This is part of a series. See the index here.
Hypergamy is properly defined as “marrying up” and polygamy is properly defined as “marrying multiple people.” But these terms can also both be applied more generally to any romantic relationship, including dating above one’s station (i.e. hypergamy) or dating multiple people at once (i.e. polygamy).
Here is a popular explanation of hypergamy:
When I first saw this graphic, my first reaction was this:
This graph makes no sense at all. This is literally impossible:
It’s not possible for each man to hook up with each woman while all women are only hooking up with one man. So if we remove the irrelevant and impossible decisions and preferences…
…we are left with the only ones that matter to actual outcomes:
And that’s it. This depiction of “hypergamy” removes all agency from men. They are simply not a part of the equation. Including their preference of “male sex drive promotes multiplication” has no effect at all on actual outcomes. It doesn’t even matter if this is true about men.
If you replaced the first graphic with a different graph that shows no connections the result would still be “hypergamy”:
The first and third graphics literally provide no additional insight into intersexual dynamics beyond that provided by the second graphic.
The male sex drive does not provide any insight at all into the aggregate sexual marketplace. It does not have any impact on women’s choices. The male sex drive is as irrelevant to the argument for hypergamy as male interest in the Roman Empire is.
The entire theory of hypergamy rests on this premise to the exclusion of all else:
Hypergamy presumes that men have no agency over dating and marriage; that their choices, preferences, and deeds do not matter.
Under this conception of hypergamy, there is no sexual multiplication happening. So why even bring it up at all? It has no relevance to the discussion. Just say that men have no control whatsoever over whether or not they date or marry. There is no need to mention unproven theories about multiplicative sex drives.
But it’s obvious that men do, in fact, have large amounts of agency when it comes to dating. That’s why explanations like this…
…simply fail to comport with reality. As we’ve seen throughout this series, there is no non-anecdotal data to support this kind of claim. It does not match reality. Women do not, in fact, all choose the same men, but have widely divergent preferences and ultimately tend to mate assortatively.
Now, let’s step back a second and note that what is being described is not hypergamy at all. It is polygamy with the causal arrows reversed:
Just reverse those arrows and have the men doing the selection and you’ll see that the difference between hypergamy and polygamy is solely one of agency and timing.
Let’s try to determine which way the arrow goes. We note, critically, that this is a supply and demand imbalance that heavily favors the male. It is very obvious to this writer that this situation depicts elite men having their pick of the women while the non-elite men are left high-and-dry by the elite men. The elite man is able to select exactly who and how many partners he wants, because he’s in high demand and the women are not (because they are chasing rare resources). And, just like female hypergamy, the elite man can achieve a polygamous result without having to get married.
That description is just traditional polygamy….without the long term commitment.
But here is the catch. We see nothing like that in today’s dating market. At online dating sites—where most people meet—there are roughly two males for every one female. Females are in low supply and high demand while men are in low demand and high supply. The reason women are viewed as “hypergamous” is because they are buyers in a buyers market (or sellers in a sellers market, if you prefer). In other words, they are not marrying up at all, they are extracting exactly the value that the market allows them to extract. This imbalance leaves roughly 50% of men completely without meaningful prospects.
What is the explanation if it isn’t hypergamy? WGTOW.
Everyone knows about MGTOW—Men Going Their Own Way—but it is rare and exceptional for men to do this. What the dating market shows is that most men still want to get married and few men are willing to eschew marriage for the solitary life. But women have, as a collective unit, Gone Their Own Way in large droves. WGTOW—Women Going Their Own Way—has been highly successful.
WGTOW, not female hypergamy, explains the current state of dating and marriage. Among other things, hypergamy fails to explain the sustained prevalence of assortative mating, the low male virginity rate, and the 2:1 male-to-female ratio in the dating market. WGTOW explains these easily.
This graphic is completely and totally inverted. What we observe as so-called “hypergamy” is directly caused by women not selecting. Let’s try to fix it to match reality:
Women are not sexual selectors. They are, by and large, non-selectors.
Every explanation of hypergamy that I have ever seen within the Manosphere fails to account for the massive number of women who are choosing not to participate. The lack of women choosing men is of much greater import than the men that women choose.
Let us—for sake of argument—accept that hypergamy is 100% real and prescriptive, and that hypergamy maximallly explains why some men have success and others do not. At the absolute most, fixing this hypergamy would still mean that 2 out of every 3 men currently without prospects would continue to have no prospects.
