You really need to swot up on both the data here as well as mate market dynamics and what operative sex ratios do to mate markets. I feel like I am talking to a creationist about evolution - so many "first principles" errors that need correcting here it would take a book to do it. Intelligence is highly correlated with income. It doesn't…
You really need to swot up on both the data here as well as mate market dynamics and what operative sex ratios do to mate markets. I feel like I am talking to a creationist about evolution - so many "first principles" errors that need correcting here it would take a book to do it. Intelligence is highly correlated with income. It doesn't matter what we see when we look at a few pre-selected small groups, it matters what patterns we see when we look at millions of people. Female hypergamy in long-term mating is one of the largest effect sizes in psychology. Your data is way off. See: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/09/20/americans-see-men-as-the-financial-providers-even-as-womens-contributions-grow/ There is also data on how low men and women would go in intelligence and other metrics if you choose to find it. This is painfully obvious stuff. Women who can choose, choose based on predictable things and if they can't get those things, they are increasingly not getting married at all. And it isn't because they are brainwashed by feminists. It is because there is an operative shortage of men on the metrics women care about. It would take me way too much time to point you in the direction of more information about mate market dymanics, but it isn't hard to find.
Not entirely sure what SWOT means here.... but, I am correct. (And no I am not an creationist, but also not a RedPill incel or MRA or MGTOW, so...)
Intelligence can be correlated with income but... correlation is not causation! DUH!
How about inherited wealth? I know some of the dumbest dumbasses you can imagine, who inherited millions.
I am not looking at pre selected small groups, but I think YOU are and from a very biased RedPill mandate. WHAT PATTERNS?
We know that today, women are just as likely as men to be the primary breadwinners and in 1/3rd of all marriages... couples earn roughly the same amount. How is this hypergamy? I think you are just in love with this as a BIG WORD to dump on people, without even knowing what it means.
The fact that men contribute to family income AS WELL AS WOMEN is not some big revelation. Also you fail to see that women often need men to provide while they are incapacitated by pregnancy or nursing small babies... something men never deal with... and which directly impacts female income and health. Remember the last time you were recovering from childbirth? yeah, I didn't think so. Women face financial repercussions from having offspring that men do not face....and many women do not have health insurance, let alone maternity leave.
Hypergamy is absolutely NOT one of the largest effect sizes in psychology, LOL. Not even close. And men ALSO practice hypergamy... why dont you talk about THAT?
People can only speculate on how LOW THEY WOULD GO... would you marry an ugly girl? a fat woman? a woman over 50? a woman who you knew was infertile? you cannot know this until it happens. What if that ugly girl is a wonderful person, funny and charming? what if the fat woman wins the Powerball Lottery? what if you find out your fiancé is infertile ONLY AFTER you propose?
You have to be either very young, or very naive to believe this. Also: please stop getting your information from the RedPill community. They take legit science (sometimes, not often) and twist it to their own ends... the whole MEN HAVE IT WORSE thing.
Who are the WOMEN WHO CAN CHOOSE? do you mean young or pretty or slender women? because they often choose young, and very unwisely. And not always rich guys. I know quite a few who choose the handsome football player or the good looking bad boy.
And isn't the very basis of RedPill MGTOW theory, that men who cannot get what they want ... a 22 year old virgin with no education or career, who just wants babeez!... will instead choose to go it entirely alone? that is admirable in men... there is no WGTOW for women. Why is that? a woman who chooses to go her own way... is a spinster with a lot of cats, cringe about her empty egg carton (LOL) but a man who does THE SAME THING is a brave MGTOW.
There has always been a shortage of rich (or handsome, or handsome AND rich) men... apparently you have never read Jane Austen. I suggest you remediate that immediately. You can get her stuff online, it is in the public domain.
I know all about metrics and the man/woman thing, being married for decades with adult children, thank you kindly. You are correct on one thing only: this is not about feminism. Most young women (millennials) dont even define THEMSELVES as feminists.
You are blaming your own dating failures on the idea that ALL WOMEN want Chad... the mysterious rich and handsome billionaire, who gets to have sex with about 90% of women (even the old ugly fat ones) and then dumps them as sluts .... leaving them without sexual market value (SMV) to the incels. This is pure fiction. Not even good fiction.
What are the metrics women care about? you have no idea, do you? let me tell you a secret... well something I discovered in talking to hundreds of women (probably thousands if you count online)... the most important thing to women is a mans LIBERAL political views. Not his looks... not his money. He can be an adjunct college professor earning $14 an hour, but if he is a hard left liberal... he is in like Flynn. Women (as a group; obviously some outliers) want liberal men. Women skew much more politically left (as a group, in the US) than men do.
BTW: men practice hypergamy too. Lets discuss MALE hypergamy.
It probably wasn't clear, but I like Louise Perry's book and I think some of her points are quite valid descriptively, but I think she vastly over-rates the influence of "bad ideas" in influencing people's behavior around deep self interest tradeoffs. Culture broadly is the net outcome of people adjudicating tradeoff self-interests between individual needs and social needs and changes to the environment those choices are made in can change those tradeoff structures. An extreme example - I live in a southern town with a large HBCU and we have a large population of black folks with either a 2 year degree from the local community college or a 4 year degree from the HBCU. When you look at the data about women's educational attainment, the insanely high lifetime likelihood of black men being incarcerated (it is like 25%) that stuff is going to influence the mating market and you get exactly what you see - lots of black women in professional or semi-professional jobs, having kids unmarried, because the men in their mate market would be a net drain on their resource. When there is a shortage of men, mate markets shift to male preferences. It isn't because hippies told them that boss bitches don't get married and that having kids is for the patriarchy. Plus, income inequities affect net work differently at different income levels. A spousal split of 100k/150k makes both parties richer. A spousal split of 50k/20k makes one party poorer. The gender split in income question isn't so much who makes more, but are earnings flowing from one party to the other. Marriage has traditionally served two functions - men got more access to sex married than they could otherwise and women got more access to resources than they could otherwise. Women balk at subsidizing men, and for good reason. Marriage would suddenly go way up if every male's income doubled tomorrow and every female's income was halved, regardless of what the hippie free love feminists were telling them. And that too would come with tradeoffs that would be way worse for some people and way better for others. As an aside, I have been married for 25 years, but my and my wife's self-interest tradeoffs around marriage, that is what we get vs what we give up, is different than differently situated people. I could easily assortatively mate with someone else educated with high earning potential. I have no idea what it would be like to be, say, a black woman with a associated degree working with a medical technician in a southern town - the option to assortatively mate to improve her position via marriage just isn't going to be as easy. And it isn't cultural leftists with bad values brainwashing people that caused the problem. It was the mate market - declining importance of male-valent traits to income and rising importance of IQ and soft skills. These things change the operative sex ratio when mate standards aren't that flexible.
I like the book less than you, but appreciate your insights. I also think it is overly simplistic... people are individual and complex, they have motivations that are not easily determined from a casual observation.
I agree culture is outcome of a LOT of tradeoffs between needs and society and this also vary a lot due to economic conditions... look at peoples behaviors during The Great Depression, WWII or more recent economic collapses.
Your situation in a small southern town with an HBCU... black women are leaps ahead of black men in terms of both educational attainment and not doing crimes, which has caused a really huge marriageability gap. On top of that, there is STILL a very pernicious cultural belief (among black men) that white women are more desirable and a high status marker. Black women have it tough!
However, there is no shortage of men in the US... not black men, not white men, not men in general. We are fortunate that our population is well balanced gender wise, unlike China. It might be that some black women have to marry outside their race to marry at all. Interracial marriage today is at an all time high, for all groups.
The last time there was a legit shortage of men was after WWI (not WWII)...and the result wasnt what you'd think. Single women without prospects of marriage decided to go to college, have careers and this was the birth of what we think of as first stage or generation feminism! this where we start seeing significant numbers of women going into medicine and law, college professors and so on.
IS there a shortage of men, outside of non incarcerated black men? (And lets remember, that incarceration rate doesn't mean 25% of black men are ALL in prison AT ALL TIMES... it is a lifetime risk.) Is a shortage of men causing women to shift to male preferences to get a man? or the opposite?
I am not sure I get the spousal split thing. Sure a $100k/$150 couple are wealthy... but the $50K/$20K couple are also wealthier than either of them ALONE. That extra $20K is the difference between having a nice car, vacations, vs. just getting by. That means something.
I am not sure about the traditional aspect of marriage there... depends on what era. Men have always had options for sex outside of marriage and before DNA testing, could impregnate lower class women and get away with it. Women did not have this option, without any birth control. It made for tremendous gender inequality. Also how much access a woman had (in say the year 1823) is very debatable.... women would not have had access even to money they INHERITED once married. They had no money of their own! so marrying a rich man would give you status, maybe pretty clothes & jewelry but money... nope. Also: you fail to see that marriage gives WOMEN access to regular sex... usually safe sex with someone you know wont hurt you (*outside of abuse of course) and if you got pregnant (which you did ALL THE TIME before contraception)... you would know your children would be cared for.
