ACX Not-a-Book-Review Entrant: Review of Human Sexuality.

Human Sexuality, reviewed. 

I’ve always been curious about why people are turned on by some things, but not others. Why do 50% of surveyed men fantasize about their partner sleeping with someone else? Why do something like 45% of surveyed women have fantasies where they're forced to have sex against their will? What is up with all these fetishes, like people who wear diapers, or findom, or furries? I’m not alone in these questions.

 In an essay in 2022,  Scott Alexander laid out some of his confusions about human sexuality:

"Upon contact with any real people, our society's stylized description of sex (people get pleasure from genital contact with others, especially hot others) fractures into a dizzying array of inexplicable weirdness.

The first layer is people who can only get pleasure from unusual sex positions, or orifices, or people wearing certain clothing, or taking certain roles - fine, you can explain that by some kind of weird classical conditioning… 

Then there are the people who can only get pleasure from some very specific scenario - imagining that they're an antebellum slave owner and their partner is a runaway slave who they're punishing, or that their partner is their brother and they're committing incest, or that their partner is their disciplinarian teacher who always gave them bad grades but secretly it was because they loved them the whole time and wanted them to get strong enough to be a good spouse. 

Then there's the dirt-common phenomenon of people who can only take pleasure in sex if they know their partner is enjoying it too, and the thankfully rarer phenomenon of people who can only take pleasure if their partner isn't enjoying it. There's people who can only enjoy hate sex, or makeup sex, or who want their partner to be hard to get, or who pursue someone until they say "yes" and then they're not interesting anymore, or who only date abusers even though they hate it, etc, etc, etc."

He goes on to explain the limitations of the current model: 

“Physics is stuck in an annoying equilibrium where the Standard Model works for almost everything, and then occasionally we come across some exotic domain where it totally falls apart and we know that reality must be something deeper and weirder. I feel like psychology is the same way: you can explain almost everything with your standard scientific toolkit. Then you look at sex, and you realize you’ll need something much more complicated and worse. And since sex is maybe the strongest and most primal form of desire, if the Standard Model Of The Mind doesn’t explain sex, it probably doesn’t really explain anything else. There are probably all those weird curled-up shadow dimensions in everything, just out of sight.”

I'm starting this post off with a long Scott Alexander quote for two main reasons. One, I figure there's no better way to attract an ACX reader's attention. Two, and more importantly, this quote was the reason why I wrote this post. I read this post two years ago, in a book review about Lacanian psychology, and thought, "I'm pretty sure I have answers to a lot of these mysteries, and I would like to share them with Scott." 

This review of human sexuality will be my attempt to do so, by laying out my framework for understanding why we do all the weird things we do in the bedroom.

I’m going to start by going through some critical background, and then use that context to answer both the mysteries that Scott brought up, as well as those additional mysteries that used to confuse me.

Spoiler alert: like many things in psychology, it all comes back to status.

What is Status?

If I'm going to claim that sex's "dizzying array of inexplicable weirdness" is all connected to status, then we better define what status actually is. There's an intuitive sense of the word—being valued, being liked, popularity. That's all true, but status is a much broader, much weirder cognitive system (or systems), deeply embedded in our minds, that has huge effects on our behavior and thoughts. I'm going to be mostly taking this from Kevin Simler's essays at Melting Asphalt, Keith Johnstone's book Impro, and various neuroscience readings.

First off, status isn't one thing—it's two distinct systems that evolved for different purposes.

Dominance

Dominance is the older system, shared with virtually all social animals. It's the status you get by being threatening, by being the baboon who can beat up the other baboons and so getting first pick of food and mates. Dominance works through fear: if you don't defer to the dominant individual, bad things happen to you.

Our brains process dominance signals automatically—a raised voice, a certain type of unbreaking eye contact, or someone invading our personal space all trigger low-level stress responses. When someone dominates us, we physically make ourselves smaller—hunching shoulders, avoiding eye contact, speaking softly. These responses are so automatic they're almost impossible to fake convincingly.

