A while back I wrote “Hypergamy is a Myth.” There I made a few observations and conclusions.

First, numerous studies show that both men and women desire to pair with someone above their station. Both men and women want to be hypergamous. There is no indication that only one sex is motivated by hypergamy.

Second, it is not possible for both men and women to be successfully hypergamous. For every hypergamous woman, there must be corresponding a hypogamous man. And for every hypergamous man, there must be a corresponding hypogamous woman. Thus, if men and women were both equally successful (or unsuccessful) at hypergamy, then they would cancel each other out and you’d have heterogamy. This is precisely what happens.

Third, there is a widespread belief—especially in the Manosphere—that human pairing is a non-Normal Pareto Distribution. This is normally called the “80/20 principle”, where 20% of men pair up with 80% of the women, leaving the bottom 20% of the women for the remaining 80% of men. However, this is not found in any data on long-term relationships (dating or marriage). In fact, humans tend to assortatively pair with people they are “looksmatched” with.

Fourth, there is a disconnect between the perception of attractiveness and what is actually “looksmatched.” In any given good match, both men and women  tend to perceive women to be more attractive than men in those average pairings. This is what leads to the common stereotype “he didn’t deserve her.” This, surprisingly, is not a feminist trope but is actually a misunderstanding of reality based on a shared false perception: women’s looks are overvalued by both men and women. In actual reality, the most successful “looksmatched” matches are those in which the man is perceived to have—but not actually having—been hypergamous.

Fifth, unbalanced relationships (where one hypergamous partner actually moves up) have a higher divorce risk. Interestingly, a hypergamous female relationship is less likely to divorce than a hypergamous male relationship. In other words, female hypergamy has better outcomes than male hypergamy, but both are worse than heterogamy. Consequently, avoiding male hypergamy would be more likely to reduce the divorce rate than avoiding female hypergamy. However, if a man avoids all hypergamy and hypogamy, he’s minimizing his divorce odds.

Sixth, since people are naturally highly effective at assortative pairing, altering the sorting process is likely to cause a bunch of negative outcomes. For example, while the perception of attractiveness leads to the perception that most pairings are a mismatch, they are actually good assortative matches. This means that any attempt to alter the normal assortative pairing process (e.g. trying to match people by perceived attractiveness) is likely to be negative and increase, not reduce, divorce risk. Consequently, by altering the natural sorting processes, following Red Pill wisdom can either result in no pairings at all or a worse pairing.

Last week, I posted a link to my original post over at Spawny’s and I made this critique regarding the standard Manosphere’s tendency to blame Bad Things on female hypergamy:

Given the sad state of discourse there, I’m sure you’ll be unsurprised by the result. Here are the least constructive comments:

…and…

…and:

These have “crazy uncle” vibes. You can see how I would avoid engaging with such ad hominem and those ridiculous assertions. In any case, none of that has anything to do with hypergamy, even if it were true.

Fortunately, Cameron responded in the comment section under my article with productive and insightful comments, showing that when people come here to chat, things generally proceed nicely. I suggest you check those out if you would prefer positive analysis.

As for Spawny’s Space, the on-topic comments were not much better. Here is another “6 like” comment:

This doesn’t even appear to be an anecdote, as it isn’t substantiated. The “yes men” in the crowd just eat it up as if the data supported it. Hint: it doesn’t.

If these men were actually interested in testing their viewpoint to see if it is actually true, they’d build some hypotheses and test them. For example, if men are prone to polygyny and women were prone to hypergamy, then at any given time, you’d expect men to have multiple partners while women would be serially monogamous. In other words, you’d need a lot of sexually active women for a relatively few men. That’s the assumption of the 80/20 principle, where 20% of men are paired with 80% of the women. In other words, you’d have a lot of these:

The problem? Reality doesn’t match.

As “Chains of Affection: The Structure of Adolescent Romantic and Sexual Networks” by Bearman, Moody, and Stovel shows, in an entire high school with ~600 students in relationships over an eighteen-month period in the 90s, there is only one of these alpha males. In fact, if we zoom out a little bit, we’ll see that the whole narrative breaks down even further:

That’s right. Almost every female that this “alpha” was with was with one or two other different males (and they in turn with one or two other different females). There was not a single alpha male whose partners were exclusive only to them. There was just one alpha female (with exclusive access to four males). For the most part, there are no differences between male and female behaviors:

For example, considering people who had 4 or more partners, at least half were female. Males were not more likely to have been selected by many different females, something you would not expect if you thought female hypergamy and the 80/20 principle were true.