Women subsidize men all the time. Such as, your example of black women. They still have sex with black men, creating their out of wedlock children (at a staggering rate of 74%)!!! many times they support those men, even spending things like SNAP and EBT on a boyfriend vs. their own kids. As a result some black men make beelines towards women with kids, not seeing it as a negative... such women are cash cows.
Why would marriage go away if mens income were doubled and womens halved? wasnt that the situation, say 75 years ago? yet marriage was much more dominant then! did ou misstate that? did you mean WOMENS income doubled and MENS income halved? so that men had no resources to offer women?
How do you and your wife self interest tradeoffs differ around marriage? what did you give up? are you saying you married (for love, I assume!) a woman of a lower social class and income... but you COULD have someone more educated and high income? how does your wife feel about that?
I do agree black women have challenges that some white women do not... though lower class southern white women would probably say they face much of the same. They work harder than the men in their class, go to school, get jobs and the guys lay around drinking beer, complaining, watching TV or video games!!! in other words, they are not demonstrating their worth as husband material!
So what does such a woman do, black or white? the answer appears to be they take charge of their own lives... go to college, work hard, have careers and support themselves... so they do not need men ECONOMICALLY. Do you really want a spouse who only choose you to better her financial situation... vs. romantic love?
Yes, IQ does play a role because marriage generally involves children. Not many people would deliberately choose a stupid person to have children with... would you want stupid kids? really? this kinda destroy the incel theory that even rich powerful educated men would gladly marry a dumb blonde secretary.... because no matter how pretty she is, you dont want those traits (stupidity, lack of ambition) in your kids!
This of a scenario where women all got 2 inches taller. You would see an increase in height assoratative mating simply because women are now closer in height to men, not because male preferences changed. And if women strongly avoided marrying shorter men, you'd see an increase in height assortative mating and a decrease in marriage overal l at the same time. This is exactly what we see in terms of the effects of increasing female earning on marriage. And I'll say again, if "love as causation" rather than "love as adaptation" is the operative factor, someone needs to explain to me why women just happen not to frequently fall in love with lower earning men, but men fall in love with lower earning women much more often? Attractiveness is a real thing, traits people find attractive are largely heritable, and it is hard to fall in love with people one doesn't find attractive.
That is not what assortive mating even means. It is not about height. It is about people marrying others in their same profession and social class.
Lets say all humans were the same height... 5ft 9inches. What would that mean for mating and dating? nothing, thats what.
Women marry short men all the time. In my family. On my street. ALL OVER. How can you not see this? It may not be a 6ft woman and a 5ft 3 inch man.... more likely a woman of 5ft 10 and a man of 5ft 8... but it happens ALL THE TIME.
Some women prefer taller men, and they may or may not find one. A few inches taller is likely as men are generally taller than women... about 6 inches on average. But if a woman sets a very unrealistic standard, like 6ft 4inches... she will either be disappointed OR get more realistic. Will she really refuse to marry a millionaire who is 6ft 2inches? Nah.
How about men? they refuse to date taller women... even slightly taller. They get crazy when their girlfriends wear high heels! they feel resentful and try to sabotage relationships... this has happened to me and many other women. We were OK with the man being shorter... the MAN was THREATENED to be the short one.
Increasing female earnings doesn't harm men... for 40 years it has helped families keep up with inflation. Without female earnings, a lot of men would not be married or own homes or have children... not enough money.
Men earn more on average; statistically that means it is more likely any woman they date will earn less. How could Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos ever find a woman at their level financially? but women have been catching up for the last 40 years and things have evened out considerably.
1 in 3 marriages have the woman as the higher earning partner. Another 1 in 3, the couple earns roughly the same amount.
Women fall in love with lower earning men ALL THE TIME. You are working from a scenario that is decades out of date. Women care about things that are not related solely to earning power. Many high earning men are total asshats... selfish, cheaters, too busy to spend quality time at home, etc. How many women DIVORCE their high earning spouses for these reasons?
Attractiveness is very much in the mind of the beholder...there are some basics, but if you think you define beauty in absolutes... you will always be wrong. There is plenty of proof that ugly people marry and have children! any Walmart! check it out!
The height example is a metaphor for economic assortative matiing as an instance where relatives matter more than absolutes and how that would affect markets just by one party altering their rank on that metric. Every piece of data you can find will demonstrate two things 1)assortative mating is increasing and 2)women are far more rigid on the "relative to me" standards they will accept in marriage. Additionally the higher a woman's incine the more rigid she is in her status demands. Markedly not so for men.
Listen to me again, carefully. That is not what assortive mating means. It means marrying someone just like yourself... a doctor marrying another doctor.
It is increasing, because women are now 50% to 55% of medical school classes, and similar in law school and other high end professions (MBAs, etc.). A lot of people meet & marry in graduate school.
Women are FAR FAR FAR more flexible than men, who often have incredibly stringent PHYSICAL standards and are doctrinaire on things like weight, height (she must be shorter than me, my ego is so tiny!), physical beauty, etc. Women will marry a man who is homely if he has money or comes from rich parents... men will often reject even nice looking women for being say 10 lbs overweight.
None the less, most people manage to get together and marry and have kids anyways. Because as I said earlier... love is MYSTERIOUS and people do strange things.
You have this 100% backwards. Women are NOT rigid! they are far more flexible than men! MEN are rigid, and proof that is the (relatively) new RedPIll and incel movements... that characterize women as if they were inanimate objects, or reject them for trivial reasons, call them ugly hateful names (blue haired land whales, etc.) and insist they (men) will remain unmarried as MGTOWs... there is no similar term for women.
Men actually have far looser physical standards than you think. You left out the crucial caveat "the men I Find Attractive have strident physical standards". But yeah, men do weigh physical standards more heavily than women but crucially men don't insist women be more attractive than themselves. It's not a relative metric. Also quite a bit if research in this. And of course there is a term women use for men that men never use for women to derogate their mate value..."loser". But yeah, whose arguing about the fairness of attractiveness standards? I'm sure not. I'm just saying that the standards women have, being relative, cause more marriage market issues writ large. I guess maybe if all women suddenly got obese while all men suddenly got better looking it might cause the same problem. Look at Tindr swiping data - men are far less picky.
Using red pill/incel as a metric of anything important would be like looking at women with borderline personality disorder as important data about mate markets - both tiny sunsets of each gender that dont tell us much about anything.
Are they looser or tighter? You say looser and then say men do weigh physical standards more heavily than women! you have literally just contradicted yourself.
How can a woman be MORE ATTRACTIVE than a man? womens and mens looks are entirely different. Beautiful women marry ugly men all the time, and believe it or not... some handsome men marry homely women. Obviously it is relative, you just brought it up.
hahahaha... men do not call women LOSERS? hello Brian, welcome to the INTERNET. They do it ALL THE TIME.
Men call women blue haired land whales ALL THE TIME.
Men call women SPINSTERS if they never marry while a man who does not marry is a proud MGTOW.
There is no term WGTOW for a woman choosing not to marry.
Women over THIRTY are mocked daily on social media as EMPTY EGG CRATES even though women can have offspring up to their early 40s.
Male infertility and decline is denied daily.
The constant screeching about YOU WILL DIE ALONE WITH CATS lobbed at women and not men.
Tinder means nothing. It is a biased dating site, that is 75% male. Of course women get more swipes; they are only 1 out of 4 on the site. Also, I am not so sure Tinder is reliable about reporting stuff.
Women are accepting and kind hearted; men (at least the RedPills) are cruel and condescending, even threatening REGULARLY to leave the US to find a passive grateful Asian bride in a poor third world nation. This is supposed to instill terror in women that will end up alone! without an incel!
Many still believe, even faced with data, that men are all slim or normal weight and only women are fat. Men are just as fat statistically and have high obesity rates....but are not rejected solely for this characteristic.
RedPillers have an effect, even on men like you who probably do not think you are a member of that subset. There is no comparable group for women that constantly degrades and demonizes men and calls them names.
Lastly: men absolutely have standards for women that do not apply to THEMSELVES... for example, demanding much younger partners, or demanding a woman have a low body count (or be a virgin) while reserving the right for themselves (men) to sleep around as much as they can.
"There is no comparable group for women that constantly degrades and demonizes men and calls them names." Feminists? (I'm joking). But seriously, the reason for that is far more men are deemed unattractive by women than women are by men so lots of bitter men act out because of that.
So the way they usually research this is they get a baseline attractiveness by having raters rate photographs. So they will have women rank and rate men's photos and men rank and rate women's. Then they ask if they'd consider certain photos for long or short term mating. So then yiu have a rating for everyone and you can then see if men and women will consider people with lower rankings than them.