As we already noted in the discussion on adultery, the theory of hypergamy lacks relevant explanatory power:
The more adultery a person commits, the more likely their legal marriage(s) will end in failure as a consequence of that (repeated) sin. By contrast, hypergamy does not provide an adequate explanation for this statistical effect.
…
Hypergamy does not provide an adequate explanation for why first time marriages—whether biblical or legal—are so much more successful.
…
Hypergamy does not provide an adequate explanation for why women do not always seek to “return” to their alpha partner(s) (no matter what order she bedded her men).
But hypergamy and adultery lack explanatory power because they are rooted in illicit sexual behavior. They can’t account for non-sexual behaviors.
Neither hypergamy nor adultery provide a first-order explanation of divorce for the purpose of remaining single. Adultery, despite its higher explanatory power, does not explain everything.
This is where WGTOW comes into play. It explains why women are opting out both before and after dating and/or marriage. It also explains the distortions to the dating and marriage marketplace.
Not too long ago I was a 6 foot 5* finance bro on dating apps. I’m fairly in shape. Yet still I swiped THOUSANDS of times with barely any matches at all.
I have ended up going on some successful dates, but these often came after swiping on nearly every available girl in my area. Literally thousands of girls.
By the time you find out that you need to perfectly curate every picture and every word on your profile, you’ll be so demoralized that you don’t even want to try anymore. Even if you’re halfway decent looking.
If you’re not, my good I can’t imagine the pain and suffering that must be caused. Apps reduce you to your mere physical attractiveness, so if you’re not high on that already you just don’t have a chance. Even if you look good, you pretty much have no chance.
These apps are confidence and masculinity destroyers. Just get off the apps. RETVRN TO THE WILD (bars and going outside).
My hottest take on dating is that women have just tuned out of the entire “dating men” thing. Especially in terms of seeking long term companionship. It is a very cost-benefit driven decision on their part. The sooner people come to terms with it the better.
All Incel theories about Chad and hypergamy are mostly cope. Women really did the Men Going Their Own Way and people are just too stubborn to accept it.
Without WGTOW—which is really just feminist women’s liberation—the market dynamics would stabilize and women would go back to meeting and marrying more like they used to.
It is no mere chance that the Manosphere’s conception of “hypergamy” began after online dating took off. Nor is it a surprise that “hypergamy” is a popular concept among introverted INTJ males (and the non-extroverted adjacent personalities). As women have gone their own way and introverted men no longer meet women through friends, in school, or at church, these introverted men have been left holding the bag. Meanwhile the extroverted men are having success in online dating and in situations where aggressive social skills are required (e.g. bars and restaurants).
This is what the Manosphere thinks is reality:
This is what the reality actually looks like when measured:
Among high school students, the assortative pairing rules, with the N-count staying mostly in the neighborhood of 0 to 4 with only few outliers. By the time men and women reach the age when most people marry (in their late 20s and early 30s), the assortative distribution remains the same. The only key difference is that the N count has gone up to account for more partners over time.
Hypergamy, despite its popularity among the Manosphere, lacks non-anecdotal supporting evidence.
In short, N-counts can be modeled like this:
This is roughly what happens when the average N count is 2. As the N count rises, the arrows just distribute semi-randomly until the result is a normal distribution of N counts centered around the average. It would look something like this…
…where there are no absolute alphas or betas, only the occasional relative ones.
Meanwhile, because of WGTOW, the online dating and marriage marketplace at any given time looks something like this:
That’s why dating apps only favor women and elite men (at least the ones that don’t care about N-count). By contrast, it has never in this history of mankind looked like this:
This level of fantasy is, as one might say, “cope.”
The most notable observation as that this…
…is the modern analog to historical bog-standard patriarchy. The top tier men are polygamists, the average men get a single mate and the low-tier men are set up to be eunuchs (in service to the patriarchs) or to die fighting in wars or while performing dangerous labor (possibly as slaves).
“Hypergamy” implies that elite men have all the power: a lot of women (high supply, low demand) are chasing a few men (low supply, high demand). Women being “hypergamous sexual selectors” gives gives all the power to a very few men.
“Hypergamy” is True Patriarchy…. but from the perspective of the non-elite men who can’t participate. It’s exactly what would happen in a properly functioning patriarchal society: the elite men would be in high demand and be the choosers who choose all the women for themselves, while the lower tier men would be left out. The reason the Manosphere hates the true patriarchy of modern times is that they thought that when the patriarchy was established that they would be the ones to benefit. But all they are left with is…. cope.