Prestige

Prestige, by contrast, is a much newer system. It's the status you get by being useful or impressive to others. The hunter who consistently brings back meat, the storyteller who remembers tribal history, the craftsperson who makes the best tools—these individuals gain status not through threat but through admiration.

The tribe pays individuals who help and who have promise with prestige, as an evolutionary mechanism to lessen free-rider problems in groups. Since having people like you and supporting you is useful, this incentivizes individuals to contribute to the group. In prestige relationships, low-status individuals approach high-status ones (rather than avoiding them as in dominance), and the flow of benefits is bidirectional.

Status

These twin systems use much of the same psychological machinery and produce similar subjective rewards. Whether your status comes from dominating others or from being admired for your skills, the brain's reward circuits light up in similar ways. Status elevations in either system trigger dopamine release, increase testosterone levels, and reduce stress hormones. Status drops in either system can feel terrible and trigger anxiety responses.

The prestige system evolved as humans became more dependent on cultural knowledge, skill acquisition, and complex cooperation. As tool use made pure dominance strategies more dangerous (it's hard to be the alpha when weaker members can kill you in your sleep), humans increasingly relied on prestige. But we never lost the older dominance circuits—we just layered the new system on top.

So, we're left with a leaderboard in our head, keeping track of something called "status" for us and those around us. Status can be earned through dominance or through prestige, but is usually stored in memory and action as a single variable; social software is easier if you just have to keep track of one thing. 

Status is constantly being determined at both the micro-level through dozens of micro-signals—indicators of prestige and dominance such as who interrupts whom, gaze-holding time, whose jokes earn laugh-echoes—but it's also created at the macro-level by memory of someone's potential threat and usefulness. In social circumstances, parts of our brain constantly determine relative status, and use it to inform how to act, how to stand, when to talk.

Keith Johnstone describes the micro-level in his book Impro:

"If I speak with a still head, then I'll do many other high-status things quite automatically. I'll speak in complete sentences, I'll hold eye contact. I'll move more smoothly, and occupy more 'space'. If I talk with my toes pointing inwards I'm more likely to give a hesitant little 'er' before each sentence, and I'll smile with my teeth covering my bottom lip, and I'll sound a little breathless, and so on. We were amazed to find that apparently unrelated things could so strongly influence each other; it didn't seem reasonable that the position of the feet could influence sentence structure and eye contact, but it is so."

Taskmaster

For more details on what exactly high and low status look like in practice, Taskmaster is a British comedy show that provides a perfect illustration. The show features five comedians completing arbitrary tasks, given to them by the Taskmaster, who then scores and ranks them. It's a comedy show predicated on making a very high-status judge (Greg Davies), who then is funny in contrast to his sniveling assistant (Alex Horne), who is as low-status as possible.

If you want to see the pure body language of status, look no further than Greg and Alex. This picture shows it, but the video of them is much clearer. Greg is relaxed, stares fixedly at whomever he is talking to, has his shoulders back. Alex looks around, off in space. He sits forward, tucked in on himself, nervously glances at Greg, constantly making fast darting movements. He compliments and adores Greg; Greg constantly insults him. Greg has all the status, Alex has none. Most of the comedy comes from the difference in status between them, and crucially to the show, Greg's status is amplified by Alex acting so low-status, which makes Greg's judgments of the other comedians feel much more real and powerful.Notably, Greg acts both dominant and prestigious, fluidly switching between threatening Alex and impressing other comedians with a quick joke. Both raise his status in ways that the show needs to function, and I think this helps show what I mean when I say that status is a single variable, that can be raised in two different, but not exclusive, ways. 

That's a lot of info, but for the purposes of this essay, the important points are:

1. Status is earned through two different mechanisms: prestige and dominance

2. Status is stored as a single variable, which our subconscious mind tracks in people around us

3. Status is hooked into the reward mechanisms of the human brain

The Status Theory of Sexual Attraction

Now that we have a proper background on status, let's dive into what people find hot.