Yes, I know. I'm the one who brought it up and I am explaining how it works with a thought experiment on another relative metric women have for mate standards. Both income and height preferences in women involve "relative to me" evaluations and I'm saying that assortative economic mating with women rising in status relative to men affects marriage rates in the same way it would if women mate selected strongly on height while themselves as a group growing a few inches.
Sorry, that doesn't even make sense. If women were taller... height would matter less? or more? what if men & women were THE SAME HEIGHT?
According to the Redpillers... women have ABSOLUTE height requirements of 6ft or over, even when the women themselves are tiny... 5ft 2inches. They should be happy with a man who is 5ft 6, but still want a very tall man. (of course in real life away from RedPillers... short women DO marry short men. All the time.)
A lot of stuff affects marriage rates. but ASSORTIVE MATING really doesn't. The nurse who doesn't get a doctor to marry, just marries a cop. The legal secretary who does not marry her boss, just marries a contractor or plumber. They all still get married.
The people who DO NOT get married are at the low end of the economic ladder... plagued with things like prison time, slackerdom, refusal to finish school or go to college... the men devolve into dependence on parents and live in moms basement playing call of duty. These men are not marriageable, and it doesn't matter if they are 6ft 6 inches tall and built like Thor.
Women sleep with them, and have their babies (so their genes are carried on... geez) but do not marry and thusly tighten the chains of poverty around themselves and their children. It is sad. I am not sure how to break this cycle... because the causation was really globalization stealing the jobs of working class men and also massive illegal immigration.
"How do you and your wife self interest tradeoffs differ around marriage? what did you give up? are you saying you married (for love, I assume!) a woman of a lower social class and income... but you COULD have someone more educated and high income? how does your wife feel about that?" I am not naive enough to think my psychology evolved in such a way to make decisions denovo. Love is an adaptation to make us do things that are good for us. Attractiveness standards are the same. Love is like the taste of sugar - it serves a function and knowing that doesn't talk you out of it. I am perfectly typical of a PMC man - I married a PMC woman and marriage vastly improved both of our financial wellbeing. If love is so pure, why do we see such consistent predictable patterns of who falls in love with whom? I shouldn't be able to predict better than blind guessing if something besides "love as causation rather than post hoc rationalization" was the rule. Is it just a coincidence, for example, that female doctors are many times more likely to fall in love with male doctors than male doctors are to fall in love with female doctors? Or is something else going on?
What does your WIFE say about that? just that you evolved biologically to choose someone based on certain traits, income etc.... not LOVE?
I have no idea what PMC means... and I hope you actually love your wife and didn't just marry her because of social pressures or desire for kids. That wont end well.
Love is not exactly pure, but it IS MYSTERIOUS... it is very hard to know why any two people find one another. Some couples are bewildering and we cannot figure out why they love each other (but they do). Many many couples break the mold... interracial... mixed religions...taller, shorter... high income, low income... to say everybody marries the exact proper person by some kind of destiny looks reality in the face and denies the facts!
WHERE do you get the idea that female doctors fall in love with male doctors, but are not reciprocated???? ASSORTIVE MATING! most doctors today marry other doctors!!! (*I am limiting discussion to heterosexual couples.) Doctors do NOT marry nurses or underlings!
There is no evidence that male doctors do not marry female doctors... JUST THE OPPOSITE. The days of old where a businessman married his secretary... gone, gone gone! Lawyers marry other lawyers... engineers marry other engineers... computer analyists marry other computer analysts... and so on....
How old are you? because this has not been true for over 40 years... ASSORTIVE MATING.
PMC = professional managerial class. College degree people who work at computers and make decent wages. Yeah, that is kind of what I said - assortative mating is becoming more common, but the driver is not as much men refusing to marry down but women having higher status and marrying laterally plus cultural changes that keep lower class women away from upper class men (see for example the book Paying for the Party about a sorority at Indian University where the sociologist researchers thought they were going to write a feminist book about patriarchy but ended up writing a book about class antagonism in female mate competition). You can see many studies about doctors alone - some showing female doctors as much as 5 times more likely than male doctors to marry other doctors. So imagine in the old days doctors married nurses, mostly because there were no female doctors and men don't care all that much about a woman's status either way, although they will take it if nothing else is sacrificed. Men are still fine to marry nurses (again, see the research on this), but their social circles are no populated almost exclusively within class and professional women actively try to keep it that way and if you can get everything you used to get but also mate assortatively, why not? The point is that women women's status rises relative to men, fewer men are marriageable by default because women rate status as a strong trait of marriageability. This isn't' controversial.
PMC is a new acronym to me! you dont seem to understand assortive mating: it means like marrying like... doctors now marry OTHER DOCTORS, not nurses.
People have always married laterally; marrying above or below your station (more than few notches) is not that common.
You can TRY to keep lower class women from upper class men, but sororities are not the norm anymore (this is not 1950!) and people marry in their late 20s (especially the more affluent and your PMCs)... so who you date at college is far less relevant.
Female doctors are 5 times as likely to marry doctors than male doctors? honey, that makes ZERO sense. Who do male doctors marry? OTHER DOCTORS. They marry EACH OTHER.
In the old days, whenever you define that... sure, doctors did marry female doctors (much) because they were rare. But they did not typically marry nurses either. Nurses are working class. Doctors married socialites, daughters of the upper crust. They may or may not have worked, but if they did it was something socialites worked at... art galleries, museums, that sort of thing.
MEN CARE ABOUT WOMENS STATUS... as much or more than women care about mens status. It reflects on the man. It signals to others his worth and social ranking. He is judged by if his wife is attractive or comes from the right (social) family. To think men are immune to this, or at any large scale always marry DOWN... is flatout provably wrong.
Of course men marry nurses. I have seen all the research. Nurses are a CATCH... for a blue collar man. She brings a relatively high income ($75K and up), union benefits plus her knowledge of medical care. Often nurses are married to cops, farmers, skilled trades, truckers. There social circles vary by location, but nurses do not hang out socially with doctors... doctors earn 5 to 6x more and live in fancier neighborhoods.
Nursing is interesting because it IS a medical profession. It DOES require college (at some levels even masters degrees) but it is not considered anything close to a doctor. This is why so many bright young women go into DOCTOR training, not nurse training. Interestingly... few men go into nursing despite the good pay and benefits (and they are in demand!)... why? I think honestly it is the name. It is a very girly name.
I think you are confused on assortive mating. It means like marrying like, not dating an assortment of various people at different levels. It means doctors marrying other doctors.
It may not be controversial but I believe you are wrong. Womens status rises, but it doesn't diminish men (unless they have incredibly weak self esteem)... it should enhance it. If not, then you are arguing for women to drop out of 8th grade and become housewives at 18, like in the 50s.
Reductive.... super paranoid... from a MAN who is likely reflecting his own experiences... sounds like he desired females more attractive than what he could actually acquire!
Dont be fooled by titles like PSYCHOLOGY PROFESSOR... this guy is writing his own personal opinions, not the results of any long term studies, double blind or peer reviewed.
Jesus there really is tons of research on this stuff. I can point you to tons of female researchers who have researched the same stuff if that helps. I feel like the motivated reasoning is more evident in denying this stuff. Buss has a few well sourced books on this. Again, in any individual instance things are complicated, but when you look at large datasets and see strong patterns that is what is relevant when also trying to make statements about societal phenomenon.
Jesus, sir, I have read all the research. You are wrong. You are using biased sources and pop psychologists who do not even conduct real research with double blind studies or peer reviewed articles!
Anybody has an opinion... you can get 10 or 12 opinions each morning on your bus on the way to work! doesn't mean they have real validity.
WHAT LARGE DATA SET? most people get married. Most people are average looking. Most men AND women get married... to each other.
There is no vast demographic of never married women who are so undesirable (due to their high paying JOBS) that no man will ever marry them. That is a fantasy of the RedPill movement.
MARRIAGE is actually correlated strongly with educations and high incomes. High income successful women almost ALL get married... it is the poor cocktail waitress in the trailer park who doesn't get married. This is regardless of their looks.
Here is a question for you: how did it happen that CHELSEA CLINTON and CAROLINE KENNEDY both married billionaires? They are homely beyond belief. They are not rich in their own right, but probably inherited money from parents (but Kennedy not until middle age). They dont have real jobs. They are high status due to their family names. Why would a billionaire marry a butt ugly woman from a high status family instead of a gorgeous cocktail waitress? Remember, he does not need her money.
Oh and another one... fashion model Karli Koss is 6ft 3. Very beautiful but crazy tall... in heels, she is 6ft 7inches tall! yet she married a billionaire. Please explain.... he is much shorter than her.
