We usually think of evolutionary urges as always being good. Like the drive to reproduce, or find a good mate. But when an environment changes rapidly, adaptations that previously served a species well can frequently end up hurting them. In the worst case scenarios, those maladaptations can drive a species extinct (e.g. the dodo bird).
To take an example from the animal world, it's speculated that moths' well-known attraction to bright flames developed when the only source of light was the sun or moon. Those rays of light, being from such a distant source, are essentially parallel, and so flying towards such a light is a good way to maintain a straight path. And of course, a moth is safe doing so because it will never actually hit the sun or moon.
But once humans came along and could create artificial sources of light, that moth adaptation that served it so well became a curse. A close-in light source doesn't emit parallel light rays, which means moths following such sources start circling it erratically, getting closer and closer, until eventually it gets too close and gets fried.
I humbly suggest that women's hypergamy is a similiar adaptation that used to serve a good purpose but is now a maladaptation.
Hypergamy is a biological imperative. Evolutionarily speaking, a man improved his chances to pass on his genes by having sex with as many females as possible. Quality didn't matter, only quantity. If you could impregnate the alpha female, that's great, but there was no reason to not *also* impregnate the beta / charlie / delta females too. That's why even hot guys will "slum it" with undesirable women for quick, easy sex. OTOH, since a woman can only have 1 child every 9 months, and must raise it afterwards, she does much better by being more selective about who she allows to impregnate her. Therefore, she's programmed to go after the absolute best guy she can get. If evolution allowed her to feel tingles from undesirable men, she'd be less successful at passing on her genes than a woman who was more selective.
Unfortunately, hypergamy never evolved to deal with unavailable men. It evolved when we humans / chimps lived in small colonies of maybe 20-50 people and you had a reasonable shot with any of the males. If hypergamy made you wait for some mythical chimp in another chimp colony 100 miles away, someone who would never actually arrive, then females would never have reproduced and evolution would have weeded it out.
This was fine because until now, the only eligible men you met were all in your high school class and local neighborhood, fairly similar in size and social ties to our original hunter-gatherer colonies. In those situations, hypergamy prevented you from settling with the worst guy, and pushed you to at least try for the best guys. So when the so-so guy flirted with you, you blew him off, waiting to see if the better guy was interested. And you were incentivized to work on traits that would attract high-value men, like being attractive, having a good personality, showing that you could be a good mother, etc. That's not a bad thing. Furthermore, if you didn't get the absolute best, the next guy was not that much worse, so you were satisfied with that. E.g. say the best guy in your high school was the starting quarterback for your HS team. That's great, but he isn't Tom Brady. And the next-best guy is not that much worse an option.
In our new, social media-driven environment, hypergamy has become maladaptive, because it exposes women to a bunch of guys who they don't really have a chance with (at least to marry), yet the same instinct kicks in. Now, instead of only being exposed to your high school quarterback, if you post an ass selfie, you might get a DM from Gronkowski or some other professional player who's following some hashtag you wrote. Do you have a shot at marrying him? Unlikely. Yet once you get that 'like', your hypergamy kicks in and says that's the guy you need to pursue and drop all the others.
It's even worse, because the difference between Gronkowski and your neighborhood beta dude is far, far more than the difference between the HS quarterback and that beta (in a few years, that beta might even exceed him, by getting a better job and staying in shape, while the HS QB never goes to college, gets fat, and ends up working at the local gas station). So "settling" for the beta guy seems like even more of a drop, when the alpha you thought you had a chance with isn't just the HS QB, but Tom Brady or Gronk.
Similarly, even if you lived in NYC, unless you worked in the finance industry, or went to one of their elite schools, or moved in their circles, you would never meet a hedge fund guy. They might as well have been on Mars for all you'll have access to them from Queens or Jersey. Now, put your picture on Tinder, and you'll probably get a reply. He's looking to slum it for a night, but your hypergamy kicks in, makes you think you have a chance and should hold out for him, and now, anyone less than a billionaire hedge fund manager is no longer acceptable.
Hypergamy has always been about taking a gamble: holding out for the better guy, hoping that you get him. But if you hold out too much and end up with no one to reproduce with, you lose the game. That's what's happening now.
Social media is giving women the illusion that those top 20% are available to them. Years ago, if you lived in Cleveland, OH, there was no way to even meet a celebrity in Hollywood or a hedge fund manager in NYC. Now, if you post an ass selfie on Instagram, you might get DMs from celebrities, rich guys, not to mention thirsty dudes from Saudi Arabia and India asking you to show your bobs and vagene. It's not uncommon for an average instagram ho to get hundreds of messages from guys when she posts a selfie. And it's not uncommon for girls to get literally *thousands* of matches over the course of a year on tinder. In the past, an average girl would never even *meet* a thousand eligible guys in her lifetime.
