 Greetings, gentlemen! Today I want to talk about hypergamy, because this is the question I get more than any other among guys who have encountered the Red Pill community. I guess I should say up front, I don't really know how to define that community because it includes a lot of men with a lot of different ideas and agendas. So for the sake of this video, I'm just referring to men who are exchanging notes about gender dynamics because they've noticed something. They've noticed that what they've been told about women and men isn't really how things seem to work. They're looking for the truth. That's where the Red Pill metaphor comes from. I thought I'd spend some time on this and try to give a coherent answer to questions like, is hypergamy real? Does it control female behavior? How worried should I be? Short answer? Yes, it's real. No, it doesn't control women. And if you're worried about it, then you're focused on the wrong problem. Hypergamy is an obscure term outside the Red Pill community, so for those of you who are new around here, it refers to the generally incontestable observation that women prefer to date men who have higher status than themselves. That's the basic definition. There's not much to it. There's also a Red Pill definition that covers much more than simply dating up. Hypergamy seems to be the single biggest topic in Red Pill conversations about female relationship motives. I think it's fair to call the Red Pill version of hypergamy an entire theoretical framework. I'll flesh out both definitions in a bit, but as always, I want to tell you where I sit before I tell you where I stand. I believe the Red Pill understanding of hypergamy is a mixed bag. On one hand, I think it's a tremendously inflated concept. It tries to predict and explain things that are beyond its limits. It's difficult to support empirically, and it doesn't square with my experience as a clinical psychologist who has dug into the intimate details of hundreds of relationships. On the other hand, hypergamy is a vital concept for men to embrace, and the Red Pill definition in particular brings with it a bit of necessary wisdom that my profession generally doesn't offer to men. This video is going to be a bit of a winding road with a few stories along the way. To be honest, it's a reflection of my own effort to sort out some of the contradictions I see between the Red Pill and my clinical experience. When two sets of ideas seem true, but they don't play nicely together, that's the sort of thing that keeps me up at night. So to start off, I want to jump all the way back to the 1950s and tell you the story of the schizophrenogenic mother, because it illustrates a shift in my profession's attitude that I think is at least partly responsible for the evolution of the Red Pill, that shift in attitude may even have indirectly contributed to the Red Pill theory of hypergamy. The term schizophrenogenic mother comes from the psychiatric literature of the time. It refers to the mothers of people who developed schizophrenia. The idea was that the disease was caused by mothers who were so cold and untrustworthy that they literally drove their kids crazy. The woman who coined the term wrote this, The schizophrenic is painfully distrustful and resentful of other people due to the severe early warp and rejection he encountered in important people in his infancy and childhood as a rule, mainly in a schizophrenogenic mother. Psychiatrists eventually figured out that schizophrenia is an organic disorder. Bad parenting can't cause it, but psychologists and psychiatrists at the time were more than happy to blame things on women, mothers in particular. It's not that they demonized the feminine. In fact, with schizophrenia, they were blaming an absence of what they would have considered more feminine traits at the time, like sensitivity and empathy. It's more accurate to say that they idealized masculine qualities. They didn't seem to blame men for problems the way they blamed women. As a quick example, I have an old introductory psychology textbook from 1949. It has a chapter called Character, a topic my profession doesn't really discuss anymore. According to the book, there are two types of character. You got your Socrates and you got your Caligulas. Don't be a Caligula. But under the heading of good character, there are a few interesting items like self-control, which it describes as keeping serene and a good humor when everything else goes wrong. Psychologists today call that stoicism. There's courage, which includes physical bravery and the willingness to stand up for what's right. They even use the metaphor of a soldier facing an enemy in battle. They also talked about sportsmanship. They say people of good character know how to win and lose gracefully in a competition. You heard that right. They encouraged competitiveness, something mainstream psychologists now find distasteful. It's all pretty masculine stuff. It certainly wasn't anti-feminine, but the traits they would have considered more feminine back in the 1950s were absent from the list of good character traits, things like being demure, deferential, and sensitive. Those qualities didn't make the list. Apparently, masculinity was the ideal. Let me tell you, the tide has turned. The profession that idealized masculine traits in the last century now openly blames mental illness and societal problems on the same traits it once held in high esteem. You might remember what the American Psychological Association told us back in January of 2019. They said traditional masculinity, marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression, is on the whole harmful. They wrote an entire set of treatment guidelines to institutionalize their opinion of men. Those guidelines are one example of how my profession has gone from idealizing masculinity to an open disdain for it and an almost idolatrous view of femininity. If it sounds like I'm overstating the matter, let's do a little comparison between the APA's guidelines for working with boys and men, and the less publicized counterpart for girls and women. I think these two documents are a fair representation of the way my profession generally views the sexes. At the very least, they represent the way psychology's largest governing