"Love is not exactly pure, but it IS MYSTERIOUS... it is very hard to know why any two people find one another" But when you look at thousands of couples and start to see predictable patterns with sex differences and those sex differences make sense in a context of different evolutionary strategies for reproduction, you know something is going on. Love is a suite of biochemical cognitive responses that evolved as the hardwire is heritable. Things that help people survive to reproduce are passed on and people that don't have those traits don't reproduce so some things are reinforced and others aren't.
Sorry, the more I live and learn and see couples... at my age, you see the ones that really worked out... that lasted 30 to 40 years and beyond. And yes, it is mystery!
What are the predictable patterns? what sex differences? what strategies for reproduction? we are already talking about married adults. If they want kids, they will almost certainly have kids (by adoption if no other way).
Does your wife know you think this way? lol! that love is just biochemical responses? LUST is biochemical responses, but lust doesn't last very long and it is a very flimsy base to build a marriage on. You need basic desire of course, but lust burns out. What is left behind is the underlying structure of marriage... trust, honesty, kindness, fidelity, honor, decency.
As I say in some post here... if ugly fat people never reproduced... they would have died out generations ago. Yet any visits to a Walmart proves that ugly fat people are in abundance... pushing baby strollers.
If marriage is just about love (rather than love being an evolved motivator that nudges us toward evolutionarily valent ends) then why do we see patters such as assortative mating, female hypergamy, etc. Do you think that men with lots of options just happen to fall in love with women who are in the top 5% of attractiveness by chance and that if they found the same personality in a 400lb homeless woman they would have married them? Or women married to doctors if they have just found the same personality in a homeless man they would have married them? Do you think liking sugar is an adaptation to guide our behavior? Or liking sex? Does admitting that make you immediately not like those things?
Of course it is more than about romantic love, it is about building A. family and B. kinship relations (through children that carry both of your DNA) and C. things like home ownership, savings for retirement etc.
Assortive mating makes perfect sense in this context, because it is like marrying like... people with the same educations and values, more likely to fall in love than people from vary different backgrounds (though of course, that happens too!).
Female hypergamy is an obsession of the RedPill Manosphere... it is no more true than for MEN. Hypergamy just means aspiring to marry UP... it can be money, social status, LOOKS, etc. Men also desire this.
What are men with lots of options? Rich men? very good looking men? men from High Society families? you are making a lot of assumptions, including that WOMEN do not have lots of options.
I do think people experience attraction first with their eyes, and only later with personality... so yes, beautiful women attract attention just as very handsome men do! Men seem to think women have no lust, no physical desire for a hot sexy guy. They are wrong.
Sure, you wont be drawn to that 400 lb homeless woman, but neither will a 400 lb homeless MAN attract a woman. But AFTER the initial attraction... yes, personality and character qualities start mattering more and more. After all marriage is intended FOR A LIFETIME and we know people do not stay young and beautiful forever!
I think women DOCTORS marry other DOCTORS because they have a lot in common... attractive looks perhaps, but remember MOST PEOPLE ARE AVERAGE. They are neither supermodels NOR are they 400 lb homeless people.
What does liking sugar mean here? all humans have a natural propensity for sweetness, it is part of our taste sensation. What does that mean about MATING? most humans like sex. A few outliers are asexual but in general.... not liking sex is pretty darn rare.
The bottom 30% of men are just invisible to most women - they aren't "marriageable" - they come with costs without benefits. The ratio that matters is men that can satisfy a large mate requirement for women (if you look across large numbers, not any one woman) - that to be acceptable for marriage a husband has to improve, not hurt, my financial status. Women just don't like marriage if it functions to transfer wealth from women to men. To put it bluntly - what would they be paying for that they can't get for free? Marrying laterally improves your financial status, marrying down a little improves your financial status, especially if you are higher income. Marrying down doesn't. Think about another well know female preference (again this is really well documented) - women want to date men taller than them. Imagine women all got 2 inches taller all at once and men got 2 inches shorter. Many more men would be unmarriageable. Even the word "marriageable" is a word women use for men, not men for women. If you need the references, I can show you many lines of evidence for women being pickier on key metrics in long term mating than men are. One of which is that far more men than women die without having reproduced. Now of course, mate preferences are a menu and people will sacrifice some things to get other things. But men aren't compensating for the things they have lost if you look at aggregate data. And most of that is just down to real durable biological gender differences. Again, no moral judgement in any of this. You can't blame people for wanting what they want/liking what they like, particularly when it is likely a part of our hardware.
It doesn't require all women to have these preferences - it just needs to be more than chance (that is, better than guessing) would predict to have sizeable societal effects. If 60% of men are willing to marry 1 standard deviation down in income and only 40% of women are, that will have huge societal effects even though there are plenty of people not acting to type.
You think 30% of men are unmarriageable? what is this based on? just poverty? I dont think the poverty rate is anything close to that... more like 14%! and poverty is not the sole criteria.
How about a man who earns $14 an hour as an Adjunct Professor, but has a PhD and looks like Brad Pitt? still unmarriageable?
In 33% of marriage today... women are the primary breadwinners. Not households... MARRIAGES. In another third, both partners earn about the same. How does that dovetail with your theory?
A surprising number of women today pay alimony to... ex husbands. Because the woman earns MORE than he does. It is not equal or a majority but growing rapidly.
What is it women GET FOR FREE that they do not have to marry to get? do you mean sex? or children? so women only do those things to get mens money?
If marrying laterally (equal incomes) improves your financial status... why does marrying DOWN also improve it? do you mean the opposite? it does NOT improve it? Marrying down might matter or might not... does it matter who Jeff Bezos marries in terms of income?
And I have discussed the height thing before. Women are not the ones obsessed with height... IT IS MEN. Women who express a preference for a taller man are asking for this to protect MALE EGO.
I have dated shorter men; I am about 5ft 5inches. They all had serious issues with my height, and demanded I NEVER wear high heels. They all lied about being 5ft 6, but were probably closer to 5ft 4 or 5ft 5. One guy wore a smaller shoe size than me! I didn't care... he was OUTRAGED and angry and ridiculed me for HAVING BIG FEET.
I came to realize short men had the issues... not me. Not most women. (Obviously exceptions on both sides exist.) So women who ask for a taller man... are doing so because they know short men are obsessed with this and they dont want the drama.
I actually know several couples, including my stepdaughter, where the woman is somewhat taller than the man... very happily married, MATURE and sensible couples!
Men use marriageable as a term all the time. Not sure where you get this. I suppose you could say that the vast majority of women are marriageable... in the sense of wanting to marry and being mature enough to marry (by age 25 or so)... but some men are Peter Pans, wanting to be bachelors much longer and generally leading hedonistic lifestyles (if they can afford it!) and you see this clearly in the RedPill community and MGTOW movement.
Who is pickier? I guess we would need a side by side study! remember we are talking marriage here... not just sex. People in general are far pickier about who they marry and HAVE CHILDREN WITH than they are about casual sex partners.
It is true that far more women have children than men... making the incel meme about EMPTY EGG CARTONS hilariously untrue!!! women have plenty of kids and all them fathered by MEN. It is men who (sometimes) fail to breed, because they are immature... isolated loners... in the RedPill incel community... misogynistic... on the Aspergers Spectrum (a HUGE problem). Men in the last generation (millennials) are also strangely avoiding college and preparing themselves for a successful future... this needs more study!!!
As for women being pickier... Ill believe it when I see it! on the internet, ALL I ENCOUNTER, week after week... are incels and MGTOWs and RedPillers who insist that women are slutty tramps who sleep with Chad and only want a tall guy with money (but will end alone as spinsters with cats)... while demanding for themselves a short, slender, pretty virgin of 22... even while they live in their moms basement, playing Call of Duty all day.
"We know that today, women are just as likely as men to be the primary breadwinners and in 1/3rd of all marriages... couples earn roughly the same amount. How is this hypergamy? I think you are just in love with this as a BIG WORD to dump on people, without even knowing what it means." I referenced research showing this is just not correct. And there are tons of lines of evidence about female hypergamy and it isn't something women hide from pollsters. How about Kenrick et all - http://www.mysmu.edu/faculty/normanli/LiBaileyKenrickLinsenmeier2002.pdf And this isn't remotely the only research on this. Nor is it an insult. Women have extremely good reason to rate male attractiveness on status. Morally judging such a thing would be as silly as judging any other attractiveness standard. One being the one you cited - that women have different tradeoffs than men do - for a minute there I thought you were prooftexting my point.
I am not RedPill Incel MRA or MGTOW either. Those people don't understand this stuff any better than their polar opposites in the other camp do. I am bored with this discussion because it seems it is mostly motivated by an assumption about what values I hold and are attempting to prooftext than empirical interest in what is going on. I have never voted for a Republican in my life and can't imagine I ever would, volunteered for Obama campaign, voted for Bernie is 2020 and even voted for Biden despite being much to his left on economic issues, althoug no longer in sync with the professional class DNC on identity issues but also hating as always the GOP on these issues..
