JulianMorrison:
Seems pretty obvious that hypergamy is what poor women do in societies that only let them gain control of resources through marriage. It's a rational adjustment to a sexist, unequal society, not some sort of instinct.
This is a hypothesis worth investigating, but how much data seems to support it? The research I've read supports the existence of hypergamy in both modern societies, and in pre-agricultural societies without high levels of gender inequality.
The Dalmia study cited on Wikipedia supposedly doesn't find women "marrying up," but since I can't read the full text I'm not sure how they were operationalizing "marries up." For instance, perhaps the study found that women don't marry up in wealth. But that doesn't mean they don't marry up in education, which is what this study found:
Contrary to popular beliefs, the increased concentration of women at the top of the education distribution has not resulted in a worsening of the marriage market prospects of more educated women. The “success gap” declined substantially in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The marriage market accommodated the shift through a decline in hypergamy at the upper end of the education distribution.
On the other hand, the declining economic prospects of men at the bottom of the education distribution have rendered many below the threshold of marriagiability. The likelihood of a 40-44 year old man with 11 years of education being married fell by over 20 percentage points over the 20-year period, a greater decline than that for women of the same education level. There was no decline in hypergamy at this end of the spectrum; in fact, some measures indicate an increase in hypergamy for this group, as women have increasingly been reaching upward in the education distribution for husbands.
In short, education hypergamy exists, but it’s getting weaker at the top (presumably because there is a shortage of higher-education men to date up to), and may be getting stronger at the bottom.
For women of high socioeconomic status, hypergamy does appear to decrease. For instance, women in some college samples tend to not care about men's wealth very much. Though this could also be partly because those women are more oriented towards short-term mating.
Even in a modern, short-term mating context, it's not clear that hypergamy disappears. In a speed dating study, Asendorpf & Penke found
The key finding for popularity was that both men and women’s popularity was largely based on easily perceivable physical attributes such as facial and vocal attractiveness, height and weight. This was already the full story for women’s popularity in speed-dating, that is, men used only physical cues for their choices. In contrast, women included more criteria, namely men’s sociosexuality and shyness as well as cues for current or future resource providing potential, such as education, income, and openness to experience (but not cues of steady resource striving like conscientiousness).
Note how eduction and income mattered to women, but not to men. Those are elements of hypergamy. Avoiding shy men is also hypergamy because shyness is low-status in Western men.
For another example of modern hypergamy, observe the attraction of women to rockstars and actors. Yet do women become groupies of rockstars merely in hope of gaining their resources through marriage, as a rational adjustment to a sexist society? I doubt it.
Is modern hypergamy merely a hold-over due to outdated norms? No. In pre-agricultural societies where women don't economically depend on men, hypergamy still exists. Anthropologists used to be bamboozled by the discovery that the lioness' share of calories in some cultures is supplied by the women. So why were the men hunting, if it was so inefficient? Anthroplogists eventually came up with the hypothesis that male hunting isn't (just) about providing meat.
Hawkes and Bird argue that a large function of men’s hunting isn’t putting food on the table for their families, but rather showing off to gain social status and mating success. The researchers observe that competent male Ache hunters have greater mating success:
The families of better hunters end up with no more meat than other families. Hill and Hurtado’s demographic data show little difference in survival risk for the children of better hunters. But men rated as better hunters had much higher fertility. In a smaller data set, better Ache hunters were more often named by women as lovers and as secondary fathers of more children. (Secondary fathers are men other than a mother’s husband who were sexually involved with her at the time of her pregnancy). Ache women did not nominate hunting skill as a criterion for choosing a mate, but men emphasized its importance for success with women.
Since the hunter's skill doesn't translate into more provisioning for his family, the it's difficult to explain women's preference for hunters as a response to economic deprivation. Women don't have to date good hunters to feed their children, but they do anyway.
