Why Female Leaders Abuse Their Power (The Science)

Dive into a provocative discussion with Malcolm and Simone Collins as they debunk two major myths: the idea that female-led societies are inherently peaceful, and the romanticized view of bonobos as gentle, utopian apes. Drawing from their book The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality and fresh data from studies (including 2024 research on bonobo aggression), they explore how matriarchal structures—both in history and among bonobos—often lead to more violence, coercion, and hierarchy than expected. From evolutionary psychology on women’s submission fantasies to historical queens waging wars, this episode challenges progressive narratives about “natural” societies and argues for building better futures through pragmatism, not nostalgia.

Key highlights:

* Why bonobo society is a nightmare of sexual coercion and aggression.

* Data showing female rulers are more likely to start wars (27% higher in historical Europe).

* Evolutionary insights into gender dynamics and power.

* A rant on rejecting “hidden utopias” and advancing civilization.

If you enjoy data-driven takes on culture, evolution, and society, subscribe for more episodes from Based Camp! Check out our books and join the conversation.Episode Transcript:

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are gonna be going over two persistent myths in society, dissecting them, looking at the actual data to show that no. One female led societies historically are, and actually in modern times because we’re gonna be going into new data, not just the old data that we had in our book, the Pragma Guide to Sexuality are, are more violent than non-female led society.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah, sure, of course

Malcolm Collins: that makes sense. But also the myth of the peaceful bonobo is where we are going to start because Bonobo society is actually. Horrifying.

Simone Collins: I don’t understand why people have this vision of the Gentle Ape. All, all apes and monkeys terrify me more than Pelicans, and there’s nothing scarier than a pelican.

Malcolm Collins: So we’re just gonna go over a bunch of data, mostly drawing from a chapter from the Pragmatist Guide to Sexuality about why. You shouldn’t let women run [00:01:00] things. And not just that, but how the progressive movement and the progressive part of the academic movement has this tendency to create these con conflation or confabulation of, unique examples or cherry picked data to try to say that we should go back to some earlier way of doing things or some earlier way is natural.

Simone Collins: Ah, the

Malcolm Collins: old sapien argument, fix it Dawn. Where they’re like, well, our ancestors were polyamorous. Look at the gentle bonobo. Look at the tribal they are. And I’m like, well.

First of all, that’s not true of all tribal groups, and it’s certainly not true of the more successful ones. You just chose one that fit the society that you wanted. You’re like, okay, where’s the most communist, the most matriarchal, the most? Okay. We will say, this is the model for early humans. Yeah. When that’s not actually the predominant evidence that we have, and we can do a separate episode on that.

But it’s the same with you know, with with [00:02:00] Bonobos. They go, oh, what, what? There was a period where like some researchers really romanticized Bonobos. And now we know that they basically made a mistake and they created, it is true that Bonobos do have a matriarchal society. It’s just not true that it’s a benevolent, matriarchal society.

So let’s go into this. All right.

Simone Collins: I wonder. Yeah, and I, I, I’m very curious to, to know when in history women were seen to be. Nice. I, I’m thinking maybe certainly with the Victorian era, this, there was this picture of like, the woman is being the moral anchor of the household, but yeah, I’m, this is gonna be fascinating.

Malcolm Collins: Some of our readers may be wondering at this point why we have not referred to Bonobos. It has become popular to cite Bonobo behavior as evidence that humans in their natural state would be free loving, polyamorous, matriarchal communities. This view of Bonobos has been aggressively pushed by those whose political agenda benefits from the belief that our distant ancestors lived in this kind of [00:03:00] utopia.

First, we would point to the fact that women tend towards submissive sexual fantasies much more than men. That this tendency does not appear to be socialized. And male humans almost certainly have an infanticide impulse. This serves as fairly concrete evidence indicating that early humans did not interact like Bonobos, or at least how people believe Bonobos interact.

Matriarchal utopias do not create evolutionary pressures, nudging women to become turned on by violence against themselves, or sexually aroused by men stomping on babies like lucy McGillicutty stomping in a great vat. A 2015 psychology study of 1000. This is not from the guide. I’m just sort of adding this for people who don’t know because in the guide I just citation, citation, citation, citation is, I’m just gonna go into some of this, right?

A 2015 Psychology Today Review of 1,516 participants found 52% of women fantasized about forced sex verse lower male rates for submission, often weekly [00:04:00] linked to implicit associations of sex with surrender rather than cultural norms. A 2006 sex role study confirmed women’s non-conscious sex submission link predicted lower arousal, if not acted on suggesting an innate component.

So I want pull out what both of those studies are saying. It’s saying that if a woman has a. Forced submission fetish, and she engages in vanilla sex. She will not become as aroused during that vanilla sex. As a woman. It’s not like it’s just an additive to her arousal. It is a necessary component of her arousal.

To reach a, a, a full arousal state. Mm-hmm. And, and in terms of this 52%, when you get to 52% of women fantasizing about forced sex, that means that it’s the normal thing to do. That means that, well, it’s not by a huge amount. It means that the women who don’t fantasize about this are the weird ones.

Simone Collins: It also just says something really sad about our evolutionary [00:05:00] history.

Throwing that out

Malcolm Collins: there. Yeah, it does. It does. It does because it there, I mean, clearly there was an evolutionary pressure to be turned on by that, right? Like

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Interestingly here, high resource women, eg. Executives report even more forceful submission fantasies as per a 2009 Journal of six research analysis.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: That is important to note.

The reason why we need to bring this up that a woman’s desire to be subjugated goes up as she reaches higher levels of status and power within society is that means if you put a woman at the top of an organization or say a country, she will have a desire for. Not just her, but everything associated with her to be subjugated as a result of that.

Now, obviously we don’t always act on our desires, and obviously not all women, right? You know, Margaret Thatcher was a goat leader, right? But it does mean that. [00:06:00] On average, you’re going to get this tendency, and I can think that this might be why a lot of women politically hold views that lead to a culture or a country to end up in a position of subjugation if they fee