This deleted reddit poster=commentor from 9 years ago agrees with this. From here:
Throughout history, men and women have been entwined. In early history, male disposability was extreme, but roughly a quarter of women died in childbirth. Women were considered more valuable for their ability to birth children, and men were considered valuable for their ability to fight or work. The unfortunate result was one powerful man with a harem of women. (When feminists cry about “The Patriarchy!” I don’t think they understand that this is what they are really talking about: one man who has many wives and sends other, less powerful men to die for him.)
With advances in medicine fewer women died in childbirth. This resulted in a more even ration of men to women, and now most men could get a wife. The last picture we have of this system was our culture in the 1950’s. It was difficult to get divorced, and the women who were wives and mothers strongly depended on their husbands to be the breadwinner of the family.
In the 50s and in tradcon households, the husband is “the patriarch” of his family, a microcosm of what life looked like before the advances. Instead of having many wives, he could have one, who tries to be everything to her husband; instead of sending men to die for him, he sends himself to work. Some women worked (despite what feminists today will tell you!), but most wanted to secure a good man for themselves, being more fulfilled in the role of wife and mother.
In the 60’s, there was a dramatic shift in our cultural values. Equality became the buzzword it still is to this day. This is the point women began to “go their own way”–straight into the arms of the government. Divorce became easier, to the point that in California, they even have no-fault divorce. Women, who could always work, were started to give special treatment in the workplace. “Sick days” and “affirmative action” ensured this.
Once birth control came into the picture, I think that is when women achieved total “go their own way” status. Women now have no reason to guard their sex as they have been doing for literally thousands of years. In the 50’s and before, premarital sex was a serious risk. Women didn’t want to take that risk, but of course they wanted sex and relationship–so they tried to be good women, and get married to an attractive, stable man. Now that abortion is also normalized, a woman has absolutely no responsibility for her sexual agency, either. She can go to work and make her own money, have all the sex she wants and never worry about raising children. Think about all the young single women you know–probably each one would have been married in the 50’s, but today lives a life comparable to male bachelor of that time.
If she does choose to raise her kid, she can get government assistance from the “deadbeat dad” who left her with it. So Men’s responsibility to their families has been taken away, too–your woman literally doesn’t need your help to raise the kid. (I mean financially–the emotional turmoil is of course another issue. But even that idea, that children need a father for emotional reasons, is sometimes challenged in feminist circles.) Men started to realize this when women started divorcing them. Thus, they started their own movement–MGTOW.
So MGTOW is really just a reaction to many, many years of increasingly oppressive feminist doctrine. The feminist doctrine tells women to go their own way, ie the famous mantra, “You don’t need no man!” And that is what women have been doing, in one way or another, since the 60s.
TL,DR: WGTOW is feminism, and we live in a feminist society, so (nearly) all women are WGTOW.
i know of an divorced woman with a teenager, in her mid-late 40s or early 50s(i didn’t really get a good look at her as she walked by me(other than she was obviously older & grayer than women in their 20s or early 30s), a family friend is the one who knows her)who is quietly trading sex for work out of a certain handyMAN she knows.
Professor,
This definition of patriarchy matches precisely my conclusion:
“Hypergamy” implies that elite men have all the power: a lot of women (high supply, low demand) are chasing a few men (low supply, high demand). Women being “hypergamous sexual selectors” gives gives all the power to a very few men.
“Hypergamy” is True Patriarchy…. but from the perspective of the non-elite men who can’t participate. It’s exactly what would happen in a properly functioning patriarchal society: the elite men would be in high demand and be the choosers who choose all the women for themselves, while the lower tier men would be left out. The reason the Manosphere hates the true patriarchy of modern times is that they thought that when the patriarchy was established that they would be the ones to benefit. But all they are left with is…. cope.
Patriarchy has always been about elite, powerful men and their harems of women. The top tier men have always been polygamists. In ancient times they had a wife (or two) and a concubine (or three). In more “respectable” times, they had a wife and a bunch of mistresses (and subsequent bastards) who were kept neatly out of the sight of the rest of the landed gentry. Meanwhile, the excess men were expected to die.
Hypergamy is just what normal patriarchy looks like from the perspective of the one who doesn’t get to participate in modern patriarchy and modern polygamy (i.e. high N-count).
If hypergamy were really true, then it would just be ancient patriarchy implemented in a modern setting.
This…
…is patriarchy when you remove the high “average guy” mortality that was common to ancient patriarchal systems.
Peace,
DR
There has been some missing-of-the-point.
Agreed 100%.
