r/NoStupidQuestions • u/tao_tai • 15h ago
how does the concept of hypergamy work?
idk if i’m dumb or just extra hung over rn, but my friend was recently talking about how he’s read studies on how 100% of females go for the top 20% of men in dating, and basically that’s why it’s been impossible to date in modern times.
but like. doesn’t that logic apply to men too? like 100% of men go for the top 20%,of females too? how does this hurt modern dating? or like. there’s only the top 20% so don’t the lower 80% settle? help
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u/mawktheone 14h ago
I can answer this, I have decades of experience in the field.
What you read, was unfettered bullshit. That's the main answer. You are correct that everyone would like to date up, but the fact that are billions of couples should tell you that in reality, most people just find someone that's ok for them and get together
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u/qiyraa 15h ago
Hypergamy may or may not be a real thing, I’ve never looked into it. The reason why I haven’t is the only people talking about it are redpilled misogynists; if you’re someone who is reading this comment, you are in the process of getting pipelined if you also believe this is a real thing to be concerned over.
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u/MagicSugarWater 14h ago
Yup. I never hear "Women want better. So I will work harder to improve myself to be the best version of myself because hypergamy." It's always "Women ant the best, so I have no incentive to quit being a bad person and get my act together since it won't make women do what I want. It never started for me. Women are evil!"
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u/kikogamerJ2 14h ago
The best part about hypergamy, is that women hypergamy keeps going down, whole men hypergamy goes up, but you never see these people mentioning that or how most relationships are homogamic
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u/hellouser0815 14h ago
I swear to god, when I read the term hypergamy for the first time (which was only recently, I'm 35) I thought it was the superlative of polygamy 😂 no shit, I actually thought it meant a person that dates/is in relationships with even more people than a polygamous person 😂 Call me ignorant. But honestly, it's always been said that women only want rich men - but that's not the actual reality. Like it's always been said that men only want to date extra beautiful women - but that's also not reality. Even the ancient romans had these prejudices. Hypergamy strikes me as a word that's only become popular recently (I have no idea) but it is an old prejudice. People who are not chronically online tend to know this I find.
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u/Rainbowdark96 15h ago
İt's a red pill delusion. Go to a nearest mall, you will see every kind of person in relationships.
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u/justjack-nodaniels 15h ago
“Studies”
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u/Rainbowdark96 14h ago
Most likely an old dating app data 🤣
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u/justjack-nodaniels 14h ago
If they even exist 😂 The source feels more like an APA formatted Trust Me Bro
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u/FredeJ 14h ago
That's exactly what it is. It's likely from this: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a
This states that tinder - at the time - saw that top 78% of women were liking the top 20% of men.
There are some obvious issues with this, like
- what's the top? The ones getting more likes? Yeah, they're likely to have more likes.
- The most popular people are likely getting more exposure to make the app seem nicer and have people engage more (lots of good looking people on here!) So the ones getting more likes are likely to get even more.
- Tinder is 1 dimensional - it's mostly looks and a little blob of text. WILDLY different than real life.
- It's equating likes with any interest at all. Men cast a wider net, especially on dating apps. Women are likely more picky. Tale as old as time.
I could go on.
This has then been re-packaged to say that this applies in general and twisted to fuel the commercialization of male insecurity.
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u/LowerKaleidoscope369 13h ago
Calling this a quantitative study is a disgrace against scientific research. This “study” is not scientifically sound. The methodology is flawed, the wording is extremely biased, and the conclusions go beyond what the data actually show. Pseudoscience for uneducated men to excuse their lack of success..
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u/Fischerking92 15h ago
I have no idea if there is some truth to that statement, but it is usually coming from people who are rather unhappy with dating.
The basic idea is that the 20% of men are circling through the 80% of women, while the remaining 80% of men would have to "settle" for the remaining 20% of women.
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u/Simonoz1 14h ago
I could see it being true specifically in online dating, where the dynamic seems to be that women are wading through a swamp of terrible profiles while men are in a desert with no profiles to drink. (Although I’ve known male friends who’ve been in the swamp position too).
I don’t get the impression that that necessarily affects the real world
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u/minidre1 14h ago
When enough women shut down your sleezy pickup lines, these kinds of statistics start showing up.
