Trophies

Hypergamy is seen 90+% in men while “upgrading” their wives; and only <10% in women for “upgrading” their men. Yet it gets called out disproportionately as a thing women do… Geese and ganders. Geese and ganders.

I got this comment on Hypergamy Doesn’t Care a little while ago. It’s about what I’ve come to expect from women who find revealing the secret of hypergamy offensive. These of course are the women who’s sexual strategy relies on men’s unawareness about hypergamy in order to consolidate on long-term security, but I find it entertaining that when a Man exposes that truth there is a ready social convention to shame him with, rather than the prideful embrace of an ’empowered’ woman revealing exactly the same truth.

What commenter CV’s proffering here is the Trophy Wives convention. A lot has been made of this recently and it’s brought to my attention that this is a feminine operative social convention that I haven’t covered as of yet.

There was a time when this social convention was a very functional shaming device for women. Right around the mid 1980’s to the late 1990’s the notion of men becoming bored with their wives and “upgrading” them for a newer (younger, hotter) model was a very popular trope. There were romantic comedies based on the convention as well as an underlying presumption that men would just be biologically predisposed to this upgrading.

In the popular media, movies and sit-coms of the period, we could tell the measure of a man’s character by the way he would or would not fall to the temptation to ditch his ubiquitously loving and devoted, but SMV declined, wife in favor of a hot young (usually mid 20s) woman who was stereotypically vapid, immature and shallow. It was fun to ridicule (and pathologize) men’s sexual response while fostering an endearing sympathy for the poor, unjustly served wives who, through no fault of their own, fell victim to so many men’s base urges to wantonly discard her for a hotter, tighter blonde with fake tits.

Naturally the caricature wouldn’t be complete without accounting for a Trophy Wife’s character – always vapid, usually gold digging, and uniquely incapable of relating to him on the same level of intellectual and emotional maturity his discarded wife had so selflessly devoted herself to.

To further the mythology this want for a young ‘Chippy’ was almost always paired with the ‘infantile and ego-bruised’ man’s mid-life crisis, selfishly attempting to recapture his youth in a sports car and a new ‘bimbo’ wife.

This was an effective convention then because it played on women’s fear of the Wall and built upon their, feminine-as-correct, moral / intellectual superiority of men, who could only be counted on to reason with their penises rather than consider the relational equity women would necessarily invest into a marriage with only the best of intentions. In a sense it was the female flip side of the Relational Equity fallacy found predominantly in men today.

As with most of its social conventions, the Feminine Imperative got a lot of milage out of the Trophy Wife fear – not the least of which was due to the perception of men’s more prominent role as financial providers. But with time and a new global degree of connectivity this trope is no longer as tenable as it was.

Dead Conventions

From about the turn of the millennia, the concept of “Trophy Wives” has been a dead feminine social convention.

Whereas most long held feminine social conventions can be socially rejiggered to accommodate new circumstances or even directly proven contradiction as time and society progresses, the Trophy Wife canard simply doesn’t hold water the way it used to. In fact, for men aware enough of it, it’s really a cruel reminder of its original intent now.

You see, when it’s statistically 70+% women initiating divorce, detonating marriages because of an Eat Pray Love script and a “I coulda done better than this Beta” commercialization effort of women’s innate hypergamy, it’s kind of hard to float the male-shame of “men divorce their wives because they want a newer model” trope. At present, there’s enough connectivity and enough shared male experience, even from the female side, to make the Trophy Wives convention an embarrassing holdover from when it was useful.

Oh I still get it occasionally in my comment sections, but now it’s just the “ooh ooh men do it too” script that falls flat, and I think even the hard-sell women are realizing this with such readily available divorce stats online now.

The Trophy Wife convention worked in stupid 80′s movies plots as a vehicle to infantilize men’s commitment to women’s long-term security, but when Stella heads off to Jamaica to ‘get her groove on’ it’s called female empowerment.

Trophy Wife may not be a functional convention anymore, but it’s certainly a good illustration of the Feminine Imperative at work.

Smoking Guns

About a month ago Dalrock did some yeoman’s work in comparing divorce statistics with women’s rate of remarriage. From the Smoking Gun:

I’ve focused on the stats for women because it is women who are driving the divorce rates.  As you can see, divorce rates track very closely with women’s opportunity to remarry.  Note also that the old canard that as women age their desire to be married goes away;  if this were true the divorce curve would slope upward, not downward.

Rather than lift Dal’s charts I’ll refer readers to have a look at his original post. For the purposes of comparing these stats to the old model of the Trophy Wives convention, it’s fairly obvious that the actual trend was never a mythology of discontented men jettisoning their wives for younger ones, but rather common, average women discontent in their hypergamous “Assortive Mating” detonating their marriages for the promises of a guaranteed security and a second chance at optimizing hypergamy “before their looks run out.”

From a legal and social perspective, a feminine-primary society has undeniably made the cash & prizes incentive for women to Cash Out of their marriage a realizable and socially acceptable option.

I may ruffle some feathers with this proposition, but I can’t ignore the prospect that, for some women, this ‘detonation’ may have been part of, or became, their long-term security strategy once she’d ‘settled’ on her post-Wall Beta male provider. Even for women with whom this wasn’t a conscious plan the failsafe of post-divorce social and financial support represents is always present.

