Girlboss Gatekeeping

Is anti-natalism a luxury belief?

Vogue magazine recently ran a piece with this striking headline.

The author interviews young women who say there’s something “cringey” about posting pictures with their boyfriends on social media. One woman says she’d feel guilty doing it. Especially when the dating scene is so rough for other women. She wouldn’t want to seem “boastful.”

The piece references a popular podcast called Delusional Diaries, where two New York influencers discuss whether having a boyfriend is “lame” now. But here’s the interesting part: both podcast hosts have boyfriends themselves. Funny how that works.

The article’s author notices this pattern everywhere online. Women in relationships with large online followings publicly complain about men and relationships. They say they do this out of solidarity with single women.

Here’s the part Vogue didn’t mention—and probably couldn’t.

Dr. Dani Sulikowski, an evolutionary behavioral scientist, has suggested an explanation that sounds strange at first. She argues that women advising other women against relationships and motherhood might be an unconscious competitive strategy.

To understand why, we need to start with a basic principle of evolution.

Every animal (humans included) is in a reproductive competition. The genes that spread are the ones that lead to more offspring. If you have more children than average, your genes become more common in the next generation. If you have fewer, your genes become less common. Over many generations, the genes associated with successfully attaining a partner and having children become more widespread.

This creates pressure on all individuals to win the reproductive race. But here’s the key: evolutionary pressures not only shape organisms to have more offspring. Organisms also evolve strategies to reduce how many babies their competitors have.

Evolutionary biologists describe this as “reproductive suppression.”

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How Reproductive Suppression Works

Scientists first noticed this pattern in non-human primates.

In many primate species, higher-status females have more babies than lower-status females.

Researchers wanted to understand why. Was it just that dominant females had better access to food and mates? That was part of it.

But something else was happening too.

Dominant females were actively suppressing the reproduction of lower-status females.

The main mechanism is stress.

When dominant females constantly harass, intimidate, or exclude subordinate females, it raises the subordinates’ stress hormones. Particularly cortisol. High cortisol disrupts the reproductive system. It can delay ovulation, disrupt the menstrual cycle, and thereby reduce fertility.

The subordinate female’s body essentially shuts down reproduction because it’s under too much stress.

Dominant females create this stress through several tactics:

• Social exclusion and isolation

• Physical bullying and intimidation

• Controlling access to resources

In baboons, dominant females physically intimidate subordinates. In marmosets, dominant females actually emit pheromones that prevent subordinate females from ovulating. In tamarins, dominants monopolize food and safe nesting sites, making it nearly impossible for lower-status females to successfully raise offspring.

If a subordinate female’s status improves or if she leaves and joins another group, her fertility often increases.

The purpose, from an evolutionary perspective, is clear: reduce competition for resources and ensure your own offspring have the best chance of survival.

Humans are primates. We should expect to see similar patterns.

And we do.

In many human societies, high-status women influence the reproductive choices of lower-status women.

In some cultures, mothers-in-law dictate when and whom younger women can marry. They can delay a young woman’s reproduction by years.

In other contexts, high-status women enforce social norms that discourage reproduction. They stigmatize pregnancies and motherhood. They pressure women to prioritize education or career over family. They create an environment where having children seems like a failure rather than an achievement. They stigmatize relationships or tell you that having a boyfriend is embarrassing.

This works the same way as primate stress-based suppression. It’s mediated, though, by culture and social pressure rather than direct physical intimidation.

In contemporary settings, this plays out in workplaces and institutions.

Women in positions of power—corporate leaders, senior academics, influential media figures—create environments that make reproduction difficult for the women below them. They do it through culture and expectations.

Long work hours become mandatory. Women who prioritize family are passed over for promotions. The message is clear: serious women don’t have children. Or at least they don’t let children slow them down.

The subordinate women absorb this message.

This helps explain something puzzling about modern feminism.

Progressive feminists often criticize capitalism. They talk about how corporations exploit workers, how the pursuit of profit harms people, how we should value things other than career success.

Yet the same voices insist that there’s no higher priority for young women than organizing their lives around a career.

