explores contentious topics such as surrogacy, abortion, and assisted dying, viewed through the lens of long-term civilisational sustainability.

Transcript

Zoe Booth: I’ve been very interested in this topic of fertility decline. It was something I was never that interested in until I turned, I don’t know, 28, 29, and started thinking about having kids myself, and now I’m obsessed with the topic. Australia has a declining fertility rate like most OECD nations. You have some really fascinating theories on why that’s the case. Could you tell our audience a little bit about your theory?

Dani Sulikowski: Okay, so we can start small and then continue to add layers and get more big-picture and more complex. But the very basics of human behaviour—or indeed any animal behaviour—is this idea of competitive reproduction.

The currency of evolution is reproductive success. If you have more offspring in the next generation, your genes become overrepresented in that generation. If that continues, generation after generation, then your lineages effectively dominate and come to be what’s there. Therefore, whatever behaviours and any other traits those genes cause due to behaving well—that becomes how the population behaves. Right? Basic principles of selection.

What that means is that all individuals are under selection pressure to win that competitive race. That means not just maximising your own reproductive success, but actually minimising the reproductive success of rivals around you. That’s what we call intrasexual competition.

ZB: It’s fascinating, and I assume men and women have different ways of reducing that reproductive capability in rivals?

DS: Yeah, that’s right. The fundamental biological difference between men and women is that men have the small gametes—sperm—which they give to the women. Women have the large gametes, which means they receive the opposite sex’s DNA, and then they’re the ones actually responsible for making the offspring.

Most people are probably familiar with the idea that a population—or a society—can and frequently does send large numbers of men off to fight and die in wars. And the reproductive capacity of the population doesn’t necessarily change as a result, because women are the rate limiters of population. Right? Women, by virtue of how reproduction works, can have a finite number of children. Men can potentially father an infinite number.

So a population can afford to sacrifice a lot of men in something like a war. And the small number of men left are sufficient to support the women remaining to effectively replace the lost men in one generation. You can’t do the same thing with women.

ZB: I’ve heard it explained as sperm is cheap and eggs are expensive—perhaps the most expensive per pound. I think our writer Rob Brooks said that it’s not diamonds or oil, it’s eggs—human eggs.

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DS: That’s right. They’re very valuable. They’re kept inside. Men’s sperm can be spread around anywhere, but because women’s eggs have to be kept inside and take an entire woman to percolate over time, you can only do one at a time. Maybe two if you’re lucky, but essentially one-point-something on average—not many.

So now, looking at it from the position of intrasexual competition, if a woman wants to increase her net reproductive success, she needs to reproduce at a rate greater than the background population rate—so she can have more babies. That’s one way. Another way is to try to reduce the net reproductive rate by influencing rivals to have fewer children.

If you have two children in a population where the background population rate is 1.8, then you’re winning that intrasexual competition race. You’ll become overrepresented in the next generation. If you have two children in a population where the background rate is 2.2, you’re losing. So manipulating the background rate by even a small amount can be the difference between your genes gaining or losing ground in the next generation.

Now, this is something women can do. Limiting other women’s reproductive capacity can lower the overall background rate. Men can’t really affect that by limiting other men’s reproductive capacity—for the same reason we can send huge numbers of men off to war and recover in a generation. Even if a man convinced other men to withdraw from the gene pool, the small number left could still sustain reproduction.

So this technique—manipulative reproductive suppression—really only benefits women.

When men engage in intrasexual competition, it’s a running race: just have as many babies as you can, eyes on the prize, ignore what everyone else is doing. For women, it’s much more about promoting your own reproductive success and investing energy in pulling your competitors back behind you.

That’s the reason for the sex difference. This is a female phenomenon—much less so a male one.

ZB: It’s hilarious to even think about men trying to manipulate other men into not having kids—like boycotting sex. Like men would ever boycott sex. It’s a ridiculous idea. Or they’d say, “Yeah, sure mate, I’m going to boycott,” and then definitely not boycott.

Whereas with women—I talked to Holly Lawford-Smith, who’s a radical feminist academic—and one of the best soundbites from that podcast was her radical idea (which other feminists have said as well): that women should be boycotting sex. It sounds crazy to hear, but you hear variations of it. You hear women say, “I’m sick of men. I’m sick of dating. I’m not doing it anymore. I’m not trying to find a partner. I’m going to be single forever and live with my cat—and I’m fine with that. And if you have an issue with that, you are a bigot,” essentially.

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DS: Oh yeah. And it’s not just in everyday conversation either. It’s part of social discourse now—this narrative that having children oppresses you. It limits your career, your freedom, and has all these negative impacts.

And that’s not just an Australian phenomenon. It’s not even Western-specific. South Korea, if I’m not mistaken, probably has the lowest birth rate at the moment. I think they’re “winning” or “losing” depending on how you look at it.

They’ve had for quite a long time a cultural slogan—it’s referred to as the “Four Bs.” I believe the four words in Korean mean: don’t date, don’t marry, don’t have children. It’s a really strong cultural movement.

And we see this in politics too. You may remember when Trump won the election, a whole bunch of women came out to protest by shaving their heads and declaring they were not going to get married or have children. There were even women having their tubes tied in response—as some kind of feminist, left-wing, or “woke” attack on reproduction.

It perhaps started more gently, but it’s ramping up. My argument around feminism is that I used to say it began as a movement interested in women’s place in society but was co-opted by what’s effectively become reproductive suppression.

Now, I think feminism was always an attack on reproductive output. That’s all it’s ever been. And I think you can explain it from beginning to end with that one principle.

ZB: Such a fascinating topic. I want to go back slightly to this idea that I always knew, but it’s really dawning on me now—just how important and integral sex is. The act of it, but also reproduction, to the human species.

And that, as a woman, that’s why the rape of a woman is such a—such a—is it “derogation”? No, that’s not the right term. Such a violation.

DS: Violation, maybe.

ZB: Violation, yeah. And obviously it is for men as well, but there’s something about it for a woman—because it’s your innate power. As you were saying, women are the reproductive limiters. We have the choice. And when that choice is taken away from you, it’s such a gross violation.

And I guess by women using their sex to negotiate or to protest—it’s such a deep thing. It’s like the last sort of power you have as a woman, to say yes or no to sex, in a way.

DS: Yeah, it is. And I think you’re absolutely right about rape having a very unique position psychologically—because it is, perhaps second only to murder, a complete violation of what almost all aspects of our psychology have been selected for over many years to maximise and finesse: that mate choice and that reproductive success.

To have all those decisions and that autonomy violated is huge. That’s why it is a crime with such a massive psychological impact on women. Not to minimise the impact it has on men—but it is a different crime. Different for men. I’m not going to argue what’s better or worse, but I’ll say that it’s a different crime for men.

And yes, I think it is a decision of some gravity for a woman to use her reproductive capacity as a form of protest—or rather, to hobble her own reproductive capacity as a form of protest.

And I guess what I’d say to that observation is: it’s true. That’s one of the really telling signs that women are being manipulated by other women into doing this. Because, evolutionarily speaking, we need an explanation for why people would behave in that manner.

That should be something—and it is in a lot of ways—something women should guard fiercely. And so the fact that it gets used as a form of flippant and transient political protest requires explanation. It’s not a behaviour we should expect to see and just call “normal.”

ZB: And it’s so close to home. Because I haven’t looked at the studies, I haven’t looked at the data—but I’ve felt it myself.

Firstly, I’ve had many issues in girls’ groups, which I’d love to talk about because your theories explain a lot of that. But one particular girls’ group—the last one I was kicked out of—and I don’t think I’ll join any more. I think that ship has sailed.

