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The hypergamy hypothesis: much more than you wanted to know
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- peepee1982 3y agoIf you're dependend on your status or looks to attract women, you're probably just really boring and unoriginal.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoStatus and looks attract women, but your personality keeps them.
- lamp987 3y agoyour personality doesnt matter if your looks arent good enough to open the door for the personality to be presented.
- surgical_fire 3y agoGiven a long enough timeline, everyone gets boring and annoying.
- throwawaygoon1 3y ago[dead]
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoI'd like to date a really hot supermodel with education and a lot of money too, but well, I can't, and I can still be (and am) in a happy relationship. To skip the main controversial topic, I find it interesting (and sad) how in many developed countries, we've left men behind in education (eg. mine, slovenia, 50% more women than men in uni of ljubljana), and nobody is bothered by this. We have a bunch of "get women into stem" programmes and promotions, but a part of stem is the only field where men outnumber women in the university. If it was the opposite (more men in colleges), we'd be hearing a lot more of this topic, but now this always gets ignored.
- realjhol 3y agoThat's because it was never about helping "level the playing field" - thats just the message they placated the public with. Rather this is a patronage network; a way of giving gifts to client groups of the power structure.
- ethanbond 3y ago“Never?” One can argue we’ve gotten as close as possible to a level playing field or even over shot in some areas, but to say that the cultural changes that have been fought and won over the last 100 years or so have never been about leveling the playing field is utterly detached from reality. You do realize that, for example, a husband could legally rape his wife in any US state until the 1970s? This wouldn’t be illegal in every state until 1993! Let me reiterate that: there were people in the United States of America who did not have any legal protection from rape until 1993. Subjugation of women (and of minority groups) is not some mythical injustice and it’s not even a distant injustice. We’re talking about thousands of years subjugation and vast amounts of progress being made in the last 50-100 years. It’s insane to refer to this as “never” been about fixing real problems.
- sanitycheck 3y agoMinor nit: hundreds of thousands?! Maybe let's just take this back to the beginning of recorded history in 2600BC? And ancient Egypt was apparently OK for women (or at least not worse than for men), to pick a random example. No disagreement with the rest though.
- PostOnce 3y agoI had typed an argument of that nature, but closed the tab because I didn't want to spend time arguing. Now that you mention it, though, my problem is with the word subjugation, which isn't an accurate descriptor of what was happening 200,000 years ago when we were living in small bands in the woods, starving, being hunted by animals stronger than us.
- suoduandao2 3y agoRegarding the 'looks don't matter, class does' hypothesis discussed in the article, does anyone know whether attractiveness correlates with social class? Seems like a weird thing to assume is uncorrelated.
- ununoctium87 3y agoIt strongly correlated with wealth, which itself strongly correlates with status/class
- red-iron-pine 3y agoOr as someone else put it: Good looks are a function of 1) Genetics, 2) Effort, and 3) Money -- pick two. Like, if you ain't naturally gifted it takes a bunch of time and cash (clothes, gym membership, makeup, expensive haircuts, etc.) to compensate -- but you can. Lord knows I'm a walking, talking ogre but can pull it off by putting in the effort. But lots of effort requires the time and ability to invest the energy -- which implies money -- and then there is the literal 3) Money, which aside from clothes and makeup is also things like plastic surgery, teeth whitening, etc.
- djmips 3y agoIt was mentioned in the comments/notes after the article.
- bestouff 3y agoMy partner and I are both more educated than the other one, but each one in its own (very unrelated) field. I'm so proud of how good and recognized she's in her field (from what I can understand), and I hope she appreciates how I can find my way with anything that has some CPU inside. Win-win situation if you ask me.
- iWasAGrocer 3y agoSomething about this hypergamy concept is strange. At some level, it seems obvious - people will seek out partners with a higher status than themselves. That is not a behavior specific to women. It feels like this article is portraying women as creatures bound to their nature and men as unchanging monoliths.
- ajuc 3y agoIt's just presenting data.