Many of these elite women have partners. Many of them have children. They figured out how to balance career and family, or they had resources that made it easier.

But they don’t advertise that. They don’t tell young women that women who are married and have children report the highest levels of happiness.

Instead, they emphasize the importance of career and the burden of children.

It’s the primate pattern playing out in modern institutions. Dominant females suppressing the reproduction of subordinates. Not through conscious malice, but through the same unconscious evolved mechanisms we see in baboons and marmosets.

Non-elite women absorb the message that reproduction is incompatible with success. Their fertility gets suppressed.

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Reproductive suppression is primarily a female phenomenon.

Because of basic biology, intrasexual competition looks different for women and men.

Men produce millions of tiny sperm cells. Women produce relatively few large egg cells. Women carry pregnancies and, historically, do most of the childcare. This difference creates an important consequence: women limit how fast a population can grow.

Think about it this way. A society can send many men off to war and still bounce back quickly in population. Within that society, the remaining men can father children with the women. But if you lose many women, the population takes much longer to recover. Each woman can only have so many children in her lifetime.

For men, what other men do doesn’t change your potential that much. It’s also harder to convince men to forego sex and relationships. Imagine trying to convince men to go on a sex strike. But even if you could, it wouldn’t matter. Because the men who don’t participate in the sex strike can still have lots of kids.

For women, the math is different. Convincing other women to forego relationships and motherhood is within reach. Moreover, each woman who doesn’t have children is a huge victory for you.

Knocking a man out of the mating pool doesn’t matter because other men can have plenty of kids. Knocking a woman out of the mating pool is a big deal because each woman is so valuable, reproductively speaking.

A woman has two ways to win the competition: have more children than average, or convince other women to have fewer children.

If you can lower the background rate—the average number of children other women have—you improve your relative position without having more kids yourself.

This is why reproductive suppression is primarily a female phenomenon. Of course, there have been cases of male suppression (e.g., eunuchs). Or men raiding a village and simply slaughtering all of the males and abducting the women as wives and concubines. But suppression among women is subtler.

The ancient Greeks understood something about this. In 411 B.C., the playwright Aristophanes wrote a comedy called Lysistrata. In the play, women withhold sex from their husbands to force them to stop fighting a war. The play treats this as absurd. The women can barely maintain the strike themselves—they keep sneaking off to be with their husbands. The whole premise is treated as ridiculous.

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Off With Her Hair

In a series of studies reported last year in a paper titled “Off with her hair: Intrasexually competitive women advise other women to cut off more hair,” Dr. Sulikowski and her (all female) co-authors found that women who score highly on measures of “intrasexual competitiveness” were more likely to recommend that other women cut their hair short.

They recruited female study participants and found that women who reported strong agreement with statements such as “I tend to look for negative characteristics in attractive women,” “I wouldn’t hire a very attractive woman as a colleague,” and “I want to be just a little better than other women,” were more likely to recommend shorter haircuts for women. Interestingly, the researchers also found an inverse correlation between age and intrasexual competitiveness. In other words, compared with older women, younger women reported stronger competitive feelings with other women.

I’m reminded of a line from the comedian Adam Carolla who said “[S]hort haircuts. This is a thing chicks like on other chicks. Girls always tell other girls how cute they look with a short haircut. But they’re really thinking, That’s one bitch I ain’t gonna have to compete with. I’ve never heard one of my male friends say, ‘That girl would be hot if only her hair looked like Moe Howard’s.’”

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Now return to those women with boyfriends declaring that having a boyfriend is embarrassing.

They’re partnered. They have access to potential reproduction. But they’re publicly stigmatizing the very thing they’re doing.

The stated reason is solidarity. They don’t want to make single women feel bad. But look at the actual effect: they’re making partnership itself seem uncool, outdated, or morally suspect.

If you’re a young woman reading this content, or watching the many viral social media reels promoting the same message, what do you take away? That pursuing a relationship makes you look desperate. Old-fashioned. Politically suspect.

Meanwhile, the elite women saying this aloud are in relationships themselves.