(One quick sidebar: Throughout this section, I'm going to be using the term "hot" and "hotness" a lot. Something that is hot is something that turns someone on, that they find sexy, that activates the part of the brain responsible for sexual pleasure. Someone can be hot, but so can their actions, their voice, the decisions they make, and the way they move. It's a general purpose term, and I don't think English has a better one.)

I'm going to make a bold claim: most kinks and most things that people find hot are based around the two possibilities that status allows—higher and lower. These two fundamental orientations toward status produce nearly all the sexual preferences, behaviors, and fantasies we observe.

High Status Hotness (HSH)

Let's call the first possibility "high status hotness" because that's exactly what it is. This is the hotness that consists of having somebody you find attractive servicing you, of making somebody lose themselves in pleasure because of your actions, of telling somebody what to do and having them instantly do it.

It's doing whatever you want with your partner, whatever makes you feel good, and that act of not caring, of being such high status that you don't care about pleasing them, ends up being exactly what they want. We can call this being a dom, a top, a sadist, the more active partner—they're all slightly different  ways of describing being the higher status partner.

Now, as discussed above, status has two main components: dominance and prestige. Some people are more into being dominant, the more sadist/mean dom side of things; others are more focused on prestige, on being a pleasure dom, where the fantasy is being so skilled that you make someone lose their mind and adore you.

But fundamentally, the important thing is being high status, and sexuality has these two components relatively intermixed. Someone who finds being high status hot, who is normally prestige-focused, will probably at least somewhat enjoy something more on the dominance side of things. 

Low Status Hotness (LSH)

Low status hotness is the hotness, the turned-on-ness that comes from being with a high status partner. This is the hotness that consists of being paid attention to, of being so attractive that your partner can't hold themselves back, of being used however your partner wants (because that's what a high-status partner would do, and you find your partner behaving in a high status way directly, personally, enjoyable).

This is the hotness of being a sub, a little, a good boy or girl, of being taken care of, of being told what to do by a commanding, stern voice, of letting go of all responsibilities and obligations, of being so desirable that your high-status partner is 100% focused on you and you don't need to do anything.

As with HSH, low status hotness has different versions, based on dominance and prestige. There's pure submissiveness, of being helpless, tied up, being told what to do and doing it; and there's low prestige, which manifests as being desirable, of being wanted, of having someone higher status around who is focused on you. Different, but fundamentally similar, both tying into the status mechanisms of our brains; the thing that unites these two subtypes  is that they’re about being acted on. 

So, to summarize, there are two main types of sexiness the human brain can experience. These are tied into the status system, and each have their own two main subcategories:

1. High Status Hotness (HSH)

   • Dominance-based HSH: Controlling, commanding, potentially causing pain/discomfort

   • Prestige-based HSH: Skilled, making partner feel incredible pleasure, being admired

2. Low Status Hotness (LSH)

   • Dominance-based LSH: Being controlled, submitting, potentially receiving pain

   • Prestige-based LSH: Being desired by a high-value partner, being the focus of attention

Is this turning into a magic system-esque typology? Slightly, but I think this framework does the best job of explaining the complexity of human sexuality. High and low status are real and ancient, and the dominance and prestige model does the best job of explaining what the components of status are. Combine them together, and this is what you get.

What The Data Shows

The almost complete lack of good scientific information about what people are actually attracted to is rather impressive in a way; our society has managed to do its darndest to stop looking closely at sex, despite the stupid amounts of money spent that is predicated on human sexual instincts. But there is some info, so let's take a look at it.

Justin Lehmiller published the raw numbers from his two-year, 4,175-respondent fantasy survey in his book Tell Me What You Want. Here's a sample of the findings:

Fantasy theme

% who've fantasized ever

% who fantasize often

Threesome

89%

26%

Orgy/sex party

74%

14%

Inflicting pain

60%

17%

Receiving pain

65%

19%

Public/"people might see"

57%

16%

Cuckolding/hot-wife

52% men, 36% women

9% men, 4% women

Lehmiller's book groups the 369 prompts into seven clusters; the top three alone—multi-partner, power/control/rough, novelty/adventure—soak up over two-thirds of every "often" tick-mark. The remaining four (taboo, partner-sharing, passion/romance, erotic flexibility) are basically themed remixes of those top three.