In other ethnographic cases, hunting success is also associated with advantages in male competition. Hadza men foraging in northern Tanzania are big game specialists (Fig. 1). As among the Ache, hunters do not control the distribution of meat. In this case, the wives and children of better hunters do have more positive weight gains, and those wives have surviving children faster. But these differences are directly associated with the foraging effort of the women themselves. , As with the Ache, the wide sharing of meat means that Hadza women and children receive little of their meat from kills by their husband and father. Consistent with this, a father’s death or parental divorce has no effect on child survival. However, better Hadza hunters tend to be married to harder-working wives. Older men who are better hunters have younger wives, suggesting they are more likely to leave an older wife to raise a second family—another way they have increased success in competing for paternity. Meriam turtle hunters also have higher age-specific reproductive success than do nonhunters and, as with the Hadza, this seems due to assortative mating: hunters claim more fertile wives than do nonhunters.
Successful hunters gain high status, have more partners, and experience greater reproductive success. That's hypergamy.
The "economic inequality" hypothesis does not explain this pattern of women "dating up" in terms of . It does seem plausible that women start caring less about men's economic status in prosperous societies, but that doesn't mean that women have stopped being hypergamous.
Without the need to mate with good providers to put roofs over their heads, women are free to go after the men they are attracted to, which seems to mean dating up on other dimensions they care about such as personality traits, education, status, intelligence, and accomplishments (some of these traits have been discussed in this comment, and others will have to wait for another time). This appears to be a generalized phenomenon; for instance, women care more about humor in their partners than men do, another culturally-valued trait.
As far as I can tell, this pattern of evidence looks a lot more like some sort of instinct on the part of women than merely a response to economic inequality (those as I've mentioned above, economic inequality is a factor in how hypergamy is expressed). The other problem with the sociocultural inequality hypothesis is that it can't explain how gender inequality came about in the first place: clearly there are some pre-cultural forces in play. It's difficult to make any sense out of this data without invoking evolutionary theories like sexual selection.
This is a post about applied luminosity in action: how I hacked myself to become polyamorous over (admittedly weak) natural monogamous inclinations. It is a case history about me and, given the specific topic, my love life, which means gooey self-disclosure ahoy. As with the last time I did that, skip the post if it's not a thing you desire to read about. Named partners of mine have given permission to be named.
1. In Which Motivation is Acquired
When one is monogamous, one can only date monogamous people. When one is poly, one can only date poly people.1 Therefore, if one should find oneself with one's top romantic priority being to secure a relationship with a specific individual, it is only practical to adapt to the style of said individual, presuming that's something one can do. I found myself in such a position when MBlume, then my ex, asked me from three time zones away if I might want to get back together. Since the breakup he had become polyamorous and had a different girlfriend, who herself juggled multiple partners; I'd moved, twice, and on the way dated a handful of people to no satisfactory clicking/sparking/other sound effects associated with successful romances. So the idea was appealing, if only I could get around the annoying fact that I was not, at that time, wired to be poly.
Everything went according to plan: I can now comfortably describe myself and the primary relationship I have with MBlume as poly. <bragging>Since moving back to the Bay Area I've been out with four other people too, one of whom he's also seeing; I've been in my primary's presence while he kissed one girl, and when he asked another for her phone number; I've gossiped with a secondary about other persons of romantic interest and accepted his offer to hint to a guy I like that this is the case; I hit on someone at a party right in front of my primary. I haven't suffered a hiccup of drama or a twinge of jealousy to speak of and all evidence (including verbal confirmation) indicates that I've been managing my primary's feelings satisfactorily too.</bragging> Does this sort of thing appeal to you? Cross your fingers and hope your brain works enough like mine that you can swipe my procedure.
2. In Which I Vivisect a Specimen of Monogamy
It's easier to get several small things out of the way, or route around them, than to defeat one large thing embedded in several places. Time to ask myself what I wanted. A notable virtue of polyamory is that it's extremely customizable. (Monogamy could be too, in theory, but comes with a strong cultural template that makes it uncomfortably non-default to implement and maintain nonstandard parameters.) If I could take apart what I liked about monogamy, there seemed a good chance that I could get some of those desiderata in an open relationship too (by asking my cooperative would-be primary). The remaining items - the ones that were actually standing between me and polyamory, not just my cached stereotype thereof - would be a more manageable hacking target. I determined that I could, post-hack, keep and pursue the following desires:
These things weren't the sole components of my monogamous inclinations, but what was left was a puny little thing made of ugh fields and aesthetic tastes and the least portions of the above. (For example, the first bullet point, being someone's top romantic priority, is 95% of the whole wanting to be someone's exclusive romantic priority. That last 5% is not that huge.)
