Are Women Responsible for the Consequences of Hypergamy?

If so, do they have a duty to do anything about it?

After encountering some feminist stuff recently, I had a thought about one strange quality of discourse around female hypergamy and related gender war stuff. Everyone sane now takes for granted that women are hypergamous. If you go into spaces that are far enough left you may run into people who attempt to deny this reality, but that’s why I attach the qualifier of “sane” to “everyone.” If you’re reading this post, you’re probably sane enough to recognize the reality of hypergamy, even if you don’t share my general worldview.

We recognize that this thing clearly exists, but we speak about it as if it is an immutable force of nature, an inevitable outcome that cannot be deterred any more than one could stop a hurricane or a volcanic eruption from taking its natural course. Some people will speak about hypergamy as if it is a problem, but not as if it is a problem that can actually be solved in the usual sense. The unspoken assumption always seems to be that it cannot be reduced or removed; it simply is and will be, and must be built around, since it is effectively impossible to undo.

There are some pretty good evo-psych reasons for this. When feminists complain that women were seen as property in the past, they aren’t entirely wrong, and they’re more right the farther back in time that we go. Obviously, our evolutionary environment was really far back in time. It seems plausible that the closer we were to the state of nature, the more that women did in fact experience life as objects that were acted upon rather than as autonomous actors with independence and agency, at least by comparison to men.

We can see a glimpse of this in the fairly recent past by recalling the condition of “female hysteria,” a mystery ailment still taken quite seriously as late as about 100 years ago in which women’s behavioral problems were viewed as more akin to those of an animal, fundamentally lacking in self-awareness and self-control. If “female hysteria” is a malevolent manifestation of the assumption that women lack agency, perhaps the implicit acceptance of hypergamy is a benign manifestation of it. Yes, women only want to date Chad. No, they aren’t interested in regular guys. So what? That’s just their nature; you can’t expect them to act differently any more than you could place a steak in front of a lion and expect him not to eat it.

I believe that this is an attitude most people have internalized in Current Year, especially women themselves, and I also believe that it is fundamentally wrong. There are a few thought experiments we can explore to prove this.

The first is to merely put the shoe on the other foot. A woman who makes no attempt to resist hypergamy is going where evolutionary instincts take her, then perhaps justifying it to herself after the fact if need be. Men can do this too and we know what it looks like. A man who lets his basic sexual urges guide his behavior might engage in one or more of the following:

1.      Forcible rape, especially of women belonging to a tribe conquered in war.

2.      The keeping of harems or other formal polygamous arrangements, still observed today in some places such as the FLDS.

3.      Sexual intercourse with and marriage to women who are very young, well below what today would be considered the age of majority.

4.      Engaging with a woman only as long as needed to get into her pants, then promptly abandoning her.

5.      Obsessive viewing of increasingly depraved pornography.

And probably much, much more; I just went for the low-hanging fruit. The key difference here is that in these examples, no one is under any delusion that the man has no capacity to act otherwise (unless perhaps if they are a brown migrant experiencing a “sexual emergency,” I suppose). We correctly recognize that these behaviors are at least disordered and in some cases downright criminal, and stigmatize them as such.

If we readily recognize the need to restrain harmful manifestations of male sexuality, and women are to be equal to men, then why would women not also face similar constraints? Ironically, a traditional worldview is quite fair to women in this way, in the sense that it actually expects both men and women to behave themselves. A traditional worldview still scorns all of the harmful male behaviors listed above, but it also asks women to constrain their sexuality in important ways.

Again, it’s understandable why we might find it harder to view women as having agency than men, but at least in theory, our current society operates under the premise that women do have agency. That’s why we made such a fuss about giving them rights and shit. Agency is a double-edged sword, though. Yes, it means your life is in your own hands, but it also means that you are now responsible for the consequences of your own actions. This means that you have a moral obligation to resist baser instincts when they conflict with what is actually right. If you literally cannot resist your own emotional urges, then one has to question whether you really have agency after all, because that is the behavior of a child or a retard.

We all understand this very intuitively in most other contexts. People don’t generally get away with harmful or destructive behaviors by saying “well, it’s just what I want, I can’t help it,” and when they do, it’s almost invariably because they are benefiting from some kind of unwarranted protected-class status (think of black people being allowed to riot and burn things down because of George Floyd). Now the likely objection at this point is that you can’t force people to have certain sexual preferences, and that it’s perfectly valid for anyone to have any kind of sexual preferences for any reason, so therefore total sexual selectivity is always justified, no matter how extreme.

This is one of those things that can be true at the individual level, around the edges, but I think fails if you take it all the way to mass adoption. Here is our second thought experiment: Consider a world in which an extreme social stigma developed around people with blue eyes. For whatever superstitious reason, blue eyes are considered super duper undesirable. This stigma is so harsh that it’s nearly impossible for people with blue eyes to date, marry, or reproduce.