Whereas the Trophy Wife convention primarily revolved around elite men with the capacity, status and affluence (if not the intent) to discard their wives depended on suppressing the Apex Fallacy (only men of extraordinary means could entertain it), for women the Eat Pray Love schema can be realized by virtually any western woman – and statistically we see this played out in reality.

High profile men, who took up with a stereotypical Trophy Wife are statistically insignificant compared to women’s divorcing their Beta providers, assured of his support in the long term, and either return to their ‘party years’ model of short term fulfillment, or take up with another provider. The old male-shame Trophy Wife social convention has been replaced by a feminine-primary, feminine acceptable, form of hypergamous optimization.

Assortive Mates

This reality is a fairly ugly one to confront for women and a feminine based society at large. For the most part Beta men are more prone to get along than make waves in a marriage or LTR. So conditioned and prepared for this self-sacrificial monogamy and support, few will consider women’s sexual strategies, much less question their sincerity of their reasoning for wanting out of their marriages later.

Still, that ugly truth is becoming increasingly more unavoidable as men share their experiences with each other. What to do?

As I mentioned there’s a lot of talk about debunking the old Trophy Wives convention. I imagine my readership is already aware of a recent “study” ‘proving’ that men and women tend to pair off according to like interests and attraction – rather than the notion that women would in any way be opportunists and motivated by hypergamy:

Here’s some bad news for men with highly successful careers and fat wallets: You probably will not end up with a “trophy wife,” a new study suggests.

When researchers compared qualities such as level of attractiveness and socioeconomic status within couples, they found almost no evidence of the trophy wife stereotype, which suggests attractive, young women tend to marry rich and successful men.

Instead, couples are far more likely to end up together because they share similar traits. For example, attractive, wealthy or highly educated people are more likely to choose a partner with the same qualities. The same is true for less attractive, low-earning or less educated people. Trophy wife marriages still happen, but not nearly as often as expected, the study revealed.

Obsidian over at JustFourGuys has done an admirable job of picking this study apart. Needless to say the study begins from a point of error, relying on a sample group of early 20s couples to determine the overall social “trend” of assortive mating. Commenter John Albertsen makes the old model Trophy Wife observation:

Trophy wives are, according to the generally accepted definition, not only attractive, but considerably younger than their husbands. Limiting the study to “couples in their twenties”,eliminated the older guys with younger wives, as the difference in the ages of the pair would be a maximum of 9 years. Further, very few highly successful men reach those heights by 29 and of those that do, how many would be married at all?

The sample used in this study seems to eliminate the very people who would need to be included to accomplish it’s stated goal. Studying married couples in their 50s would be just as invalid as it would still not include a fitting age difference.

It would be better to study couples where the MEN were in their 50s to see how their attractiveness and financial success compared to the age and attractiveness of their wives. I suspect that you will find very few such ‘elderly’ gents paired up with young cuties unless they were loaded. In other words, what the young women find attractive about the guy is what’s in his wallet.

After considering this, an astute Red Pill Man needs to question the true underlying motive, not just for the study itself, but the reason for it being popularly reposted and relinked in a feminine-primary cultural bubble.

In western society it’s a statistical rarity for early 20s men and women to be married (or seriously monogamous enough to consider it) at all. Feminine-primary culture can’t seem to make up its mind; why would men need to Man-Up, stop being ‘kidults’ and accept mature marriage responsibilities at 29 if so many early 20s men (like those in the study) are pairing with their equalist approved fiancés?

Any number of studies and polls empirically show that women not only want their husbands to be older (5-7 years), but also wish to marry at or around 28-30 years of age. Furthermore, there’s no shortage of articles and blog posts relating how women are postponing marriage to pursue professional goals or are frustrated in being forced to ‘settle’ for monogamy with men they consider beneath their status, financial and educational levels later and later in life.

What the McClintock study was trying to prove had nothing to do with Trophy Wives, but rather the intent was to disprove and distract from the realities of feminine hypergamy – while conveniently shaming older men that feminine-primary culture largely still believe harbor plans to marry younger women once they consolidate their fortunes.

The intent isn’t to disprove the Trophy Wives social convention (created by the same influence attempting to disprove it), but rather to prove that women aren’t actually the opportunists an innate hypergamy would have them, by necessity, be. The intent is to distract men’s increasing awareness of women’s opportunistic, strategic sexual pluralism.

As I illustrated last week:

…hypergamy does not seek it’s own level. An ever pragmatic evolution drives hypergamy to seek a better-than-equal pairing. This is the evolutionary jackpot: to combine and send one’s genes into future generations with a (at least perceptually) better than equitable genetic match – and ensure one’s progeny with a better than SMV equitable provisioning.

Assortive mating (Alpha Fucks) is not the same as Assortive pairing (Beta Bucks). The conflicting sides of feminine hypergamy ensures that the prerequisites of satisfying both are met with different qualifiers. McClintock’s efforts here (besides her own professional aggrandizement) are yet one more attempt to sweep the unpalatable truth of hypergamy under a rug she’d rather men not have the curiosity to look under. This is simply an obvious effort in keeping hypergamy a secret, and to inspire men to shame for even being curious about it.