The vivisection process also revealed that a lot of my monogamous inclinations were composed of the bare fact that monogamy had always been the specified arrangement. Being presumed by the agreed-upon boundaries of my relationships to be monogamous meant that if either party went off and was non-monogamous, this was Breaking A Rule. My brain does not like it when people (including me) Break Rules2 or try to change them too close to the time of the proposed would-be exception, generally speaking, but doesn't object to rules being different in different contexts. If I entered a relationship where, from the get-go, poly was how it was supposed to work, this entire structure would be silent on the subject of monogamy. Pre-vivisection I would have considered it more closely embedded than that.
3. In Which I Use My Imagination
Humans respond to incentives. We do this even when it comes to major decisions that should be significant enough in themselves to swamp said incentives. Encoding the switch to poly as a grand, dramatic sacrifice I was preparing to make for cinematic reasons (advance the plot, make soulful faces at the camera, establish my character to the rapt audience as some sort of long-suffering altruist giving up a Part Of Who I Am for True Love) was admittedly appealing. But it wasn't appealing to the bits of my brain that were doing the heavy lifting, just to the part that generates fiction and applies the templates to real life whenever possible. Better to find ways to cater to the selfish, practical crowd in my internal committee.
Polyamory has perks.
So I imagined a model of myself with one modification: the debris of my monogamous inclinations that were still left after I'd pared away the non-intrusive parts were not present in this model. Imaginary Model Alicorn was already finished with her hack and comfortable with plugging into a poly network. Contemplating how she went about her life, I noted the following:
So I spent some time thinking about Imaginary Model Alicorn. When her life started seeming like a pleasant fantasy, instead of a far-out alternate universe, that was progress; when it sounded like a viable plan for the near future, instead of an implausible flight of fancy, that was progress too.
4. In Which I Put Some Brainbits in Mothballs
At this point my interest in being poly was thoroughly motivated and I already had a comfortably broken-in new self-model to move into - if and when I managed the hack. It wasn't done. I still had to get rid of:
Respectively, here's what I did to get these brainbits to stop struggling long enough that I could box them up and put them into deep storage (forgive the metaphors in which I appear to make faces at myself. I did not actually need a mirror for any of this; those bits are symbols for the attitudes associated with the mental actions):
5. In Which Everything Goes According To Plan And I Am Repeatedly Commended For Having Magical Powers
Field-testing has confirmed that I'm doing something right: I'm happy and comfortable. (Also, spontaneously all kinds of popular. If I'd known I could get this many people interested by hacking poly I might have done it sooner.) I would reverse the hack if my primary decided he wanted to be monogamous with me, but otherwise don't see a likely reason to want to.
1I'm counting willingness that one's sole partner have other partners (e.g. being an arm of a V) to be a low-key flavor of being poly oneself, not a variety of tolerant monogamy. I think this is the more reasonable way to divide things up given a two-way division, but if you feel that I mischaracterize the highly simplified taxonomy, do tell.
2The details of what my brain considers to be Rules and how it protests when they are broken or self-servingly altered are mildly interesting but irrelevant to this post.
3I don't think I'd describe myself as enjoying drama, but it's interesting and I'm drawn to it, and if I don't keep track of this carefully enough I go around starting it without realizing what I'm doing until too late. Generating actual drama is a good way to hurt people, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the same appetite appears to be indulged by working out the intricacies of relationship parameters, and keeping track of the structure of a polycule in which I am an atom, even if no drama per se exists.
4If the comments I linked when I first mentioned this aesthetic don't adequately explain it to you, perhaps listen to the song "Somewhere That's Green" from Little Shop of Horrors. The exact details in the lyrics thereof are not what I ever had in mind (it's designed to highlight and poke fun at the singing character's extremely modest ambitions) but the emotional context - minus the backstory where the character currently has an abusive boyfriend - is just right.