The ratio of participation is about 95 females to 100 males. That is what you would expect if pairing was assortative on a Normal Distribution and heterogamy was the standard. It does not replicate the Pareto 80/20 principle nor hypergamy. Males and females are almost equally likely as men to have just one partner or to have more than one partner. There is no indication at all that males are prone to polygyny and females are prone to hypergamy. The hypothesis has been rejected.

Almost a quarter of relationships were strictly monogamous and more than 40% had only one partner. There was no significant difference between male and female behavior. This militates against the hypothesis that women are hypergamous while men tend to polygyny.

By contrast, about half of relationships are interconnected in a big web of fornication. The majority of people—both male and female—had 1 to 3 relationships. There were very few alphas. In fact, there were more “alpha” females than “alpha” males, but both were relatively rare. The whores and chads might get all the press, but they really are not a significant factor. So too, all of this defies the hypothesis that women are hypergamous while men tend to polygyny.

The remaining 10% form various own small relationship webs, and again consisted of an nearly equal proportion of males and females. There is no indication of hypergamy or tendencies towards polygyny.

Notably, up to 2 in 3 students were romantically and/or sexually active. Up to two-thirds of males were in at least one relationship (and often more). Even accounting for out-of-school relationships, this defies any notion that only 20% of males can attract a female.

There is almost a complete lack of “short cycles” in the sexual habits of males and females in large groups like this.

Short cycles, or small loops, are what you would expect if there were a lot of male or female “alphas”: highly attractive individuals that have a lot of partners. The female partners of the male alphas should, if hypergamy were true, mostly partner with the other top-20% male alphas, leading to loops between common persons. But, in general people rarely shared more than one partner in common and almost every participant had 1 to 3 partners. There are only three short cycles among nearly 600 students.

The researchers—two decades ago in 2004—specifically noted how rare short cycles were and were surprised by the result. The Manosphere has never received this message.

What’s interesting is that men in the Manosphere are probably most aware of this part of society…

…but are probably least aware of this one:

In any case, what the researchers found was that students assortatively paired. Assortative mating is antithetical to hypergamy:

…and…

But most importantly is this conclusion:

People naturally sort themselves according to sexual experience. Males and females with more experience tend to pair up with others who have more experience.

This leads to a very uncomfortable fact: sexually experienced men—or men who would choose to be if they could; or men who would have if not for religion —in the manosphere are naturally attracted to women who themselves have more sexual experience or are more likely to cheat. This process process of assortative mating is natural and mostly unconscious, but it helps to realize that the men complaining how bad women are are actively—even if unconsciously—naturally attracted to the kind of women most likely to cheat on—and ultimately divorce—them.

It would be decidedly unhelpful to say “be more attractive to women who are less attractive to you and less attracted to you in order to have a better relationship” but that’s what we are talking about. This isn’t hypergamy, it is assortative mating.

Since mating preferences are not merely about sexual attraction, but involves a number of other factors, attempting to improve your looks is generally not going to dramatically alter your assortative mating prospects (whether positive or negative). Nor are most other self-help pieces of advice. Making dramatic alterations to oneself, including moving into a much higher income bracket, becoming a better student, or altering one’s social standing, are not always possible. People are not blank slates.

Anyway, let’s see if we can find any more constructive comments.

The data (and what I actually wrote) tells a different tale, leading me to wonder if they actually read what I wrote or if they just didn’t comprehend it. Researchers have been unable to replicate the claim made in this comment. By all indications, neither men nor women are actually hypergamous.

This is a perception, not a reality. The reality is that women are perceived to be slightly hypogamous in practice, but heterogamous in actuality.

The irony is that as a relationship length increases, the more likely that the perception is that he moved up to a woman who is more attractive than he is.

