The Hypergamy Hoax

The theory of hypergamy that women are naturally hypergamous, meaning that they always marry up and are continuously looking to move up the dominance hierarchy in terms of a mate is one of the dumbest ideas to come out of the red pill community. I mean, on the face of it, it's about as superfluous as Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest, which in a nutshell just basically says that whatever is fit to survive survives and whatever has survived was fit to survive. We don't really need a theory for that. It's self evident. Women seek the best possible husbands.

Who knew? But it gets even dumber than that. Hypergamy means that women are going to be continuously seeking high status men, but what defines high status will differ from woman to woman, which renders the whole theory meaning less. One woman may see good financial standing as the criterion for high status. Another woman might value a man's ability to write limericks.

So what? You've learned nothing. And the same, of course, is true for men. In the red pill theory, men marry down, meaning they will marry a woman who is lower than them on the dominance hierarchy. But the dominance hierarchy, whatever that subjective construction is supposed to be, has nothing to do with the criteria by which men marry women.

The vast majority of men feel that they married up. In their minds, the woman that they marry represents the pinnacle of everything that they want and value in a woman. You'll barely find a husband who doesn't say, doesn't feel that his wife is too good for him, that he doesn't deserve her. So according to the dominance hierarchy in his mind, he married up. That's nearly universal.

Husbands prize their wives. The whole theory is very influenced by capitalistic materialistic thinking. What's generally understood to determine status in the dominance hierarchy revolves around materialistic definitions, usually fixating on wealth and power and social influence. And this is very male thinking. Men compete with each other over these things, and red pill theory imagines that women value in men what we admire and envy in each other.

This is just not the case. Hundreds upon hundreds of millions of broke, lazy, unambitious, slacker men in this world have wives and girlfriends. And it is not because those women couldn't find more materially successful men. It's just because for whatever reason, they happen to love those guys. Our mothers were not hypergamous, were they?

Or our grandmothers. They either married who they loved or who they were arranged to marry, and they stayed together. Your mother didn't dump your dad for a richer man, did she? Probably not. Now when women seek divorce, the most common reasons are lack of commitment, infidelity, domestic violence, drug abuse, or constant fighting, not seeking an upgrade.

The theory of materialistic hypergamy doesn't really play out in reality. It's the way men think women behave or the way men think women should behave because that's the way we would behave if we were women because it's male logic. Women don't think like men do. They don't behave like men do, and they don't make the decisions the way we do. The truth is that what spouses value in each other goes far deeper than what marketplace logic can fathom and very often can't even be quantified at all.

Seriously, this theory is a nonstarter if you think about it for more than five minutes.