body thinks psychologists should view the sexes. So let's look at them. The male guidelines set the tone right out of the gate by talking about male privilege, violence, substance abuse, and incarceration. While they do acknowledge some of the problems boys and men face, the tone is clear. Masculinity is the source of men's problems. The introduction to the female guidelines sets a different tone by asserting that women are disadvantaged, oppressed, and abused by men. But girls and women draw on a considerable array of strengths and resilience to cope with these and other gender-based adversities. They've set the tone already, and that's before we even get to the specific guidelines. The first male guideline says, traditional masculine ideology as they describe it is a social construct that leads to problems like racism, sexism, homophobia, and depression. The first female guideline on the other hand says the strength and resilience of femininity should be honored and cultivated. Girls have better relationships than boys, they're kinder and less prejudiced, and according to the APA, the deck is stacked against girls and women in western society. They frame women as the noble, righteous victims, and femininity is the healthy ideal. Here's one of my favorite discrepancies between these two documents. Item nine of the female guideline says that psychologists should honor traditional means of feminine healing. They say psychologists should seek female community leaders and healers as a form of co-therapist. That's an odd suggestion from an organization that values licensure, but the message is clear. We should trust traditional femininity and the wisdom of women. There's no such recommendation in the male guidelines. The APA sees only danger when men turn to each other, like when they caution that male peer groups lead to dangerous levels of stoicism or that male socialization pressures lead men to become hyper-competitive and hyper-aggressive, whatever the hell that means. Men, unlike women, should not be left to their own devices. Let me give you one more. In the female guidelines, the APA says that emotions like anger and resentment in women should be thought of as signs of resilience and engagement. I agree. Sometimes those emotions are a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation, but men get no such consideration from the APA. The male guidelines don't even use the word anger a single time outside of two reference titles, but they do mention violence nearly 70 times. Of course, they blame violence on masculine socialization while ignoring the fact that the most violent men come from fatherless homes or masculine influences minimized. That's the level of brain-dead ideology that infects these guidelines. These two documents didn't come out of the blue. If you follow the references, as I did in a previous video, you'll find that this pathological ideology has been brewing for decades. These APA guidelines are just the cliff notes. So here's where that leaves us today. The mainstream authorities of my profession have gone from foolishly blaming mothers for schizophrenia to foolishly exalting femininity and vilifying masculinity. This is not a healthy way to view men or women. One of the results of this is that the clinical side of my profession does very little to help men understand their experiences with women because they have difficulty seeing the dark side of femininity just like they have difficulty seeing the positive side of masculinity. That divine feminine wisdom is not what men reliably experience with women, especially when their relationships fall apart. That's when men discover that femininity has a dark side, that for good or bad, women are fully human. Imagine that. Psychology's narrative doesn't offer a satisfactory explanation for men's experience of female infidelity, divorce, withdrawal of intimacy, rejection, general bitchiness, or just the inability to connect with women in the first place, especially if these men have followed the mainstream prescription and done everything they thought they were supposed to do to become what women want. These men are left wondering what the hell's going on, why didn't anyone warn them about this, what happened to the fairytale vision of the divine feminine ideal. It's truly sad, but mainstream psychology is currently too blinded by gender ideology to help these men solve these problems. But don't you worry about us We're problem solvers. The bigger the hole, the bigger we fill. This is where the red pill community comes in. If psychology has no answers for men, then men will find answers on our own. It happens in forums, in videos, and blog posts. It happens at conferences and on social media. Men share their experiences. They discuss ideas. They formulate explanations and prescriptions for their problems with women. The red pill is a metaphor for finding the truth after a lifetime of lies. Men don't search for the red pill when things are going well. They find the red pill when they're searching for an explanation for their heartbreak, their trauma, their very bad day in family court. The red pill might go down hard, but it does provide answers. Didn't like the taste, but I swallowed it anyway here. Sometimes some pretty dark and hopeless conclusions come out of the red pill. But a lot of the observations are insightful and useful to give men strategy for a better life, even if it leaves them wondering why no one told them these things before the damage was done. Here's one of my favorite red pill observations. Women don't desire men they don't admire, and what they tend to admire are traditionally masculine behaviors. You won't hear that from my profession beyond a few specialized areas like evolutionary psychology. That sub-discipline tends to be pragmatic, and it doesn't have much interest in transient social sensibilities. It's good at identifying what men and women have historically desired in each other. For example, they've made the politically incorrect observation that across cultures a man's ability to provide is a major variable in what women find attractive. And what does it take to be an effective provider in a competitive world? It requires some of the very same traits mainstream psychology has labeled