It looks like some of the ideas from the manosphere have finally made it big. The arcane term “hypergamy,” for example, was given new life by F. Roger Devlin, who wrote the review I discussed yesterday. It was virtually unknown until Roissy/Heartiste popularized it on his widely-read blog, but now it has appeared not only in the NY Times (right before V-day), but in the Wall Street Journal’s online edition in a piece by Taranto that could almost have passed for Heartiste’s daily fare.

Taranto addresses a couple of articles, including the Bennett “It’s time for men to man up” piece that came in for criticism here a couple months ago, and the recent NY Times op-ed by Stephanie Coontz that attempted to put a positive spin on the crashing marriage rate by pointing out that, relative to others, college-educated women aren’t doing so bad. Bennett’s simplistic piece lauded women for their achievements, then took men to task for being a bunch of immature losers. Coontz, for her part, suggested that educated women have it better, because now they can demand that their men scrub their floors, bake cakes and knit doilies.

In her conclusion, however, Coontz gives it all away:

I am not arguing that women ought to “settle.” I am arguing that we can now expect more of a mate than we could when we depended on men for our financial security, social status and sense of accomplishment. But that requires ditching the Lois Lane syndrome, where we ignore the attractions and attention of Clark Kent because we’re so eager for the occasional fly-by from Superman.

Yep, there it is. If you become a “kitchen bitch” for your wife, she’s going to be lusting after other men, and if she gets a “fly-by,” we all know what will happen…

Fortunately, Taranto takes both Bennett and Coontz to task with a good dose of reality in his “Girls gone hyper” piece:

She makes a fairly persuasive case that educated women are at an advantage over uneducated ones in today’s mate market. That shouldn’t be surprising. As Charles Murray shows in his new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” marriage has declined much less sharply among the educated and affluent than among the so-called working class. But it has still declined, and it can be expected to decline more absent a reversal of the trend toward greater female education and accomplishment.

The statistics Coontz marshals are less impressive than they seem. Of women who graduated college before 1900, 3 out of 4 never married. By 1950, she notes, a female college grad in her late 50s was nearly five times as likely never to have married than a nongraduate. Today, that gap has almost vanished, and there is no gap for women in their late 30s.

What Coontz doesn’t say is that this seemingly encouraging trend is almost certainly the result of selection bias. College-educated women were statistical outliers in 1900 or 1950. As the proportion of women who have college degrees expanded enormously, one would expect a convergence with the overall female population. In other words, married women were much more likely to have college degrees in 2010 than in 1900 or 1950. But when you put it that way, it’s a commonplace.

[...]

Most important, the problem that female education poses to marriage is a product of female, not male, mate preference–of what Coontz calls “the cultural ideal of hypergamy–that women must marry up.”

That is where Coontz goes badly wrong. Any evolutionary psychologist will tell you that female hypergamy–more broadly defined as the drive to mate with dominant males–is an animal instinct, not a product of human culture, which can only restrain or direct it.

[...]

For young ladies anxious about spending their lives alone, Coontz offers this advice:

Valentine’s Day is a perfect time to reject the idea that the ideal man is taller, richer, more knowledgeable, more renowned or more powerful. The most important predictor of marital happiness for a woman is not how much she looks up to her husband but how sensitive he is to her emotional cues and how willing he is to share the housework and child-care. And those traits are often easier to find in a low-key guy than a powerhouse.

I am not arguing that women ought to “settle.”

That last sentence is both funny and poignant. Coontz has just advised young ladies to marry short, poor, ignorant, obscure, ineffectual men who will help with household chores. If that’s not settling, the word has no meaning.

The cultural shift has begun. The Victorian myths of women’s unassailable purity are on the way out, and a more realistic interpretation of female sexuality is finally beginning to enter the mainstream. This will have profound consequences for policy in the long term, but there’s still work to be done.