If we encountered this hypothetical society, what would we think of it? Would we really shrug our shoulders at it and say “well that’s their culture?” No, we wouldn’t. We’d rightly recognize that these people are crazy. We might stop short of intervening with violence to change the situation, but if one of the blue-eyed people from this society came to us complaining about their plight, we’d absolutely be sympathetic to their cause. In any sort of dialogue or cross-pollination between this society and ours, we would almost certainly speak up where we could in favor of reducing this insane stigma against mating with blue-eyed people.

While this example is hypothetical, there are actual real-world parallels that are sort of close to this, most notably stigmas around interracial marriage. Within living memory, interracial marriage was considered so beyond the pale in the United States that it was actually illegal in some places! Yet today, a single lifetime later, most of us have correctly figured out that it’s not really such a big deal after all, and there are more important factors to consider when choosing a mate.

This demonstrates that yes, actually attitudes around mate selection can be and are policed, especially at the mass level, and that sometimes this is done for very good reasons. If the cultural sentiment is strong enough, this can easily extend down to the individual level as well. For instance, if you run into a white man who insists that he will only consider marrying racially pure white women, because he needs to keep his bloodline pure and free from the taint of other races, many of you (I guess not all lol) will judge him harshly for this. We might fairly say that it would be a bridge too far to punish him with violence for this attitude, but we would most certainly be comfortable applying social sanctions.

There is thus no reason that it cannot be the same with any other aspect of courtship. Marriage is an inherently social project, after all. It is an essential building block which provides the foundation for social stability, so we all have a very big stake in protecting it from disordered attitudes and behaviors. We can therefore say that, at a certain point, a collective refusal of women to resist hypergamy becomes something like the example of shunning blue-eyed people; if taken far enough, the standards become so divorced from reality that they are actively harmful to the social fabric, and absolutely do need to be brought back down to Earth.

I expect that the cope at this point in the conversation would be something about how I’m just a misogynist, that I hate women, that I just want to force women to have sex with incels, or some other garbage like that. This brings me to the final thought experiment. If women simply refuse to resist hypergamy, for any reasons or under any circumstances, how should we expect men to respond? The feminist answer, of course, would involve a lot of moral-splaining about how men just need to accept that and respect women’s choices and whatever.

This response fails basic scrutiny under game theory. Moral-splaining alone doesn’t cut it when there are real reproductive stakes at play, and that goes for double if you’re operating under an atheist materialist framework, which feminists usually are. If men perceive that they’re getting a raw deal, why would they accept being told to just shut up and deal with it? That’s a worst-case scenario that won’t be tolerated for very long if there are any other options out there at all. It might hold in the short term, especially if the men have pre-conceived notions of morality that can be appealed to. Better hope they aren’t atheist materialists!

It won’t be viable as a stable long-term strategy though. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to predict that future generations of men will come to one of two conclusions: Either women are intentionally screwing them over, or women are just incapable of acting otherwise (i.e. women do genuinely lack agency). In either case, the remedy quickly becomes obvious. If women can’t adjust their behavior, men will begin seeking ways to adjust it for them.

We can already see some hints of this as the gender gap in politics grows wider than ever among young people and influencers like Andrew Tate gain popularity with young men. Andrew Tate is the male-coded version of a feminist with unrealistic standards who refuses to give the average man a chance. He’s what you get when a man sees women behaving selfishly in an unapologetic fashion and decides to do the same thing according to his own standards instead.

Needless to say, I don’t think this is good for anyone involved, but women least of all. I prefer to believe that women have agency because that means there is a real chance to avoid going down this path. Yet I recognize that if women truly insist that they will make no compromises, at some point it becomes perfectly logical for men to respond to that “fuck you, got mine” attitude in kind. The ball is in women’s hands on this, at least for now. I would suggest making a play while that’s still the case. With hypergamy being a uniquely female trait, the onus is on women to either prove that they can control it, or else to have it controlled for them.

This doesn’t mean I am asking women to go out with actual NEET incels living in their parents’ basements. Those guys suck. I am hoping for women to recognize the general need for compromise in this space. Marriage, family, and children require compromise, because ultimately the project is (or should be) for the benefit of a third party, the offspring. Even if you have no children, marriage still means working together to build something that is greater than either of you as individuals. In order to accomplish this, both man and wife will probably have to give up some things along the way. Men usually don’t get as much sex as they really would prefer, for instance. Women might have to go ahead and commit to a partner instead of holding out indefinitely for a better deal. Both parties need to resist the temptation to abuse no-fault divorce.

A predictable cope here will be to claim that ackchyually marriage and kids are badmeanevilwrongstupid so who needs men after all. Strong woman don’t need no man! I already wrote about why this is a bad idea in a previous piece. This is basically the route that was taken with feminism, with disastrous consequences in my opinion. A lot of people still cling to feminist frames if you say the word “hypergamy” even if they’re capable of criticizing feminism in other contexts. This is another emotional hang-up that people need to be disabused of, so I will probably write a follow-up article on it.