To wit:
For a low-precision, back-of-the-napkin sketch, that’s very close, wouldn’t you say? And also even this hypothetical online dating example:
Perhaps the most important difference between MGTOW and WGTOW is that the former is driven by (involuntarily) celibacy but the latter is not. Per the OP:
…
WGTOW [is] really just feminist women’s liberation
And per the professor’s citation:
WGTOW—not celibacy—explains these easily.
This wasnt an issue when the loser, tooly, nerdy guys couldnt get dates or a wife in 1960’s or 1970’s and into the 1980’s and 1990’s.
This suddenly became a “crisis” for men when suddenly average looking guys were being left in the cold. Now it was a problem. Men had to do something to “make women like them” and hence the PUA / Game thing……proto “red pill” as we know it.
All men need to improve, to be something. I get it. But with Game and Co, the ante was pushed so high. You had to be an Alpha. You had to live at the gym. You had to approach all the time. You had to be “masculine” and you had to “fake it til you make it”
And if it still didnt work….
Men outright turned on other men. Harshly. The smears, the negs, the insults, the backhanded compliments that were not compliments. You just were not “trying” hard enough and you loved “being miserable”
The gulf has widened 1000 fold since those days of the late 1990’s. Part of this problem we have is that our “leaders” in the ‘sphere encouraged it. They were defending “women” from all these creepy men, who “just were not putting the work in”
Blankslatism in this area.
Im sure a 5’8″ guy who is not physically attractive as all the men over on the other blogs has “just an equal chance” as they do. They will pay lip service but inside, they know the truth and are “glad” they dont look like him 🙂
Trends change. Apparently the stigma against loser, nerdy guys has declined somewhat. My daughters tell me that things in public school are different these days and girls don’t hold such boys with the same disgust that they did in the age before the internet.
I think the Manosphere tends to presume that women’s preferences are fixed and homogenous.
It could be many factors. I have younger cousins who have finished up high school in the past two to three years. My one cousin is very pretty….and she knows it……….she views most guys as “ugly” and “creepy”
My other two cousins, the guy is pretty tooly. No social skills at all, not ugly per say……and really has no problem with this. he feels perfectly “okay” with who he is (which I find odd, might be a generational thing). I asked him about the Prom several years ago “are you going?” kind of thing. He said something to the likes of “why would I go to a place and party where no one wants me around to begin with” and he didnt say it in a “self pity” way. He has his online friends and has a part time job and really doesnt seem to be bothered with what “the manosphere” has to say. I did refer him to some spot. He just shook his head like “i dont get it” when I asked him if he checked them out (we did this on a video call through Skype)
The other cousin….she’s very, very obese but thinks she is “gorgeous” and has no problems with her size. She has a very highly inflated vision of herself. Lives at home with. Is twenty three, has no drivers license……..I dont know.
Im not saying our generation had it “figured out” when we were twenty-two….but all of us at least had to work.
I agree with your byline and conclusion. After being around the Manosphere for twenty years or so, I would say that most people who have used the term ‘hypergamy’ in the manosphere don’t generally use it the way your analysis purports. They use it more generally to mean ‘I was hurt by the fact that the last woman I dated or wanted to date didn’t find me attractive enough and I’m trying to rationalize that as a peculiarly female behaviour.’ That’s more in line with your ‘simple economics’ argument. Who wouldn’t want someone better that the last one, obviously the relationship with whom wasn’t good enough to last. Discontented men trade up, so do discontented women. It’s learning – learning by doing.
It’s not biblical of course, Christians find their contentment in Christ, and strive to love the spouse they have. Obviously, they would be wise to marry someone they’re attracted to, in order that the path ahead is as smooth as possible, but that’s not a hard and fast rule. Christians marry for all sorts of reasons that are not based on the usual attraction metrics associated with hypergamy, at least in the way the Manosphere uses it.
I think a closer fit to women’s hypergamy for Christians is ‘enacted discontentment.’ This has to do with the curse of Eve – the desire to be like God (and believing the serpent that that is even possible.) This is another way of describing WGTOW, in that Eve went her own way after being told explicitly by God not to eat the forbidden fruit.
Mrs Amelia Barr wrote in her 1896 essay Discontented Women :
But with all its variations of influence and activity there has never been a time in the world’s history, when female discontent has assumed so much, and demanded so much, as at the present day; and both the satisfied and the dissatisfied woman may well pause to consider, whether the fierce fever of unrest which has possessed so large a number of the sex is not rather a delirium than a conviction; whether indeed they are not just as foolishly impatient to get out of their Eden, as was the woman Eve all those years ago.