This group was a bunch of uni friends—I studied law at uni. Law and politics. I was a massive feminist. Joined the Young Greens the day I could. Marxist, vegan, feminist—the whole gamut.

And I was actually one of the more radical girls in that group. I was known as the most politically outspoken one, which was cool when I was left-wing. Not as cool now—even though I don’t think I’ve changed that much.

But I remember there were about four girls. And one girl—who was also, I’m not sure if this is relevant, but the tallest and the most physically imposing in a way—she would often make comments about girls in our group, and other girls, and disparage them for wanting to get married and have kids.

Pretty much the worst thing you could do in her eyes was drop out of school—Year 10—not do the HSC, marry a guy, become a hairdresser or get some other trade, and become a young mum. That was the most socially embarrassing, low-class, low-intelligence thing you could do.

With maturity—I grew up in Newcastle, a pretty working-class town—

DS: Did you? So did I.

ZB: Yeah!

DS: Okay. Talk more about that. We so understand exactly what’s going on here now. We did it.

ZB: Yeah. But now I look at the girls who did do that—who did drop out of school or maybe didn’t go to uni, got a job and became mothers in their early twenties—they’re really happy.

A lot of them—not all, obviously, you can’t fully generalise—but they’ve had their kids. Now they’re thirty, they’ve pretty much had at least two, maybe three, or they’re going to have more. And they seem financially quite stable.

The ones who ended up with tradies—they own their own businesses. It’s just funny to see how much I have to admit I mocked that too. I thought it was a sign of low status and lowbrow.

Now with hindsight and maturity, I think it’s a very enviable position—that I hope to emulate in the next few years.

DS: Yeah. I think you’re completely right. And I think it’s really interesting—and I’m sure many others have had the same experience—how those life choices are demonised as being low-class.

Because what that reflects—that’s very telling—what it reflects is how much of this is coming down from what people refer to as “the elite.” It’s a bit of a nebulous term—who actually decides who gets to be the elite? But somehow, we all know what we mean by it.

ZB: Cultural influencers.

DS: Exactly. Girls, the influencers. Exactly.

We know there are certain things the elite do: they go to university, they get the degrees, and so on. And it is very much the elite who are pushing the anti-reproductive narratives.

Everything that is feminist began in the universities. That’s a university ideology that has escaped the ivory tower and is now mainstream. But that’s where it began, and that’s where it continues to percolate and to emerge in its newest forms.

It keeps reinventing itself to match whatever would be the most reproductively inhibiting narrative of the day. But it’s that elite pressure put on the people below.

I want to call it “snobbery”—in order to disparage those life choices.

DS: There is a bit of a curve regarding when women should start having children in order to maximise reproductive success. It’s a short window—not necessarily the youngest age—but it is a lot younger than when most women begin now.

ZB: What age do you think it is, more or less?

DS: It would differ in different societies as a function of resources and so on. But you’re probably looking at around early twenties.

Of course, biology comes into it as well. So even though girls become biologically capable of conceiving much earlier, it’s not ideal to become pregnant at those early ages.

There’s an interesting evolutionary game being played when young girls enter puberty, and then their fathers and so on protect them from boys and men while they’re still too young. That tension plays out as the girls age.

ZB: When you say it’s “not ideal,” do you mean socially, or biologically as well? That a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old doesn’t have the—what, width or strength or something?

DS: Yeah, that’s right. So it’s both biological and what you might call socio-ecological.

Biologically, their bodies aren’t necessarily quite ready for it. But socio-ecologically, in order to have solid lifetime reproductive success, the ideal scenario is to have a long-term partner with whom you’re jointly committed to raising children. That’s unlikely to be the outcome if two teenagers—just in an unserious relationship—get pregnant and have a child.

Sometimes it works out, but that’s usually not the case. It’s unlikely that will endure into a lifetime marriage, or even one that lasts for the duration of raising those children. So there are risks to your long-term success—your lifetime family-raising success—if you get pregnant too young.

We tend to see social stigmas around things that aren’t good for society. And certainly, very young girls getting pregnant is not good for society—so we tend to see social stigmas around that.

But it’s absolutely the case that women today, who are delaying pregnancy until their early thirties, are well past whatever would be the ideal peak time. When you balance off the risks of choosing a long-term partner and being confident that it’s a good partner choice, versus having children early enough that your body is still at its peak fertility—not just for pregnancy, but for raising children, which requires a lot of energy.

You haven’t got kids yet, is that what you said?

ZB: Yeah, I’m thirty. Maybe next year or the year after.

DS: Right. So as anyone with children knows, what happens for the next—I don’t know, my daughter’s five, so I can’t say much about after that age—but between zero and five, you don’t get much sleep. And that’s a lot easier for someone in their mid- to late-twenties to deal with than it is for someone like me. I’m 46 now. I had a very late baby.

ZB: You had her at 41?

DS: That’s right.

ZB: That’s beautiful. My parents had me at 38, and they only had one. They’re not even married, actually—they’re the best example of marriage I’ve ever seen! They just went about things differently, which actually isn’t that different by today’s standards, but maybe thirty years ago it was.

I’m not reacting against that. I’m very happy with my childhood and my upbringing—it was idyllic. But I personally—maybe as a form of protest as well, I have to admit—want to have more children.

I’m an only child, my fiancé is an only child, but we would like to have more. And I have to say as well, my fiancé is Jewish. I’m not Jewish, but after October 7 and seeing what’s happened to Israel, the attacks on Jews and Israelis, I’m like—no. I’m going to have Jewish children, as a form of protest in a way.

DS: Yeah. I think another thing that’s happened since October 7 is that people are now paying attention to wokeness and to left-wing politics and all of its different angles in a way they weren’t before.

The leftist response to October 7 has really laid bare what looks on the surface like hypocrisy. You see this, for example, in “Queers for Palestine”—you could not have two ideologies more opposed than those two.

And then you roll into that some of the feminist narratives—certainly some, not all—and again, you find feminists getting behind the Palestinian cause and the “Free Palestine” narrative. But were the Palestinians to be given a state, it would not be a state that any woman would enjoy living in.

No feminist is going to say, “Let’s give the Palestinians a state—because that’s going to be a great place for women.” It obviously wouldn’t be. So again, there’s complete ideological incoherence in the leftist response—except if you consider that all of the leftist narratives are actually aligned by two main things.

The first is reproductive suppression. That explains the feminism, it brings in the trans ideology and the queer narratives. I think it also brings in a lot of the net-zero narratives and the tremendous harm they’re doing to the economy. And it’s very anti-natalist.

We’ve got some data, collected with one of my students this year—we’ll be looking to publish it soon—that shows pro-environmental attitudes feed through this concept of eco-anxiety. People are developing genuine anxiety disorders around the ecology and climate change, and that’s driving anti-natalist attitudes.

Not just “I don’t want to have kids,” but also the idea that having kids is immoral. It really is an attack on natalism, coming in from that angle as well.

DS: And then again, we see support for the Palestinian cause—and it’s not just about Palestine. We see the same rhetoric coming up in Western countries, where there’s a clash between Western values and Islamic values. The narrative being pushed again by the elite—the endorsed discourse—is focused entirely on “Islamophobia.”

We’re not seeing a Left that stands up and says: hang on, the Islamic values being imported or advocated for are tremendously disrespectful to the feminist values and women’s rights that Western societies have placed at their centre for decades. No one wants to acknowledge that.

