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)
Today we will discuss:
Part 7 — What is Hypergamy? (Part 2)
It is clear that [he] is not talking about hypergamy as that term is used here.
As we’ve seen throughout this series, and especially in yesterday’s post, the three, four, or even five definitions of hypergamy that I have addressed are all compatible with the various Manosphere expressions over the last 15 years.
The problem is that the definition—outside the one in the dictionary—is ill-defined and a matter of opinion. Just consider that Keoni Galt gave three different definitions for hypergamy! It would be projection to assign to me all the confusion inherent in the ‘sphere’s inability to come to a consensus.
My “confusion” stems from having too much knowledge of the ‘sphere’s inconsistency and imprecision. It’s hard to have a single coherent refutation when there isn’t a coherent stance to refute!
That’s assortative pairing. People do not ‘marry up’ (literally hyper+gamy), they pair up laterally.
What [he] doesn’t want to address is women’s natural tendency to want “better”. A large number of those women become very dissatisfied with their marriages and blow up their marriages because they want “better” and think they can get “better”.
This provides a good illustration for why commenters should stick to ideas and not personal motivations (i.e. ad hominem). It really isn’t about what I want or don’t want to do. After all, in the piece that inspired this series—”Hypergamy is a Myth“–I addressed this very concern, concluding from the data that hypergamy is about preferences. Women and men want to do better, at rougly equal levels. But this desire largely gets canceled out.
In actual practice, the human tendancy towards hypergamy is rarely successful. Even when it does happen, risk of ultimate failure is more likely. That’s why hypergamy as a practice is largely a myth. And because unimplemented preferences are illusory, we can call those mythical too.
The hypergamous preferences don’t end up nowhere. Rather, they lead to extra competition and conflict, just not to actually “marrying up.” This competitive sorting process—i.e. assortative mating—takes place rapidly at the early stages of relationships becoming less prominent in longer-term relationships: bad matches get dropped early.
We have a 50% divorce rate in the US. At least 70% of those divorces are initiated by women, mostly because they just do not want to be married to those men anymore.
I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s hard for non-mathematicians to grasp: averages are abstractions, not descriptions of real things. They can be useful approximations, but one must be careful about using them.
For example, the divorce rate (an average) tells you something about what a population is doing, but tells you much less about individuals or their behaviors. If you break it down by things like the number of marriages, geography, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, educational attainment, wealth and income, intelligence, etc. the resulting rates vary considerably from the general average.
Consider the general statistic that women are responsible for two-thirds (not “at least 70%”) of divorces. That sounds high until you realize that divorcese among the highly educated are ~90% driven by women. So in the population with the lowest divorce rate—the higher classes—women dominate the divorces. In the rest of the population women divorce less than the average of 2 in 3. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find any sub-population that has exactly the average of the entire population. Most are higher or lower according to their tendencies.
The problem then, with respect to hypergamy, is that you’d expect women in the lower classes to be responsible for a higher than average number of divorces as they ditch their low-class husbands for higher-class men. But that’s the opposite of what we see. In the lower classes, men are more likely to divorce than in the higher classes, and in the higher classes women are more likely to divorce than in the lower classes! Once again, actual behavior in practice does not support the claim of female hypergamy.
Similarly, the divorce rate itself is artificially high because of divorce prone men and women getting multiple marriages and divorces. Among those who shun divorce or remarriage, the divorce rate is lower than the average. As above, you’d be hard pressed to find an actual population that has an average divorce rate: most are higher or lower according to their tendencies.
Yes, men are marrying their SMV/RMV counterparts. So are women. Men are OK with that. Women are not OK with that. Men don’t mind their looksmatches. Women do mind. Women want “better”. Men are satisfied with their matches. Women are not.
We discussed this in “Reasons for Divorce” where we determined that both statements are false.
Both men and women exhibit satisfaction and dissatisfaction. It is simply not the case, especially among low-status men and women, that there is a strong distinction between the satisfaction of men and women with their marital choices. Divorce is highest where you should expect it to be: among the less educated and intelligent, the less wealthy and prosperous, those of lower status, the less religious, and the political left. And, as you’d expect, who files for divorce—and who is to blame—is more evenly split among men and women who meet those descriptions.
I find it extremely interesting that the closest thing I can find to female hypergamy is among the higher classes where a subset of women are dissatisfied with their high class marriages to high status men while their husbands are largely satisfied with their high class wives. This suggests to me that the Manosphere is predominately made up of wealthier, more intelligent, mostly White and Asian men, religious, higher status, and/or politically right men. These men are the only subset or group I know of mwhere the description “Men are satisfied with their matches, women are not” and “only women are blowing up perfectly good matches” could be widely perceived anecdotally as being rationally true.
The problem is not that people are marrying their looksmatches. The problem is that men are satisfied with that situation and women are not.
