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Boys don't like girls, boys like postgrad housewives
What does the man with a lot of romantic options want?
Does he want a beautiful young trophy wife? Does he want a high-earning girlboss?
The answer, according to Lyman Stone, is neither. What he wants (according to the data) is a woman around his age, with the same academic qualifications. Men with younger (and indeed, older) wives are the ones earning less money. What rich men want, it seems, is a (cultural, educational) peer.
With earnings is becomes a bit more complicated. As a man's income goes up, so does the income of his wife. But richer men earn a larger proportion of household income, and the women married to these men are the most likely to not work at all.
So what's going on here? The Red Pill explanation of men preferring younger women doesn't seem to fit, since the men with the most options (high earning ones) are more like to choose women the same age. However, these couples also choose housewifery at the highest rate. My interpretation of this is that the more money a man earns, the more secure in their class position the couple can be. Therefore, they can afford to have the wife give up work without losing their place in the class hierarchy.
The bitter professional woman explanation (men are intimidated by my qualifications and high salary) doesn't seem to work either. Sure, wives of rich men are the least likely to work, but those that do work are also the highest earners among women. A more parsimonious explanation seems to be that high earning women want higher earning men, and they (mostly) get them.
High earning men seem to want class peers. A woman's qualifications are a marker for class, and a woman's high salary is a manifestation of her class. Of course, once married, they can afford for her to stay home more easily than poorer families.
The thing that surprises me most is that you don't see richer men marrying younger women, as all of the older-younger pairings I've seen in real life have involved high-earning men. It might be that richer men marry younger, and therefore there is simply less scope for large age gaps. Or it might be that richer men are more sensitive to judgement from their peers, who would disapprove of larger age gaps.
Well. That's who they want on their arm when they're seen in public. Certainly selection bias in terms of what we actually see.
My inherent issue with this is its not differentiating between what they chase as sexual partners vs. what they might actually settle in for a long term relationship.
Red Pill would suggest that a wealthy man can and would keep a soft harem of younger women, discarding them as needed, which isn't really refuted by the data here.
Possible. I'll also throw out that younger women are a little less likely to successfully keep up the right appearances and are probably somewhat more likely to do something that is blatantly embarrassing to you either intentionally or unintentionally.
So even if your peers 'approve' of large age gaps, you're still risking reputational damage if the woman you choose is actually immature.
There's the key word. Marry. Leo DiCaprio has gone through 12 younger women in the last 20 years alone (is he an outlier? Probably, but not by much). No wedding in sight.
Broaden the question to more general 'relationships' and I'd imagine age gaps are more prevalent.
So yeah, is there anything in the data to suggest that rich men wouldn't pump and dump as many young women as they can (Elon sure goes that route) and only marry one that actually matches his personal status more closely?
I'm genuinely not trying to be contrarian, I'm just put off when I see a claim like this, backed up by a narrowly-defined set of data that purports to refute an idea that is making a substantially different claim.
I’d guess actual billionaires (like Hollywood stars, whose indiscretions are more public) have a higher rate of infidelity than average, but do male investment bankers have a higher rate of infidelity than male bartenders, tattoo artists, taxi drivers or nurses? I doubt it. Polling shows that male infidelity stays pretty similar controlling for education and most non-religious class background.
The idea that every rich man who can afford to is secretly fucking hot teens or young women seems like more of a prurient fantasy than anything else. Some do, just like plenty of married cops and truckers fuck hookers. But most? I doubt it.
If I had to pick high rates of infidelity by profession, I would put bartenders, tattoo artists, and taxi drivers towards the top, and male nurses solidly above average just due to gender ratios in their field.
I would agree that working class men in male dominated but lucrative(by working class standards) professions are much more likely than average to see sex workers of any description, regardless of marital status. I would also say that fucking teens is either weirdo coded or solidly working class(in the not particularly high income sense) in American culture. But bartenders and tattoo artists cheating on their wives is mostly shocking in the sense that they got married in the first place; these are (relatively)high income men surrounded by easy(relatively) women.
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