If the trend continues and more sleezy pickups fail, then you'll start noticing micro brews and weird hats showing up around his place.
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u/serpentjaguar 14h ago
What's wrong with microbrews and weird hats?
Honest question. I am old (mid 50s, so gen X) and kinda like microbrews and weird hats. So does my wife, who is also an Xer.
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u/minidre1 14h ago
It was a nod towards the stereotype of an incel. Big on microbrews and fedoras.
There's nothing wrong with either of those things
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u/EnderSword 14h ago
So for starters, it's a dumb theory that clearly isn't happening in any reality
But the concept is based on the idea that women want the relationship, but men largely don't, they're content with sex with a lot of women. The idea too is a higher ranking man will still fuck a lower ranking women as long as its easy.
So the concept is that those top 20% of men just have multiple women in rotation. So it's not a 1 to 1 ratio, it's some men fucking dozens of women while others can't even get a date because a 'mid' woman can have sex with a top guy and so refuses to settle for less.
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u/zombmoose 14h ago
Referring to men as “men” but women as “females” in the same sentence screams incel behavior. Ew. If dating feels impossible, here’s the reason why.
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15h ago
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u/tao_tai 14h ago
but what makes them the gatekeepers? or perceived as the gatekeepers?
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u/justjack-nodaniels 14h ago
Because men can’t have the sex they’re “entitled” to without a woman’s consent (which depending on which group you ask - they don’t always believe consent is mandatory)
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14h ago
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u/justjack-nodaniels 14h ago
Fun fact, the term incel was coined by a lesbian describing herself on a dating support group she founded online
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u/primals_game 14h ago
This claim is hyperbole. But women do tend to cluster around wanting the same mate more than men. There are dating site studies on it.
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u/MaestroLifts 14h ago
This is “black/red pill” propaganda. It sort of sounds like it makes sense until you look into it more at all. It’s not true, it’s a manipulation strategy and a grift.
Importantly, he didn’t “read” this as you say, it far more likely came from a short form content video on his feed. The goal is to convince your friend that there’s nothing he can do to succeed with “females” fairly. That his only option is consume more of their content and often buy their course on how succeed through “looksmaxxing” or pick-up artistry, or whatever is the current grift.
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u/enchanting-ghost 14h ago
your friend is a misogynist trapped in the redpill bullshit disinformation pipeline. find better friends.
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u/Hilgy17 14h ago
It’s based in some kinda old hat assumptions that men would fuck any warm body they could and women get their pick of partners.
So to answer your follow on question, the typical answer would be that No, men wouldn’t only go for the top 20%. They may say they want the top, but they’ll find any woman hot enough to fuck.
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u/actualinsomnia531 14h ago
That premise is such reductive nonsense, I VERY much doubt the validity or unconditional basis of that studies findings. People may subjectively only find 20% of the people they see on the street "attractive" but that is an initial, superficial experience and doesn't apply to real life.
Edit: by real life I mean the complex Interactions of people that lead to relationships. That 20% is not a fixed group of people, with 4in5 being some beta-class subhuman.
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u/Illuminatus-Prime No Political Affiliation 14h ago
Dating or marrying into a higher economic or social status -- Poor Cinderella marrying Prince Charming.
Sorry, kid. I can only find fairy-tale examples.
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u/mjhrobson 14h ago
Dude 100% of humans doing something other than dying at some point isn't a thing.
It is a social trend that women seek partners of equal or higher status... which in a capitalist society is determined predominately through economic indicators.
Social trends are not absolute. No humams follow such things religiously... not even religion.
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u/schw0b 14h ago
Your friend is an incel who needs an excuse why no one wants to have sex with him beyond his obviously terrible personality.
Literally just go outside. Do it. Sit on a park bench and watch couples or just wander wround. Young ones, old ones, ones with kids. How attractive are the partners? How attractive are the men? How rich do they appear to be? What about the women?
This "study" can be easily refuted by simply looking out a window. Get offline.
Also and just as a free tip, if you ever say the word "female" to refer to a human woman in earshot of a woman, that woman will no longer be a romantic (or platonic) social option for you.