That’s hypergamy. That’s evidence of “attracted only to those people who are more attractive than me”.
Now we are just spinning our wheels. In the last post, hypergamy was defined as “lack of character.” Now it is defined as “attracted only to those people who are more attractive than me.” This is a perfect example of the Dalrockian Manosphere’s ill-defined ‘hypergamy’ as it deviates from the standard, easily understood dictionary definition. The goalposts are constantly moving. It also fails to distinguish between hypergamy as a desire and hypergamy as an action. Is hypergamy defined by what a woman wants or is it defined by what she does?
This is not an insignificant question. If you include what she supposedly “wants,” you can claim that all women are hypergamous, even the happy ones who would never divorce their husbands. Why? Because you think you know that their true motivation is to ditch their husband as soon as a better option presents itself. This is not science, because it’s not a falsifiable position. No matter how many times a woman proves she loves her husband and wouldn’t divorce him, the assumption that she is hypergamous remains assumed.
In short, the broad definitions of hypergamy that we’ve seen are just thinly veiled ad hominem, argument from authority, and guilt-by-association. The ‘sphere presumes that they know the motivations of women even when the data says otherwise and even when the women and their husbands say otherwise.
Who you marry has absolutely nothing to do with this. How you feel about it and how you take action on those feelings has everything to do with this.
“Who you marry has absolutely nothing to do with this.” That’s a blankslatist claim, encompassing the idea that everyone is a tabula rasa—a blank slate—interchangeable cogs in a big machine. It’s the idea that there can’t be inherent differences (nor, thus, inherently different outcomes)
“How you feel about it and how you take action on those feelings has everything to do with this” encompasses the blankslatist view that everything is a matter of environment. Any differences are thus attributed by different external factors that are not inherent to individuals.
Few in the ‘sphere are aware that their view of women is rooted in this leftist philosophy.
This is why despite the strong and obvious evidence that different groups have different motivations and outcomes, the blankslatist simply ignores it because it doesn’t confirm his bias that all are inherently equal.
When you hear a sentence that starts with “All women…” you are about to hear a blankslatist claim; a claim that could only be true if blankslatism were true.
Blankslatism is not a true description of reality. It is false. Any claims that rely on it are also false.
Who you marry has a massive impact—but not absolutely everything—on all of the things we’ve been discussing. Were it not for leftist philosophy, this would be obvious.
Note that this is different from determinism. If “All women…” statements were about some global inherent attribute, then there would be no sense in making moral judgements about—and assigning blame for—something that can’t be changed and isn’t a matter of agency. After all, you don’t blame the apex predator for eating baby seals: it’s their nature, not a character defect.
Men were happy with their looksmatches. Women are not. And women are now empowered to do something about it. Women have to settle for their looksmatches, and they are NOT happy about it. They seethe with resentment about it.
I just don’t know how I can explain it any simpler. I just do not know how this can be dumbed down any further.
The problem isn’t with the complexity or simplicity of the explanation. I understand quite clearly what is being said. It’s just that what is being said is obviously wrong.
Men are not happy with their looksmatches. They often complain about their miserable choices, both of their available choices and of those they actually chose. Just look at the Manosphere, where I could find a nearly limitless supply of dissatisfied men. Many of those men are seething with resentment. Some men will willingly divorce if things don’t go their way, for example:
So why say that men are happy when this is obviously false? Why make such simple, but obviously incorrect, claims?
Perhaps Deti would counter by saying “women divorce their husbands because they want a better-looking husband, but men divorce their wives because they don’t like her as a person.” Even if this were true as a rule, should we award men a prize for this? It’s curious to me why one of these is truly terrible, but the other one is not.
This is happening all over the place. It’s literally everywhere. I didn’t make it up. I didn’t invent it. I’m just a guy who saw it and experienced it. Just like millions of other men. Cameron sees it too. He understands it. The only person who doesn’t seem to understand it is Derek.
I won’t presume to speak for Cameron, who can speak for himself.
What I will say is this: I’m not going to embrace something that is obviously false. I’m not going to generalize personal anecdotes. I’ll repeat what I said:
Calling hypergamy a myth is not a denial of the symptoms that hypergamy supposedly explains.
In closing, here is the thing I’d like to share. Believe in something greater than yourself. Don’t worry about the approval—or disapproval—of others. Find a spouse and latch onto her for life. Speak positively about your wife, so that no one can claim that you spoke ill of her. Be kind, generous, and polite. Don’t bully, but instead go and do something good! Exude gratitude, graciousness, joy, hope, and optimism. Be self-aware. And avoid unhappy people. If you can’t do that, make boundaries (such as primarily posting on your own blog, utilizing anonymous links, and obscuring your sources). Try starting there, men.