But they never realize the truth: that financier in NYC is either going to marry his college sweetheart, someone from work, or someone else in a similar socioeconomic group. Yes, some will marry their secretaries, but the vast majority don't. You can fuck him all you want. When he's ready to raise kids, he'll choose someone who will be a "good mother" and that includes navigating the socioeconomic circles necessary to ensure his kids will get into the top private schools, have the "right" playdates with the right kids, and socialize with the right families. Etc. Marriage at those levels is a lot more than just sex and tingles. The availability of these men to the average woman is illusory. But they don't know that, so they keep thinking they have a shot with them. Or they do know that, but wish to keep trying anyway because they think getting pumped-n-dumped is "so close" to getting one of them to commit. Either way, their hypergamous drive never evolved to distinguish available from unavailable men, because in ancient times, the small number of guys you knew were all potentially available, and you never had any contact with unavailable men anyway.
Social media is the antithesis of those small, close-knit social and kin networks from which hypergamy evolved. It's designed to tease you with possibilities (so that you keep clicking). In the past, girls would have crushes on some celebrity and maybe put his pictures up on their bedroom walls. But they knew he was out of reach, and so their hypergamous drive would focus on guys more available. Now, if she posts an instagram picture with her tits out, there's a good chance a celebrity will DM her, or at least 'like' her picture. Heck, most celebrities have social media teams that respond to fan tweets and facebook posts, deliberately trying to get you to think you have a real "connection" to the celebrity (so that you'll see his/her next movie).
I liken it to how a casino is designed. Most of us are mathematically innumerate. But we do have a reasonable, intuitive sense to correctly deal with everyday probabilities like 1:2, maybe 1:10, and can make the right choices in those scenarios. Our intuition breaks down when you're talking 1:1 million or 1:1 billion, because in our everyday lives, we never ran into those types of probabilities until modern times. Casinos are designed to take advantage of this deficiency by trying to convince you that the odds of that million-dollar jackpot are "intuitively" the same as the 1:10 chance you're familiar with in everyday life. They do this by having lots of bells ringing, lights flashing, etc. and dribbling out a few coins every couple of pulls to keep you thinking you're about to hit the jackpot any second now. Eventually, you end up with an empty wallet, wondering why you never won the jackpot when it was "so close". And then you blame the slot machine and kick it :-)
The modern sexual marketplace is even worse. At least casinos are regulated and can't lie about the actual probabilities (if you look closely, every slot machine will have fine print on the side telling you what the odds of each payout is). No such restriction keeps a hedge fund guy from telling a woman what her real chances of being married to him are. And no such restriction keeps Tinder from trying to convince you that all those thousands of matches are guys who want to marry you and shower you with gifts and make all your princess dreams come true.
And that totally messes up normal hypergamy. It's like asking a brain that has developed a sense for optimizing 1:10 probabilities, to intuitively optimize a 1:1 million chance. Social media tricks a girl's normal drive into believing she has a chance with these guys, and that those are the guys she should aim for. So she aims for them, ignoring the good but normal guys around her that she could choose from. And after 10 years, she wonders why she never got any of the guys she was aiming for (even though they were "so close" because they'd pump-n-dump her off a tinder match), while simultaneously, emptying her "SMV wallet" such that she's now not able to attract any of the remaining good guys around her. Which means she'll become a single cat lady and never pass on her genes, even with a "lousy" mate.
Now, I don't mean to say hypergamy is all bad. A little bit, tempered with an understanding of probabilities, can still be good. And that's what marriage-minded women in their 20s essentially do. They stay away from riding the CC, and focus on getting the best mate. She doesn't chase celebrities, or blow the band's lead guitarist backstage after the concert. The absolutely hottest ones might lock down an alpha guy, or maybe an older alpha guy who played the field but now wants to start a family. And less attractive girls marry less attractive but good guys like their high school sweethearts, someone they met in college, or maybe in their early working years to a co-worker or a friend-of-a-friend. That's what we mean when we say a woman in her 20s can easily find a decent man to marry. Yeah, you may not get a millionaire Christian Grey, but there are lots of decent men, and plenty of them get paired up with girls who aren't supermodels but are good, decent women.