What jumps out immediately is how common these supposedly "unusual" fantasies are. A full 65% of respondents have fantasized about receiving pain, and 60% about inflicting it. These aren't fringe interests—they're mainstream human sexuality.

Another surprising finding is that while there are gender differences in the prevalence of certain fantasies, they're smaller than most people would expect. For instance, while men are more likely to have cuckolding fantasies than women (52% vs. 36%), that still means over a third of women have fantasized about their partner sleeping with someone else.

Aella's sexual fantasy survey, while not academically published, provides interesting data on dominance/submission preferences. She found that 71% of women reported being sexually submissive, compared to 26% of men. Meanwhile, 26% of women reported being sexually dominant, compared to a surprisingly close 36% of men.

What these numbers tell us is that:

1. Status-related sexual fantasies (dominance, submission, exhibitionism) are extremely common

2. Both HSH and LSH are present in both genders, with statistical tilts but not binary splits

3. Many people enjoy both high and low status fantasies, suggesting the neural circuitry for both exists in most people

4. The most popular fantasies across genders can be classified using our status framework

Now, let's examine how this framework explains specific fantasies and behaviors:

BDSM: The most obvious example. Bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, and masochism are explicitly about power exchange—creating temporary status differentials for erotic pleasure. The dominant partner performs high-status behaviors (giving orders, controlling movement, administering pain), while the submissive partner performs low-status behaviors (obeying, being restrained, receiving pain).

Threesomes:  I think there’s some element of just additional stimulation here; if one person is attractive, then two people is twice as attractive. But I also think that a big part of the threesome fantasy is about status; it’s quite high status to have two partners focused on you. Imagine the guy who brags about the time that he had a threesome to all of his mates… 

Role-play scenarios: Teacher/student, boss/secretary, doctor/patient, police officer/criminal—these common scenarios all feature clear status differentials. The appeal comes from temporarily inhabiting these status positions in a sexual context.

Exhibitionism/voyeurism: Being watched during sex typically signals high status (you're important enough to command attention), while watching signals lower status (you're paying attention to someone else). The exhibitionist gets arousal from the status boost of being observed.

Cuckolding/hotwifing: These involve complex status dynamics where someone derives pleasure from their partner having sex with someone else. In cuckolding, the arousal often comes from the status humiliation (low-status sexuality). In hotwifing, the arousal can come from "owning" someone desirable enough that others want them (high-status sexuality).

The Evolutionary Story

Why would there be any reason why the human brain would work this way? Why would sexuality and status be  interlinked so closely? As is often the case, it comes back to evolution.

Dominance and sexuality started out interlinked. In most animals, dominance comes from males trying to stop other males from breeding. Makes perfect sense; if you're trying to spread your genes far and wide, stopping other males who are trying to do the same is an obvious strategy.

Mature male alligators pick an area of river, and hunt down and kill any other male alligators, monopolizing any females in the area until a new male alligator rises up and kills them. In social animals, such as our ape ancestors, dominance developed into hierarchies, where the individuals have a ranking order that dictates who breeds and who doesn't.

Over time, this results in individuals in social species having sophisticated built-in status detectors and motivational systems, so that they can navigate this landscape and find reproductive success. Evolution makes it so that it feels good to be dominant, because now you can monopolize reproductive opportunities, and feeling good is how evolution incentivizes being on top.

Meanwhile, males are spending all this energy fighting each other, testing each other, ranking each other. Females, who invest more resources and time into children than males do and so need to figure out who has good genes, learn to take advantage of this ranking.. "Top of the ranking = good genes" is a great heuristic for quality, because being dominant in a group is a complicated, hard-to-fake signal, similar to many other kinds of male mating displays. 

Being high status is a hard-to-fake signal, a la a peacock’s tail

As discussed before, humans added prestige to this dominance equation, and over time, status was born. Sexuality was already tied into dominance, as it is in many animal species, but now in humans it becomes much more complicated. However, the fundamental principle that being attracted to status is a great evolutionary hack still holds true; being high status is a hard-to-fake signal, and so evolution makes high status attractive, at least for those who are picky, i.e., females.