toxic, like stoicism, competitiveness, aggression. And I'm not talking about cruelty or abusiveness. Those aren't masculine traits. Either gender can be destructive. In fact, men are at least partially incentivized against those behaviors because traits like kindness and generosity also weigh heavily into what women find attractive. Think of the ideal man shaped by natural selection as the strong but loving provider, someone who's willing to take responsibility and lead the way, someone who's bold enough to draw boundaries, pursue what he wants, and say no, even to the people he loves. Obviously that man isn't every woman's cup of tea, but like it or not, this is what natural selection has encouraged women in general to find attractive. The red pill helps men understand that sort of reality, but mainstream psychology with its current emphasis on gender ideology does not. What men get instead from my field is a feminine framework for relationships because, remember, femininity is the ideal. My profession teaches men to learn their love language, empathize, communicate, be vulnerable. Some of it's good advice for men, but it's dangerously incomplete. It sets men up for failure. I've seen it in my practice more times than I can count. Men who rely exclusively on feminine relationship skills without knowing where to draw the line or how to incorporate more masculine traits like stoicism and even disagreeableness, these men tend to lose the respect of their women. The red pill understands that. I've heard a lot of thoughtful nuanced conversations in that community about bringing masculinity back into relationships and back into society. The downside to these conversations is that the red pill community is an echo chamber, and it suffers from a massive case of self-reporting. Men are mostly forming theories by way of sharing their own stories with each other. You might ask, what's wrong with self-reporting? Anecdotal data is still data, right? Right. But there are a couple of problems if you're using personal stories as the foundation for your understanding of things. For one thing, the storytelling becomes self-amplifying, with people quoting each other in a circular fashion and boosting the narrative beyond anything that resembles reality. Self-reporting is notoriously inaccurate because our eyes point outward, not inward. We're reasonably good at assessing what other people are doing, but we're generally pretty bad at sizing up our own behavior. Let me give you a quick example of how terrible people are telling their own stories. This 2011 study from a handbook on sleep medicine asked people simply to report their own sleep habits, then the researchers compared the self-reports to objective measurements. All the subjects had to do was report how long they slept and how well they slept. You'd think they could get it right, right? Wrong. They screwed it up. For example, the subjects reported that women have more sleep difficulties than men. That's what they reported because that's what they felt. But the objective data showed that the women in the study slipped longer, better, and more efficiently than the men. If people can't accurately report on an activity as mundane as sleep, then how the hell are they going to accurately report on something as subjective and complicated as their relationship problems? Something that's laden with emotions to cloud perceptions, and something that involves at least one other point of view to consider. I can tell you first hand, it's the rare person who can see their own relationship behavior with anything resembling objectivity, and I include myself in that. So, with all of that by way of preamble, and all those social forces' background, let's get back to the topic of hypergamy. This is probably a good time to define the term, so here's a little history. The word itself is only about 140 years old. It appears it was coined in 1881 when a census taker in India needed a word to describe the rule which compels a man to wed his daughter with a member of a tribe which shall be actually superior in rank to his own. That census taker noticed that people were trying to improve the lives of their families by marrying their daughters into families of higher status. It's worth pointing out that he wasn't talking about women marrying up so much as families marrying up. More precisely, the fathers were being hypergamous by marrying off their daughters to higher status men. That's a trivial point. It doesn't undermine the red pill definition I'll talk about later, but I think it's amusing that men were the first documented case of a word that describes a female mating strategy. The census taker also noticed the challenges that hypergamy creates for groups at the highest and lowest levels of the caste system. Women at the highest levels can't marry up because there is no up, and women who marry up from the lowest levels create a shortage of women for men at the bottom. And that's about all there was to the word hypergamy back in the 1800s. It doesn't really matter what the word meant 140 years ago because things evolved, but that's a good place to start. Since then, social scientists haven't had much to say about it. I think it's interesting that the word doesn't appear a single time in David Busse's two-volume handbook of evolutionary psychology. On those rare occasions when scholars do talk about it, their definition lines up pretty neatly with the original, like a dozen this paper titled The Economics of Hypergamy. It's one of the few papers I could find that discusses hypergamy directly, and they only go so far as to say that, quote, women on average are likely to mate with men of higher economic and social status than themselves. It's all pretty unremarkable stuff so far, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to make the case that women don't prefer the highest status men they can get. Why wouldn't they? But the red pill definition goes so much further than that. For some guys, hypergamy seems to explain damn near everything women do in relationships, from dating all the way through to divorce. The red pill community has expanded the definition of hypergamy mainly by incorporating into it what's known as the ovulatory shift hypothesis. This theory says the traits women