You really need to swot up on both the data here as well as mate market dynamics and what operative sex ratios do to mate markets. I feel like I am talking to a creationist about evolution - so many "first principles" errors that need correcting here it would take a book to do it. Intelligence is highly correlated with income. It doesn't matter what we see when we look at a few pre-selected small groups, it matters what patterns we see when we look at millions of people. Female hypergamy in long-term mating is one of the largest effect sizes in psychology. Your data is way off. See: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/09/20/americans-see-men-as-the-financial-providers-even-as-womens-contributions-grow/ There is also data on how low men and women would go in intelligence and other metrics if you choose to find it. This is painfully obvious stuff. Women who can choose, choose based on predictable things and if they can't get those things, they are increasingly not getting married at all. And it isn't because they are brainwashed by feminists. It is because there is an operative shortage of men on the metrics women care about. It would take me way too much time to point you in the direction of more information about mate market dymanics, but it isn't hard to find.
Not entirely sure what SWOT means here.... but, I am correct. (And no I am not an creationist, but also not a RedPill incel or MRA or MGTOW, so...)
Intelligence can be correlated with income but... correlation is not causation! DUH!
How about inherited wealth? I know some of the dumbest dumbasses you can imagine, who inherited millions.
I am not looking at pre selected small groups, but I think YOU are and from a very biased RedPill mandate. WHAT PATTERNS?
We know that today, women are just as likely as men to be the primary breadwinners and in 1/3rd of all marriages... couples earn roughly the same amount. How is this hypergamy? I think you are just in love with this as a BIG WORD to dump on people, without even knowing what it means.
The fact that men contribute to family income AS WELL AS WOMEN is not some big revelation. Also you fail to see that women often need men to provide while they are incapacitated by pregnancy or nursing small babies... something men never deal with... and which directly impacts female income and health. Remember the last time you were recovering from childbirth? yeah, I didn't think so. Women face financial repercussions from having offspring that men do not face....and many women do not have health insurance, let alone maternity leave.
Hypergamy is absolutely NOT one of the largest effect sizes in psychology, LOL. Not even close. And men ALSO practice hypergamy... why dont you talk about THAT?
People can only speculate on how LOW THEY WOULD GO... would you marry an ugly girl? a fat woman? a woman over 50? a woman who you knew was infertile? you cannot know this until it happens. What if that ugly girl is a wonderful person, funny and charming? what if the fat woman wins the Powerball Lottery? what if you find out your fiancé is infertile ONLY AFTER you propose?
You have to be either very young, or very naive to believe this. Also: please stop getting your information from the RedPill community. They take legit science (sometimes, not often) and twist it to their own ends... the whole MEN HAVE IT WORSE thing.
Who are the WOMEN WHO CAN CHOOSE? do you mean young or pretty or slender women? because they often choose young, and very unwisely. And not always rich guys. I know quite a few who choose the handsome football player or the good looking bad boy.
And isn't the very basis of RedPill MGTOW theory, that men who cannot get what they want ... a 22 year old virgin with no education or career, who just wants babeez!... will instead choose to go it entirely alone? that is admirable in men... there is no WGTOW for women. Why is that? a woman who chooses to go her own way... is a spinster with a lot of cats, cringe about her empty egg carton (LOL) but a man who does THE SAME THING is a brave MGTOW.
There has always been a shortage of rich (or handsome, or handsome AND rich) men... apparently you have never read Jane Austen. I suggest you remediate that immediately. You can get her stuff online, it is in the public domain.
I know all about metrics and the man/woman thing, being married for decades with adult children, thank you kindly. You are correct on one thing only: this is not about feminism. Most young women (millennials) dont even define THEMSELVES as feminists.
You are blaming your own dating failures on the idea that ALL WOMEN want Chad... the mysterious rich and handsome billionaire, who gets to have sex with about 90% of women (even the old ugly fat ones) and then dumps them as sluts .... leaving them without sexual market value (SMV) to the incels. This is pure fiction. Not even good fiction.
What are the metrics women care about? you have no idea, do you? let me tell you a secret... well something I discovered in talking to hundreds of women (probably thousands if you count online)... the most important thing to women is a mans LIBERAL political views. Not his looks... not his money. He can be an adjunct college professor earning $14 an hour, but if he is a hard left liberal... he is in like Flynn. Women (as a group; obviously some outliers) want liberal men. Women skew much more politically left (as a group, in the US) than men do.
BTW: men practice hypergamy too. Lets discuss MALE hypergamy.
It probably wasn't clear, but I like Louise Perry's book and I think some of her points are quite valid descriptively, but I think she vastly over-rates the influence of "bad ideas" in influencing people's behavior around deep self interest tradeoffs. Culture broadly is the net outcome of people adjudicating tradeoff self-interests between individual needs and social needs and changes to the environment those choices are made in can change those tradeoff structures. An extreme example - I live in a southern town with a large HBCU and we have a large population of black folks with either a 2 year degree from the local community college or a 4 year degree from the HBCU. When you look at the data about women's educational attainment, the insanely high lifetime likelihood of black men being incarcerated (it is like 25%) that stuff is going to influence the mating market and you get exactly what you see - lots of black women in professional or semi-professional jobs, having kids unmarried, because the men in their mate market would be a net drain on their resource. When there is a shortage of men, mate markets shift to male preferences. It isn't because hippies told them that boss bitches don't get married and that having kids is for the patriarchy. Plus, income inequities affect net work differently at different income levels. A spousal split of 100k/150k makes both parties richer. A spousal split of 50k/20k makes one party poorer. The gender split in income question isn't so much who makes more, but are earnings flowing from one party to the other. Marriage has traditionally served two functions - men got more access to sex married than they could otherwise and women got more access to resources than they could otherwise. Women balk at subsidizing men, and for good reason. Marriage would suddenly go way up if every male's income doubled tomorrow and every female's income was halved, regardless of what the hippie free love feminists were telling them. And that too would come with tradeoffs that would be way worse for some people and way better for others. As an aside, I have been married for 25 years, but my and my wife's self-interest tradeoffs around marriage, that is what we get vs what we give up, is different than differently situated people. I could easily assortatively mate with someone else educated with high earning potential. I have no idea what it would be like to be, say, a black woman with a associated degree working with a medical technician in a southern town - the option to assortatively mate to improve her position via marriage just isn't going to be as easy. And it isn't cultural leftists with bad values brainwashing people that caused the problem. It was the mate market - declining importance of male-valent traits to income and rising importance of IQ and soft skills. These things change the operative sex ratio when mate standards aren't that flexible.
I like the book less than you, but appreciate your insights. I also think it is overly simplistic... people are individual and complex, they have motivations that are not easily determined from a casual observation.
I agree culture is outcome of a LOT of tradeoffs between needs and society and this also vary a lot due to economic conditions... look at peoples behaviors during The Great Depression, WWII or more recent economic collapses.
Your situation in a small southern town with an HBCU... black women are leaps ahead of black men in terms of both educational attainment and not doing crimes, which has caused a really huge marriageability gap. On top of that, there is STILL a very pernicious cultural belief (among black men) that white women are more desirable and a high status marker. Black women have it tough!
However, there is no shortage of men in the US... not black men, not white men, not men in general. We are fortunate that our population is well balanced gender wise, unlike China. It might be that some black women have to marry outside their race to marry at all. Interracial marriage today is at an all time high, for all groups.
The last time there was a legit shortage of men was after WWI (not WWII)...and the result wasnt what you'd think. Single women without prospects of marriage decided to go to college, have careers and this was the birth of what we think of as first stage or generation feminism! this where we start seeing significant numbers of women going into medicine and law, college professors and so on.
IS there a shortage of men, outside of non incarcerated black men? (And lets remember, that incarceration rate doesn't mean 25% of black men are ALL in prison AT ALL TIMES... it is a lifetime risk.) Is a shortage of men causing women to shift to male preferences to get a man? or the opposite?
I am not sure I get the spousal split thing. Sure a $100k/$150 couple are wealthy... but the $50K/$20K couple are also wealthier than either of them ALONE. That extra $20K is the difference between having a nice car, vacations, vs. just getting by. That means something.
I am not sure about the traditional aspect of marriage there... depends on what era. Men have always had options for sex outside of marriage and before DNA testing, could impregnate lower class women and get away with it. Women did not have this option, without any birth control. It made for tremendous gender inequality. Also how much access a woman had (in say the year 1823) is very debatable.... women would not have had access even to money they INHERITED once married. They had no money of their own! so marrying a rich man would give you status, maybe pretty clothes & jewelry but money... nope. Also: you fail to see that marriage gives WOMEN access to regular sex... usually safe sex with someone you know wont hurt you (*outside of abuse of course) and if you got pregnant (which you did ALL THE TIME before contraception)... you would know your children would be cared for.