Now we have a feedback loop. Being high status was already enjoyable for males; it meant more mating opportunities, and evolution incentivized it with positive feelings. But as female sexuality begins to be based around identifying high status individuals, evolution starts to make acting high status, especially in a sexual context, even more appealing. This kicks off a feedback loop, where both  sexes are incentivized  to play their role, to focus on high or low status sexuality and to be increasingly turned on by it.

This story is sounding pretty gender essentialist: men are doms, women are subs, divine masculine and feminine energy, yin and yang, yada yada yada. But by looking at the data, we know this is an incomplete, inaccurate picture. There certainly is a tilt to who is a sub and who is a dom based on gender, but there are plenty of female doms and male subs. How does this crude evolutionary story explain that?

Well, I think it's pretty simple: evolution is a lazy hack.

High status and low status sexuality may have evolved for the reproductive strategies of each gender, but actually giving completely different sexuality systems to each gender would be complicated and hard. After all, every fetus starts out as female, and the blueprints for male and female aren't that different. Instead, evolution found an easier approach: give both sexuality systems to everyone (which isn't too hard when everyone already has built-in status detection modules) and then use hormones to modulate which is more active.

Evolution being a lazy hack.

Hormone and gene based modulation is how a lot of male and female differences already work, and this strategy is simple and robust. Furthermore, it neatly explains the diversity of sexuality that we see in the present day. High status and low status sexuality may have evolved for the purposes of male and female reproductive strategies, but they're not limited to them; nowadays, people can have one or the other or both, regardless of what biological sex they are. Men are biased towards high status and women towards low status strategies on average, but it's crucial to remember that this is simply an average, not an immutable characteristic of each biological sex.

This explains why, despite statistical differences, we see the full spectrum of sexual preferences across genders. A man can be primarily aroused by acting low status  just as a woman can be primarily aroused by acting high status —it's just that the biological defaults are set differently. Furthermore, I don’t think same sex relationships, or the modern understanding of gender fundamentally do anything to change this picture; people on Grindr say whether they’re a top or bottom immediately, and the full analysis 

The Mysteries, Explained

Armed with this knowledge of status, the two main kinds of sexuality and their subtypes, and an understanding that any individual can have a mix of these, we can go back to those initial questions, those mysteries, and come up with answers that I find to be mostly satisfying. I don’t think this theory explains literally everything, but I do  find it to be an incredibly powerful and elegant theory for understanding human sexuality.

Let's dive into some of those mysteries that Scott identified, plus a few more that always confused me until this all started clicking together:

Mystery #1: Specific Scenarios

Scott writes:

"There are the people who can only get pleasure from some very specific scenario - imagining that they're an antebellum slave owner and their partner is a runaway slave who they're punishing, or that their partner is their brother and they're committing incest, or that their partner is their disciplinarian teacher who always gave them bad grades but secretly it was because they loved them the whole time and wanted them to get strong enough to be a good spouse."

Here, Scott goes into the mystery of specific fantasies. I don't fully know why one specific fantasy gets locked in, other than vaguely gesturing at trapped priors and critical windows. On the other hand, this theory does explain why it's these fantasies that are locked in. All of these fantasies, and most common roleplay scenarios, are about status.

Slave owner and slave? Extreme status and power differential.

Brother and sister incest? It's a little harder to spot, but still based around status; you have to be very attractive, very high status for your sibling to want to sleep with you despite the incest taboo or, from the other point of view, one person is being low status, degrading themselves by breaking societal norms.

Disciplinarian teacher and student? Super obvious status differential, and the tweak of it being motivated by secret love fits in with low status sexuality being about having a high status individual focused on you.

We can go down the line of stereotypical roleplay scenarios: police officer and citizen, doctor and patient, boss and secretary, teacher and student, even criminal and home-invasion victim. There's not much that unites these except that in the scene, one is high status and one is low status, and the hotness either comes from imagining yourself with high or low status, depending on what gets you going.