This looks exactly like what Dr. Sulikowski describes: women with access to reproductive success making that same path less appealing to their competitors.

The women probably don’t think of it this way. They likely believe their own stated reasons.

But the behavior pattern matches the evolutionary logic perfectly.

Reduce other women’s access to relationships and reproduction. Lower the background rate. Improve your relative position in the competition. Without anyone realizing there’s a competition happening at all.

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Consider what happens when societies get wealthy.

They build infrastructure. They create sanitation systems. They develop medicine. Life gets safer and more predictable.

One major result is infant mortality drops. In our hunter-gatherer past, 30 to 60% of children died before age fifteen. Parents had to have many children just to ensure a few survived. If you wanted 3 living children to survive to adulthood, you needed to have 6.

But when infant mortality drops, the math changes. Now you can have 3 kids and expect all 3 to live.

So birth rates fall. This makes sense. It’s an adaptation to better conditions. You’d expect birth rates to drop and then level off at some new, stable number.

But that’s not what happens.

Birth rates keep falling. They don’t stabilize. They continue to fall through replacement level and keep going down. In much of the developed world, birth rates are now far below what’s needed to maintain the population.

This is the mystery. Why don’t birth rates stabilize at a reasonable level?

Dr. Sulikowski offers an explanation.

In the past, elite women had a reproductive advantage. Their children were more likely to survive. They had more resources. Better nutrition. Cleaner water. Access to medicine. They held a large advantage, reproductively, over other women.

But when a whole society develops, that advantage disappears. Now everyone has clean water. Everyone has antibiotics. In rich first world countries, a poor woman’s children survive at nearly the same rate as a rich woman’s children.

Elite women have lost their edge. So they find a new way to suppress competition.

Think about what’s considered necessary to raise a child today versus fifty years ago.

In the 1970s, a middle-class family might have one television. One car. Kids shared bedrooms. Parents didn’t sign them up for expensive activities. College wasn’t assumed for everyone. Today, the expectations are different.

Each family member needs a smartphone. Kids should have their own bedrooms. They need to travel. Sports teams. Music and ballet lessons. SAT prep. A family vacation means flying somewhere. Preferably internationally. College tuition.

Parents who don’t provide these things are judged as failing their children.

Elite women, generally speaking, are the ones who set these standards. Women make most household purchasing decisions. Women dominate conversations about parenting standards in social circles, in media, and online.

The effect is clear: raising a child “properly” now costs far more than it used to. Not because children’s actual needs changed. But because the social requirements (as set by high-status women) have changed.

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Pricing out the competition

Which leads to an interesting result.

Poor and working-class families look at the cost of “acceptable” child-rearing and decide they can’t afford it. Which is one reason (among others) why the birthrate has dropped more among low-income women than high-income women. The birthrate among women used to be similar across the socioeconomic spectrum. This is less true now.

Elite women have restored their reproductive advantage by making reproduction socially acceptable only if you can afford an expensive lifestyle.

This isn’t necessarily conscious. Most women genuinely believe children need all these things. They’re not sitting around plotting to suppress poor women’s fertility.

But the evolutionary logic is the same. Elite women use their status and resources to raise the bar for acceptable motherhood. This suppresses reproduction among women who can’t meet the new standards. And it works.

As societies develop, women gain more time and resources. With lower infant mortality, they spend less time pregnant and caring for babies who might not survive. They enter the workforce in large numbers.

This means women gain influence over institutions: schools, hospitals, corporations, government agencies, non-profits.

And those institutions change. They adopt perspectives and priorities that reflect female concerns and female perspectives. This isn’t good or bad inherently—it’s just different from how male-dominated institutions operated.

But one consequence appears to be the spread of anti-reproductive norms.

Universities—increasingly influenced by women both as students and faculty—produce ideologies about gender, family, and reproduction. These ideologies then spread through other institutions. Schools teach them. Corporations adopt them as policies.

Again, the people spreading these ideas mostly believe them. But the effect is that they suppress reproduction, particularly for lower-income women.

Look at fashion, lifestyle brands, social media influence. All heavily driven by women for women.