So, when you look at it from that perspective, all of these seemingly incoherent positions—queer alliances with Islam, feminists supporting anti-women ideologies—they all make sense if you understand the underlying logic as anti-reproductive and anti-woman. Including feminism—because feminism is, at its heart, anti-woman. Most of the things it espouses end up being bad for women, not good.

Alongside that, what we’re seeing is not just manipulative reproductive suppression occurring in isolation—it’s becoming systemic. We’re creating a society that is hostile to reproduction. These anti-reproductive ideas are becoming the mainstream discourse in universities, in education, in governments, NGOs, hospitals—all the places where our society actually operates.

And they’re all adopting this anti-natalist perspective. So we’re creating a civilisation that is openly hostile to reproduction.

ZB: If I understand your position correctly, you believe we’re in this anti-natalist phase—where women are suppressing other women’s reproductive capacity—because society has reached a level of comfort and wealth that makes that possible. Is that correct?

DS: Yes, that’s definitely part of it.

There are a few stages that all civilisations seem to go through. They’re all different, of course, but they have a lot in common. And something that appears to be a reliable pattern is this sequence of events:

Civilisations come together, build things, create infrastructure, sanitation, stability—essentially a more hygienic and survivable world for people. And one major consequence is a drop in infant mortality. Mortality overall drops, but infant mortality especially.

Now, when mortality is high, people have a lot of children because they know some proportion won’t survive. So if you want three children to live and the infant mortality rate is fifty percent, you have six.

But when infant mortality drops, you can have three kids and expect them all to live. So you go from six kids down to three. Same net reproductive output. You’re not trying to maximise numbers, you’re trying to ensure survival. So the number of children per woman declines, and that’s a good thing—it’s an adaptation to better living conditions.

Now, if that was the only thing going on, you’d expect the birth rate to go down and then level off at some new equilibrium—based on better conditions. But that’s not what happens.

What we observe is that birth rates keep falling. They don’t stabilise. They bottom out. And that’s a really interesting phenomenon.

I think the reason that happens is because of female manipulative reproductive suppression. So as a society becomes more developed, women gain time and resources. Mothers can now get the same number of surviving children with fewer pregnancies. They have more freedom, more opportunity.

But also—here’s the critical point—the women who were previously “elite” because they had wealth and better access to survival factors, no longer enjoy that advantage. Everyone now has sanitation. Everyone now has antibiotics and clean water.

So the wealthy women lose their edge—unless they do something new to maintain it.

And what they do is use their excess resources and time to suppress the reproductive success of other women.

We then see a bunch of things happening: increased female presence in all institutions—in councils, boards, workplaces, NGOs, hospitals, etc. And that female presence changes how those institutions operate. That’s the feminisation of institutions.

ZB: Exactly.

DS: And we also see women using their consumer power to change what the “bare minimum” looks like. The “bare necessities” for raising a child today are much more expensive than they were in the 1970s or 1980s.

Today, people think they must have a seventy-inch television. Every family member needs an iPhone. These are considered basic. And that standard is created and policed primarily by women.

So instead of having enough wealth to easily raise children, people are pressured into spending their limited wealth on things that don’t help with reproduction at all—just to maintain social status.

That creates a world where the poor can no longer afford to have children. Or if they do, their kids are deprived and judged. Meanwhile, the elite women—who can meet all these standards and also provide for their children—get their reproductive advantage back.

They’ve created a system that artificially raises the cost of motherhood. And in doing so, they suppress the fertility of the classes below them. That’s how they restore their evolutionary edge.

This explains consumerism, fashion trends, the obsession with lifestyle products—it’s all part of a broader system. We’ve created a world where being “acceptable” in society means spending on things that have nothing to do with reproductive success. So the elite get their advantage back.

ZB: Yes.

DS: As women gain influence in institutions, those institutions become hostile to reproduction. And then what happens, evolutionarily speaking, is one of two things.

Either: the entire system crashes, in which case it can’t be selected for—and we shouldn’t see it again. But we do see it again. We see this pattern repeating in ancient civilisations: Ancient Rome, ancient Arab civilisations. There’s plenty of evidence that they went through the same sequence—the feminisation of institutions, the elite overconsuming, birth rates declining, collapse.

So, if it just ended with collapse every time, it would be selected out. But it’s not—which suggests that someone’s lineages are surviving the collapse and founding the next civilisation.

And once you understand that—once you accept that this is an evolutionary system for determining which lineages persist—then it all starts to make sense.

It’s the women driving the collapse who end up being the ones who do reproduce, while everyone else is slowly discouraged, manipulated, or priced out of reproduction. And the next civilisation is founded by their descendants.

ZB: So it happens again.

DS: Exactly. That’s right. So the minute the new civilisation rises, it is destined for exactly the same path—and the same decline.

ZB: And you say that the women who promote these ideas—these anti-natalist ideas—actually do go on to have children anyway. So their offspring are getting amongst it. But they want other people to...

DS: Yes, that’s right. And that’s really the clincher—identifying who those women are. And not just individually, but at a demographic and group level. There needs to be some coherent qualities that unite them so we can say: yes, in this complex sociopolitical system, this group has the influence and is driving things.

They’re the ones who are actually reproducing.

It’s not easy, though, to separate those who are architects of the suppression from those who are victims of it—but who also promote it. Think of it like a pyramid scheme. You get a few people at the top who know it’s a grift, and they convince others to join and spread it.

Then you have a whole group of people who genuinely believe in the product—they don’t know it’s a scam—and because they believe it, they’re incredibly convincing salespeople.

We see the same thing with reproductive suppression. Many of the women promoting these ideas aren’t consciously sabotaging others. They’ve fallen for it themselves, and that makes them the most effective evangelists.

So you can’t just look at who’s promoting these ideals and assume they’re the ones who are going to reproduce successfully. It’s hard to untangle what people believe from what they actually go on to do.

ZB: My laywoman’s analysis—from looking at Newcastle, for example—is that I’ve seen it over the past few years: just your average, normal girl who grew up in Newcastle, whose parents aren’t university-educated—dad’s maybe a tradie, mum works but didn’t go to uni...

They see the children of the so-called elites—these super-educated women with amazing partners who travel and live exciting lives. And that becomes the standard for what a “cool girl” is. And it’s not just what they wear or do—it’s the beliefs that come attached. The “correct” opinions to have.

And, as we both know, women enforce beliefs on other girls in the group. If you don’t go along with the belief, there are severe repercussions—which I’m sure we’ve both experienced.

I’ve definitely suffered from that in all the girls’ groups I’ve been kicked out of for not going along with the beliefs. It’s genuinely painful—almost more painful than a romantic relationship breakdown. I’ve found it on par, or even worse. It’s so socially hurtful.

Anyway, all this to say: the sort of aspirational middle-class girls are getting these opinions and standards from the upper class. And I’ve just seen the average girls I grew up with going along with opinions that I find quite extreme—like, from a university-educated mindset.

Over the years, they’ve absorbed feminism—but not just basic feminism. Things like “Free Palestine,” the black square on Instagram, pronouns in their bio—just little signals. I don’t think they fully ascribe to the beliefs or even care about them that much, but it’s like a handbag. It’s a symbol.

It says: “I’m this type of girl. I’m cool.” And I fear that those girls—girls like that—are the most susceptible to this reproductive manipulation.

And the girls “below” them—sounds bad—but they’re maybe still having kids. Less affected. Though we’re all affected through social media.

DS: Yeah. No, what you’re describing is ostensibly correct.

I think it’s really important—and I don’t know if men truly appreciate this—but it’s the impression I get. That the social policing among women is very different. Male friendships just aren’t structured the same way.