Mystery #2: Partner Enjoyment

Scott notes:

"There's the dirt-common phenomenon of people who can only take pleasure in sex if they know their partner is enjoying it too, and the thankfully rarer phenomenon of people who can only take pleasure if their partner isn't enjoying it."

This also makes sense under the status lens. These are people who primarily experience high status sexuality, but differ on whether they are wired more for prestige or dominance. Your partner enjoying themselves is affirmation of your prestige, your skill in making them feel good, which reinforces your status. Your partner not enjoying themselves is an affirmation of dominance, of being so in charge, so powerful that it doesn't matter if they're feeling good or not. Crucially, both are about what you're doing to your partner, not what is being done to you; this is what makes them both high status.

Mystery #3: Hate Sex & Makeup Sex

Scott says: “There's people who can only enjoy hate sex, or makeup sex.” 

Hate sex: clear, reified status dynamics; the one hating, punishing, being angry is acting higher status than they normally would, by virtue of being more dominant, and the other partner enjoys those higher status actions, despite the anger being directed at them.

Makeup sex: works similarly but through a different mechanism. The preceding conflict creates an emotional intensity that heightens status awareness. The reconciliation often involves one partner taking a lower status position (apologizing, admitting fault) while the other affirms forgiveness from a higher status position. This temporary clarification of the status differential creates an erotic charge that makes makeup sex particularly intense.

Mystery #4: Abuse Patterns

Scott mentioned people "who only date abusers even though they hate it." This is an area where the theory makes strong predictions: people would generally assume that being around an abuser is bad, and people wouldn't do so. But real life indicates there are many people who continuously date abusers, even when it seems statistically implausible; Scott discusses this in the middle of this post. 

The status theory of sexuality would say that there are people who are attracted to status, and more specifically, attracted strongly to dominance. A lot of abusive behavior is extremely dominant, and this helps explain why they keep being attracted to these people, despite all the terrible consequences. The full story is more complicated, of course, but I think this is a big part of it. 

Mystery #5: Forced Fantasies

When I was younger, I was quite confused by the studies showing that a substantial number of women have dark sexual fantasies about coercion, violence, blackmail, and home invasions. According to one study by Bivona & Critelli, between 31% and 57% of women have fantasies of being forced into sexual activity. I didn't understand why this was so common, but this theory gives a solid answer.

Status differences are hot, and people can enjoy being lower status than someone in a sexual context, even if they normally wouldn't. Someone with the ability to credibly threaten you or hurt you has super high status/authority. Someone can enjoy being overpowered, outmatched, if it happens in a way that demonstrates that the person doing the overpowering has high status.

And yes, this skews female, but it certainly isn't unique to women; there are plenty of men with similar fantasies, which makes sense given that everyone has the neural circuitry for both high status and low status sexuality.

Mystery #6: Cuckold Fantasies

Another mystery was male sexual cuckold fantasies. I knew the simple story of reproductive logic, of men wanting to spread their genes and women being selective, and that completely failed to explain why something like 58% of men in a large survey reported fantasies about watching their partner with another man.

I knew why it would make sense for men to fantasize about being the bull, the person sleeping with the other man's wife, from an evolutionary "I'm the best" kind of logic, but instead, the point of view of the fantasy seemed to be from the male, the cuckold, whose partner slept with another man.

Pretty baffling, until you understand that men have low status sexuality as well. Cuckold fantasies or reality is a way to induce intense feelings of low status in a sexual context, especially for men who have self-worth/status tied into which/how many women they're with. The humiliation aspect, which is often central to these fantasies, is essentially a form of extreme LSH, where the status drop itself is the erotic trigger.

Mystery #7: Fetishes Through a Status Lens

One of the strengths of the status framework is its ability to explain seemingly bizarre fetishes that appear to have nothing to do with reproduction or conventional attractiveness. Let's look at some examples:

Age Play/Adult Babies: People who wear diapers and act like babies are engaging in an extreme form of low status sexuality. Few positions are lower status than that of an infant—completely dependent, unable to control bodily functions, requiring constant care. The appeal comes from the total surrender of status and responsibility. The complementary "caregiver" role experiences high status sexuality through both dominance (complete control) and prestige (being needed, providing care).