Consider the general statistic that women are responsible for two-thirds (not “at least 70%”) of divorces. That sounds high until you realize that divorcese among the highly educated are ~90% driven by women. So in the population with the lowest divorce rate—the higher classes—women dominate the divorces.
Do you think Heartiste has it mostly right here then?
https://heartiste.org/2015/04/28/smarter-women-more-likely-to-be-romantic-failures/
Smarter Women More Likely To Be Romantic Failures
Apr 28th, 2015 by CH
In my years of living, dating, and loving across these United Plates, I’ve come to certain conclusions about women drawn from a wellspring of eagle-eyed observations and red raw experiences. One of my personal observations is that smarter women tend, for various reasons among which female hypergamy must surely loom prominent, to have more difficulty locking down a long-term boyfriend, and to stay single far longer in between relationship bouts, than do women of less Hollywood-sized prefrontal-pectorals. And this romantic failure is worse the smarter the woman.
But, I didn’t have the benefit of ¡scientifical! studies to confirm my observations, so I guess I should have washed my brain of any pattern recognition inputs and waited the requisite fifty years for the scientific consensus to come to a prevailing view.
As I’ve always said, if you keep your eyes open and live not by pretty lies, 80% of the patterns you observe about human nature will eventually be proven true by laboratory analysis (or at least recognized as a real phenomenon by cultural gatekeepers). (15% of the remaining 20% are too difficult to properly measure by social scientists, and the last 5% of your observations can be grouped under conventional wisdom that science manages to overturn, usually by data-twisting legerdemain.)
From the article relevant to this post, the quotes that make feminists choke:
A study conducted with 121 British participants reported findings that females with high intelligence in male/female relationships were seen as problematic.
Their intelligence were predicted to cause problems in the relationships. Whereas, high intelligence in the male partner was not seen as problematic, but desirable. […]
Why don’t men want women with whom they can converse and who challenge them? [ed: spot the false premise] When did the aversion to strong and intelligent women become a code orange? When did everyone just want to go to the Bahamas and lie around?
In an article by “The Wire,” financial reporter, John Carney, gives one explanation for this phenomenon, deducing, “successful men date less successful women not because they want ‘women to be dumb’ but rather because they want ‘someone who prioritizes their life in a way that’s compatible with how you prioritize yours.’”
Basically, they want someone who isn’t ever going to let her career come before making dinner and pleasing them first.
My take is that men, especially smart men, instinctively recoil from very smart and/or educated women (in the same way women instinctively recoil from needy niceguys) because men know that a woman of equal or greater brainpower or academic achievement is a high risk for future relationship instability and a latent threat to paternity assurance. Men are aware, consciously perhaps, subconsciously definitely, that female hypergamy is real and therefore it’s personally advantageous to find women who aren’t too much more gifted in traits that double as male mate fitness cues.
In short, it pays men to date up in looks and date down in everything else.
The inverse is also true. It pays women to date down in looks and date up in everything else.
Everyone’s happier all around if they abide the above two Heartistian precepts.
A reader contemptuously adds,
Nearly schizophrenic incoherence, self-loathing, generalized rage, sexual frustration, pride that she can’t admit that a life has been spent believing pretty, stupid lies and making irretrievable mistakes, contempt and hatred for men on one hand, yet demands and pangs of hopeless desire for their attention and affection and love on the other hand, unabashed hatred for women who are young and attractive and willing to make love and devotion to a man a priority in their lives.
This hamster wheel is spinning at 10,000 revolutions per second. The axle is going red-hot from the friction. The spinning wheel is making a sharp, high-pitched, painful screeching sound, which sets your teeth on edge. If you listen carefully millions just like it are audible all over America.
This can’t go on much longer. 10 years, maybe. But not 50. Probably not another entire generation.
Future generations will look back on the women of this era with disgusted amazement.
Before then they are going to spend the second 50 years of their medically extended lives alone and filled with a despair and a hatred for their own lives and for the lives of those around them who have managed to be happy which is going to poison our society for many years to come.
If they weren’t so vicious and destructive you could almost feel sorry for them.
I do think we Americans are living through a period (heh) when women are at their absolute worst. Porn addicted manlet men aren’t much better, but this dystopia is largely a female-centered implosion.
There’s a gene-culture co-evolution process that describes how groups have self-balancing mechanisms, so that when one type of organism within the group becomes too numerous, a competing type will start to have greater reproductive success to “bring balance to the force”. I forget the term for it, but the classic case is the “cheater-cooperator” evolutionary strategies, in which cheaters prosper (and hence reproductively prosper) in cooperative societies, but then lose ground to cooperators when cheaters become too numerous and start poaching each other.
