Is Male Hypergamy Real? (No)

Commenter days of game offered the “normie” objection to female hypergamy that I’ve come across from other readers in previous posts on the topic: specifically, both sexes want the best deal they can get in the mate market, so “hypergamy” isn’t limited to one sex.

I don’t understand the manosphere’s interest in “hypergamy.” It’s the most obvious thing… girls are looking for the best opportunity. That’s not girls… that’s everyone.

And then: Eggs are expensive, sperm are cheap. Got it.

So… girls have more bargaining power, and thus… a lot of guys lose (due to low SMV)… and girls hop around (because they can)… as that egg is in demand (until it isn’t).

Why does this need a billion hours of analysis?

This particular research continues the pattern of underwhelm:

A seller with a high-demand product (her pussy), that can find more and more markets (online)… can charge a higher price, and/or burn more potential buyers (for fun or profit).

Econ 101.

When I see guys that get frothy about MUUHHH HYPERGUUHHHMEH… I increasingly read all that as signals of beta reality/paranoia. And a waste of our time as men to go over this again and again.

The cool guy get the girl. Dur.

For a simple concept, a lot of men (and women) dismiss female hypergamy out of hand as having no basis in reality. And that reality is this: There is no equivalent male hypergamy to female hypergamy. “Everyone is looking for the best possible deal” is a trivially true statement which obfuscates the fact that men and women look for mate market deals with differing intensities of commitment and with differing emphases on what constitutes a good deal. These differences are so profound in both a quantitative and qualitative sense that they may as well be representing totally different mate selection strategies (which they are).

I’ll quote myself here on the subject of “male hypergamy”, before illustrating the Fake Comparison of male and female sexual market bargaining using a car dealership analogy,

Some readers would demur that hypergamy isn’t sex-specific, pointing out that men also strive to find the best possible lover they can get.

My rebuttal is two-part: One, men don’t date up based on social, economic, or occupational status. Men, if and when they are able to date up, do so based almost entirely on women’s looks. We’ve all seen or experienced how men trade up when they’ve come into a financial or social status windfall — younger, hotter, tighter women, as the GBFM would put it. So male hypergamy — what is more precisely termed “physiogamy” — is different in kind from female hypergamy.

Second, male physiogamy is also different in degree from female hypergamy. Women are biologically compelled to aim for a man higher in SMV from themselves, and this compulsion is strong enough that many women will accept long bouts of solitude before settling for a man at their own SMV level (usually at the moment when The Wall first looms on the horizon). When men aim higher, they a. don’t aim quite as high as women aim and b. won’t opt out of the sexual or marital market (like women will often do), if they don’t get everything they want in a lover.

Another point of difference between male and female “dating up” limbic algorithms which I alluded to in that quote but didn’t clarify is this: Male SMV is largely contextual and relational. Social, occupational, financial, and prestige status have to be measured against a backdrop of other men all competing along the same metrics that women use to assess male mate worth. Women only have to look young and pretty, which can be accomplished with or without other women to use for comparison purposes.

This has an impact on how each sex dates up. Men will upgrade to a hotter younger babe after they have spent considerable time improving their SMV, either through amassing resources or social/psychosexual capital (Game). Men’s ability to date up is thus limited by the time and energy commitments required to do so. Men respond to this sex-differentiated mate market reality by de-emphasizing dating “up” and settling for dating “as good as possible for right now”.

In contrast, women have to commit relatively little time and energy to improving their SMV, largely because their mate value is set at conception and there isn’t much they can do to improve upon what they were given by their parents. There’s no point working hard to improve that which has only a tiny margin for improvement (unless we’re talking about a fatty who could slim down and gain 5 SMV points). What this means in practice is that women can spend a lot more time and energy “dating up” while their looks are holding up. Their window for primo action is smaller than it is for men, but within that window they have a lot more leeway to entertain suitors and hold out for the best, even if the best is a cad illusion who offers empty promises of commitment (the age-old risk that women take when they hold out for mr right aka mr beta bux and mr alpha fux in one man). Dating up comes more naturally to women because it comes more easily; as long as they aren’t old fat or ugly, women can leverage their looks almost as an afterthought to attract attention from a lot of men, both low and high SMV.

The analogy of female hypergamy is this:

A man goes to a car dealership. He’s a sensible fellow, and just needs a commuter vehicle. He sees a cherry red Corvette center stage. He salivates. He walks over, runs his hand across the finish. Maybe he asks to sit in it and dream, gripping the leather steering wheel. But he knows he can’t afford it, so he quickly focuses his thoughts and leaves fantasyland behind, to browse the boring sedans. He consoles himself with the hope that maybe, someday, he’ll have made it and can return with enough to buy that Corvette. In the meantime, he haggles like a champ with the seller to drive down the price of his sedan and maximize the amenities at his budget. No undercarriage rust protection, thank you! Finally, he signs on the dotted line, and drives off content that he got the best deal he could, and as he’s heading home he thoughtfully itemizes all the good things about his new car. The smell! The climate control! The gas mileage! He’s happy for himself.

A woman goes to a car dealership. She’s a sensible lady (for a lady), and just needs a commuter vehicle. She sees a cherry red Corvette center stage. She salivates. She walks over, runs her hand across the finish, sits in the car, applies lipstick in the rearview mirror, lays across both front seats in a languid pose, asks to take it for a test drive, motors giddily around town for an hour until the seller has to gently chide her to call it a day, returns and labors some more over the Corvette, sighs heavily as a penny drops out of her purse, shuffles over to the boring sedan and gives it a perfunctory once-over, noting with depressing self-encouragement that it gets 35 mpg on the highway. She haggles with the seller for five grueling hours before announcing she needs more time to think on it. (meanwhile, the seller wonders why she’s shit testing him.) On her way out, she stops by the Corvette again, for one last flirtatious hand graze. Over the next six months, she stops by the dealership weekly to cavort with the Corvette, until her current rust bucket dies in an intersection to a thousand honking cars and sheer embarrassment drags her shamed butt back to the dealer to grudgingly trade in her dead clunker for the boring beta sedan. She resents her new car the second she rolls off the lot in it, and abuses it daily with cigarette butts, spilled coffee, and unchanged oil, until she has to repeat the process, except next time with even less money in her pocket, which forces her to browse the sub-compacts. Oh lord, what will her friends think?! They’ll know she settled because she waited too long. Maybe she can get a bike instead and rationalize it as environmental activism. One night, in a horny and desperate mood, she sneaks into the dealership and fucks the Corvette’s stick shift. She slumps spent, in the love puddle she left in the bucket seat, and whimpers softly for a romance that will never be.

***

I hope that clears things up.