Its almost a strawman. Or maybe just the PR or marketing. It is what they say they believe, not necessarily what they actually believe. My analysis is just pointing out that the Manosphere PR is pure garbage.
I’m not saying there isn’t discontenment, but WGTOW explains it much better than hypergamy.
Other than personal anecdotes here and there, I’ve seen little-to-no formal evidence that hypergamy leads to greater contentment. The evidence shows that when compared to the assortative homogamous choice, women are much less happy with a hypogamous choice and somewhat less happy with a hypergamous choice.
The core point is that hypergamy and polygamy are indistinguishable in their actual pairings. Both involve elite men having multiple partners, while the dispensible men go without. The major differences between classic patriarchy and modern society is that (1) elite men don’t have to marry and (2) non-elite men are stubbornly refusing to die (in wars, due to disease, or doing dangerous work) or going into traditional roles (eunuchs; priests).
The curse of Eve is that she will turn towards her husband and he will rule (perhaps dominate) her. That sounds like patriarchy, not hypergamy, to me.
The curse of Eve is that she will be ruled by her husband because she was first deceived…by the diabolical desire for more than she was given. The sequence of events matters. If you want to use the term Patriarchy in this context, which I don’t think is quite the the right term, it would be the appropriate man’s response to woman’s hypergamous nature – i.e. woman is hypergamous by nature and therefore prone to want to trade up, therefore she is to be ruled by her husband in lifelong matrimony to avoid temptation. A conjugate idea for men would be the Apostle Paul’s teaching that it’s better to marry than to burn with sexual desire, which is because of men’s naturally straying gaze – i.e. a wife is given by God to keep man sexually faithful. Thus, lifelong marriage is the optimal relationship to keep both male and female natures in godly check. Women are ruled by their husbands, and men only get to sleep with their wife. Seems fair.
You are entitled to your opinion, but your claim is not stated explicitly by the text, nor is it a logical deduction from the text. You’ve inferred it by asserting what is not stated. I’m under no obligation to cede to your inferences, and so I find your argument wanting.
See also Lastmod’s comment.
For the lurkers, let’s define our terms:
Assortative mating is a mating pattern where individuals tend to choose partners based on shared characteristics, such as phenotype (observable traits) or genotype (genetic makeup), rather than randomly. This contrasts with random mating, where individuals mate with any member of the population, regardless of their traits.
When I use the term, this is the way I am using it. There is nothing unclear or deceptive about that.
Speaking of misusing definitions:
And that is hypergamy.
This is self-refuting.
If hypergamy—literally ‘marry up’—means, as the above quote claims, that women are ultimately legally marrying men who they are assortatively paired with, then that isn’t hypergamy by definition. It is homogamy.
Homogamy, in a sociological context, refers to the tendency of individuals to marry or engage in relationships with people who are similar to them in terms of characteristics like race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status, or other culturally significant traits. It’s essentially a form of assortative mating,
It’s easy to see why *I* have a problem with intellectual dishonesty, rhetorical slights of hand, and cognitive dissonance. Calling actual homogamy “hypergamy” is exactly what that is.
Hypergamy does not and cannot entail its near opposites (homogamy; assortative mating). Such a claim is logically incoherent. If you find yourself making such a claim, then you need a new theory, or at least a new term to describe the complex phenomenon.
So, yes, looking past the smoke and mirrors, I agree. Hypergamy is, in fact, a myth as I have been saying all along. The empirical reality is actually homogamy, and it is the reality long before the wedding day.
——————————————
Let’s assume hypergamy is true in order to prove, by logical deduction, that hypergamy is false by contradiction.
First, non-elite men have no SMV because of their complete lack of discrimination:
By selecting everyone, men are not selecting anyone at all.
Second, hypergamous women have no SMV because they are all competing over the same scarce resources:
By not selecting different men, women are not able to select anyone at all. They are not sexual selectors.
So if hypergamy means that women and non-elite men have no value in the marketplace, then who does hold all the cards? Who are the sexual selectors? Elite men.
What is the system called where elite men have all of the SMV, while women are chosen and non-elite men get the scraps (if anything). That’s right: Patriarchy. “Hypergamy” and patriarchy are two sides of the same coin.
But we do not live in a patriarchy, and so hypergamy does not exist. Thus, we have arrived at a contradiction. Therefore, the original statement “assume hypergamy is true” is shown to be false because it leads to a contradiction.
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