These create endless pressure to spend money on things unrelated to reproduction. The latest phone. The right clothes. The perfect home decor. Expensive vacations.

The message is that this lifestyle is what success looks like. It’s aspirational

Women with more resources can have both. They can have the lifestyle and the children. They can hire help. They can afford the big house that accommodates perfect decor and kids.

From an evolutionary perspective, this is successful reproductive suppression. The women promoting these standards—often affluent women with platforms—are suppressing the reproduction of women who can’t afford to meet them.

To be clear, it’s not that having children carries low status.

Rather, it’s that children raised “incorrectly”—without all the expensive inputs—carries low status. The parents are judged as inadequate.

This prices reproduction out of reach for more and more people.

This is the bottleneck Dr. Sulikowski describes. A large segment of the population is being suppressed out of reproduction by standards they can’t meet.

The women whose genes survive this bottleneck are the ones who are either affluent or are resistant to anti-natalist messaging.

Anti-natalism might be a luxury belief.

A luxury belief is an idea that confers status on the people who hold it while inflicting costs to people lower on the social ladder. The elite can afford to advocate these beliefs because they’re insulated from the consequences.

Many women promoting anti-natalist ideas aren’t consciously trying to sabotage anyone. They’ve internalized these beliefs themselves. They’ve been convinced that career advancement matters more than family, that children are burdens, that traditional motherhood is oppressive.

But these same women are in a position to pay to have their eggs frozen or afford expensive fertility treatments if they change their minds. Most other women can’t do this.

But for anti-natalism to be a luxury belief, I would first want to see data indicating that high-status women are the most likely to endorse it. There’s plenty of anecdotes but we need some survey data too.

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Disrupting Mate Preferences

One of the most powerful anti-reproductive narratives today is “toxic masculinity.”

This concept has become central to how we talk about men. From an evolutionary perspective, though, it serves a unique purpose.

Women can disrupt other women’s mate preferences.

Think about what “toxic masculinity” discourse does. It demonizes traditional masculine traits. Protection becomes controlling. Confidence becomes arrogance. Ambition becomes aggression.

The qualities that up until 10 minutes ago would have made a man attractive as a partner and father are now presented as red flags.

Women are directed away from men who would make good partners. They’re encouraged to prefer men who are less masculine, less driven, less capable of providing and protecting.

This is reproductive sabotage by proxy. If you convince another woman to choose a lower-quality mate, or forego relationships altogether, you reduce her chances of having children.

Her children—if she has them—will have fewer resources, less stability, a less invested father.

What’s weird is that men are kind of going along with this.

You’d think they’d push back against narratives that undermine their own value.

But mostly, they don’t.

In fact, many men endorse these ideas. They call themselves male feminists. They apologize for masculinity. They celebrate dismantling traditional male roles.

One reason is because traditional manhood requires a lot of effort to live up to, which most men would rather not do.

Another reason might be biological. Testosterone levels in men have been declining for decades. Average testosterone is lower at every age compared to previous generations.

So we’re seeing men become less masculine. And these less masculine men are exactly what the anti-masculine narratives say women should prefer.

Of course, that’s not actually what most women prefer. But the social pressure is strong enough that many women convince themselves they should prefer these men.

The result is women end up with partners less capable of provision and protection. This is another form of reproductive suppression. Getting women to accept lower-quality mates than they could otherwise attract.

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None of this requires conscious intent.

Women promoting anti-natalist ideas usually believe them. Men endorsing these narratives think they’re doing the right thing. People aren’t sitting around plotting reproductive sabotage.

Still, we can better understand the evolutionary reasons for behavior by looking at its consequences rather than conscious intent.

People’s stated beliefs often aren’t coherent anyway. Most people can hold contradictory views without much discomfort. They just don’t think about it too hard.

What matters evolutionarily isn’t what people believe. It’s what they do.

Recent research shows something interesting: anti-natalist beliefs correlate with Dark Triad personality traits.

The Dark Triad consists of three traits: psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. These are personality types associated with manipulation, lack of empathy, and self-interest.