Furries: The furry fandom often involves creating anthropomorphic animal personas or "fursonas." Through a status lens, these personas often embody exaggerated status characteristics—powerful predators (wolves, lions, dragons) for those drawn to high status, or cute, small animals (bunnies, foxes) for those drawn to low status. The fursona allows exploration of status dynamics in a safe, removed context.

Financial Domination: "Findom" involves giving money to a dominant partner who may offer little or nothing in return. This is a pure status transaction—money is a status marker, and voluntarily giving it away to someone who doesn't reciprocate creates an extreme status differential. The appeal for the submissive is the humiliation and objectification of being "used" purely for resources.

These examples show how even seemingly inexplicable sexual interests can be understood through the status framework. The more "unusual" the fetish appears, the more likely it represents an exaggeration of basic status dynamics—taking either high status or low status sexuality to an extreme.

Limitations and objections:

Objection #1: "This Seems Unfalsifiable"

Haven't I just invented a flexible enough framework that anything related to sexuality can be said to be high or low status, and therefore proves the theory correct?

To some degree, yes. I don't think it's a coincidence that anything can be high or low status; that's just a fundamental result of a ranking algorithm that has two possible outputs. If your options are black or white, then the color of any object can be categorized under that system, while losing a lot 

of nuance. 

Anything can be sorted into two buckets

At the same time, I do think our brain does that fundamental simplification, that sorting into high and low status  because it makes social decisions and judgments quicker and easier. Having a leaderboard in your head for those around you and yourself, which tracks who is ahead and who is behind, simplifies a lot of decision making.

Ultimately, I think this framework is still valuable if it:

1. Provides a unified explanation for seemingly unrelated phenomena

2. Makes successful predictions

3. Offers more explanatory power than alternatives

And this theory does make testable predictions:

1.  People with more testosterone should be more likely to exhibit high status sexual preference.

2. Basically all fetishes should have some status component, including common roleplay scenarios; 

3. Porn that caters to one gender should be more focused on one kind of sexuality than the other, i.e. porn consumed by woman should prominently feature extremely high status suitors (and I do notice that written erotica for women does feature a suspicious amount of billionaires…)

Objection #2: "This Reduces Sex and Love to Status Games"

The status framework might seem to paint an unromantic picture of human sexuality—all calculations and hierarchy rather than connection and intimacy.

But, just because something is uncomfortable, doesn’t mean it’s not true. We don’t particularly like thinking about status, and we don’t like thinking about sexuality; combining them feels uncomfortable. But, 

“If the box contains a diamond,

I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond;

What is true is already so. And I think having a framework, having explanations, is more comforting than people might think. I’ve talked to friends that had dark, violent sexual fantasies, and were ashamed of them, felt bad about them, and from what I’ve seen on the internet, they’re far from alone in this. I’ve explained some of this framework to those friends, that this is widespread, that our sexual instincts are focused on status, and that it’s ok to be turned on by these fantasies, that it’s human, not evidence of your brain being broken; they found that message helpful. 

There’s also an element of staying on the right level of abstraction in human interaction; even if this theory is 100% correct, it’s still not the most useful lens to use in most sexual-social interactions. If you need to explain mysteries, it’s powerful, but for regular interactions, just be human and don’t worry about the underlying mechanisms. 

A Grand Unified Theory of Sexuality

The status-sexuality framework doesn't explain everything about human sexuality. Biology, learning, trauma, pair bonding mechanisms, and cultural factors all play crucial roles. But it does provide a compelling explanation for many otherwise puzzling aspects of sexual desire.

