The Online Right’s Fairy-Tale Gender Politics
The most dysfunctional participants in the online gender wars just faced a major blow. The traditionalist online right frequently opines about how, as one representative post on X recently put it, “[High-value] men would rather marry a humble, cute Waffle House waitress than deal with a empowered boss b*tch.” But it turns out that the wealthier a man is, the more likely he is to marry a highly-educated woman.Â
“Overwhelmingly, it turns out that the men with the most relationship options (wealthier, higher-social-status men) marry women similar in age to them and with high educational attainment,” writes demographer Lyman Stone in an article published this week for the Institute for Family Studies. “Relationships with large age gaps are more common for low-income men than for high-income men.”
Stone found that, contrary to stereotypes that proliferate online, the wealthier a man is, the more likely it is that his wife has a graduate degree and the less likely it is that there is a considerable age gap between them. Further, high-earning men were mostly married to high-earning women. The average wife of a top 1 percent–earning man also earned over $100,000.
“The simplest explanation for these trends,” Stone wrote, “is that high-earning men who have more romantic options prefer to marry women who are more like a peer. When men have power to influence their mate options, they tend to use that power to find a peer-age woman for companionship and partnership in life.”
These revelations shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone not clinically glued to their phones. For those not obsessed with online gender-resentment fantasies, it’s pretty obvious that people tend to couple up with partners similar to themselves. (For example, Stone also found that a minority of marriages, at all income levels, have an age gap of five or more years.) Falling in love with someone usually necessitates that they have similar values and interests to yourself—features that correlate closely with education, age, and class.
And yet there’s a coterie of tweets—and online personalities—devoted to insisting that high-achieving men find high-achieving women repulsive and instead choose to marry from America’s veritable cornucopia of smokin’ hot Applebee’s waitresses.
Last year, one X user went wildly viral for insisting that men “who feel hopeless about ever finding a good woman to marry” should travel across the country and stop at small-town gas stations and diners in search of eligible young women.
“Every time you see a pretty cashier or waitress with a good vibe, politely ask her out,” the post read. “Tell her you’re out seeing the country and looking for a place to settle and a good woman to mar
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