find attractive in men shift across the ovulatory cycle. The theory makes three predictions. First, it predicts that when women are in the most fertile phase of the cycle, they'll be attracted to men with overt masculine traits that correlate with higher genetic quality. These men have more masculine faces and bodies, and they show more dominant social behaviors. For shorthand, we'll call these guys alphas. Second, it predicts that the attraction to alphas will be absent or very weak during the low fertility phase of the cycle. Women in this phase are supposedly more open to men who may be less masculine but who show stronger signs of long-term suitability, like the ability to provide and predict over the long haul. We'll call these men betas. The third prediction is that women will not be attracted to betas on high fertility days when they're sexually attracted to alphas. The theory aligns well with the fact that there's no free lunch in nature. Everything comes with a trade-off, and that includes masculine traits. High masculinity correlates with a man's physical health, his immunity, his dominance, and his competitive ability. Those genetic qualities make him attractive sexual partner, but according to the theory, they don't necessarily make him a good provider. The theory says he's a self-absorbed horned doc who's likely to love him and leave him. On the other hand, the theory says that while betamen are less sexually attractive, they're more attractive to settle down with because they're more compliant, more loyal, and likely to invest in offspring. Ovulatory shifts suggest women are subtly inclined to mate with an alpha but settle down with a beta, and that idea is the foundation of red pill hypergamy theory. The red pill says the female mating strategy is to strike a balance between the exciting alpha and the dependable beta, and if a woman can't find the ideal alpha-beta mix in one man, then she'll mate with exciting Mr. Alpha and then settle down with dependable Mr. Beta. She'll cuckold him, at least until a better option comes along at which point she might trade up. Red pill hypergamy suggests women are always subconsciously scanning the social landscape for a better option than the man they have at present, at least until age causes their sexual market value to decline and they run out of options. So in creating red pill hypergamy theory, the red pill community has taken two separate ideas and combined them to create a whole new animal. It has fins and flippers. That's a hell of a conceptual leap. For hardcore adherence, it's like a grand unified theory of female motivation that explains everything women do. I want to give you some examples of the more strident thinkers out there, but before I whip this out, I want to make it clear that I'm not talking about the work of Rolo Tomasi. For those who don't know him, he's a strong proponent of red pill hypergamy theory. I like Rolo. I admire his work because he's helped thousands of men, and on the topic of hypergamy, Rolo sees nuance where others don't. Those others are a large and diffuse group of men who advance some pretty grim and inflexible messages. Let's look at a few. Here's a blog post in which a red pill writer explains how hypergamy causes women to initiate divorces. He writes, Women, with a hypergamous objective function, betray by trying to replace their existing man with a better one. It's only natural then for the woman to initiate most divorces. She has to lose her zero before she can renew her search for a hero. Here's another essay. This one explains how hypergamy ensures the failure of nearly all marriages. He writes, Feminism essentially unleashed hypergamy that was bottled up for thousands of years, which is why we are seeing women getting completely out of control. This piece explains how hypergamy causes women to find a new man before they've left the old one. He writes, When monkeys swing from branch to branch, they grab a hold of the next one before they let go of the first one, otherwise they could fall, just like it would be risky for a woman to leave a man without having a backup man ready to go. The backup man may be another relationship or just sex, but the point is, she has her options lined up. I'll admit, I'm sniping at low hanging fruit here. These are some of the worst examples of red pill writing. These guys take scraps of ideas and personal experiences and cobble them together into something that's usually pretty irrational. But I'm starting with this low hanging fruit because it's the lowest common denominator. This stuff is out there in droves. It's in videos, essays, forums, and comment sections. The ideas get recycled and repeated endlessly. A cynical person might say there are a lot of guys out there who got dumped and they're looking to blame some factor outside themselves. I don't want to start there because I don't think it's entirely true. Plus, I try never to start with a conclusion. So let's start with a question I've been wrestling with for the last few months. Does red pill hypergamy theory explain behavior? Does it predict the decisions women make once they've entered a relationship? I have no doubt hypergamy influences what women find attractive. It undoubtedly affects the relationships they choose. But does it predict things like cheating, monkey branching, divorce? I can't logically say that it doesn't, but beyond men's self-reported anecdotes, I can't find much evidence that it does. I'll give you two reasons I think the red pill version of hypergamy doesn't have much predictive power. First is my clinical experience. Over the last 15 years of frontline clinical practice, I've seen the ugly, intimate details of a lot of broken relationships. I've seen destructive behaviors of all kinds from men and women. But never. Not once, not a single time have I seen a case of female infidelity or female initiated divorce where hypergamy appeared to be a relevant factor. I'll explain why in a minute, but I want to assure you that I'm not talking about relationships I'm forced to speculate over or situations in which I only heard one side of the story. I'm talking about relationships that I methodically dissected from different points of view. I don't doubt for a minute that hypergamy under the