If I had to formalize this theory, I'd propose something like this:

1. Humans evolved dual status systems (dominance and prestige) for navigating social hierarchies

2. Sexual selection pressures linked status and sexual arousal in complex feedback loops

3. Rather than creating separate systems for males and females, evolution gave everyone similar neural circuitry but with different default settings

This isn't a complete theory of human sexuality, but it's a substantial improvement over the standard model of "people want genital stimulation with attractive partners." It explains weird edge cases not as anomalies but as predictable variations within a coherent framework.

Most importantly, it suggests that sexuality isn't some bizarre exception to our psychological models—it's deeply integrated with our social cognition. The same status-tracking systems that help us navigate office politics and dinner parties are recruited for our most intimate desires.

In the quote from Scott that opened this essay, he compared psychology to physics, where the Standard Model works until it doesn't. Perhaps a better analogy would be to early astronomy, where epicycles were added to make geocentric models match observations. Eventually, someone realized that a heliocentric model was simpler and more elegant.

Likewise, a status based theory of sexuality is a framework that replaces increasingly complex explanations (trauma, "daddy issues," classical conditioning)  with a simpler, more unified model. Not "epicycles upon epicycles" to explain each sexual preference, but a single principle from which diverse phenomena naturally emerge.

It's elegant. It's predictive. And most importantly, it helps make sense of human behavior in all its weird, wonderful complexity.

Why does this matter?  To some degree, as mentioned before, this is insight porn; great for understanding things, or feeling like you understand things, but potentially less useful in day-to-day life. Status is a powerful framework, but also, if you try to handle regular social interactions through it, I think you’ll mostly just be incredibly awkward and weird. Pick the right frame for the context you’re in. 

But, I do think there is some value in understanding the links between status and sexuality. In my life, it’s made me a better lover. I flailed around when I first started sleeping with people, trying out different things. Some things got better reactions, and so, I started doing those things more, but I had no idea why people liked it when I moved them around, told them what to do, lightly choked them, etc. I could vaguely speculate, “I guess being dominant is attractive?” but that was about the limit of the framework I had at the time. I knew BDSM was a thing, and realized that I was acting as a Dom, but I’m a pretty prototypical Scott Alexander reader; I needed a framework, a scaffold to understand what the essence of being a Dom was, not just a list of traits. 

And so, I constructed one, pulling from different things I had read; this was the framework I’ve explained in this essay. 

I realized  that I had been with partners that enjoyed me acting high status , and I could lean further into that, now that I knew what the essence of status was. You still have to communicate, to try out different things, to see what the specific person you’re with actually enjoys; this is not license to assume that there is one universal human sexuality and that you know what someone will enjoy.

 But, it is license to say, there are patterns to what people like, and if they like one thing, they will likely enjoy similar things that hit some of the same buttons. And those buttons are mostly based on dominance, prestige, and status. 

Aside from the purely selfish benefits (which are pretty significant), I do think this model has broader implications. For one,  it implies that what we consider deviant or unusual in sexuality isn't actually that strange – it's just the status game playing out in different forms. Instead of pathologizing certain desires as abnormal, we could recognize them as variations on universal human status-seeking mechanisms.

Second, it offers a more nuanced lens for sexual education and therapy. Rather than focusing solely on the mechanics of sex or treating problematic sexual behaviors as isolated phenomena, therapists and educators could address the underlying status dynamics. Understanding that many sexual preferences are fundamentally about experiencing status shifts might help people communicate their desires more effectively and understand their partners' needs with greater clarity.

Perhaps most importantly, this perspective offers some resolution to Scott's original puzzlement. The apparent contradictions in human sexuality – why some people want to dominate while others want to submit, why the same person might want different things in different contexts – become comprehensible when viewed through the lens of status. We're not just seeking reproduction or pleasure; we're navigating complex status dynamics that tap into our deepest evolutionary and social programming.

Understanding sexuality through status doesn't diminish its mystery or beauty. If anything, recognizing these patterns enhances our appreciation of human complexity. Like how  understanding the physics of a rainbow doesn’t make it any less beautiful, seeing the status structures underlying our desires doesn't make them less profound. It simply gives us a better map of the territory – one that might help us navigate with greater awareness, compassion, and perhaps even skill.