Debunking Manosphere Evolutionary Psychology, Part 1: The Myth of Hypergamy

"Dating up" is a male fantasy, not a real-world reality

Artwork: “Bruh” by the author, Joe Duncan

This is part one in a several-part series debunking the lies and myths spread around in the Manosphere (they are multitudinous). It’s much longer than my usual article—the result of years of research—in part because this particular myth is so ubiquitous, so omnipresent, and uttered so breathlessly by people both inside and outside the Manosphere, that it deserves a full and thorough refutation, not just a once-over.

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What does it mean to love someone? What does it mean to desire them?

In today’s low-key dystopian world of hyper-consumerism—where individuals and identities are curated, packaged, and sold across digital storefronts and algorithmic platforms—few questions are more pressing than those concerning how we bond. Yet, contemporary discourse on sex, desire, relationships, and love have followed corporate consumerism, becoming enmeshed with the lexicon of marketplace transactionalism, reducing the complexities of human intimacy to transactional metaphors. Dating apps exhibiting potential matches like a catalog of commodities certainly haven’t helped.

The commodification of connection has spawned a sprawling cottage industry of self-help relationship gurus peddling formulaic solutions, who pretend to have unlocked the secret to success with women. In what can only be dubbed “instructional performance art” (and that’s putting it nicely)—equal parts pseudoscience and machismo theater—men dig out charts, graphs, labyrinthine diagrams, and fill entire blackboards with lists and notes, trying to solve women like a math puzzle.

At the core of it all lies a singular, rigid, belief: hypergamy.

Hypergamy is the idea that relationships operate on a transactional logic, where men trade resources—wealth, power, social status—for women’s youth, beauty, and fertility. Men and women are believed to be biologically “hardwired” for distinct mating strategies¹, trading men’s money for women’s looks. Popularized by 1980s and 1990s evolutionary psychology, and amplified by uncritical media outlets, it says that women are biologically predisposed to “marry up,” picking older, wealthier partners to obtain material security, while men pursue attractiveness as a sign of reproductive fitness.

The idea is replete throughout the Manosphere. It’s echoed everywhere men congregate and discuss relationships online. Yet, for all of its ubiquity, hypergamy is a myth, one born more out of consumer culture and media than real-life relationships. In fact, I believe, the myth of hypergamy is the root cause of all of our gender and culture woes, as the gender wars rest on a fundamental misunderstanding between men and women in how we approach relationships. Today is the myth of hypergamy’s day to die.

A History of Forking Paths

How did we get here? What’s going on with men and women? Why can’t we understand each other? And how did our relationship approaches become so dissimilar? It wasn’t always this way. We didn’t always have divided conceptions of love and relationships.

A split emerged in the late 20th-century understanding of human relationships, and we’ve been feeling the catastrophic aftershocks ever since. This chasm, that began with a paper in economics, lies at the heart of our gender battles. It birthed the cultural filter bubbles, long before social media, that would grow into our modern culture wars.

In 1973, the Western world changed when Nobel-prize winning economist Gary Becker published A Theory of Marriage, Part 1. The paper started a longstanding tradition of imbuing human relationships with economic characteristics. Becker said that families are little economies, complete with liabilities and assets, and individuals seek to maximize their returns (personal utility), while marriage was viewed as a competitive market where individuals “bid” for potential partners, like at an auction.²

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Becker ushered in an era where everything important in the West would be tainted by an omnipresent concept embodied in two of the most vomit-inducing words in the entirety of the English language: “human capital.” Becker did more than anyone else to forge this idea that humans can be considered units of capital—numbers, not people. Love, long celebrated in art and literature as ineffable and transcendent, was quantified as a marketplace dynamic. Becker’s model, though criticized for its reductionist scope, profoundly shaped how human relationships were understood in academia and beyond.

Simultaneously, the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychology adopted a similarly economistic lens. Researchers framed human mating as an evolutionary “battleground” where reproductive gains and losses determined genetic survival. Men, so the theory went, evolved to seek youth and fertility, maximizing offspring potential, while women prioritized resource acquisition, ensuring security for themselves and their children.

In a word, hypergamy.

This “battle of the sexes” wasn’t a metaphor but a scientific framework, saying that gender differences in psychology were biologically fixed, sculpted by relentless Darwinian competition, one that fit perfectly in with Becker’s economic theory, which, itself, fit with the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of rugged individualism and Evangelical, traditional family values, then a backlash against feminist gains of the 1960s-1970s.

We’ll call this the “competitive, biological model” of human relationships.