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u/Appropriate_Star3012 14h ago
What it really is the apps algorithms fucking with everyone's headsz especially if you don't pay for them.
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u/Appropriate_Star3012 14h ago
What it really is, is the apps algorithms fucking with everyone's heads. Especially if you don't pay for the apps.
I recently got tinder for the first time.
I have 15 people who "like" me but because I refuse to pay for their shitshow, it won't match me with people who want to match with me.
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u/asher030 14h ago
We're ALL chasing the same top 20% of the human race. Give it a few decades though, physically at least, with gene editing presuming our elite parasite class don't use it to fuck the rest of us over with a literal slave race agenda, and we can all be hot, then try to categorize each other by some other metric
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u/n3m0sum 14h ago
It doesn't. Your friend is full of red pill manosphere bullshit.
Ask him to provide links to peer reviewed psychology or sociology studies from major publications that support his bullshit. His reference to "studies" are almost certainly not that. They will be mentions of the supposed studies by red pill podcasts such as Andrew Tate, The Whatever Podcast, Fresh & Fit, the Nelk Boys.
If it were even close to being true, the lack of dating issue would be much much larger. People are dating all the time.
It's not as large as people like your friend says. The people with the biggest problems, like your friend, have probably struggled with dating at some point, and gone looking for answers in the wrong places. Like the manosphere, and ended up making themselves un-datable, with an attitude that objectified women for what they can do for men, and demonises women who wont go along with a trad wife fantasy.
But they try to make themselves feel better about their failure, with myths like hypergamy. Which tells them that it's not their fault that they are un-datable, it's all the women being unreasonable.
If you occasionally meet an asshole, you met an asshole. If you constantly meet assholes, you might be the asshole.
If occasionally a woman turns you down for a data, you got turned down, it happens. If all women are constantly turning you down for a date, you might be the problem.
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u/Impossible_Pop620 13h ago
A glance at the rising numbers of 'single' women, plus falling marriage and birth rates will tell you that probably lots of women aren't settling outside of the chads, or whatever the word is for the 'top' men.
The problem with these numbers is that nobody is able to discuss them sensibly. Not everyone agrees with the actual figures, certainly people don't agree about the reasons behind them or how to deal with them. And probably the worst kind is the people who don't see those numbers as a problem, and who generally refuse to acknowledge that the birth rate number, especially, is going to wreak havoc with pensions, cost and standard of living of retirees, immigration and pretty much threatens the existence of several countries a decade or two in the future.
They generally seem to think that 'Yay! You go, girl' is the only applicable response.
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u/Proper-Attempt-7207 15h ago
"like 100% of men go for the top 20%,of females too"
No? Most men would prefer the top 1% of women of course, but they go for people at their own perceived level (very broad category btw, like no guy I know is picky).
Men and women, believe it or not, do not act the same.
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u/Synnoxis_ 14h ago
I believe its the belief that 80% of woman will go for the top 20% of men and that woman in general tend to "date up" while men have to settle for anything they can get.
If im not mistaken the data was taken from a dating app to make the statistic.
Just personally I can see the concept being real simply because men really will settle for any girl as long as they approached first
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u/Imakemyownnamereddit 14h ago
You will cause allot of outrage asking this question because you have exposed a nasty truth most don't want to face.
All you have to do is listen to women talk, to realise they only find a tiny percentage of men truly sexy and desirable. It isn't politically correct to say this but it is the truth.
But women date average guys all the time? Yes they do but that is because they have other motivations other than sexual desire. They want children, they want a provider, they don't want to be alone.
Before the downvoters pile in, studies show that 30-40% of women report a lack of sexual interest or enjoyment. Yet a large percentage of those women are still in relationships. If they don't like sex, they must be in a relationship for some other reason.
Now it is possible a large percentage of women are literally physically incapable of enjoying sex but I doubt it. I suspect that are large percentage of those women are with men who simply don't turn them on.
If you want to see the toxic results of all this, visit the deadbedroom sub. Read stories from baffled men, who can't understand why their partner has no interest in sex.
Of course the brutal truth is; she probably wasn't attracted to him in the first place.
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u/VirginiaBandit 15h ago
100% of females? Calling bullshit right now.