Episode Details

In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the controversial idea of bringing back the concept of the “concubine” (or courtesan) in modern relationships. They contrast two distinct relationship models: the true wife/housewife — a full business and life partner who advances the family’s interests — versus the courtesan/tradwife/trophy wife model, where the woman’s primary role is pleasure, aesthetics, and appearance rather than deep partnership.

Drawing on history, labor statistics, and cultural critique, they discuss how women historically contributed far more to subsistence and family businesses than modern narratives suggest. They examine why many people today unconsciously seek unpaid courtesans, the problems with “ornamental” relationships, and how clear terminology can lead to better-aligned marriages. Topics include trophy wives as a profession, Real Housewives culture, objective-function alignment in relationships, and practical advice for high-achieving men and women.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] what I like about the term courtesan is it helps separate between a true housewife and the more modern tradwife, which I think is closer to a - courtesan.

If you look at the tradwife, right, the tradwife makes everything look pretty, right? She, , does up the house. , She does the baking from scratch and everything. And she’s doing all that for appearance. She’s doing all that to, to sell, , that he has a certain type of wife.

But, like, she’s not actually managing the family budget, right? Like, she’s not actually managing the deeper parts of the family. And many people who society at large would confuse, they would say, “Well, this woman stays at home and educates the kids , as part of her duties, therefore she’s the same type of thing as this trad woman.”

Speaker: Specifically, we will be delineating two categories of relationships. One, the courtesan relationship, where the woman believes that their core job vis-a-vis their partner is just their [00:01:00] partner’s pleasure and reproducing. Whereas the other, the true wife or housewife, sees their job as being fully integrated with their husband’s life and advancing the interests of their family.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be expanding on a concept that a fan came up with in response to a previous video, and it is that we should bring back the concept of concubine. And when I first heard this I was like, well, we don’t wanna normalize sort of, you know, promiscuous behavior in this regards.

There’s a lot of negative social externalities for doing it. But after they laid it out for me, I’m like, actually we, we need to start having a conversation about this. We need to normalize this concept. This is a good concept So let me explain. We had a video where we basically go over the history of male [00:02:00] and female labor.

And what we pointed out using a lot of statistics, a lot of historical examples, is the modern idea that throughout history men mostly did all the labor and women mostly stayed at home and did education and child-rearing, is just completely historically anachronistic. Women actually did the majority and I, and I mean the majority of b- like grueling labor, like, repetitive

Simone Collins: tasks.

But y- y- subsistence, subsistence labor. So sort of your baseline food and, and everything else was more or less

Malcolm Collins: handled by the- Yeah, yeah. If, if you’re talking about, like, the majority of, of, of human history was during the hunter-gatherer period, that’s 95% of human history women were doing 60 to 70% of the calories in those societies.

And then you transition to an agricultural society, and in most agricultural societies women do the farmin