I do sometimes find it hard to explain to men what female social policing is actually like. But I think most women just understand. You say, “Oh, you’re just not allowed to do that,” and they know exactly what you mean. There are certain things you’re just not allowed to do. You just don’t. That’s it.

And I think that’s something that’s seriously underappreciated: the power that women have to dictate to each other what is and isn’t allowed—what you can wear, think, say, believe, endorse, support. People underestimate just how much power that has among women. But it’s huge.

And you’re absolutely right about the symbols—pronouns in the bio, the flag, the slogan. Most people don’t understand what they’re even advocating for. And if they did understand it, they probably wouldn’t support it. They just know these are the right things to say to stay in the group.

And look, that’s not unusual. It’s a human universal. People rarely make up their own minds about things. They think they do, but they don’t. It takes time and effort to properly research an issue, evaluate it—and people have competing motivations.

If your main motivation is social inclusion, to be liked and accepted, then why waste time thinking critically? Because if you do that, you’ll probably end up going: “Wait, this is nonsense—I don’t agree with any of this.” But then you’ll be socially punished. So people suppress the truth even from themselves.

And as you discovered, once you see through it, those friendships become untenable. So it makes perfect sense that people who are highly socially motivated just go along with the group. There’s no benefit to discovering the truth—just social risk.

That’s why people respond aggressively when you try to explain it to them. You’re threatening their whole social structure. They need that ignorance. That ignorance is what allows them to keep living the way they’re living.

And you’re absolutely right—the average person’s beliefs are a social signal, not a deep philosophical stance. The reason they get so angry when challenged is because the belief was never based on logic. It’s not about ideas; it’s about group membership.

DS: And then there’s pretty good data supporting what you’re saying about who is most affected by these anti-natalist narratives.

Up until recently, there was a negative correlation between socioeconomic status and number of children—that is, the more elite women had fewer children, and women lower on the SES scale had more. But I think that’s changing.

ZB: Wow.

DS: It seems to be flattening out more. So within societies like ours—and someone can probably come on and correct me with more recent stats—but my understanding is that socioeconomic status now doesn’t predict very much at all in terms of how many children a woman will have.

So it suggests that these anti-natalist narratives are filtering further down the SES ladder.

Political orientation is still a big predictor, unsurprisingly. Women who endorse left-wing narratives—who are more progressive—are much more anti-natalist and have fewer children. Conservative women are still having more children than leftist women.

But what’s also happening is that, within specific cohorts of women, we’re seeing some really interesting effects.

For example, within the upper echelons—someone told me about this data recently—female CEOs, the women at the very top of organisations, are actually having more children than the women one or two rungs below them.

So the women who are very high up in companies but not the top—those are the ones working seventy–ninety-hour weeks, foregoing all other aspects of life, and ending up past their reproductive window without having had children.

But the CEOs? The ones in charge of those women? They’re taking time off. They’re having children. Obviously that’s a generalisation, but there appears to be some truth to it.

So we’re starting to see, in limited pockets, these anti-natalist ideas reaching across all social strata. And we’re beginning to see what you’d expect if the elites driving these ideas are the ones whose lineages will survive.

We’re beginning to see evidence that it is the elites who are bucking the trends—and reproducing successfully.

ZB: That’s what makes an elite, in a way—to some extent.

DS: Except they don’t want anyone else to follow what they’re doing. They’re not being vocal about their own pro-natal choices. They’re being very vocal about the benefits of anti-natalism. But they’re very quiet about their own reproductive behaviour—because they don’t want that to be modelled by others.

They’re doing it—but they don’t want anyone else doing it.

ZB: Fascinating. Do we know anything about how much men are affecting this? It sounds like they’re not doing much. They don’t affect too much of it. Are women choosing different types of men?

DS: So—then you bring men into it. And that’s a whole other interesting story. Men are really interesting.

ZB: They are– I’m a fan!

DS: One of the dominant discourses right now—and has been for a while—is “toxic masculinity.”

That’s become the centre of gravity in all discussions about men.

Now, many people see that as an attack on men—and I’m not saying it isn’t—but I think the purpose it serves is slightly different.

Women can’t manipulate the reproductive output of men. That’s why it’s called intrasexual competition. Men compete with men; women compete with women. The reproductive output of any population is evenly split between the sexes—half male, half female. You can’t gain a relative reproductive advantage for yourself by manipulating the opposite sex’s output. You have to do it within your own sex.

So, the attacks on “toxic masculinity” aren’t really about men. They’re about women’s mate preferences.

What these narratives are doing is disrupting other women’s mate preferences. They’re demonising everything that makes a man a good partner. They demonise masculinity. They demonise a man’s tendency to protect. They demonise a man’s desire to provide.

All these things that—thirty or forty years ago—would have been seen as virtues in a man, as things to admire, are now systematically being torn down.

So feminist narratives are having the effect of inverting female mate preferences—and directing women toward men who will be less likely to be good partners, fathers, and providers.

That’s what’s happening.

But what’s even more interesting is that men are not resisting this trend.

That’s what I find fascinating, from the perspective of the theory I’ve laid out—that this is a coherent, cyclical system of civilisation-building and collapse.

If this were just something women were doing to sabotage each other, you’d expect men to be selected against it. You’d expect men to stand up and say, “No—we built this civilisation. We’re not going to let you destroy it.” You’d expect men to resist.

But what we see instead is that men are going along with it. In fact, they’re endorsing it.

We see men celebrating the “toxic masculinity” narrative. Declaring themselves male feminists.

And we’ve also seen a serious decline in population-wide testosterone levels in men over the last few decades.

So men are actually becoming less masculine now. I would argue that there’s not a terrible chance that that actually is a result of a lot of these social changes and social pressures, because testosterone levels are quite facultative. They do respond to male behaviour and what men are doing and things like that. They’re not necessarily set in stone.

So we are seeing drops in testosterone that I would suggest is part of this thing. So men are becoming the less masculine men that these narratives are telling women to choose. And then, of course, women are choosing the less-than-ideal partners, which itself is a form of reproductive sabotage—encouraging her to take a lower-quality partner when she could potentially choose a higher-quality partner.

So we’re seeing men going along with this and not resisting it.

And then we’re also seeing men—we’re seeing this a little bit with the incel culture, although even that name has become a bit of a misnomer now. Because involuntarily celibate men are actually choosing to identify into these subcultures now. It’s not about being involuntarily—these are not the men who can’t get women. These subcultures—and also the Men Going Their Own Way subculture as well—men are identifying into this and actually saying, “Look, the way that women are behaving at a social level—not necessarily individual women, but the behaviours that are being now endorsed and encouraged at a social level—means that we’re not going to find women who want to be mothers, who want to be partners. That’s not going to happen.”

And so men are beginning to just reorganise themselves effectively around pulling themselves out of the dating pool and out of the reproductive pool. And it’s not necessarily happening in an aggressive way—the way it began with the incels. So the incels—it was this idea that these are the men who hate women because they can’t get women, and so they’re bitter and despise the women who have rejected them, effectively.

The Men Going Their Own Way subcultures that are rising up now are much more positive. They’re about men just looking after their own health, buying their own houses, looking after their own wellbeing and being happy, and not hitching their happiness to women and children—because they understand how unlikely that is to happen now.

Zoe Booth: Which sounds very similar—sounds very similar to the equivalent which came from women first. Which is, “I’m a strong independent woman. I’m not going to hitch my happiness on finding a man or being a mum,” or whatever.

There’s also a sort of subculture—I’m not sure if you’ve come across them. I think they call themselves Passport Bros. Do you know these guys?

