The Limits On Hypergamy

Via Randall Parker, here is a study of birds showing that less attractive female birds choose equally unattractive mates.

Less-pretty female house sparrows tend to lower their aim when selecting a mate. Addressing the lack of studies on condition-dependency of female mate choice, researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology found that female sparrows of a low quality prefer males of an equally low quality.

Researchers from the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Ethology in Vienna studied sexual selection preferences in the common house sparrow. Though it has always been assumed that females will want to choose the best possible mate, in terms of reproductive and genetic fitness, Matteo Griggio and Herbert Hoi have found that, in fact, unattractive females dare not dream of mating with males who are considered out of their league. […]

“Actually, we found that overall, female sparrows don’t have a preference for badge size in males”, Griggio explains, “but we did find that less attractive females – those with a low weight and poor condition – have a clear preference for less attractive males with smaller or average-sized badges”. Rather than not find a partner, unattractive females will simply settle for an unattractive male.

Griggio continues: “There is some good news for the plainer females though – while they may be forced to settle for less dominant males with small chest badges, these males have been shown to invest more time in parental care than their good-looking counterparts.”

We here at the Chateau write a lot about female hypergamy, as it is a powerful motivating force in shaping the dating market and, ultimately, influencing your own success or failure with the opposite sex. Female hypergamy gets short shrift in studies and in popular culture because it is one of the uglier truths about women’s natures. Since gender is one of the four pillars of protected PC classes holding up the high church of leftist blank slate theology — right behind race but trumping homosexuality and any-religion-that-isn’t-Christianity — it makes sense that our commissars of media agitprop would work hard to avoid having to touch the subject of female hypergamy.

But we touch it here! And grope and fondle it lasciviously. That’s why it’s worth mentioning that even hypergamy must occasionally bow to the restrictions imposed on free market choice by female mate value. Although the above study is of birds, some parallels can be drawn to human behavior; parallels which are corroborated by real life experience. Women may loathe the idea of settling, but many of them do, as you can readily see by walking out your door and noticing all the ugly ass couples canoodling like they really enjoy the prospect of fornicating with each other.

Like the female house sparrow, less attractive women may deliberately avoid dating higher quality men in favor of beta males for a number of reasons:

1. Less attractive women sacrifice too much to keep an alpha male around. There are plenty of couples where a much better looking man invested absolutely nothing into a skewed relationship and got all the sex he wanted in return. This might be fun for the plain jane for a while, but I’m sure the thrill wears off after a few months, (or years, if she’s truly deluded about her own value).
2. Less attractive women figure they don’t have a shot, and so don’t bother flirting with alpha males. Call it the Sour Grapes Syndrome; a homely chick insists she prefers niceguys or nerds to the exclusion of those “meathead jocks” or “douchebags”, but in reality she is simply rationalizing her limited options. Sour Grapes Syndrome explains why ugly chicks don’t commit suicide en masse.
3. Less attractive women have to make a trade off that more attractive women don’t. A hot babe can land *and* keep an alpha male around to help her raise her young, but a homely chick has to decide between a one night stand with a horny alpha who will be embarrassed by his slumming the next morning and a relationship with a beta who will lavish more caring attentiveness on her and any brood she may have with him.
4. Less attractive women like to feel they are better looking than what their partner normally gets. This is a power law of mating dynamics. We all want to leverage our power in the dating market to the hilt, and a relationship where there is a big imbalance in power sharing is inherently unstable. Homely chicks know, either through experience or instinct, that dating alpha males results in a huge power differential that will almost always result in a breakup with her in tears. So she avoids dating alphas when it’s time to get serious about landing a committed man. Homelier women are smart to do this; studies have shown that the strongest relationships are ones where the woman is better looking than her partner. When a women feels pretty in the context of the man she is with, she will be happier… as long as the man keeps up his end of the bargain by having higher social status and/or game.

Note that none of the above reasons should imply that female hypergamy is rendered null and void for unattractive women. Human females are a little more complicated than house sparrows. In real life what we see are homely girls giving hypergamy the ol’ college try until their options, and their ability to stoically endure continual pump and dumps, are exhausted. This often plays out in practice with the widely observed phenomenon of urbanized 4s, 5s, and 6s suffering a series of humiliating short term flings with men well above their level during their 20s, followed by a grudging acceptance of the utility of settling for the boring beta male in their later 20s and 30s.

Seduction artists who like to dumpster dive (and really, you should probably turn in your PUA card if you prefer taking the easy road to low quality pussy) should continue treating the playing field as if female hypergamy was in full effect all the time, because most homely chicks — even the married ones — can’t resist getting used like a disembodied hole by a superior man.