Here is the series so far:
Part 1 — Hypergamy is a Myth
Part 2 — Hypergamy Note
Part 3 — Luck
Part 4 — Reasons for Divorce
Part 5 — A Case Study on Marriage (Intermission)
Part 6 — What is Hypergamy? (Part 1)
Part 7 — What is Hypergamy? (Part 2)
Part 8 — Wants and Choices
Part 9 — Hypergamy or Adultery
Part 10 — Hypergamy and Adultery
Part 11 — Matters of Selection
Part 12 — Matters of Fath (Intermission)
Part 13 — Relationship Satisfaction
Part 14 — Hypergamy and the early Manosphere
Today we will discuss:
Part 15 — Hypergamy is WGTOW
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.
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 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.
Critically, 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. This leaves nothing for the other men. And, just like female hypergamy, he 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:
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 explain non-sexual behavior.
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 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.