DS: No.

ZB: Okay, oh, this is a good one. Related—someone can fact check me—but there’s definitely a group of men, they’re sort of related to the Men Going Their Own Way movement. But it’s men who are opting out of trying to find a woman in their host country—in their native country—and are going to more either traditional cultures like Slavic nations, Russia, Ukraine, the Baltic states, where there’s a clear divide between men and women, and gender roles and stuff. And finding women that are more interested in settling down. Or Asia—Asian women, Southeast Asia often—nations as well, where women can’t afford to be so choosy and picky with men.

Really fascinating. It’s different to mail-order brides, but similar in a way.

DS: Yeah, by the sounds of it, the goal is not so much just mail-order a bride. Which—the implication of that is it was sight unseen. Or perhaps, certainly personality unmet, if not sight unseen. That was always the implication of the mail-order bride—that you basically just bought a photograph and had the real person delivered.

Whereas this, from what you’re saying, sounds like the goal is—I guess implied by a passport—the goal is to actually go there and travel and try to meet someone that has the values that they have.

And that is also interesting too. It also suggests a little bit—these are people who are jumping from a sinking ship. These people have realised that this current society is on that downward spiral and not going to recover.

Then one thing you can do—if you’re not going to be part of the very small number of lineages that survive—then one thing you can do is attempt to jump ship and find somewhere that is still on its way up, not on its way down.

ZB: It’s a proactive response instead of maybe going down the incel route. It’s a proactive measure. So, look—I have no problem with it. Sounds great. I think that anyone trying to have children seems like a good idea to me. It reminds me about the debates about surrogacy, especially on the Right.

I understand the myriad concerns involved in surrogacy. But still, although it might not be the ideal, I’m happy that people are still having those kids. And I think it’s a net positive to be having the kid than to not be having the kid.

DS: I think surrogacy is one of the most interesting ones from this perspective. Because I tend to be like you. And I’ve also seen the more conservative opinions that are not just anti-surrogacy, but also anti-IVF treatments and things like that. My position is much more blanket pro-natal. And so I tend to be in favour of anything that’s going to help people to have children.

But on the other hand, I see surrogacy as being a bit like MAiD—assisted dying. In Canada it's called MAiD: Medical Assistance in Dying.

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And of course, legislation like that—I think it’s under review at the moment in the UK. We have it in most states in Australia in some form or another, I believe. And it's been in place for a while in Europe. And I think surrogacy is a little bit like that, where on the face of it, it looks really nice, and it sounds really nice.

Medical assistance in dying—for people who have got these horrible terminal illnesses and the end is just going to be awful and painful—and this allows them to have an end that is not awful and it’s not painful, and they can plan for it. Their family can be there, or not be there, as they wish. They can have a really nice end.

It sounds great. On what basis would you want to deny someone with a terminal illness that kind of dignified choice at the end?

But then you see where it’s actually going now in Canada. And it’s horrifying. It’s horrific. We’re seeing all these stories coming out of people being pressured, and elderly people who are potentially not even competent to make these decisions being pushed down that pathway—either sometimes by their families, and sometimes against the loud protestations of their families. And it’s becoming quite grotesque—what’s actually happening.

And then you’re forced to admit that actually, the people who mounted the slippery slope argument—which is typically very happily condemned as a logical fallacy—you realise that actually, they had a really good point.

I feel like surrogacy is a similar thing. When I hear stories about a woman who carried a baby for her sister or best friend, who couldn’t conceive—and it’s a beautiful story and it’s wonderful. I would much rather that baby be carried to term by one woman and then transferred immediately to another woman—which is obviously not an ideal thing to happen for the baby; that is not ideal—but I would much rather see that happen than that baby not exist at all. And then be raised by that second woman in a loving family, as though she’s her mother.

I would much rather see that happen than not. But then we start to see—already, you’re starting to see some of the darker surrogacy stories coming out. Where it’s starting to look a heck of a lot like child trafficking. And it’s crossing international boundaries. There’s not a lot of care and attention about knowing exactly where these children are necessarily coming from.

And all of a sudden, you realise—actually, this is a massive risk of this just being child trafficking. And it’s becoming a lot darker.

So I have a feeling that—I can already see my own opinions going that way. Where surrogacy is going to be a little bit like interventions for dying.

In principle, I’m in favour of it. But in practice, I suspect I’m going to become increasingly appalled at what happens when people attempt to implement it.

It looks a certain way when you implement it—because that’s what people are comfortable with, and that’s what the legislation supports. And people vote for it because it sounds nice.

But once it’s in place, without much attention or fanfare—little changes, little tweaks—and all of a sudden, what looked like facilitation of a beautiful scenario to make a baby that wouldn’t otherwise exist, all of a sudden it becomes indistinguishable from human trafficking of children.

And you think, “How did we go from there to there?”

It’s the same thing as MAiD. “How did we go from legislation that was designed to allow desperately ill people, who had a horrible death to look forward to, to be able to effectively just skip that death… to legislation that is now facilitating the state to just take unwell elderly people that they see as a financial burden and churn them through this system?”

It’s horrific.

I feel like surrogacy fits somewhere on that parallel. And my fear is that it’s going to end up in the same state—the same kind of situation—as where MAiD has ended up.

That’s not to say that I’ve changed my mind—that I’m no longer in favour of the sister carrying the baby for her sister, or her best friend, or whatever.

But it does concern me, because—as I said—I would never have thought that assistance in dying would have gone there. I was very pro it. And we had a euthanasia debate in Australia a long time ago, and I was very pro it happening.

I can’t remember when that was—a while ago. I think the end result is that perhaps the legislation didn’t happen. But then since then, it has come in in a bunch of states. I think that was—if I remember correctly—at that particular time when the debate was very big, the end result was that it didn’t happen. But I was very pro it happening at that point.

But now I’ve seen where it goes, I’m like, “Oh, okay, that’s not good.”

ZB: Yeah, it seems like in small doses, in individual settings—prescribed by a doctor or whatever—it’s good to have. I feel the same with abortion. My views on abortion have changed a bit and I’m sure will continue to change as I have kids. But again, I think it’s good to have as an option when need be.

But when it becomes a sort of social norm, or an option—a blanket option—for just everyone, “Oh yeah, I can just…” like choosing to go out and have ice cream or whatever… It’s not to say it’s that easy, but when you know it’s an option, and society as a whole knows it’s an option, it does change things. I’m not sure.

What are your opinions on abortion?

DS: I think I’m probably much like you, I suspect. I’m very grateful now that I never fell pregnant when I was very young. Because I strongly suspect that I probably would’ve had an abortion. would love to say that I wouldn’t have. That I would be good. But I think that would be lying.

I think I probably would’ve. And I don’t think I would’ve thought very hard about it. The world that I grew up in—it was very much drilled into me. I can’t even tell you by whom, in particular. It was just understood, if that makes sense. It was just understood that if you got pregnant and had a child when you were still in high school, or even in your early twenties, then that was it. Your life would be over. That was it. You would never go to university. You would never have a job. You would never be happy. No man would ever want you—

ZB: Exactly. All of the above.

DS: All of the above. And so I strongly suspect that I just would’ve done it. And I don’t think I would’ve even thought about it. I think it would’ve just been like, “Of course, that’s just what you do. You get pregnant at this age, and so that’s what you do. Why on earth would you do anything else? You’d be crazy.”

And so I’m very grateful that never happened, because I think that now would be something that I would really struggle with having done.

And so now I think my positions are much like you. I’ve become increasingly restricted in the scenarios in which I think contemplating abortion is actually acceptable.