People high in psychopathy show a strong and striking correlation with believing it’s wrong to have children (r = .62). Machiavellianism shows a moderate correlation (r = .49), followed by narcissism (r = .29).

This doesn’t mean everyone who holds anti-natalist views has these traits. But it suggests that people skilled at manipulation are more likely to promote ideas that suppress others’ reproduction.

This makes evolutionary sense. If reproductive suppression is a competitive strategy, the people most likely to employ it consciously or unconsciously would be those already inclined toward manipulation. It’s also important to note here that people who have elevated scores on the Dark Triad tend to be less introspective than average.

The people most affected are those who are trusting, empathetic, and sincere. They believe what they’re told by authority figures and cultural trailblazers and influencers. They internalize the anti-natalist message.

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None of this is about assigning moral blame.

The goal here is to find a coherent explanation for what we’re seeing in society. And explanations like “people are evil” or “high-status women are horrible” don’t get us anywhere. They’re not satisfying intellectually. And more importantly, they don’t help us understand the actual mechanisms at work.

When it comes to human behavior, before we can explain why people do what they do, we first need to agree on what they’re actually doing.

There’s a persistent and often unspoken myth that men can be evil but women can’t. That women are somehow inherently good, inherently nurturing, inherently moral.

Women are capable of harming or sabotaging other women. Saying this shouldn’t be controversial, but somehow it often is.

Women can be awful to each other. Anyone who has paid attention to how women interact knows this.

But (and this is crucial) most of the women involved are victims, not perpetrators.

The women most harmed by anti-natalist ideology are the ones who believe it.

They’re the ones who delay having children for career advancement. Who internalize the message that motherhood is limiting and unfulfilling. Who convince themselves that they don’t really want children, or that they’ll do it later when conditions are perfect.

Then later arrives. And they realize the window has closed.

We know from research that married women with children report the highest levels of happiness and life satisfaction.

If we’re going to apply a moral framework to this (which I’m hesitant to do) we have to recognize that the vast majority of women caught in this system are its victims.

The tiny group of elite women who promote these ideas while quietly having children themselves may bear some responsibility. But they almost certainly don’t fully understand what they’re doing or why.

What we’re observing is an evolutionary system that operates largely outside conscious awareness.

It’s a system that emerges from the logic of reproductive competition.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just an emergent pattern that repeats because it works evolutionarily.

Most individual women, most people in general, aren’t thinking about any of this. They’re responding to social pressure, trying to fit in, pursuing what society tells them is valuable. They absorb the messages they receive and make choices that seem reasonable given the information they have.

We can guess what comes next.

Birth rates continue falling. The population ages. Economic systems built on growth begin to fail. Institutions struggle to maintain themselves. Social cohesion weakens.

Eventually, the system becomes unsustainable.

And then a new society emerges, founded by the descendants of the women who maintained their reproduction through the collapse. Women whose genes include whatever made them resistant to anti-natalist messaging.

If these behaviors are deeply embedded in our evolved psychology, changing them might require more than just awareness. We’d need to change the underlying incentives, the social structures that make reproductive suppression advantageous.

We’d need to make motherhood genuinely valued and supported. Not just praised in the abstract while being punished in practice. We’d need to lower the artificial barriers to family formation. The inflated standards for acceptable child-rearing, the economic pressures, the cultural messaging that presents children as obstacles to fulfillment.

We’d need to recognize that declining birth rates are a symptom of a society that has become hostile to reproduction.

If society recognized that many of our institutions are inadvertently suppressing reproduction, would we restructure them?

If we understood that the people promoting anti-reproductive norms often don’t follow them themselves, would we be more skeptical of their advice?

The answers won’t please everyone.

Still, clarity is important here. Understanding what’s actually happening and why is the first step toward deciding whether we want to change it.

Young people who forego children aren’t making free choices in a vacuum. They’re responding to powerful social pressures, institutional incentives, and cultural narratives that point them away from parenthood. Most of them don’t realize what’s happening. Many know, though, that somehow, despite having more choices than previous generations, something feels wrong.

Understanding the evolutionary logic behind reproductive suppression won’t solve everything. But it might help us see things more clearly.