Women, get used to marrying down

Submitted by Mastodon on Mon, 2012-09-17 01:06

Article here. Excerpt:

'For much of history, the mark of an enviable woman has been her ability to secure a superior match, through her beauty, cleverness or artful deception. After the civil rights era, that expectation mellowed into something called "homogamy," meaning women marrying men of equal money and education. But that happy place of equilibrium seems to be fading as well. Instead, women have started doing something demographers thought they would never see: They are marrying down, not just in the United States, but all over the world, a phenomenon closely tracked by Spanish demographer Albert Esteve.

Women are largely doing this out of necessity. In every continent except Africa, women are more likely to have a college degree than the men around them. This means that in their late 20s and 30s, when most people get married, women's earning prospects are brighter. So they have no choice but to marry someone who in a Jane Austen novel would have been declared an unsuitable match.

About 40 percent of wives in the United States now out-earn their husbands, and researcher Liza Mundy predicts they will be the majority in a generation. It's already happening with education: According to Mr. Esteve, the majority of women in France, Hungary, Israel, Portugal, Brazil, Belarus, Mongolia and Colombia -- to name a few -- now marry men with less schooling than they have.'

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Comments

Marriage is a dying institution, not just in the west but also in places you wouldn't think it'd be (e.g.: the divorce rate in Saudi Arabia is according to one source I read 20%, but I have seen higher numbers quoted). Hypergamy as a strategy for the economic well-being for women in any case can only work if men are economically well-off to begin with. In the US/west, the trend is downward for men's economic well-being, unless of course they are either one of the better-off few or themselves "marry up". Thing is, most women would rather stay single than "marry down". Old habits die hard. And there are many historical examples of how civilizations, once their men lost their "economic relevance" to the female population, simply died out due to a lack of pair-bond mating and thus overall reproduction. Our repro rate decline has been steady for the past half-century but the loss in men's earning power relative to women will only hasten it. Imagine being a woman who makes $100k/yr and is looking for Mr. Goodbar (points if you remember that reference!) All the men she meets who make that kind of money are, guess what, married, or already been clobbered in "family court" and so just are not buying what she's selling. The other guys she meets, well, maybe some make half that, others maybe make a lot but they're skilled tradesmen and have to work long hours to pull in the O.T. Besides, why get married unless you are going to have a kid, and does she really want to work her 60-hr/week job AND be a mother with a husband making half what she makes, etc., etc.? Not very appealing. There isn't much to incent higher-earning women to get with lower-earning men (except of course, "true love", which doesn't come along that often-- for most people, not at all). So again, why bother?

Does all this point to a conclusion as follows: "Societies where men under-earn women are doomed to fail, therefore women cannot be allowed to out-earn men."? No, it doesn't. What it does mean is that there is significant downward pressure on the marriage and reproduction meter under those circumstances. If women are going to at least reproduce (never-mind get hitched) beyond under-replacement level, there has to be a reason for them to do so. (Some European countries have tried outright bribes for this but it hasn't met with much success.) At the moment, there isn't. Like a grinding wheel that has just been deprived of its river-supplied power, the wheel of marriage/reproduction is continuing to turn, but at a rapidly-diminishing rate. In fact here in the US if it were not for immigrants (legal and not), we'd have a net loss of population over the past decade. By and large, here in the US, the only class of person that is having a number of kids per woman greater than replacement level are immigrants. But I imagine feminism and anti-male policies will soon disabuse even that group of continuing on that way.

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Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2012-09-18 00:36

A good start would be to let men reach whatever potential they have, instead of coming up with things like Title IX that only undercut motivated people in the hopes of boosting up others who simply aren't interested to be there.

But if we did that, it would threaten the power and authority of the government. And we wouldn't want that, would we?

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Submitted by dudejo on Thu, 2012-09-20 10:17

Just get ready to keep some shotguns in the house and find a nice prostitute you can fuck for a few hundred bucks a week. That's my philosophy.

Also, man the fuck up, go lift some weights and then murder a nice steak.

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Submitted by cwondermagic1 on Fri, 2012-09-21 17:39