Hypergamy or just Inequality?

Just to give you some perspective on the Tomasi'in belief that women are hypergamous by nature, this is something that they believe is cross cultural and applies to all women everywhere, including Muslim women, since they say it has to do with human nature not socially constructed behaviors. What they conveniently leave out is the fact that at almost any time in human history, in the entire history history of marriages between men and women, women would have been marrying up because of the simple unavoidability of doing so since men have historically always been on average richer, more educated, and held higher positions in the community. A woman would have to make a very deliberate calculated effort to locate a man whose status was lower than hers in order for her marriage to not be de facto hypergamous. In other words, it doesn't reflect the nature of women but the nature of society in general and the reality of inequalities, some of which are artificial and some of which are natural inequalities occurring between men and women. Okay.

As the education gap between the sexes has not only closed but moved in favor of women with more women getting degrees nowadays than men, suddenly hypergamy is statistically in decline. In other words, conditions that made women's marriages appear hypergamous are disappearing. Women are now not marrying men above their social status and educational status and income status simply because women are now no longer beneath men in those categories to the same extent that they used to be. So in fact, the trend is now more hypogamous, women are marrying down. What all of this reveals is that hypergamy was never a real factor in women's relationship choices but just reflective of the prevailing realities of the relative economic and social status between men and women historically.

Women appeared to be deliberately marrying up, but that's only because up is where the men were. Because there's greater educational, social, and economic equality between men and women today, women are no longer marrying up, but marrying laterally and down. Let me put it this way. The Thomassian theory of hypergamy is like saying that people who only have rice available to eat prefer only eating rice. Well, you can't know if it's a preference if there are no other options.

If other food becomes available and those people start eating those other foods, then you know that your theory was wrong. The moment that women start holding higher positions in society, then de facto hypergamous marriages disappear. So now women are marrying men who are equal to them in income and social status and education or men who are below them in those categories. But here is where the Tomasiene obsession with high income and wealth emerges. Because they so deeply believe in the myth of hypergamy, they are afraid that as women become more educated and earn higher incomes, that means that men are gonna have to become millionaires in order to marry these women.

In other words, these men are afraid that they will die alone unless they can achieve fabulous wealth. But all of this is from the waswasa of Shaytaan because many many women today are more educated than their husbands and even out earned them, but still have perfectly happy traditional marriages with higher rates of marriage and lower rates of divorce. So it turns out that if the Tomas'een do die alone, it won't be because of women's hypergamy, it will be because of their own insistence on believing in it, which prevents them from marrying worthwhile decent women.