Hypergamy pt 2: hypergamy and polygamy

Part one is here and part three here.

Here is the teaser paragraph from a much-discussed piece by Katie Bolick:

Recent years have seen an explosion of male joblessness and a steep decline in men’s life prospects that have disrupted the “romantic market” in ways that narrow a marriage-minded woman’s options: increasingly, her choice is between deadbeats (whose numbers are rising) and playboys (whose power is growing). 

The situation Bolick describes above—a world in which a few high-status males have lots of opportunities for sex with multiple partners and a whole lot of others do not—is called polygamy. What women like Bolick fail to note, and James Taranto did note, is that this situation has come about entirely because of women's choosing patterns and not because of men.

And one big hint that Bolick is lying, to herself at least,  is right in the opening of her piece:

In 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered. I was bewildered. To account for my behavior, all I had were two intangible yet undeniable convictions: something was missing; I wasn’t ready to settle down. 

Katie Bolick talks about how "marriage-minded women" have fewer options but the obvious problem with that is that she has not been marriage-minded most of her life. Actual marriage-minded women in their twenties probably still have the same number of options they ever did. They face a situation that is tough but manageable. The women for whom life is suddenly much tougher are those who decided to just have fun for a decade or so "not settling down" and then decided to settle down only to find themselves trapped in a new kind of polygamy.

If women decide to pursue sex based on their desires alone, those desires will lead them to pick "high-status" partners and those partners will, because there are so few of them, be in a position to have multiple partners rather than settle with one. Meanwhile, large numbers of lower-staus men will simply abandon the field, getting by on porn and video games.

The probem then, which Bolick refuses to see, is not that women have to settle for what they don't want but that men have little reason to make a commitment. There is nothing in it for them. And, once you know that, you can find tons of evidence for the proposition in Bolick's own article:

My spotty anecdotal findings have revealed that, yes, in many cases, the more successful a man is (or thinks he is), the less interested he is in commitment.

Take the high-powered magazine editor who declared on our first date that he was going to spend his 30s playing the field. Or the prominent academic who announced on our fifth date that he couldn’t maintain a committed emotional relationship but was very interested in a physical one. Or the novelist who, after a month of hanging out, said he had to get back out there and tomcat around, but asked if we could keep having sex anyhow, or at least just one last time. Or the writer (yes, another one) who announced after six months together that he had to end things because he “couldn’t continue fending off all the sexual offers.” And those are just the honest ones. 

What she fails to see is that the non high-status men she so dislikes are also not interested in commitment for the simple reason that it offers little or nothing to them. Unless you consider years of paying child support to the mother of your child while having no input into how the money is spent and much less time with the child an "incentive" of some sort. And all this so people like Katie Bolick can call you a "deadbeat".

And what is "high status" anyway?
Years ago in university I took a job as bouncer for a few years and suddenly found myself high status. It was a very limited sort of high status as it only applied within the doors of the dance club where I was working. As long as I was there doing my job, women flocked to me, men deferred to me and scared staff would coming running to me when there was trouble.

Outside those environs I had no status. It took some getting used to because I would spend five nights a week getting a level of sexual attention from women that I'd never had before in my life and then I'd go to class the next day and it would be gone. I knew I was the same guy in both situations but women treated me like a completely different guy.

The funny thing was that even in my early twenties I knew the status I had was bogus. I knew I was doing a  stupid, high-risk job that didn't pay nearly enough that I would have cheerfully traded for just about any one of a dozen other options had they been available.

So we need to start by recognizing that "status" is a context-specific thing. And, as I've said before, hypergamy is not a rational choice. It's a tendency to respond sexually to male status. Women in any given social arrangement will tend to respond sexually to men who have status in that social arrangement.

You can fool them, of course, and that is why there is an entire industry teaching lower status men how to intentionally achieve the effect I pulled off accidentally when I became a bouncer. They call it having "game". And it also only works in highly specific contexts. You can fool a woman at a bar but she'll spot you as a fraud right away if she meets you at your workplace where your status is easier to read.

In any case, the rules of the game for men are pretty easy to figure out: either take big risks to get and maintain status or bitterly accept your low status and what goes with it.

And the definition of insanity is ...
And what is Katie Bolick's solution to the problem? It will sound familiar to you:

... as the economy evolves, it’s time to embrace new ideas about romance and family—and to acknowledge the end of “traditional” marriage as society’s highest ideal.

But that, of course, is exactly what feminists and others have been saying for as long as there has been feminism.  We have been doing nothing but embracing new ideas about romance and family for the last sixty years. Katie Bolick, quite rightly, doesn't like where this bus has gotten her but her "solution" is to get right back on the same bus and hope it takes her somewhere different this time.

Or, to put it less charitably, Katie Bolick blew it big time. She had all the assets she needed to make a success of her life only she blew it all not being "ready to settled down" and now that it is too late, she is trying to move the goal posts so that she can be a winner after all.