Well, a similar thing could be happening with SMRT women. The more smart over-educated over-credentialed women a society has, the less reproductively fit they become at the same time women with average smarts become more reproductively fit. The group shifts its evolutionary strategy toward smarter or dumber women as each becomes prominent. Maybe this is why human IQ hasn’t continued upward into the stratosphere…. smart men get tired of the haranguing from smart women and smart women get locked out of the dating market because there aren’t very many men smarter than them who can satisfy their hypergamous urgings, and they resist settling for dumber men.
Related, the supply of beta males in a group could also fluctuate according to some cosmic balancing mechanism that favors or disfavors betas depending on their numbers. The rise of pathologically altruistic white beta males in the West is producing blowback as their ranks swell with self-abnegating ankle-biters. Ultra violent thugs or ultra charming cads are starting to increase in impression, if not yet in number, and women are turning to them for relief from the effete beta male masses.
It’s a spitball, I know, but maybe it’s high time for the patented CH BOSSS strategy to invigorate our culture to take center stage? Maybe it already has and we’re just now waking up to the fact?
PS Really smart women fux like demonesses. They love their contraceptively-enabled fuxxing as much as any sub-mensa slut.”
Then people wonder why so many women are having fewer children?
Also relevant
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-relationship-between-status-and-children-is-changing.
For women in the U.S., there is an emerging U-shaped relationship between education and fertility. However, as in many countries, there is still a negative relationship between personal income and fertility for women, such that high income women tend to have fewer children than low income women.
Figure 4. Fertility by women’s education, 1980 and 2010 (Source: Federal Reserve Bank)
Most of the negative relationship between personal income and fertility for women in the U.S. likely represents tradeoffs women face between earning income and bearing and raising children. This is borne out by data from Sweden where these tradeoffs are ameliorated by generous state benefits for parents: both parents each receive about 8 months in paid parental leave while being paid 80% of their salary. While including such benefits in total income means there is a positive relationship between income and fertility for both men and women, when earnings from work are examined, excluding all of benefits and transfers from the state, high earning women still have fewer children than lower earning women.
Now see why all the ”MAGA MEN” who supposedly want tons of grandchildren shouldn’t be sending their daughters to college but to Lancaster U(which is based outside on the farm, NOT some fancy schmancy building) in Pennsylvania for their Magnum Cum Laude PhD in Amishnomics( as Derek has also hinted at before at SF)?😉😊😎😇
Over the decades I have noticed men that were naturals with women, or at least had much more ease in getting dates were:
Very good looking on a cultural standard or norm (above average). Learned from an early age (early puberty) directly or indirectly socially on what women respond to (and that in itself can cover a wide swath of actions / behaviors) and they could be average looking guys.
The rest of the men out there either were paired up a more traditional way with helps (family, friends….introductions, stuff like that)
The remainder actually got some help from PUA / Game (yes, I will admit some men it did indeed help…especially in the early days) or they were pushed out of the market by age, social IQ, below average looking (too short, balding at 19, too tall, overweight, underweight, gawky, lower than average social IQ, on the spectrum of mild Aspergers or mild Autism).
This lower end is way, way larger than the ‘Sphere admits.
For women, when I was younger, the ones I met in San Francisco / dot.com era I noticed that sure, she’s pretty. Cute. Sexy. She opens her mouth…….out spews political / ideological / dogmatic stuff, and always of the Left bent. It was a huge turn-off to me. Not that she was going to date me anyway…..but to the men who could date her? Sure, they had their fun with her for a one nighter, or a few weeks. This in turn causes the woman to get more rigid in this thinking or just angry as well. Defensive.
I also noticed many of these women…..like in college and grad school would indeed get involved with a player type. Get used. Whatever….cheated on and then I became the guy that had to *listen* to her and *make her feel better* for her piss poor choices. Thankfully I quit that as I hit my thirties. Of course then I was “cold and mean” according to them.
Women my age in my general meeting them out and about are not attracted to me per say, but I can have an okay conversation with them at this point. Small talk. Her kids. Work. Fun things she did when she was younger……similar music tastes…..we both went to college in New England kind of stuff……….but
They still think and believe they can get a very rich, handsome man their age who has a full head of hair, is over 6’ and has the car, a dream house or condo and doesnt have children.
The delusion is still real here. I blame the Internet and movies / shows like “Sex In The CIty”
“For women, when I was younger, the ones I met in San Francisco / dot.com era I noticed that sure, she’s pretty. Cute. Sexy. She opens her mouth…….out spews political / ideological / dogmatic stuff…
I also noticed many of these women…..like in college and grad school…
Women my age…still think and believe they can get a very rich, handsome man their age who has a full head of hair, is over 6’ and has the car, a dream house or condo and doesnt have children.”
Would you describe most of those (San Francisco?) women as above-average intelligence, highly educated and such? I’m trying to get a sense for whether they are the kind of people described in the Professor’s Heartiste post.