hypergamy

Definition

In academic sociology, hypergamy simply describes the observed pattern of people — in most studied societies, more often women — marrying partners of higher social or economic status. The manosphere borrowed the word and hardened it into a claimed law of female nature: that women are perpetually scanning for a better option and will discard a partner without hesitation when one appears.

The gap between the versions

The academic version is a statistical tendency that varies by culture and era and has been shrinking as women's education and earnings rise: Buss's 37-culture study found women, on average, weighted a partner's resources more than men did — a real difference, but a graded one, not the absolute law the manosphere asserts. ^[1] The manosphere version is universal, biological and permanent — and it does the ideological work of justifying preemptive distrust of women. The check on whether hypergamy is universal weighs what the evidence actually supports.