Women subsidize men all the time. Such as, your example of black women. They still have sex with black men, creating their out of wedlock children (at a staggering rate of 74%)!!! many times they support those men, even spending things like SNAP and EBT on a boyfriend vs. their own kids. As a result some black men make beelines towards women with kids, not seeing it as a negative... such women are cash cows.
Why would marriage go away if mens income were doubled and womens halved? wasnt that the situation, say 75 years ago? yet marriage was much more dominant then! did ou misstate that? did you mean WOMENS income doubled and MENS income halved? so that men had no resources to offer women?
How do you and your wife self interest tradeoffs differ around marriage? what did you give up? are you saying you married (for love, I assume!) a woman of a lower social class and income... but you COULD have someone more educated and high income? how does your wife feel about that?
I do agree black women have challenges that some white women do not... though lower class southern white women would probably say they face much of the same. They work harder than the men in their class, go to school, get jobs and the guys lay around drinking beer, complaining, watching TV or video games!!! in other words, they are not demonstrating their worth as husband material!
So what does such a woman do, black or white? the answer appears to be they take charge of their own lives... go to college, work hard, have careers and support themselves... so they do not need men ECONOMICALLY. Do you really want a spouse who only choose you to better her financial situation... vs. romantic love?
Yes, IQ does play a role because marriage generally involves children. Not many people would deliberately choose a stupid person to have children with... would you want stupid kids? really? this kinda destroy the incel theory that even rich powerful educated men would gladly marry a dumb blonde secretary.... because no matter how pretty she is, you dont want those traits (stupidity, lack of ambition) in your kids!
This of a scenario where women all got 2 inches taller. You would see an increase in height assoratative mating simply because women are now closer in height to men, not because male preferences changed. And if women strongly avoided marrying shorter men, you'd see an increase in height assortative mating and a decrease in marriage overal l at the same time. This is exactly what we see in terms of the effects of increasing female earning on marriage. And I'll say again, if "love as causation" rather than "love as adaptation" is the operative factor, someone needs to explain to me why women just happen not to frequently fall in love with lower earning men, but men fall in love with lower earning women much more often? Attractiveness is a real thing, traits people find attractive are largely heritable, and it is hard to fall in love with people one doesn't find attractive.
That is not what assortive mating even means. It is not about height. It is about people marrying others in their same profession and social class.
Lets say all humans were the same height... 5ft 9inches. What would that mean for mating and dating? nothing, thats what.
Women marry short men all the time. In my family. On my street. ALL OVER. How can you not see this? It may not be a 6ft woman and a 5ft 3 inch man.... more likely a woman of 5ft 10 and a man of 5ft 8... but it happens ALL THE TIME.
Some women prefer taller men, and they may or may not find one. A few inches taller is likely as men are generally taller than women... about 6 inches on average. But if a woman sets a very unrealistic standard, like 6ft 4inches... she will either be disappointed OR get more realistic. Will she really refuse to marry a millionaire who is 6ft 2inches? Nah.
How about men? they refuse to date taller women... even slightly taller. They get crazy when their girlfriends wear high heels! they feel resentful and try to sabotage relationships... this has happened to me and many other women. We were OK with the man being shorter... the MAN was THREATENED to be the short one.
Increasing female earnings doesn't harm men... for 40 years it has helped families keep up with inflation. Without female earnings, a lot of men would not be married or own homes or have children... not enough money.
Men earn more on average; statistically that means it is more likely any woman they date will earn less. How could Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos ever find a woman at their level financially? but women have been catching up for the last 40 years and things have evened out considerably.
1 in 3 marriages have the woman as the higher earning partner. Another 1 in 3, the couple earns roughly the same amount.
Women fall in love with lower earning men ALL THE TIME. You are working from a scenario that is decades out of date. Women care about things that are not related solely to earning power. Many high earning men are total asshats... selfish, cheaters, too busy to spend quality time at home, etc. How many women DIVORCE their high earning spouses for these reasons?
Attractiveness is very much in the mind of the beholder...there are some basics, but if you think you define beauty in absolutes... you will always be wrong. There is plenty of proof that ugly people marry and have children! any Walmart! check it out!
The height example is a metaphor for economic assortative matiing as an instance where relatives matter more than absolutes and how that would affect markets just by one party altering their rank on that metric. Every piece of data you can find will demonstrate two things 1)assortative mating is increasing and 2)women are far more rigid on the "relative to me" standards they will accept in marriage. Additionally the higher a woman's incine the more rigid she is in her status demands. Markedly not so for men.
Listen to me again, carefully. That is not what assortive mating means. It means marrying someone just like yourself... a doctor marrying another doctor.
It is increasing, because women are now 50% to 55% of medical school classes, and similar in law school and other high end professions (MBAs, etc.). A lot of people meet & marry in graduate school.
Women are FAR FAR FAR more flexible than men, who often have incredibly stringent PHYSICAL standards and are doctrinaire on things like weight, height (she must be shorter than me, my ego is so tiny!), physical beauty, etc. Women will marry a man who is homely if he has money or comes from rich parents... men will often reject even nice looking women for being say 10 lbs overweight.
None the less, most people manage to get together and marry and have kids anyways. Because as I said earlier... love is MYSTERIOUS and people do strange things.
You have this 100% backwards. Women are NOT rigid! they are far more flexible than men! MEN are rigid, and proof that is the (relatively) new RedPIll and incel movements... that characterize women as if they were inanimate objects, or reject them for trivial reasons, call them ugly hateful names (blue haired land whales, etc.) and insist they (men) will remain unmarried as MGTOWs... there is no similar term for women.
Men actually have far looser physical standards than you think. You left out the crucial caveat "the men I Find Attractive have strident physical standards". But yeah, men do weigh physical standards more heavily than women but crucially men don't insist women be more attractive than themselves. It's not a relative metric. Also quite a bit if research in this. And of course there is a term women use for men that men never use for women to derogate their mate value..."loser". But yeah, whose arguing about the fairness of attractiveness standards? I'm sure not. I'm just saying that the standards women have, being relative, cause more marriage market issues writ large. I guess maybe if all women suddenly got obese while all men suddenly got better looking it might cause the same problem. Look at Tindr swiping data - men are far less picky.
Using red pill/incel as a metric of anything important would be like looking at women with borderline personality disorder as important data about mate markets - both tiny sunsets of each gender that dont tell us much about anything.
Are they looser or tighter? You say looser and then say men do weigh physical standards more heavily than women! you have literally just contradicted yourself.
How can a woman be MORE ATTRACTIVE than a man? womens and mens looks are entirely different. Beautiful women marry ugly men all the time, and believe it or not... some handsome men marry homely women. Obviously it is relative, you just brought it up.
hahahaha... men do not call women LOSERS? hello Brian, welcome to the INTERNET. They do it ALL THE TIME.
Men call women blue haired land whales ALL THE TIME.
Men call women SPINSTERS if they never marry while a man who does not marry is a proud MGTOW.
There is no term WGTOW for a woman choosing not to marry.
Women over THIRTY are mocked daily on social media as EMPTY EGG CRATES even though women can have offspring up to their early 40s.
Male infertility and decline is denied daily.
The constant screeching about YOU WILL DIE ALONE WITH CATS lobbed at women and not men.
Tinder means nothing. It is a biased dating site, that is 75% male. Of course women get more swipes; they are only 1 out of 4 on the site. Also, I am not so sure Tinder is reliable about reporting stuff.
Women are accepting and kind hearted; men (at least the RedPills) are cruel and condescending, even threatening REGULARLY to leave the US to find a passive grateful Asian bride in a poor third world nation. This is supposed to instill terror in women that will end up alone! without an incel!
Many still believe, even faced with data, that men are all slim or normal weight and only women are fat. Men are just as fat statistically and have high obesity rates....but are not rejected solely for this characteristic.
RedPillers have an effect, even on men like you who probably do not think you are a member of that subset. There is no comparable group for women that constantly degrades and demonizes men and calls them names.
Lastly: men absolutely have standards for women that do not apply to THEMSELVES... for example, demanding much younger partners, or demanding a woman have a low body count (or be a virgin) while reserving the right for themselves (men) to sleep around as much as they can.
"There is no comparable group for women that constantly degrades and demonizes men and calls them names." Feminists? (I'm joking). But seriously, the reason for that is far more men are deemed unattractive by women than women are by men so lots of bitter men act out because of that.
So the way they usually research this is they get a baseline attractiveness by having raters rate photographs. So they will have women rank and rate men's photos and men rank and rate women's. Then they ask if they'd consider certain photos for long or short term mating. So then yiu have a rating for everyone and you can then see if men and women will consider people with lower rankings than them.
Yes, I know. I'm the one who brought it up and I am explaining how it works with a thought experiment on another relative metric women have for mate standards. Both income and height preferences in women involve "relative to me" evaluations and I'm saying that assortative economic mating with women rising in status relative to men affects marriage rates in the same way it would if women mate selected strongly on height while themselves as a group growing a few inches.
