We usually think of evolutionary urges as always being good. Like the drive to reproduce, or find a good mate. But when an environment changes rapidly, adaptations that previously served a species well can frequently end up hurting them. In the worst case scenarios, those maladaptations can drive a species extinct (e.g. the dodo bird).

To take an example from the animal world, it's speculated that moths' well-known attraction to bright flames developed when the only source of light was the sun or moon. Those rays of light, being from such a distant source, are essentially parallel, and so flying towards such a light is a good way to maintain a straight path. And of course, a moth is safe doing so because it will never actually hit the sun or moon.

But once humans came along and could create artificial sources of light, that moth adaptation that served it so well became a curse. A close-in light source doesn't emit parallel light rays, which means moths following such sources start circling it erratically, getting closer and closer, until eventually it gets too close and gets fried.

I humbly suggest that women's hypergamy is a similiar adaptation that used to serve a good purpose but is now a maladaptation.

Hypergamy is a biological imperative. Evolutionarily speaking, a man improved his chances to pass on his genes by having sex with as many females as possible. Quality didn't matter, only quantity. If you could impregnate the alpha female, that's great, but there was no reason to not *also* impregnate the beta / charlie / delta females too. That's why even hot guys will "slum it" with undesirable women for quick, easy sex. OTOH, since a woman can only have 1 child every 9 months, and must raise it afterwards, she does much better by being more selective about who she allows to impregnate her. Therefore, she's programmed to go after the absolute best guy she can get. If evolution allowed her to feel tingles from undesirable men, she'd be less successful at passing on her genes than a woman who was more selective.

Unfortunately, hypergamy never evolved to deal with unavailable men. It evolved when we humans / chimps lived in small colonies of maybe 20-50 people and you had a reasonable shot with any of the males. If hypergamy made you wait for some mythical chimp in another chimp colony 100 miles away, someone who would never actually arrive, then females would never have reproduced and evolution would have weeded it out.

This was fine because until now, the only eligible men you met were all in your high school class and local neighborhood, fairly similar in size and social ties to our original hunter-gatherer colonies. In those situations, hypergamy prevented you from settling with the worst guy, and pushed you to at least try for the best guys. So when the so-so guy flirted with you, you blew him off, waiting to see if the better guy was interested. And you were incentivized to work on traits that would attract high-value men, like being attractive, having a good personality, showing that you could be a good mother, etc. That's not a bad thing. Furthermore, if you didn't get the absolute best, the next guy was not that much worse, so you were satisfied with that. E.g. say the best guy in your high school was the starting quarterback for your HS team. That's great, but he isn't Tom Brady. And the next-best guy is not that much worse an option.

In our new, social media-driven environment, hypergamy has become maladaptive, because it exposes women to a bunch of guys who they don't really have a chance with (at least to marry), yet the same instinct kicks in. Now, instead of only being exposed to your high school quarterback, if you post an ass selfie, you might get a DM from Gronkowski or some other professional player who's following some hashtag you wrote. Do you have a shot at marrying him? Unlikely. Yet once you get that 'like', your hypergamy kicks in and says that's the guy you need to pursue and drop all the others.

It's even worse, because the difference between Gronkowski and your neighborhood beta dude is far, far more than the difference between the HS quarterback and that beta (in a few years, that beta might even exceed him, by getting a better job and staying in shape, while the HS QB never goes to college, gets fat, and ends up working at the local gas station). So "settling" for the beta guy seems like even more of a drop, when the alpha you thought you had a chance with isn't just the HS QB, but Tom Brady or Gronk.

Similarly, even if you lived in NYC, unless you worked in the finance industry, or went to one of their elite schools, or moved in their circles, you would never meet a hedge fund guy. They might as well have been on Mars for all you'll have access to them from Queens or Jersey. Now, put your picture on Tinder, and you'll probably get a reply. He's looking to slum it for a night, but your hypergamy kicks in, makes you think you have a chance and should hold out for him, and now, anyone less than a billionaire hedge fund manager is no longer acceptable.

Hypergamy has always been about taking a gamble: holding out for the better guy, hoping that you get him. But if you hold out too much and end up with no one to reproduce with, you lose the game. That's what's happening now.

Social media is giving women the illusion that those top 20% are available to them. Years ago, if you lived in Cleveland, OH, there was no way to even meet a celebrity in Hollywood or a hedge fund manager in NYC. Now, if you post an ass selfie on Instagram, you might get DMs from celebrities, rich guys, not to mention thirsty dudes from Saudi Arabia and India asking you to show your bobs and vagene. It's not uncommon for an average instagram ho to get hundreds of messages from guys when she posts a selfie. And it's not uncommon for girls to get literally *thousands* of matches over the course of a year on tinder. In the past, an average girl would never even *meet* a thousand eligible guys in her lifetime.

But they never realize the truth: that financier in NYC is either going to marry his college sweetheart, someone from work, or someone else in a similar socioeconomic group. Yes, some will marry their secretaries, but the vast majority don't. You can fuck him all you want. When he's ready to raise kids, he'll choose someone who will be a "good mother" and that includes navigating the socioeconomic circles necessary to ensure his kids will get into the top private schools, have the "right" playdates with the right kids, and socialize with the right families. Etc. Marriage at those levels is a lot more than just sex and tingles. The availability of these men to the average woman is illusory. But they don't know that, so they keep thinking they have a shot with them. Or they do know that, but wish to keep trying anyway because they think getting pumped-n-dumped is "so close" to getting one of them to commit. Either way, their hypergamous drive never evolved to distinguish available from unavailable men, because in ancient times, the small number of guys you knew were all potentially available, and you never had any contact with unavailable men anyway.

