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Disagree pretty hard. Men have a much lower bar for a partner before they say "I'd rather stay single" than women and men would rather sleep with many different partners than having a single super-high status partner. Or the other way around, some women, particularly while they're still young, apparently even prefer being a high-status man's affair over a low-status man's wife.
Just as an example, I personally know multiple women who "have trouble finding a good man" only to find out that they got hit on by a man who was, quite frankly, better than them. My wife confronted a friend of hers who had this problem and concluded herself that she will probably never find someone unless it's literally Brad Pitt, but he is also an accomplished researcher (her words, not mine). Meanwhile looking at my male friends who struggled, most jumped at the very first chance of getting any girlfriend whatsoever.
You should in particular compare what high-status man vs woman say and what they do, since this is the group that has most agency and can optimize for what they actually care about. High-status man will quite frequently have multiple affairs and rarely complain about finding a partner. High-status woman have much less affairs, and if they have one it's usually with a single man that is often even higher status than them, they will frequently complain about finding a good man and generally invest their resources into finding a single high-status man.
These are very simple, real differences between the sexes, and while you may use any word for it you like, hypergamy is a good one.
As a gay man I would absolutely prefer three 6/10 guys than one 9/10 guy. I have been with guys who are 9/10 and it feels degrading because I know they're hotter than me and it makes me feel bad to be with them. The older I get the less I want to sleep with a super hot guy because it just makes me feel worse about myself. It's basically this meme. In theory I love guys who look super hot because I am attracted to masculinity but it's the cheap thrill subsides when we both know who's hotter. I can imagine myself as richer or smarter or better educated or better on any other metric than any hotter guy but none of these dimensions really matter to me when I'm with a man I perceive as physically hotter than me. I can only imagine that straight men ultimately go through this same process of realization- the classic Gilligan's Island trope comes to mind (younger guys go for Ginger because she's a glam bombshell, older guys go for MaryAnn because she's sweet and loving). The older I get the more I'm looking for a sweet and loving guy I can actually believe likes me, rather than a guy who others will think is hot. Having three men I can believe really like me is a million times more appealing than a guy hotter than me that makes me feel less hot than him.
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As a purely egoistic question? Absolutely the former, no questions asked, and I'm even talking about me personally here. Though I do think it applies to the average man as well, especially given I know how they talk when in all-male company & drunk. If anything in my experience I'm already somewhat unusual in that I actually want kids since I'm a teen instead of purely casual sex. But again, if I'm being honest to myself, I would prefer to have lots have kids with several 6/10 than to have only a few with a single 9/10, assuming I can provide for them.
Of course, in a how-to-structure-society meta way, I prefer for everyone to prefer the latter. So I do not think my egoistic preferences to be good, in fact they're very bad, but I think it is important to be aware of your failures & weaknesses.
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Is it wrong to say it would depend on the man's age? I think the % preferring each option would be noticeability tilted in opposite directions for say 21 vs 31.
Are you saying you think the 21 year old would prefer the three 6's over the 9 and the 31 year old would prefer the 9 over the 3 6's? Or the other way around?
Correct on the first one, I think the average 21 year old would prefer the greater quantity and the average 31 year old would prefer the greater quality.
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It’s undeniable that the status of their partner is more important for women than for men. If you want to call that hypergamy, fine, but to me it’s trivial, and doesn’t translate to the vitriol that usually accompanies the term.
That this way of choosing partners is worse than men’s is not clear. I don’t see much evidence that women would rather stay single than men, for example women are often asking men to commit more, ie be less single. But in any case this is also a legitimate preference, condemning an entire sex on that basis doesn’t make sense.
Where did I condemn women, or implied that their way of choosing partners is worse? If it satisfies you, I will say that men's mate-seeking behaviour ranges from pathetic groveling on one end to callous hedonism on the other end, depending on their status. It is in no way better than women's mate-seeking behaviour.
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Saying that women are hypergamous is not a “condemnation”. It’s supposed to be a neutral descriptor of their mating strategy. The strategy itself is neither good not evil; it’s simply a brute fact, the natural outcome of biological and evolutionary factors beyond the control of any one individual.
Of course no descriptor is ever entirely neutral, and you do see vitriol accompanying the term, simply due to the fact that TRP/manosphere circles attract a lot of vitriolic young men who can’t get laid and are angry about it. But hypergamy itself isn’t inherently a “bad” thing.
Like Marx's description of capitalism is supposedly morally neutral and a brute fact. It becomes this sprawling, undefeatable monster of negative attributes of the other.
I also disagree that hypergamy as redpillers use it ( meaning , women will leave them at the drop of a hat for a higher-status man, women in general are far more likely than men to think their prospective partners are below them, etc) correctly describes women's behaviour and attitudes.
I think either your understanding of the conversations taking place is flawed or you're just looking at lower quality redpillers. It never turned into this sprawling, undefeatable monster in the circles I travelled in - the term has a very specific meaning, and even the additional connotations it took on were related to and in service of that meaning. Women will absolutely not leave them at the drop of a hat for a higher status man(notice how all marriages on earth didn't break up so that the women could go join President Trump's harem), and among people who are actually having conversations (and not just incels transforming rage and sexual frustration into boring screeds) hypergamy is viewed as one of many factors involved in female mate choice. You don't need to have a 140 IQ to understand why such a drive would come into being, and at the same time it is something that men(who simply do not function the same way) would want to know about.
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