I think that when it comes down to it, for a healthy, enlightened society, I think there really ought to be very few scenarios where abortion should be considered an acceptable option.

You’re right though—we’re in a scenario where it’s not just become completely normalised. It’s actually gone beyond that. It’s beyond normalised.

I’m not sure if you heard this, but this was just one little nugget that caught my eye. During the American presidential campaign—I can’t believe that was only last year. Was that just last year?

ZB: God, seems like a world ago.

DS: Anyway, whenever it was—it wasn’t that long ago, but it seems like so much has happened in the interim—but at one of the big Democrat rallies, one of the big events where Kamala Harris was going to speak, they actually had a Planned Parenthood bus pull up so that women could go and have abortions at the rally, as part of supporting the Democrats.

“Come and have your abortion at the Democrat rally.”

I think when pregnancy termination becomes part of a political celebration, I think something has gone desperately wrong with the narratives around it.

The other thing that has happened with abortion—that I think very few people are aware of, certainly in Australia—is that I think, unless I’m mistaken, every single state in Australia allows abortion up until birth, without cause.

Most people are not aware of that. Most people are not aware that a woman who is 37 weeks pregnant—who could potentially go into labour at any point in time—can walk into a hospital and demand an abortion. There doesn’t need to be a medical reason for it. She can actually do that. And it does happen in reasonably low frequencies but it does happen.

ZB: Yeah, I didn’t know that. I thought late-term abortion was banned?

DS No, it’s not. And this is the thing that people don’t necessarily realise. It’s not well publicised. And so we’ve gone from—I don’t know, I try to attach decades to these and I usually find out I’m wrong—but I want to say, like, the 1990s, where the abortion message that was being pushed by feminists was “safe, legal, and rare.”

That’s what they wanted for abortion. They wanted it to be safe, they wanted it to be legal, and they wanted it to be rare. They weren’t pushing for abortions to be common.

And yet now, we’ve only fast-forwarded—what?—maybe thirty years from that being the dominant narrative to the Democrats pulling up with a Planned Parenthood bus to encourage women to have their abortions at the Democrat rally.

I think that’s completely inconsistent with the “rare” part of that “safe, legal, and rare” mantra.

We’ve come a long way. And we’ve also already seen—and I fear that this too will come to pass, and perhaps somewhat hidden from mainstream understanding, the way that late-term abortions on demand are hidden from mainstream understanding; they’re legal in every state but people generally don’t actually realise that—they don’t actually know that’s something that women can go and do, and in fact, do go and do.

I was just going to say that the next step of that—and we’ve already seen it in some cases—is actually rallying for euthanasia of babies during birth.

In many states in America, there is a procedure called “partial-birth abortion,” which is an abortion that is performed effectively during birth. They kill the baby once it’s partway out. It’s not murder because the baby has not technically been born yet. But it’s called a “partial-birth abortion.”

And then we saw what is still very much an extreme and fringe position—but the fact that it’s ever been said out loud, I think, should concern everybody—and that is people… there was one academic article published a couple of years ago, maybe a year ago, arguing for “post-birth abortion,” which is exactly what it sounds like.

So the speed with which the narrative of abortion is heading down that extreme end, I think, is quite frightening.

And the other side of that, I think—which is part of the same issue—is also the discussions around what it is and isn’t appropriate to do with women who kill their newborn babies.

We’ve already got—certainly in the UK; and I’m not sure what the Australian legal position is, but I’ve seen this written about in the UK—so I know the UK legal position is, there is a separate crime for women who kill their babies, such that it’s not actually murder, because they consider that women who have just given birth will be in an especially traumatised emotional state, such that it’s got a different...

And there was a woman—I’m not quite sure—I think she was maybe nineteen. And then shortly after that there was another case where a girl was sixteen or seventeen. A couple of cases in the UK, where these girls and young women were pregnant and hid it from their families—ostensibly from everyone.

And when the babies were born, they killed them and disposed of the bodies—and then got caught.

It was both fascinating and disturbing to watch the social media narratives and comments around those cases. And the number of people who argued that there should actually just be no punishment—that this is actually no different to if these women had decided to have abortions. And if they hadn’t been too scared to tell their family about the pregnancy, then they would’ve had an abortion. And so this is actually no different.

The last observation I’ll make about that is—I find it both amazing and appalling that you’ve got the pro-abortion crowd having moved so far along the continuum of opinion, that they’re now arguing that there’s no difference between an abortion and killing a baby—because they want to justify killing the baby.

I find that to be an extraordinary kind of turn of events—when one of the pro-abortion lobby’s fundamental principles is that there is a fundamental moral difference between terminating a pregnancy—killing an unborn baby—than there is between killing a born baby.

It was just amazing to see how many of these people were actually arguing now, that they want to argue for it being acceptable and forgivable to kill a born baby. They’re now suggesting that these things are actually really quite similar.

And you think, we’ve been saying that—the people who are anti-abortion—we’ve been saying that these things are quite similar for a long time.

Interesting that now you agree. But you’re only prepared to agree with us when abortion is so entrenched in law and so socially acceptable that drawing some equivalence between those things is actually designed to change people’s opinions about murder—quite safe in the knowledge that saying that is not going to change their opinion about abortion.

It was a very fascinating thing to watch play out—all of those different narratives.

ZB: And how it appears to me is that there’s—from abortion to telling women what type of men to date and not to date—it all comes back to a sort of anti-human narrative. I often hear anti-human comments all the time. The most common one is, “Oh, humans are such bad people. I prefer dogs.” Or the enviro—

I love surfing and hiking. I love being out in nature. “Nature’s so good, and humans are so evil, and humans just want to destroy nature, and we’re destroying the world, and the world would be a better place without humans”—which is such a normal thing to say in the West, at least.

I’m not sure it’s like that in, I don’t know—Africa or Asia or other places. But how can a human be anti-human? Can you explain the... if it’s the guilt or the—if a society doesn’t even want to reproduce itself, it hates itself so much that it doesn’t want to reproduce—but then it’s happy for other civilisations or people to keep producing, and they think that’s a good thing...

Explain this sort of suicidal mindset.

DS: I think there’s a couple of things that need to be explained in order for that to make sense. And the thing you said right near the end there—that they’re happy for other civilisations to still reproduce—that’s actually the key.

They might profess to hate humanity, and/or “humans are just a cancer on the Earth”—that’s one I’ve heard quite a few times—they might profess that.

But the same people that make those claims are also the same people jumping up and down and screaming that there’s a genocide in Palestine. And you’re like, hang on a minute.

Couple of things. Number one: not a genocide. But number two: if it is, isn’t that a good thing? Because two minutes ago you were saying humans are a cancer on the Earth. Like, surely the best thing, from where you sit, is if humans just had this great big massive war and we all killed each other, and the population went down to ten percent of what it is now?

ZB: Good point.

DS: Isn’t that what you were actually saying needed to happen two minutes ago? And now you’ve decided that there’s actually something like that happening right now—and you are dead against it?

Like, how do you—? The thing is, you can’t align those two perspectives ideologically. And yet they sit inside the same person’s head.

And the reason for that is because so much of what people do and say just facilitates behaviours that they’re engaging in, right?

And those behaviours are motivated. They’re not motivated consciously. They’re motivated by unconscious functions—what that behaviour will produce. They’re motivated by outcomes that people are not conscious of.

When a woman is telling her friend that she really thinks it would be best for her to get back to work as quickly as possible, because that’s what’s going to be best for her—she doesn’t think that she’s engaging in sabotage of her friend’s reproductive success.