Sorry, that doesn't even make sense. If women were taller... height would matter less? or more? what if men & women were THE SAME HEIGHT?
According to the Redpillers... women have ABSOLUTE height requirements of 6ft or over, even when the women themselves are tiny... 5ft 2inches. They should be happy with a man who is 5ft 6, but still want a very tall man. (of course in real life away from RedPillers... short women DO marry short men. All the time.)
A lot of stuff affects marriage rates. but ASSORTIVE MATING really doesn't. The nurse who doesn't get a doctor to marry, just marries a cop. The legal secretary who does not marry her boss, just marries a contractor or plumber. They all still get married.
The people who DO NOT get married are at the low end of the economic ladder... plagued with things like prison time, slackerdom, refusal to finish school or go to college... the men devolve into dependence on parents and live in moms basement playing call of duty. These men are not marriageable, and it doesn't matter if they are 6ft 6 inches tall and built like Thor.
Women sleep with them, and have their babies (so their genes are carried on... geez) but do not marry and thusly tighten the chains of poverty around themselves and their children. It is sad. I am not sure how to break this cycle... because the causation was really globalization stealing the jobs of working class men and also massive illegal immigration.
"How do you and your wife self interest tradeoffs differ around marriage? what did you give up? are you saying you married (for love, I assume!) a woman of a lower social class and income... but you COULD have someone more educated and high income? how does your wife feel about that?" I am not naive enough to think my psychology evolved in such a way to make decisions denovo. Love is an adaptation to make us do things that are good for us. Attractiveness standards are the same. Love is like the taste of sugar - it serves a function and knowing that doesn't talk you out of it. I am perfectly typical of a PMC man - I married a PMC woman and marriage vastly improved both of our financial wellbeing. If love is so pure, why do we see such consistent predictable patterns of who falls in love with whom? I shouldn't be able to predict better than blind guessing if something besides "love as causation rather than post hoc rationalization" was the rule. Is it just a coincidence, for example, that female doctors are many times more likely to fall in love with male doctors than male doctors are to fall in love with female doctors? Or is something else going on?
What does your WIFE say about that? just that you evolved biologically to choose someone based on certain traits, income etc.... not LOVE?
I have no idea what PMC means... and I hope you actually love your wife and didn't just marry her because of social pressures or desire for kids. That wont end well.
Love is not exactly pure, but it IS MYSTERIOUS... it is very hard to know why any two people find one another. Some couples are bewildering and we cannot figure out why they love each other (but they do). Many many couples break the mold... interracial... mixed religions...taller, shorter... high income, low income... to say everybody marries the exact proper person by some kind of destiny looks reality in the face and denies the facts!
WHERE do you get the idea that female doctors fall in love with male doctors, but are not reciprocated???? ASSORTIVE MATING! most doctors today marry other doctors!!! (*I am limiting discussion to heterosexual couples.) Doctors do NOT marry nurses or underlings!
There is no evidence that male doctors do not marry female doctors... JUST THE OPPOSITE. The days of old where a businessman married his secretary... gone, gone gone! Lawyers marry other lawyers... engineers marry other engineers... computer analyists marry other computer analysts... and so on....
How old are you? because this has not been true for over 40 years... ASSORTIVE MATING.
PMC = professional managerial class. College degree people who work at computers and make decent wages. Yeah, that is kind of what I said - assortative mating is becoming more common, but the driver is not as much men refusing to marry down but women having higher status and marrying laterally plus cultural changes that keep lower class women away from upper class men (see for example the book Paying for the Party about a sorority at Indian University where the sociologist researchers thought they were going to write a feminist book about patriarchy but ended up writing a book about class antagonism in female mate competition). You can see many studies about doctors alone - some showing female doctors as much as 5 times more likely than male doctors to marry other doctors. So imagine in the old days doctors married nurses, mostly because there were no female doctors and men don't care all that much about a woman's status either way, although they will take it if nothing else is sacrificed. Men are still fine to marry nurses (again, see the research on this), but their social circles are no populated almost exclusively within class and professional women actively try to keep it that way and if you can get everything you used to get but also mate assortatively, why not? The point is that women women's status rises relative to men, fewer men are marriageable by default because women rate status as a strong trait of marriageability. This isn't' controversial.
PMC is a new acronym to me! you dont seem to understand assortive mating: it means like marrying like... doctors now marry OTHER DOCTORS, not nurses.
People have always married laterally; marrying above or below your station (more than few notches) is not that common.
You can TRY to keep lower class women from upper class men, but sororities are not the norm anymore (this is not 1950!) and people marry in their late 20s (especially the more affluent and your PMCs)... so who you date at college is far less relevant.
Female doctors are 5 times as likely to marry doctors than male doctors? honey, that makes ZERO sense. Who do male doctors marry? OTHER DOCTORS. They marry EACH OTHER.
In the old days, whenever you define that... sure, doctors did marry female doctors (much) because they were rare. But they did not typically marry nurses either. Nurses are working class. Doctors married socialites, daughters of the upper crust. They may or may not have worked, but if they did it was something socialites worked at... art galleries, museums, that sort of thing.
MEN CARE ABOUT WOMENS STATUS... as much or more than women care about mens status. It reflects on the man. It signals to others his worth and social ranking. He is judged by if his wife is attractive or comes from the right (social) family. To think men are immune to this, or at any large scale always marry DOWN... is flatout provably wrong.
Of course men marry nurses. I have seen all the research. Nurses are a CATCH... for a blue collar man. She brings a relatively high income ($75K and up), union benefits plus her knowledge of medical care. Often nurses are married to cops, farmers, skilled trades, truckers. There social circles vary by location, but nurses do not hang out socially with doctors... doctors earn 5 to 6x more and live in fancier neighborhoods.
Nursing is interesting because it IS a medical profession. It DOES require college (at some levels even masters degrees) but it is not considered anything close to a doctor. This is why so many bright young women go into DOCTOR training, not nurse training. Interestingly... few men go into nursing despite the good pay and benefits (and they are in demand!)... why? I think honestly it is the name. It is a very girly name.
I think you are confused on assortive mating. It means like marrying like, not dating an assortment of various people at different levels. It means doctors marrying other doctors.
It may not be controversial but I believe you are wrong. Womens status rises, but it doesn't diminish men (unless they have incredibly weak self esteem)... it should enhance it. If not, then you are arguing for women to drop out of 8th grade and become housewives at 18, like in the 50s.
Maybe David Buss, psychology professor at University of Texas can explain this better than I can.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26747
Reductive.... super paranoid... from a MAN who is likely reflecting his own experiences... sounds like he desired females more attractive than what he could actually acquire!
Dont be fooled by titles like PSYCHOLOGY PROFESSOR... this guy is writing his own personal opinions, not the results of any long term studies, double blind or peer reviewed.
Jesus there really is tons of research on this stuff. I can point you to tons of female researchers who have researched the same stuff if that helps. I feel like the motivated reasoning is more evident in denying this stuff. Buss has a few well sourced books on this. Again, in any individual instance things are complicated, but when you look at large datasets and see strong patterns that is what is relevant when also trying to make statements about societal phenomenon.
Jesus, sir, I have read all the research. You are wrong. You are using biased sources and pop psychologists who do not even conduct real research with double blind studies or peer reviewed articles!
Anybody has an opinion... you can get 10 or 12 opinions each morning on your bus on the way to work! doesn't mean they have real validity.
WHAT LARGE DATA SET? most people get married. Most people are average looking. Most men AND women get married... to each other.
There is no vast demographic of never married women who are so undesirable (due to their high paying JOBS) that no man will ever marry them. That is a fantasy of the RedPill movement.
MARRIAGE is actually correlated strongly with educations and high incomes. High income successful women almost ALL get married... it is the poor cocktail waitress in the trailer park who doesn't get married. This is regardless of their looks.
Here is a question for you: how did it happen that CHELSEA CLINTON and CAROLINE KENNEDY both married billionaires? They are homely beyond belief. They are not rich in their own right, but probably inherited money from parents (but Kennedy not until middle age). They dont have real jobs. They are high status due to their family names. Why would a billionaire marry a butt ugly woman from a high status family instead of a gorgeous cocktail waitress? Remember, he does not need her money.
Oh and another one... fashion model Karli Koss is 6ft 3. Very beautiful but crazy tall... in heels, she is 6ft 7inches tall! yet she married a billionaire. Please explain.... he is much shorter than her.
"Love is not exactly pure, but it IS MYSTERIOUS... it is very hard to know why any two people find one another" But when you look at thousands of couples and start to see predictable patterns with sex differences and those sex differences make sense in a context of different evolutionary strategies for reproduction, you know something is going on. Love is a suite of biochemical cognitive responses that evolved as the hardwire is heritable. Things that help people survive to reproduce are passed on and people that don't have those traits don't reproduce so some things are reinforced and others aren't.