But hypergamy in large doses is now maladaptive. It leads women to keep pulling the lever in the casino hoping to land the jackpot. And they keep pulling until they hit late 30s/40s, etc. At which point their "SMV wallet" is empty. At that point, even a 70th percentile man is now out of reach. Because those men (assuming single, never married) want to have kids. And it doesn't matter how beautiful and accomplished you are, no guy who wants a family wants to marry someone who is going to have significant problems with that. Every profile of a late 30s woman starts by talking about her college degree, her love of traveling, yadda yadda. None of that matters much. She would do better by posting a doctor's note stating that she's still fertile.
Women get shell shocked by how quickly and steeply their value drops. If you're attractive in your early/mid 20s, you can literally have celebrities trying to get into your pants. Lots of stories abound of drunk A-list celebrities hooking up at bars, clubs with random women. When you hit your mid/late 30s, even a fat schlub with a boring, so-so job wants nothing to do with you, or thinks *he's* the one settling if he has to marry you. That's a stunning fall, something many women have a massive difficulty accepting. Just look at e.g. Elizabeth Taylor, one of the most beautiful and famous women in the world. She had marriages and affairs with some of the most rich, famous, and powerful men in the world. And yet, her last husband was an ugly construction worker with a mullet.
In many ways, extreme hypergamy is worse than the most predatory casino. Because most of us, even if we lose all our money in Vegas, can go home, work, fill our wallet back up, and go back to Vegas and try again (or finally wise up and spend our money on more realistic but boring investments like a mutual fund). But a woman who listens to her extreme hypergamy, gives in to the lies that social media tells her about how that 6'4" millionaire with 6-pack abs is "just a swipe away!", and keeps pulling away at the one-armed bandit, and eventually ends up with an empty RMV wallet that she can't ever refill. At that point, 40 years old and without a man, or children, her hypergamous instinct leads her to extinguish her genetic line. The exact opposite of what it was supposed to do.
At the end of the day, an evolutionary drive that served her well for thousands of years has been unable to adapt to the new environment created by social media and the sexual revolution. Just like our sense of probabilities is good for telling us when it's safe to cross the street, but breaks down in a casino. It will probably take several generations at least, for this drive to be re-calibrated to the new environment (or the environment might change again). And in the meantime, lots of women are losing the RMV equivalent of their life's savings by it.
[deleted] 4y ago
I think this was a bug, not a feature. In accordance with r/K selection theory humans have fewer offspring with a lot more investment per child. As we know, fatherless kids are a big problem, but what people may not know is they always have been. A child whose father was around was always more likely to be successful. If for no other reason than if the bear came into the single mother's tent she's fucking dead and so is the kid, but if the man's there they have more of a chance. This is part of why monogamic societies overcame polygamic societies. Men running around and spreading their seed is what we have now and it is proving to be catastrophic, just as it always has. Far from being good for humanity, this is the Lilith of maladaptive evolution.
lauradora1122 5y ago
Is this all real?
Brickles09 5y ago
Fantastic reading, and there's another aspect in which hypergamy is maladaptive: congenital disease.
Women focus on the height, which is something essentialy meaningless in our times, but forget congenital disease. So, she ends up with diabetic offspring. Sure, very tall children, but all diabetic. They just don't care, and that's why those congenital diseases are not going away anytime soon. Kids get taller and taller every year, but so is the increase of diabetes and other congenital diseases. Women just don't care, hypergamy never bothered with that.
Another important aspect is that women nowadays don't quite understand that their sexually is unlike men's. That they can't have a n-count as big as they want and then marry the hedge fund guy you mentioned to raise a family. Well, maybe, and that's a huge maybe, he could marry her if he knew he had been her first, but there's no chance an alpha will marry her and have children if she had been a huge slut before. Well, unless you are a cuck like Tom Brady, but most alpha men wouldn't want a wife with a past like that.
moorekom Mod 5y ago
This is a good point that often gets overlooked in the larger manosphere.
Women didn't. But civilizations did. That restraint has been chipped away and you now see the results of that.
This is another piece of the puzzle. Women wait at the finish line. Hypergamy is short sighted and cannot afford to wait or dawdle. Without the long term guidance offered by societal restraints, women have defaulted to their short term tingles. And without the restraints placed by civilization to avoid the after effects of these decisions, women are left to face the consequences increasingly. Dropping marriage rate is yet another restraint that is being withdrawn by men.
Google Dubai porta pories. You're welcome.
There is a huge industry that makes its buck by selling women this dream. The dream that they're so special that they can beat the odds. And when it turns to dust, it turns around and sell women another dream or the medicine for the wound they created.
No such restrictions exist these days preventing women from leading men on either. In the old days, any contact between the sexes were regulated. You would know pretty soon which way that interaction was going to go, unlike now.
Even then,
She can only hope to entice guys older than her.
Women confuse their smv for their mmv. Yes, she will get fucked. But she won't get much else.