But some of the data that we’ve got in our lab, that we’re writing up now, suggests that actually that is what’s happening. Women who are more intrasexually competitive are more likely to tell other women that they should go back to work sooner, have fewer children, invest more in their career—we set up a few different decision points around that.

And what was really interesting about that is that it wasn’t just that the more competitive women were more likely to give that advice. We also set the study up so that we got women to tell us what they would do.

And systematically, women told us that they would behave more pro-natally than what they would tell a friend to do.

So people do not, generally speaking, think that deeply about the positions that they hold. They generally are quite comfortable with holding positions that are incoherent and inconsistent.

The way they deal with that cognitive dissonance is—they just don’t think about the incoherency and the inconsistency.

Which is one reason why they get quite upset when people try to point it out.

They just don’t think about it. And then they’re able to deal with it. They’re perfectly able to say, “Stop the genocide in Palestine. Kill all humans.” Those two positions are quite fine. They’ll hold them up on a sign at a rally, one in each hand. And that doesn’t bother them.

And that’s because human behaviour is largely dictated unconsciously. Consciousness is just the things that we do and say to wrap around that behaviour.

People who are actually “anti-human”—they say those things because they’re the right things to say. They’re behaving in this really anti-natal way now because… at least, my theory is—and I’m not advocating that my theory is 100 percent correct. I’m not asking everybody to just believe everything I say, because I’m not yet 100 percent convinced that everything I’m saying is correct.

But I think it’s at least close enough along the lines of correct that it’s worth having some really detailed discussions about.

So if the human social system operates in cycles—and part of that cycle is to have societies reach a certain point and then effectively dismantle those societies, crush reproduction, and have only an elite very small number of lineages left from which new societies then grow—

If this is just a normal part of the human condition, then people are just behaving as people should be expected to behave, given the state of the society that we live in.

And if those same people existed in a society that was much more “on the up” and not “on the down,” we would expect them to behave very differently.

That’s the best way to understand it. People are very likely just behaving the way people in this specific scenario behave.

And the way to understand that is to understand what the consequences of that behaviour are—what it’s going to do to society—and can we come up with a coherent system-level explanation that can explain how such a system could be selected for and thus perpetuate?

I think I have. And so I think we can.

Looking to understand their behaviour from a proximate perspective… it’s not that it can’t be done. You can measure attitudes, and you can measure how decisions are related to attitudes, and you can measure how individuals manipulate each other’s attitudes.

But if you’re looking for a perfectly coherent proximate explanation for their behaviour that makes their different opinions make sense, you’re never going to find that. Because people’s conscious opinions and things are frequently just not coherent.

And for most people, that’s generally a thing that they’re able to tolerate just by not thinking about it—and not making themselves too aware of it.

ZB: We’re funny creatures. I can see why you chose to dedicate your life to studying us.

Two more little questions, because we’ve been going for a while—but oh, it’s just too fascinating.

First question, I’ll start with this one. A lot of what we’ve said today—and whenever I talk about women—I often get a few comments that suggest that some people, especially maybe some men, believe that I hate women because I criticise our behaviour.

I definitely don’t hate women. I love women. I love men. We both play different roles and have different quirks.

Do you get those comments, and what do you have to say to people who would watch this video and say, “See, Dr Sulikowski proves women are evil, they’re manipulative, they’re bad”?

DS: I don’t really tend to get those comments very much. I suspect it might be the case that that’s what people think, but they might be a little bit less willing to perhaps say it directly to me. Potentially people do think that, and maybe people think that I hate women.

And certainly, I know that people take from what I say this idea that women are evil. From a simple philosophical perspective, I don’t really subscribe to notions of good and evil.

But what I am trying to do—and what my research has always tried to do—and at the moment I’m in a little pocket of intellectual thinking that people are finding quite interesting—but it’s the same approach that I apply to whatever research question I’m pursuing, even the ones that would have zero interest to anybody except me.

All I’m trying to do is find a coherent explanation for why we’re seeing what we’re seeing.

And explanations like “people are just evil,” or “people are just horrible,” or “women are just evil”—they’re not very satisfying. Because even if we accept—okay, let’s just accept that there is a distinction between good and evil. It is a real thing. And people—some people—are just inherently evil. You’re still left with the “why.”

What I’m trying to do is just work out what’s happening—first of all, accurately describing what’s happening. Because I think that when it comes to human behaviour, that’s actually a massive challenge on its own. Before you even get to the “why,” just getting to the “what,” I think is huge.

So that’s the first thing: coherent description. What is happening in our society and what has been happening over the last few decades? Who’s doing what?

And then getting down to the “why”—why, from a systems-level explanation. So from an evolutionary perspective, what is this social system that has evolved? How does it actually work and maintain itself in the broader picture?

And then, from a proximate perspective—why individual people do what they do.

And much of female intrasexual competition—we all know women can be awful to each other, right? Much of female rivalry is actually explicitly, overtly nasty.

And any sort of misconception people might have—that men can be evil but women can’t be—is just horrendously misguided. That’s an important message on the whole. Because we see the idea that women are just somehow inherently good per a lot of the—and I think it pervades the criminal justice system in really unhelpful ways.

You get women committing these horrendous crimes—frequently against their own children—and just being given levels of forgiveness and sympathy for that, that are just entirely inappropriate. Because it sits much more comfortably with people—the idea that if a woman’s done something horrible, it’s because she was damaged or broken or was responding to something horrible.

Sometimes that’s just not the appropriate explanation. There are very bad women out there—as there are very bad men. And society would absolutely be better off if we ensured that all of the bad people were in prisons and not able to do those bad things.

The idea that men have a monopoly on being capable of doing horrendous things—I think that’s an important thing to dispel, because that does seem to be something that people still struggle with.

But beyond that, I don’t think that there’s much that I’m saying that—unless you ascribe to philosophical perspectives of good and evil and want to label the group of people who are crashing birth rates as inherently evil—but on an individual person-to-person level, I think it’s very difficult to sustain that argument in light of what I’m saying.

Because, for a start, one of the key tenets of what I’m saying is that the women who are being manipulated to have their birth rate suppressed—they’re the victims in all of this, if you want to put a value judgment on it, right?

The ones who are actually having their reproductive output suppressed, and ending up not being mothers and not having children, or having very few children—these are the women who are as much victims of this whole mechanism as everyone else.

Now, we also know that on a very proximate level, women who end up childless do enjoy a much lower quality of life, and much less happiness and wellbeing and satisfaction with life as they get older and realise that possibly having children at some point in the future is now a pipe dream—that’s gone. That window has closed.

And we know that does impact women’s wellbeing.

So I think if you had a really strong understanding of what I was saying—and you want to apply some sort of a philosophical/moral framework to it, which I would not apply—but if you wanted to, I think you would have to concede that the majority of the women are victims of this system, and that the tiny minority of them would actually be the ones to be held responsible for running it anyway.

So I don’t think, if you really understand it, you can sustain the idea that “women are evil.”

ZB: Last question. What do you think we could do to increase fertility, at least in Australia, and why is it important? Because a lot of people would say, “Oh, so what if fertility rate is not at replacement level?”

DS: Look, I think it’s incredibly important. Because if fertility rates don’t rise—in Australia, the US, Japan and South Korea... I think Japan and South Korea might be beyond fixing, I don’t know. But if fertility rates don’t rise, then the societies that we live in and are familiar with, and have a lot of affection for, are going to drastically change in a very short period of time.