- solarkraft 3y agoData is frequently collected with some kind of bias.
- ajuc 3y agoBetter data with possible bias than definitively bias with no data.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago> Data is frequently collected with some kind of bias. you can't look at electrons without some sort of bias; such is the nature of all research. however "data is biased", and the implied "statistics are racist / classist / sexist" etc., is most often used by those who don't want to see what the data lays out, and have no other way to discredit it.
- tchaffee 3y agoAnd the data shows that both sexes engage in hypergamy. Men marry up in education. Men marry up in beauty. Women marry up in income but not by a lot.
- goodpoint 3y ago> It feels like this article is portraying women as creatures bound to their nature and men as unchanging monoliths. Indeed the whole article fails to identify gender roles and cultural norms as the source. It also uses the term "market value" as something natural and inevitable. There's a lot of hidden bias here.
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- tamrix 3y agoAnybody of high status knows this is true.
- seydor 3y agoThe rising trend is people living alone and childlessness. Single person households are the hottest trends for years. The US may be less affected at the moment but they will inevitably follow the trend. Why people still care about hypergamy? I do think that more research into artificial wombs is needed.
- drumhead 3y agoI don't know if the Denizens of HN are the best people to be commenting on this.....
- djmips 3y agodrumhead in particular. I'm kidding. But you know denizens of HN are all we got here...
- drumhead 3y agoLol, all I want is to play CoD and eat my chicken tenders!
- wholinator2 3y agoSee, that's how we know you're not really one of us. It's _tendies_ not tenders.
- sureglymop 3y agoDenizens of HN are great as long as they're mystical internet creatures I don't have to interact with or talk to in person.
- curiousgal 3y agoWoman here: Every single person I've come across using the word hypergamy ends up being a trashy gold digger (from friends to random Facebook group members). I find it counterproductive to think about "meta-relationships". Just meet people and see if it works. None of these insights are useful on a personal level.
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- biofunsf 3y ago[flagged]
- SuoDuanDao 3y agoI think you're onto something. It seems like thinking about 'meta-relationships' tends to depersonalize the individual interactions and devalue the individuals involved. It's as though successful relationships are a fitting problem, and looking at the macro environment strips out the individual quirks which optimize for one's own fit. If that kind of thinking were helpful, I think we'd have evolved to have a very accurate guess as to what the majority of our preferred demographic finds attractive - but apart from psychopaths, most of us don't. the optimal mating strategy doesn't actually seem to be to work to approach some generic ideal, but to be most authentically and extremely oneself, then filter out everyone who doesn't like that. It's intuitive why looking too seriously at averages distracts from that project.
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- SnowHill9902 3y agoThis can be deduced from the mere fact that reproduction and raising is extremely asymmetric between male and female.
- not_enoch_wise 3y agoIntellectualization: the reliable, enduring shield for our subtle sexist biases.
- throwaway37296 3y agoI would be more interested in studies on the people that “opt out” of this kind of hypergamy system and the personality traits that correlate with opting out, because I personally don’t know many people that fit this model (assuming the data that the article presents is correct and that there is a subset of the population for which hypergamy actually applies; I’m not convinced there aren’t confounding factors here). The author says: > I know many rich male Google programmers, but I have never seen any of them […] marry a beautiful hillbilly from West Virginia Ok, how about a Facebook engineer who married a woman that grew up in rural East Tennessee? Is that close enough? I would say the author’s observation is more due to the limited crossover between FANG engineers and the rural southeastern U.S. than any sort of innate principles of attraction. Curiously, my wife is four years older than me and had no interest in moving to the west coast for a so-called “higher status” job. I realize this is anecdata, but already it contradicts the two main premises of hypergamy (men marry younger and women want higher status). In fact, it took quite a bit of compromise for that move to occur, and from my perspective it had nothing to do with class or status either—my motivation was that I am interested in tech and the Bay Area is (was?) the geographical location of the most interesting jobs in that industry.