classical definition causes unrest among couples where she's the more successful breadwinner. I can think back on a few cases like that. None that led to divorce in my practice, but there is a recent study out of Sweden that found couples have an increased likelihood of divorce if the woman is promoted to CEO or high political office, but not if the man is promoted. Of course, the media and psychologists were quick to blame that increased risk of divorce on the fragile male ego. There's nowhere near enough data to draw that kind of conclusion, but having seen the scenario play out a few times in my office, I can't help but wonder if hypergamy, in the classic sense of the word, made some of those Swedish wives dissatisfied with their men after she achieved a higher relative status than his. Women made across and up. Right now, we don't know. I'm also not naive enough to think there are no women who cheat on divorce out of a pure opportunistic desire to trade up. Of course, those women exist. If a human being is capable of a thing, somebody somewhere is doing it. Those women don't find their way into my office because there's no incentive for them to do so. But how many of them exist? How often do women operate that way as a way of life? I don't know. Somewhere between always and never. Good clinicians are trained to be disciplined thinkers. I was trained as a behaviorist to avoid applying population level variables like hypergamy to individuals until I've exhausted all individual level variables, and even then, predicting individual behavior based on the current understanding of a group's characteristics is pretty unreliable business. The more I dig into any particular case of divorce or infidelity, the harder it is to place hypergamy as any sort of causal factor. In my clinical experience, women tend to initiate divorces and affairs for precisely the kinds of unremarkable reasons that epidemiological studies point to. Things like lack of commitment or infidelity from their men, too much conflict, substance abuse, domestic violence. It's all pretty prosaic stuff. However, there's one item on that list of mundane explanations that's particularly interesting from the red pill perspective, financial problems. Both men and women cite it as a major contributor to divorce. You could make a reasonable case that it's hypergamy at play when the woman is the one who initiates divorce because she feels her man is failing financially. That's not necessarily what's meant by the phrase financial problems, but it does happen. In my experience, when a woman is unhappy or insecure because her man's not making enough money, the money problems are typically secondary to something larger. The primary problem is something else that's weighing him down, like depression or substance abuse. Or it turns out he wasn't the guy he said he was and the two of them didn't invest enough time getting to know each other, if only someone had warned them. Now if you're a red pill adherent, you might say, so what? Still boils down to hypergamy. She thinks she's worth more than he's providing, and that's what's driving her out of the relationship. Fair enough, I don't think you're necessarily being irrational if you frame it that way. But I'm not at liberty to frame it that way, because as a clinician, I'm bound to treat the primary problem first. If the primary problem is something like alcoholism, then that's what I need to focus on. On top of that, I still haven't seen hypergamy as a relevant variable in cases of this variety because most of these women, at least the ones I've met, only leave after they've gone to heroic efforts to save him and the relationship. This scenario isn't all that common, but I do meet women who try desperately to resurrect their floundering men. These women will stick around longer than bosses, or friends, or the bowling team, or brothers and sisters. They'll stick around long after they themselves could have walked out on the guy. That's not very good evidence for hypergamy. And by the way, it's not necessarily good to have someone protecting you from the results of your shortcomings. Loyalty is great up to a point, but you don't want your wife or girlfriend protecting you from reality while the ship is sinking and you're both caught up in some adolescent you and me against the world fantasy. But that aside, healthy married women tend to stick around. They don't want to go through divorce even though they have the advantage in family court. They don't want to break up their families, disrupt their children's lives, live with questions like why can't I keep a man in my life? Maybe they even feel emotionally attached to their man, and that's no small factor. Now it's at this point that some hypergamy evangelists will lay down one of my favorite arguments. They'll say that if she's not behaving in an observably hypergamous fashion by leaving her underperforming man, it's only because she's maxed out her potential and run out of better options. She can't monkey branch because there are no more branches for that particular monkey. I've heard this argument many times that the absence of observable hypergamous behavior is evidence that hypergamy is driving her behavior. If this is you, all I can say is congratulations. You've attained a level of unconditional belief that only a lucky few will ever experience. But enough about me and my little clinical practice. It's not a perfectly representative sample, so make of it what you will. Let's talk about the second reason I don't see much predictive power in red pill hypergamy theory, ovulatory shift. There's been a lot of compelling research into ovulatory shift over the years. On the face of it, the theory makes perfect sense because one of the purposes of the endocrine system is to influence behaviors like sleep, emotion, and sex. It would be silly to argue that shifting hormones have no effect on a woman's motivation and behavior. But you know what else influences her behavior? Her prefrontal cortex, the decision maker, the front office. We're not slaves to our impulses, that's why we're able to have civilization. The red pill theory that shifting hormones can lead to the downfall of relationships, well that's a tough one to support because the existing research