Also, men are attracted to people who are more attractive than them, but they are more likely to avoid acting on this desire because the penalties of doing so are too high. If the penalties were lower, men absolutely would appear to be attracted only to those people who are more attractive than they are. It’s certainly not desire that is the limiting factor here.

Even if this were true—and it isn’t—it would only indicate that women desire to be hypergamous. But women are all talk and no game. When it comes to actual results, they are not hypergamous. Like men, they do not restrict themselves only to higher-tier partners.

It’s not me, it’s all of the studies which show that both men and women are hypergamous. Any hint of hypergamy disappears along with the increasing duration of the relationship. That’s just the reality of the situation. By the time most couples marry, they may have both racked up a lot of….mileage….but they both ultimately settled on a fair match.

First, this is not just women with men, it’s also men with women. Hypergamy of both sexes tends to fail early on in relationships.

Second, hypergamy is rare even in the initial stages of relationship. Most people preselect for homophily and heterogamy prior to acquiring a partner. In other words, the negotiation phase where people self-sort rules out hypergamy in most partners.

Third, even where one partner is hypergamous, this does not continue to all their relationships, just some of them. Others are heterogamous or hypogamous.

Because the word hypergamy means this:

To be hypergamous, you have to actually do this successfully. So the fact that women do not do this successfully means they are not hypergamous. If women are getting into relationships who are comparable matches, then by definition, they are not hypergamous.

Apparent? Did he even read what I wrote?

How about this explicit statement:

Or this one:

That claim is ridiculous, but not just because it misrepresents what I said, but because it misrepresents reality:

Referring to attractiveness to include things other than physical attractiveness is very common for people, including researchers, to do.

Now we are getting into crazy territory. That’s precisely what it means. By definition. The definition of hypergamy is this:

Hypergamy isn’t happening. Consider:

In online dating networks, homophily begins to assert itself as soon as the first reciprocal message is received. Even looks-based hypergamy is a superficial effect.

Whether this is true or not is orthogonal to the question of hterogamy, hypergamy, and hypogamy. This is orthogonal to the issue because women have relationships with and marry men—who are higher, lower, or the same level as they are—that they are not attracted to.

Anyway, if you want some more serious critiques of what I’ve written, go read what Cameron has written.

Now, let’s move on to the recent article:

Oh, yes, we all “know” about female hypergamy.

Notice how Farm Boy is defining male hypergamy as being “only satisfied with having sex with the most attractive women.” It’s feelings based, not based on actions. So, using the same definition for women, if a woman has sex with an unattractive man or a man with matched attractiveness, this doesn’t count as hypogamy because of her feelings.

It’s hard to take these feelings-based arguments seriously.

The problem with the female hypergamy hypothesis is that statistically looksmatched relationships have the most intimacy, by far. When it comes to actual feelings, a woman is happier in an assortatively matched pair. Actually hypergamous women—those who are with men who are above her station—are less happy and decidedly not satisfied. So if hypergamy is feelings-based, then hypergamy is disproved by a woman’s own feelings.

We know that women will engage in looks-based hypogamy, heterogamy, and hypergamy, so if we are basing hypergamy on a woman’s actual choices, then women are not actually choosing hypergamy. We also know that women are not more satisfied by hypergamous relationships (compared to heterogamous ones), so based on their actual feelings women are not hypergamous. And, of course, we know that women are not hypergamous when it comes to the standard full definition of hypergamy, which takes into account things other than pure sexual attraction.

The only way that women are hypergamous is their initial intentions or their motivations. But these quickly dissipate in the very early stages of relationship discovery and negotiation, and the dating and marriage marketplace quickly prices out any discrepancies. In other words, hypergamy is a perception.

Farm Boy’s cute little contrived example doesn’t work for two reasons.

First, because actual in-practice hypergamy—whether male or female—leads to worse outcomes: less satisfaction and higher divorce. Heterogamy just works better, which is why people do it.

Second, men and women are different, they are not interchangeable blank slates. Male and female hypergamy are not equivalent and interchangeable concepts. In particular, the divorce rate for hypergamous men is higher than for hypergamous women: the latter is tolerated much more than the former.  Thus, the idea that men could “bite the bullet” and pull off hypergamy in such a hostile environment is absurd. The only reason women are perceived as hypergamous is because the penalty for doing so is less.