Sorry, the more I live and learn and see couples... at my age, you see the ones that really worked out... that lasted 30 to 40 years and beyond. And yes, it is mystery!
What are the predictable patterns? what sex differences? what strategies for reproduction? we are already talking about married adults. If they want kids, they will almost certainly have kids (by adoption if no other way).
Does your wife know you think this way? lol! that love is just biochemical responses? LUST is biochemical responses, but lust doesn't last very long and it is a very flimsy base to build a marriage on. You need basic desire of course, but lust burns out. What is left behind is the underlying structure of marriage... trust, honesty, kindness, fidelity, honor, decency.
As I say in some post here... if ugly fat people never reproduced... they would have died out generations ago. Yet any visits to a Walmart proves that ugly fat people are in abundance... pushing baby strollers.
If marriage is just about love (rather than love being an evolved motivator that nudges us toward evolutionarily valent ends) then why do we see patters such as assortative mating, female hypergamy, etc. Do you think that men with lots of options just happen to fall in love with women who are in the top 5% of attractiveness by chance and that if they found the same personality in a 400lb homeless woman they would have married them? Or women married to doctors if they have just found the same personality in a homeless man they would have married them? Do you think liking sugar is an adaptation to guide our behavior? Or liking sex? Does admitting that make you immediately not like those things?
Of course it is more than about romantic love, it is about building A. family and B. kinship relations (through children that carry both of your DNA) and C. things like home ownership, savings for retirement etc.
Assortive mating makes perfect sense in this context, because it is like marrying like... people with the same educations and values, more likely to fall in love than people from vary different backgrounds (though of course, that happens too!).
Female hypergamy is an obsession of the RedPill Manosphere... it is no more true than for MEN. Hypergamy just means aspiring to marry UP... it can be money, social status, LOOKS, etc. Men also desire this.
What are men with lots of options? Rich men? very good looking men? men from High Society families? you are making a lot of assumptions, including that WOMEN do not have lots of options.
I do think people experience attraction first with their eyes, and only later with personality... so yes, beautiful women attract attention just as very handsome men do! Men seem to think women have no lust, no physical desire for a hot sexy guy. They are wrong.
Sure, you wont be drawn to that 400 lb homeless woman, but neither will a 400 lb homeless MAN attract a woman. But AFTER the initial attraction... yes, personality and character qualities start mattering more and more. After all marriage is intended FOR A LIFETIME and we know people do not stay young and beautiful forever!
I think women DOCTORS marry other DOCTORS because they have a lot in common... attractive looks perhaps, but remember MOST PEOPLE ARE AVERAGE. They are neither supermodels NOR are they 400 lb homeless people.
What does liking sugar mean here? all humans have a natural propensity for sweetness, it is part of our taste sensation. What does that mean about MATING? most humans like sex. A few outliers are asexual but in general.... not liking sex is pretty darn rare.
When I say a shortage of men, I mean an "operative" sex ratio, not the numerical sex ratio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_sex_ratio
The bottom 30% of men are just invisible to most women - they aren't "marriageable" - they come with costs without benefits. The ratio that matters is men that can satisfy a large mate requirement for women (if you look across large numbers, not any one woman) - that to be acceptable for marriage a husband has to improve, not hurt, my financial status. Women just don't like marriage if it functions to transfer wealth from women to men. To put it bluntly - what would they be paying for that they can't get for free? Marrying laterally improves your financial status, marrying down a little improves your financial status, especially if you are higher income. Marrying down doesn't. Think about another well know female preference (again this is really well documented) - women want to date men taller than them. Imagine women all got 2 inches taller all at once and men got 2 inches shorter. Many more men would be unmarriageable. Even the word "marriageable" is a word women use for men, not men for women. If you need the references, I can show you many lines of evidence for women being pickier on key metrics in long term mating than men are. One of which is that far more men than women die without having reproduced. Now of course, mate preferences are a menu and people will sacrifice some things to get other things. But men aren't compensating for the things they have lost if you look at aggregate data. And most of that is just down to real durable biological gender differences. Again, no moral judgement in any of this. You can't blame people for wanting what they want/liking what they like, particularly when it is likely a part of our hardware.
It doesn't require all women to have these preferences - it just needs to be more than chance (that is, better than guessing) would predict to have sizeable societal effects. If 60% of men are willing to marry 1 standard deviation down in income and only 40% of women are, that will have huge societal effects even though there are plenty of people not acting to type.
You think 30% of men are unmarriageable? what is this based on? just poverty? I dont think the poverty rate is anything close to that... more like 14%! and poverty is not the sole criteria.
How about a man who earns $14 an hour as an Adjunct Professor, but has a PhD and looks like Brad Pitt? still unmarriageable?
In 33% of marriage today... women are the primary breadwinners. Not households... MARRIAGES. In another third, both partners earn about the same. How does that dovetail with your theory?
A surprising number of women today pay alimony to... ex husbands. Because the woman earns MORE than he does. It is not equal or a majority but growing rapidly.
What is it women GET FOR FREE that they do not have to marry to get? do you mean sex? or children? so women only do those things to get mens money?
If marrying laterally (equal incomes) improves your financial status... why does marrying DOWN also improve it? do you mean the opposite? it does NOT improve it? Marrying down might matter or might not... does it matter who Jeff Bezos marries in terms of income?
And I have discussed the height thing before. Women are not the ones obsessed with height... IT IS MEN. Women who express a preference for a taller man are asking for this to protect MALE EGO.
I have dated shorter men; I am about 5ft 5inches. They all had serious issues with my height, and demanded I NEVER wear high heels. They all lied about being 5ft 6, but were probably closer to 5ft 4 or 5ft 5. One guy wore a smaller shoe size than me! I didn't care... he was OUTRAGED and angry and ridiculed me for HAVING BIG FEET.
I came to realize short men had the issues... not me. Not most women. (Obviously exceptions on both sides exist.) So women who ask for a taller man... are doing so because they know short men are obsessed with this and they dont want the drama.
I actually know several couples, including my stepdaughter, where the woman is somewhat taller than the man... very happily married, MATURE and sensible couples!
Men use marriageable as a term all the time. Not sure where you get this. I suppose you could say that the vast majority of women are marriageable... in the sense of wanting to marry and being mature enough to marry (by age 25 or so)... but some men are Peter Pans, wanting to be bachelors much longer and generally leading hedonistic lifestyles (if they can afford it!) and you see this clearly in the RedPill community and MGTOW movement.
Who is pickier? I guess we would need a side by side study! remember we are talking marriage here... not just sex. People in general are far pickier about who they marry and HAVE CHILDREN WITH than they are about casual sex partners.
It is true that far more women have children than men... making the incel meme about EMPTY EGG CARTONS hilariously untrue!!! women have plenty of kids and all them fathered by MEN. It is men who (sometimes) fail to breed, because they are immature... isolated loners... in the RedPill incel community... misogynistic... on the Aspergers Spectrum (a HUGE problem). Men in the last generation (millennials) are also strangely avoiding college and preparing themselves for a successful future... this needs more study!!!
As for women being pickier... Ill believe it when I see it! on the internet, ALL I ENCOUNTER, week after week... are incels and MGTOWs and RedPillers who insist that women are slutty tramps who sleep with Chad and only want a tall guy with money (but will end alone as spinsters with cats)... while demanding for themselves a short, slender, pretty virgin of 22... even while they live in their moms basement, playing Call of Duty all day.
"We know that today, women are just as likely as men to be the primary breadwinners and in 1/3rd of all marriages... couples earn roughly the same amount. How is this hypergamy? I think you are just in love with this as a BIG WORD to dump on people, without even knowing what it means." I referenced research showing this is just not correct. And there are tons of lines of evidence about female hypergamy and it isn't something women hide from pollsters. How about Kenrick et all - http://www.mysmu.edu/faculty/normanli/LiBaileyKenrickLinsenmeier2002.pdf And this isn't remotely the only research on this. Nor is it an insult. Women have extremely good reason to rate male attractiveness on status. Morally judging such a thing would be as silly as judging any other attractiveness standard. One being the one you cited - that women have different tradeoffs than men do - for a minute there I thought you were prooftexting my point.
I am not RedPill Incel MRA or MGTOW either. Those people don't understand this stuff any better than their polar opposites in the other camp do. I am bored with this discussion because it seems it is mostly motivated by an assumption about what values I hold and are attempting to prooftext than empirical interest in what is going on. I have never voted for a Republican in my life and can't imagine I ever would, volunteered for Obama campaign, voted for Bernie is 2020 and even voted for Biden despite being much to his left on economic issues, althoug no longer in sync with the professional class DNC on identity issues but also hating as always the GOP on these issues..