doesn't indicate that women based long-term life decisions on transitory shifts and motivation. At best, ovulatory shift appears to have minor effects at the margins. And it's true that minor effects can have major consequences, but not as a rule. When researchers talk about the behavioral changes that accompany ovulatory shift, they're usually talking about things like small shifts in a woman's gate or her choice of clothing. Those are the sorts of behaviors that ovulatory shift researchers measure, and while they undoubtedly reflect a shift in desire, they do not appear to be decisive variables in a woman's drive to have an affair or to impulsively bang Chad or to get a divorce. Recently, the renowned evolutionary psychologist David Buss wrote this, We do not know whether the cyclical or more enduring changes in women's desirability influence qualities such as their level of satisfaction with their current partner, their attraction to alternative potential mates, their efforts to cultivate backup mates, or the temptation to have an affair, but there is tantalizingly suggested evidence. He's right. It is tantalizing. But in order to make red pill hypergamy theory work, you have to disregard the incentives for faithfulness. Loyalty and the drive for infidelity are competing forces in romantic relationships. There are incentives on both sides of that equation, and I think Buss is saying you can't draw conclusions from ovulatory shift theory because we just don't know how much behavior the theory can actually explain. Add to that the fact that ovulatory shift has had a rough go of it lately in the professional literature. For starters, there's this replication study that's currently in press. As studies go, it's pretty large and robust. That's what she said. The authors found serious lack of support for some major pieces of ovulatory shift theory, such as female preference for more masculine faces and bodies during the fertile phase. It also found a lack of preference for socially dominant behaviors in men like arrogance and assertiveness. The study did find shifts in what women find attractive throughout the cycle, but the researchers pointed out that what a person finds attractive is not necessarily the same as what a person prefers. For example, I think the 1986 Lamborghini Countach is one of the most beautiful cars ever created. I find it attractive, but I don't want one in my garage because I don't need the headache. I prefer my pickup. Contrary to what a few meatheads might think, women are capable of that level of analysis when it comes to choosing men. That's just one of many studies that undermines ovulatory shift theory. This 2014 meta-analysis of 50 existing studies reached a similar conclusion. Ovulatory shift might nudge a woman toward Mr. Alpha for a one-night stand, but hormonal shifts don't seem to affect their long-term relationship decisions. And here's a different study from 2018. These authors also noticed a shift in women's desires, but they found that during fertile days, women in romantic relationships have a heightened sexual attraction to all male body types, not just the masculine ones. Outliers aside, I assume. That certainly undermines the red pill prediction that hormonal shifts compel women to bang Chad while dad is home watching the kids. I should note that Steven Gangestad, who is a proponent of ovulatory shift theory, argued that the study placed too many constraints on the data, and therefore the conclusion was premature. Maybe. I'll let them sort it out. But another study from 2018 found that women's preference for masculine physical traits is more reliably predicted by overall hormonal state, that is whether they're cycling or post-menopausal, than by cyclical hormonal changes. In other words, individual women have their individual preferences and hormonal shifts don't override that. And here's yet another study indicating that ovulatory shift affects sexual desire, but it doesn't create any measurable shift in actual mate choice. We could really get into the weeds on this topic. The point is, the jury is still out on ovulatory shift. The debate will continue. All I'm willing to say with any conviction is that ovulatory shift appears to affect a woman's desire, but not necessarily her behavior. I see no convincing evidence that women make long-term decisions based on short-term transient states of mind. I should point out that ovulatory shift isn't the only theoretical basis for red pill hypergamy theory. It's the most important one, but there are others, like mate switching hypothesis and sperm competition. Since this video is long enough as it is, I'll truncate the discussion by saying they don't seem important or compelling enough to include here. So to sum it up, when I look at my clinical experience, along with the controversy over ovulatory shift theory, the best I can say about the predictive power of red pill hypergamy theory is maybe, sometimes, but I wouldn't bet the ranch on it. So you might be thinking, hey Sean, if you're such a damn genius, how do you explain the importance of hypergamy in the red pill community? Are you saying all those men are wrong? No, I'm saying theories can take on a life of their own. People can be right about their own experience and wrong about how they make sense of it. I don't know exactly how red pill hypergamy theory evolved into such a powerful idea, but having read through so much of it, here's what I think might have happened. Hypergamy started out as a basic, boring concept having to do with mate selection, but because the idea was specific to female nature, it was tempting to give it more explanatory power than it possessed whenever individual women did unkind things to individual men. Some of those men who were treated unkindly found the red pill community, which is an echo chamber like any other online community. As near as I can tell, the concept of hypergamy grew and morphed over time as men told each other their stories and gathered whatever sociological studies would back them up. Those stories shared similar elements of betrayal by women, so if you're a man who's been on the receiving end and you're hearing similar stories from other men, it's only natural to conclude that those stories reflect a truth about