We don’t need a thought experiment to know what would happen. Male hypergamy has been studied and it carries a much more serious risk of divorce than heterogamy or female hypergamy. If guys were asked to do it, the bullet they’d have to bite would be the much higher likelihood of divorce. Considering how aggressively men are already avoiding attachments in the existing heterogamous environment (both in terms of sexual activity and marriage), would they actually bite the bullet en masse and take one for the team? Absolutely not. If men were asked to be hypergamous, fornication would increase relative to the decrease in marriage.

If the penalty for male hypergamy was less, men would be just as hypergamous as women are, since men and women are nearly equally hypergamous in terms of their desires.

The statistics do not bear this out. Assortative mating is the norm.

It is bad for both sides, but not no matter who has it. It is much worse for men to be hypergamous than for women. Female hypergamy involves a small rise in divorce risk, but male hypergamy involves a more significant rise in divorce risk. Since a sizable majority of women are the ones filing for divorce, hypergamy is not an unreasonable risk for women. It is a Red Pill myth that female hypergamy is devastating for women. It’s generally worse for men.

Let’s summarize.

First, the average women will mate with men of all levels of attractiveness, but most often with men who are similar to them in attractiveness. If hypergamy is “mating only with more attractive men” then women are not hypergamous.

Second, the average women might choose to mate with a more attractive man, but her satisfaction—her feelings—will not be greater. If hypergamy is “only satisfied with the hottest for banging” then women are not hypergamous.

Third, the average woman mates more often with men who are of similar attractiveness to themselves. If hypergamy is “visceral sexual attraction” then women are not hypergamous.

Fourth, if hypergamy includes things like social status or economic standing, then women are heterogamous, not hypergamous.

Fifth, if hypergamy is defined as the desire to mate with someone in a higher tier, then both men and women are equally hypergamous.

In summary, the manosphere’s belief in female hypergamy is a myth.

In closing, I want to highlight Rock Kitaro’s recent commentary:

Assortative mating is vicious and uncaring.

Few men realize exactly how powerful their ingrained preferences are in determining the selection bias that rules their relationship outcomes. Men and women are attracted to the kind of person they are attracted to: people who are largely similar to who they are. If they find themselves always alone or with women who are experienced, cheaters, or prone to divorce, it’s because that’s who the market says they should be paired with. They can blame the world for being cruel—and it is—but ultimately the world is just giving them what they “want.”

How many men are going to look introspectively at their past beliefs and past decisions and conclude that they got exactly what they should have gotten, even if they didn’t realize where it was all leading. Men can come up with all sorts of explanations for why their method is the best and some other method is the worst, and why they their previous mistakes shouldn’t have any consequences, but this is why it is important to see what the actual data says. And, frankly, not everyone is willing to do that.

Rock Kitaro is talking about people like me. I married a girl from my high school. I’m still married. My kids are about to graduate high school. Most men in the Manosphere don’t listen to people like me. They think we are always wrong about everything and have nothing to offer, that we are disconnected from the real reality.

Back when I was on Boxer’s blog, I was the only one in the group telling people that they should be trying to find a wife as soon as possible when they are a teenager, because the best brides go quickly and young. By age 25 or so, it is too late. They tried to tell me that the divorce rate is higher among the young and that I was wrong. It turns out the divorce rate is higher among the young, but this is due to confounding: the divorce rate is higher because people prone to lower divorce rates don’t get married young….but they should and would have even lower divorce rates if they did.

The point is that if you dwell on hypergamy—a rare and mostly meaningless phenomena—you will be wasting your time when it could be better spent elsewhere. And the fact that you are wasting it discussing hypergamy is one of the reasons assortative mating practices have put you in the position that it has by your own choice. To quote Rock Kitaro:

If you spend your time talking about women on the internet (something I generally avoid in favor of talking about men or having topical discussions), you are most likely going to get “assortatively paired” with yourself. This isn’t meant as an insult, it’s just that assortative mating is vicious and uncaring. Be aware. And take Rock Kitaro’s advice and branch out. And, as much as I hate saying it because I enjoy the interaction, you may want to stop reading blogs, including mine.