Social media is the antithesis of those small, close-knit social and kin networks from which hypergamy evolved. It's designed to tease you with possibilities (so that you keep clicking). In the past, girls would have crushes on some celebrity and maybe put his pictures up on their bedroom walls. But they knew he was out of reach, and so their hypergamous drive would focus on guys more available. Now, if she posts an instagram picture with her tits out, there's a good chance a celebrity will DM her, or at least 'like' her picture. Heck, most celebrities have social media teams that respond to fan tweets and facebook posts, deliberately trying to get you to think you have a real "connection" to the celebrity (so that you'll see his/her next movie).

I liken it to how a casino is designed. Most of us are mathematically innumerate. But we do have a reasonable, intuitive sense to correctly deal with everyday probabilities like 1:2, maybe 1:10, and can make the right choices in those scenarios. Our intuition breaks down when you're talking 1:1 million or 1:1 billion, because in our everyday lives, we never ran into those types of probabilities until modern times. Casinos are designed to take advantage of this deficiency by trying to convince you that the odds of that million-dollar jackpot are "intuitively" the same as the 1:10 chance you're familiar with in everyday life. They do this by having lots of bells ringing, lights flashing, etc. and dribbling out a few coins every couple of pulls to keep you thinking you're about to hit the jackpot any second now. Eventually, you end up with an empty wallet, wondering why you never won the jackpot when it was "so close". And then you blame the slot machine and kick it :-)

The modern sexual marketplace is even worse. At least casinos are regulated and can't lie about the actual probabilities (if you look closely, every slot machine will have fine print on the side telling you what the odds of each payout is). No such restriction keeps a hedge fund guy from telling a woman what her real chances of being married to him are. And no such restriction keeps Tinder from trying to convince you that all those thousands of matches are guys who want to marry you and shower you with gifts and make all your princess dreams come true.

And that totally messes up normal hypergamy. It's like asking a brain that has developed a sense for optimizing 1:10 probabilities, to intuitively optimize a 1:1 million chance. Social media tricks a girl's normal drive into believing she has a chance with these guys, and that those are the guys she should aim for. So she aims for them, ignoring the good but normal guys around her that she could choose from. And after 10 years, she wonders why she never got any of the guys she was aiming for (even though they were "so close" because they'd pump-n-dump her off a tinder match), while simultaneously, emptying her "SMV wallet" such that she's now not able to attract any of the remaining good guys around her. Which means she'll become a single cat lady and never pass on her genes, even with a "lousy" mate.

Now, I don't mean to say hypergamy is all bad. A little bit, tempered with an understanding of probabilities, can still be good. And that's what marriage-minded women in their 20s essentially do. They stay away from riding the CC, and focus on getting the best mate. She doesn't chase celebrities, or blow the band's lead guitarist backstage after the concert. The absolutely hottest ones might lock down an alpha guy, or maybe an older alpha guy who played the field but now wants to start a family. And less attractive girls marry less attractive but good guys like their high school sweethearts, someone they met in college, or maybe in their early working years to a co-worker or a friend-of-a-friend. That's what we mean when we say a woman in her 20s can easily find a decent man to marry. Yeah, you may not get a millionaire Christian Grey, but there are lots of decent men, and plenty of them get paired up with girls who aren't supermodels but are good, decent women.

But hypergamy in large doses is now maladaptive. It leads women to keep pulling the lever in the casino hoping to land the jackpot. And they keep pulling until they hit late 30s/40s, etc. At which point their "SMV wallet" is empty. At that point, even a 70th percentile man is now out of reach. Because those men (assuming single, never married) want to have kids. And it doesn't matter how beautiful and accomplished you are, no guy who wants a family wants to marry someone who is going to have significant problems with that. Every profile of a late 30s woman starts by talking about her college degree, her love of traveling, yadda yadda. None of that matters much. She would do better by posting a doctor's note stating that she's still fertile.

Women get shell shocked by how quickly and steeply their value drops. If you're attractive in your early/mid 20s, you can literally have celebrities trying to get into your pants. Lots of stories abound of drunk A-list celebrities hooking up at bars, clubs with random women. When you hit your mid/late 30s, even a fat schlub with a boring, so-so job wants nothing to do with you, or thinks *he's* the one settling if he has to marry you. That's a stunning fall, something many women have a massive difficulty accepting. Just look at e.g. Elizabeth Taylor, one of the most beautiful and famous women in the world. She had marriages and affairs with some of the most rich, famous, and powerful men in the world. And yet, her last husband was an ugly construction worker with a mullet.

In many ways, extreme hypergamy is worse than the most predatory casino. Because most of us, even if we lose all our money in Vegas, can go home, work, fill our wallet back up, and go back to Vegas and try again (or finally wise up and spend our money on more realistic but boring investments like a mutual fund). But a woman who listens to her extreme hypergamy, gives in to the lies that social media tells her about how that 6'4" millionaire with 6-pack abs is "just a swipe away!", and keeps pulling away at the one-armed bandit, and eventually ends up with an empty RMV wallet that she can't ever refill. At that point, 40 years old and without a man, or children, her hypergamous instinct leads her to extinguish her genetic line. The exact opposite of what it was supposed to do.

At the end of the day, an evolutionary drive that served her well for thousands of years has been unable to adapt to the new environment created by social media and the sexual revolution. Just like our sense of probabilities is good for telling us when it's safe to cross the street, but breaks down in a casino. It will probably take several generations at least, for this drive to be re-calibrated to the new environment (or the environment might change again). And in the meantime, lots of women are losing the RMV equivalent of their life's savings by it.