the world that people outside the group are too naive to see. That doesn't necessarily mean the group's ideas are wrong. All it means is that the ideas were insulated from any real scrutiny beyond small disagreements over minor points. It can happen to any group, and if dissenters are invited to kindly fuck off, then ideological purity sets in, and confirmation bias runs amuck. The discussion devolves into a repeating cycle of people telling each other how correct they are while the group becomes increasingly intolerant of information that might challenge the orthodoxy. I can't say for sure that that's how the red pill community crowdsourced this theory, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that I've watched that cycle play out in real time with a different community and on a much larger scale. And where would such an unsavory thing take place? Unfortunately, it happened in my own profession of psychology. Let me take you on one last detour. I want to talk about one of social science's more embarrassing chapters. It's what's come to be known as the replication crisis of recent years. It was in all the papers. Maybe you heard about it. It's relevant here because it provides repeated examples of how theories can veer off course when they're insulated from proper scrutiny. Let's start with this happy little report from 2015. It's just one example of recent events. As the replication crisis was coming to light, 270 psychologists got together and tried to replicate 100 experiments from three psychology journals. The results were troubling, to say the least. Only 36% of the original studies held up, and most of the ones that did showed weaker effects than the original study. When the psychologists combined the original studies with the replication results, only 68% of the studies remain statistically significant, and statistically significant doesn't always mean very much. On the plus side, other researchers examine the methodology of this giant replication study, and they claim that it's flawed. They say the psychologists cherry picked studies to replicate, that they use different populations from the original studies, and that they failed at randomization, which might have introduced bias. They say the replication crisis isn't nearly as bad as it's being reported. I want to believe that's true, but it doesn't change the fact that an unacceptable number of studies, both old and new, appear to be flat out wrong. For example, maybe you've heard about power posing. This was a famous study that came out in 2010. It said you can increase your courage and improve your personal outcomes by posing your body in a non-verbal power display before a performance. The study said that merely by posing in a confident manner, you can elevate your testosterone, decrease cortisol, and increase risk tolerance. So far, the author's TED Talk, where she promoted a free low-tech life hack, has had more than 55 million views. But when outside researchers replicated the study, they found something different. They found that power posing did slightly increase people's subjective feelings of power, but they found no changes in hormones or behavior. They couldn't replicate the finding that power posing has any real-world effect. This problem is showing up repeatedly, sometimes with very influential studies, the type of stuff that shows up in psychology textbooks like social priming, the Stanford Prison Experiment, the famous Marshmallow Test, or that video games can cause aggression. Out of all of these topics, there's one area of study in particular that has a major replication problem, and I want to spend a few minutes on it, because I think both the theory and the way people respond to it bear an uncanny resemblance to red pill hypergamy theory. It's called implicit cognition. It comes out of the work of Anthony Greenwald and his colleagues starting way back in 1995. His idea was that you could measure a person's unconscious biases and attitudes by timing their reactions to various words and images. Then you can predict how those biases will mediate people's behavior in the real world. In 1998, Greenwald published the results of his first implicit association test, where they supposedly uncovered the hidden racial biases of their subjects. This was exciting stuff, and Greenwald became a rock star in the social sciences. Finally, there was a way to ferret out all those hidden roots of racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other biased people might harbor. An entire industry grew up around implicit cognition and the implicit association test. There was a proliferation of researchers studying it and consultants selling it to HR departments. Implicit cognition researchers became a club. They were the cool kids, the avant-garde. They started citing each other, recycling the same language and the same data. The theory took on momentum. It became increasingly insulated and self-referential. To some people, it became sacred. In fact, when the replication crisis was coming to light and researchers began examining the methodology of these studies, one implicit cognition evangelist famously called those challenges methodological terrorism, conducted by bullies. Luckily, cooler heads prevail. The scientific method is winning out, and people are acknowledging that implicit cognition is probably a whole lot of nothing. The test doesn't appear to measure anything beyond reaction time, and even Dr. Greenwald himself has said the theory lacks the integrity needed to be put to any practical use. There are two problems with implicit cognition theory. First, the implicit association test doesn't measure anything people aren't already aware of. I'll give you a brief quiz to show you what I mean. Quick, answer these questions. Elvis or Beatles? Ginger or Marianne? Time's up. Were you surprised by your answers? Of course not. You know which way you've leaned, and so does everyone who takes the implicit association test. The second problem is that biases don't seem to hold much influence over social behavior. You might hate the Beatles with a burning passion, but you don't throw a tantrum if someone plays Penny Lane at a wedding reception. You probably don't react at all. This is where implicit cognition falls apart