- Sebb767 3y ago> Ok, how about a Facebook engineer who married a woman that grew up in rural East Tennessee? Is that close enough? I would say the author’s observation is more due to the limited crossover between FANG engineers and the rural southeastern U.S. than any sort of innate principles of attraction. More to the point, next to the trouble of them meeting, there is also a pretty big cultural difference [1] between these states. A FAANG engineer is probably closer in their views and interests to a cashier working in SF than a similarly positioned businessman in rural Texas. [1] Note that this is an uninformed opinion from across the pond.
- moralestapia 3y ago>Ok, how about a Facebook engineer who married a woman that grew up in rural East Tennessee? This is the weakest counter-argument I've read in years. Anyone with a minimal amount of comprehension would've understood the point being made.
- drumhead 3y agoWe all go for looks fundamentally. I wouldn't believe any guy that says he wouldn't go for a good looking girl because she only had a high school education. It reminds me of the 2/10 would not bang meme.
- misja111 3y agoYeah it's so obvious. Take a look at the wives of very successful men, so men who have lots of choice between women. Not many ugly women there but quite a lot of variation in education level.
- tetromino_ 3y agoI suspect the number of such celebrity-type couples is so tiny as to have no effect on the statistics discussed in the article. Outliers gonna outlie.
- red-iron-pine 3y agoWhy are you looking at wives, and not mistresses? e.g. all of the ladies Tiger Woods, or David Letterman, etc., was cheating on their actual wives with. The President of the US used to sleep with famous figures like Marilyn Monroe, or occasionally chubby interns. Jude Law married the model / actress Sienna Miller... but got caught sleeping with his kids' fairly plane-jane nanny. You marry on your level to be around that person, but that doesn't mean you're not sleeping with cocktail waitresses and bar floozies.
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- rbanffy 3y agoI for one am completely comfortable having married a woman with advanced degrees and an IQ about 10 points above mine. Even considering the fewer degrees and lower IQ, we both agree I am the smartest one, because I married her.
- knallfrosch 3y ago> Finally, a practical question: to maximize your odds of getting a desirable spouse, should you make more money or less? For men this is easy: earn more. For women, it’s a harder question It's not really that hard, and even mentioned in the article: Make a lot of money, meet rich men over hors d'oeuvres at a vernissage and once you talk about money, simply lie and understate your income.
- misja111 3y agoThe following contains a logical error: > That is: if men cared about looks more than women, then they would trade off status for looks: faced with a choice between an average-looking woman of the same class, or a beautiful woman of a slightly-lower class, they would choose the beautiful-but-poor woman. But this would mean men would marry lower-class women more often than women married lower-class men, which would imply a less-than-perfect status correlation between husbands and wives. But the data show a pretty perfect status correlation between husbands and wives. Therefore, men can’t care about looks. The fallacy here is in the last sentence. This assumes the only possible cause for having perfect correlation, would be men not caring about looks. But there are more possible reasons: for instance men could prefer looks over class, and women prefer some other quality over class as well; the result is that both genders equally often marry below class. The data in the article seems to confirm that, because women prefer marrying up wrt income. So it might be like in the song; daddy's rich and mom is good looking.
- knallfrosch 3y agoIn theory, another cause overriding class completely could be true. But the other suggested selection factors from you- class, education, looks, income - are exactly those that were controlled for. Sure, it could be that people marry by IP address, or ZIP code, or name first and foremost (over looks, class, income and education!), but it seems highly unlikely.
- cardanome 3y agoPeople tend to marry people that they have things a common with, that they work with or live in proximity with. I don't think many people have checklists where they evaluate potential partners based on education, income, looks and so on and consciously choose the best match. People just fall in love. The social classes just don't really mix that freely and it is not surprising people tend to stick to their own class. Yes, you can find all kinds of people on Tinder but most relationships don't start there. Relationships are often build on shared goals and having things in common and having similar social status, class and income helps.
- marek22 3y ago[dead]