It sounds quite dramatic to be talking about civilisational decline, and people imagine the ruins of Ancient Rome or something. They imagine this vast area of landscape with destroyed buildings where there’s just nobody there. But that’s not what civilisational decline looks like, right? Civilisations don’t collapse the way buildings collapse—they’re there one minute and then gone the next.

Civilisational decline happens over decades—sometimes even stretching out to centuries. It’s a slow process. What you lose is the culture that was there before. It changes a little bit at first, and then it changes a little bit more, and then all of a sudden it changes within the lifetime of people, such that you then always have individual people who can remember how it used to be so incredibly different, and now it’s something else.

And the thing is, when you lose a civilisation, you lose everything that you are familiar with. And what it gets replaced by is frequently not something that is as good. We lose knowledge, we lose culture, we lose understanding. So if you don't want the social world that you are familiar with to be gone forever, then that world has to be sustained.

Certainly the West can’t be sustained by immigrants not coming from the West. People are not going to come in large numbers to countries that have completely different cultures to them, and then fundamentally change their behaviour in order to sustain the culture of the place that they’re arriving at. It’s just not how people are.

If we are going to replace reproduction with immigration and sustain our population that way—and economically, that is currently what most Western countries are doing—they’re relying on immigration to sustain the population, because birth rates are not just below growth levels, they’re below replacement levels.

So, even just to sustain the population, let alone to grow it, you have to rely on immigration. And given that all Western countries have got declining birth rates, we aren’t getting immigrants from other Western countries—not net. We’re getting immigration from countries that are very different to ours.

The inevitable conclusions are going to be that either Western countries, on the whole, are going to change a lot—and they’re very likely going to change in ways that people who are in them now would not like, and would not want for their children to live in.

The alternative to that is to turn the taps off on immigration and then wear the tremendous economic costs of having a shrinking population, which is economically horrendous. That’s also not a future that anybody wants for them or their children.

So, from a macro-societal level, it’s a really simple decision. If we don’t start having more children, then we’ve got two possible outcomes. One is that the population goes down. The other is that the population gets maintained by immigration instead of by reproduction. And both of those result in a society that looks very different to the one we’re living in now.

The other option is to have more babies.

ZB: What are some basic ways that we can encourage people to have more babies—in Australia, at least?

DS: To be honest, look—I’ve been asked this question quite a few times, and I’ve thought about it, and I’m not sure that there is an answer.

I think the closest we’ve come to seeing the brakes being put on the anti-natal narratives and the pronatal narratives being promoted—the closest we’ve seen to something like that happening in any country with these low birth rates—is what’s happening in the US right now, with the resurgence of popular conservatism.

ZB: What about Hungary? Didn't Orbán try to—?

DS: Yes, he did.

ZB: Did that work?

DS: No. So he’s poured huge amounts of money into it, and my understanding is that it hasn’t worked—not beyond an initial blip when the policies were first announced.

ZB: Yes. And our baby bonus?

DS: No.

ZB: What government did a baby bonus?

DS: Howard and Costello had the baby bonus. That may or may not have worked. But Hungary has done a baby bonus, and it hasn’t worked. The Nordic countries have got tremendous financial incentives to have children. It’s not working.

So I think that, look—the financial incentives have been tried. They might have some sort of nudge in the birth rate, but it doesn’t continue, because it’s not something new. People respond to a change. Once that’s in place, unless you’re going to keep persistently increasing it, there’s no change for people to respond to.

Then people get all of the feminist narratives—the internationalist narratives—that set their attitudes in that way. And if all that happens is the baby bonus exists, and the baby bonus can’t—there’s nothing to change on the other side of the ledger to shift people’s opinions. People’s opinions respond to changes in those things.

ZB: So there clearly needs to be cultural change?

DS: Exactly. It needs to be—that’s right. It has to be a sociocultural shift.

And the biggest one that we’ve seen is what’s currently happening in the US. But I’m not sure that is—because the US is—was—many parts of the US, not all of it, but many parts of the US were a lot further down this road than—although Canada is probably even worse—but a lot further down this road, certainly, than we are. And perhaps even then the UK is, with the extreme progressive policies that were seriously increasing crime, seriously increasing homelessness, seriously increasing illegal drug use, and general social decay.

And then of course, the US had a much more extreme trans episode that really—that could not avoid but capture public attention and condemnation eventually.

And so there was a whole lot of things going on in the US where it came to people’s attention and they just went, “No. Enough of this. We’re just not doing this any more.”

ZB: That seems like we need some strong influencers as well—people with cultural power.

DS: Yeah, I think a mainstream backlash against extreme progressivism is inevitable—that’s the word I’m looking for. And so I think what we saw in the US, we will see in Australia in about a decade.

Because we always seem to be about a decade behind the Northern Hemisphere on everything. I don’t know how we manage it in such a connected world—but yet, here we are. We’re still about a decade behind on everything.

So I think we’ll see that in about a decade. But my concern is that if we wait a decade for that kind of backlash, then we’re so far down the progressive rabbit hole, the hill will be too steep. That there’ll be a backlash, but I’m not sure that it will actually fundamentally change the centre of gravity of what our society is doing.

I’m not sure that the American university system is salvageable, given the state that it’s in. I’m not sure that the American education system—large parts of it—I know it’s state-based and so there’s not an “American education,” but the state that some of those are in—it’s hard to see that they’re salvageable.

And I think we might see a similar thing in Australia, where we get to a point where there might be a backlash, but so much damage will have been done by then that it’s not clear that backlash is going to be anything other than a bump in the progressive road.

And that’s what I fear the MAGA thing in America is at the moment. It’s a big bump in the progressive road—but my fear is that it is just a bump in that road. I’m not quite sure that it is actually going to signal a wholesale cultural change in American society.

We’ll wait to see.

The other place I look at, which doesn’t give me much hope, is Canada. Because I think Canada is, perhaps, if anything, even further down that path than California and the most progressive parts of America.

Canada is heading—and there have been skirmishes, you could say—but there hasn’t, by and large, been much, like Australia, there hasn’t really been a mainstream backlash to progressivism in Canada.

And they’re so much further down that path even than America is, which suggests that Australia potentially has a long way to go before your average person is going to look around and go, “Hang on a minute. I’m calling bullshit on all of this.”

We’ve got a long way to go before the average Australian has a problem with what’s happening, by and large, around them in their daily life.

So yeah, I guess the short answer is: I’m not sure what we can do. And I’m not sure how you socially engineer a cultural shift, because plenty of people try it. And it’s not an easy thing to do.

And usually, when people do it, it’s in the direction of fascism, not in the direction away from fascism. It’s not in the direction that we would like it to go in. It’s in the opposite direction.

So it would appear that it’s quite easy to impose fascism on a culture, and that culture then ends up—and that society ends up—crashing and burning and disappearing, and that’s how fascism gets gone.

How you actually head back in the other direction is much more difficult to understand. I’m not sure most people have.

That’s probably something I could spend a bit of time reading about—societies that have gone partway down that path and headed back in the other direction. Try and find some examples and see what they did.

ZB: Thank you for giving us so much to think about. Thank you for your research. Thanks for coming on the podcast. It’s been absolutely fascinating.

I’ve done, I think, 53 podcasts now—this has to be up there with one of my favourites. I just love talking about sex, gender, fertility, but also how that relates to civilisational decline.

Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm glad you are researching it, because we need you. So thanks, Dr Sulikowski.

DS: Oh, that’s alright. You’re very welcome. I’ll come back in six months and maybe I’ll have something a little bit more positive to say at the end.

I hope so. That’s my hope anyway.

ZB: Hope so. Thanks, Dr Sulikowski.

DS: Alright. You’re very welcome.