completely. It does not predict behavior. Personally, I've always found the theory to be creepy and authoritarian. I picture an army of social workers and HR directors with clipboards using the implicit association test to get people's minds right. The theory doesn't even pass the smell test if you stop and think about it. It sounds a lot like L. Ron Hubbard's clap trap about n-grams. In the Scientology cult, n-grams are hidden, painful memories that can override the conscious mind and seize control of people's behavior, almost as if they were hypnotized. But anyway, there are a lot of half-baked theories in the social sciences, so why did this particular theory gain so much traction? I think the answer is that it fits a narrative. Social scientists tend to be highly concerned with social justice, and here was a theory that fit their worldview, explained so much of what they believed about racism as a driving force in society, and that human nature can be perfected if we can just get into people's heads. The theory even allowed them to reject people's stated motivations because now they could see what was really going on in the deep, dark corners of people's minds. But it's a theory that predicts nothing about real-world behavior. This is where I find a similarity between implicit cognition and the red-pill theory of hypergamy. There are two theoretical frameworks created by well-intentioned, like-minded people siting and agreeing with each other. Two theoretical frameworks that supposedly allow the user to peer into the minds of strangers and give rational explanations for things that seem hurtful and senseless. Two theoretical frameworks that give a sense of predictability over other people's behavior. The difference between these two frameworks is that social science is self-correcting. The replication crisis has been embarrassing, but at the same time it's a shining moment in the social sciences because it shows an ability to recognize that things have gone off course, and it shows a willingness to take meaningful steps to correct the problem, even if a few knuckleheads don't like it. I don't see that self-correcting mechanism in any online community. The red-pill community has no institutional checks and balances. It doesn't require classes and statistics or research methods. There are no pre-registered studies to discriminate between theory building and theory testing, no peer review, no institutional review boards, no replication tests, nothing to correct the heading when ideas veer away from reality. That makes it difficult for a skeptic like me to put any faith in the predictive or explanatory power of red-pill hypergamy theory. The potential cost is too high. When you put your faith in a model that has unknown predictive power, you run a serious risk of missing the real reason behind a problem. It boils down to this. If a man is having trouble with a woman, it might not be because of hypergamy. But if he's a true believer that the theory explains female behavior, he runs a serious risk of overlooking the true source of his problem because the theory has convinced him that he already has his answer, so there's no need to look. That usually means a person is bound to repeat the problem. Blind faith in theoretical frameworks is a very dangerous thing. However, having made all those arguments against the explanatory power of red-pill hypergamy, I still think it's a useful concept because it does something mainstream psychology seems unable to do, put men in touch with some hard truths. As far as I can tell, the general message of the red-pill community is that men should take care of themselves in ways that most social scientists frankly don't understand. A crucial part of that message is that men should embrace the darker side of feminine nature rather than idealizing women like a child idealizes his mother. And whether or not red-pill hypergamy theory predicts women's actual life choices, it does carry one lesson in particular that every man needs to take as seriously as if his life depends on it. It has to do with his burden of performance. Red-pill hypergamy theory says there are no guarantees in romance, and because women date across and up, a man's sexual market value is largely determined by what he does with his life and how well he performs in the world. The red-pill says if you're a man, you need to get yourself in order and stay that way because unlike women and children who are automatically entitled to respect and protection, you're not entitled to anything. You're not entitled to love. You're not entitled to forgiveness. You're not even entitled to the relationship you already have. As a man, you're in a constant state of having to earn it. No one expects you to cure cancer on a daily basis, but you do need to drag your ass out of bed each day and make yourself useful. You can rest when you're dead. Until then, you better come to terms with the reality that women and societies admire men who know what they're doing and why they're doing it. The red-pill isn't the first to notice that fact. Roy Balmeister pointed out that this has been the case for men throughout time and across cultures and the burden of performance isn't just about being attractive to women. It's a societal expectation and societies are pretty harsh on men who don't rise to the demand. As he put it, a woman is entitled to respect until and unless she does something to lose it. A man is not entitled to respect until and unless he does something to gain it. My grandfather could have told you the same thing. Any man who's willing to face reality knows it. It's why in The Tactical Guide to Women, I wrote three chapters about purpose and mission before I even got to the topic of vetting women, and it's why I wrote this phrase long before I ever heard the word hypergamy. I don't mean to paint a bleak picture. Personally, I think the burden of performance is a blessing. There's no feeling in the world like walking tall because you have value and you know it, so if any part of the red-pill helps a guy stay on that straight and narrow path, then it's just fine by me. Alright fellas, there you go. You asked and I answered. This video certainly isn't the final word, so let me know what you think and I'll talk to you soon.