Hypergamy, regulated by civilization, is a step up. Hypergamy, these days aided by idealogy, is a ladder. Women want to go up and up until they reach the very best and even if they do, they still look for more steps to climb because they are so used to the journey so far, that is what defines them. In a marriage oriented market, like in the olden days, women had limitations enforced by society on their hypergamy. So even if she did want that rich high school Chad, she knew or gets reminded that she cannot keep him around and settles for someone who is within her league. In a sex oriented market, women get a temporary boost to obtain guys well above their league. But this only lasts until their youth does and it declines pretty fast. This sets women up for failure.
For a discussion on rmv, look here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WhereAreAllTheGoodMen/comments/b2mvet/post_wall_woman_confirms_the_wall_is_real_and_has/eitrv93/
Cagalhoto2002 5y ago
Interesting abstract with what I think are plenty of projections and subjective analysis by the author, and filled with "bro-science" conclusions. It would be great to have more data to backup claims. I liked the part where you mention some organisms incapacity to adapt to their environment. Entertaining read though.
neuromolecule 5y ago
2,500+ words of excellent social and biological analysis. Thank you for putting the time and effort into this insightful contribution. :)
[deleted] 5y ago
[removed]
ghost-zz 5y ago
This one I believe can be explained by women confusing confidence and arrogance. These women can't tell what the difference is. They lack the necessary skills to make this determination.
disayle32 5y ago
Very good read. The Game is very much like a casino for men as well, especially those who are not in the top tier of attractiveness. They can play and play and play until the cows come home, but they will lose and lose and lose. And when they get some small win, more often than not it turns out to be a false victory that blows up in their faces and destroys their lives.
funkyjunkymonkey 5y ago
Solid post.
[deleted] 5y ago
This drive used to be adaptive as well, when people lived in little tribes raising their kids together. Now it leads to single moms raising fucked up kids, eventually ruining society.
hideout78 5y ago
This is a good post and it’s objective, as opposed to laced with anger at a biological impulse that’s tens of thousands of years old.
The best thing guys can do is be the best guy they can be, then choose very, very carefully if they want to play the Russian Roulette game of getting married.
There are no safe options. Women who have been around the block are definitely more prone to ditching your ass and wrecking your life when the going gets tough, you lose your job, or she gets bored.
But in recent years, society has pushed the FOMO narrative hard, so even girls who haven’t slept around are much more likely to have a “midlife crisis” and ditch your ass than they used to be. Social media plays a huge role in that as well. She sees her newly divorced friends highlight reel on FB and that induces FOMO. Or...some thirsty simp hits her up, shows her a little excitement, and then it’s all over. The excitement of an affair will always beat the ups and downs of a marriage. It’s all an illusion of course, but no one sees that until it’s too late.
It’s a game where, no matter what, women nearly always win and men nearly always lose.
Long term, I predict that the birth and marriage rates will continue to fall. That may be a good thing in the context of climate change, etc., but a falling birthrate always precedes the fall of a civilization.
houseoftolstoy Mod 5y ago
Good insight here. One thing that must be considered with evolution and adaptation is that any particular set of characteristics are not moving in a gradual or intended path, but it is rather chaotic in nature. We will see all sorts of characteristics form, where some will flourish while others will perish based on a number of factors. So the discrimination on what succeeds and fails is not on what is truly the objectively best traits in most circumstances, but the traits that can thrive in current circumstances.
Not only is technology bringing out maladaptive traits, but the welfare state as well subsidizing bad choices. Arguably we would still see problems with women chasing the types of men they have no chance of locking due to apps such as Tinder and Instagram, but they would have to weigh any consequential decisions far more carefully if there was not a welfare state that would provide them a soft landing. Technology has certainly allowed the welfare state to last far longer than it really should, but we also must take steps to actually remove the subsidizing of bad decisions in order to have any chance of fixing anything.
While they are hard to find, good women that do not let their hypergamy lead them astray do exist, but they are often off the market quite quickly and are also in the same boat as the good men in terms of losing out in the current system. That is, if they marry a good man they will be in the same boat of having their collective resources being taken from their household and given to those who made bad decisions. This is largely why married women vote more conservatively than non married women. In circumstances without a welfare state, these good women who make it their focus to find a good man would be thriving far more, just as the good men would be. But subsidies for stupid choices gives the maladaptive short term strategies a leg up that they would not get outside of the artificial environment that is the welfare state.
aussielander 5y ago
In a similar manner guy the white knight single mothers Their brain is telling them that this woman who rejected him in the past will breed with him if he takes over paying for her kids fathered by other men.