Critical Hypergamy and the Enslavement of Women in Capitalist Modernity
I confess: more and more, I find myself coming to dislike the adult human female—at least those in my orbit. This is not an abstract misogyny but a reaction to lived experience. Again and again I encounter patterns that give credence to the so-called hypergamy thesis. At first I dismissed it as crude evolutionary psychology or as red-pill ressentiment. Yet the longer I observe the behaviour of women under late stage capitalism, the more I see that what passes for “choice” is in fact social engineering. Women are not simply hypergamous by nature—they are made to be so, brainwashed into hypergamy by a system that weaponises their survival instincts and sells them enslavement in the guise of empowerment.
The Contractual Illusion of Freedom
Modernity preaches that women are free. But this freedom, stripped of transcendence, is little more than the freedom to negotiate contracts within predetermined conditions. Liberal modernity offers “rights” defined by expensive law, privileges masquerading as justice, and conditional indulgences doled out by privilege itself. Women are told they are liberated because they can “choose” partners, jobs, lifestyles. But what they are actually given are managed negotiations with their captors.
Hypergamy—choosing up, trading up, seeking the “better master”—is not instinct but adaptation. In a world without transcendence, without the horizon of Judgment, survival is achieved by attaching oneself to power, wealth, or privilege. This is not liberation; it is managed captivity.
Mainstream Feminism as Capitalist Reinforcement
Mainstream Western feminism has not destroyed patriarchy but perfected its camouflage. By equating empowerment with entry into the marketplace, it has trained women to see their bodies and desires as commodities. Autonomy is reduced to wage labour or consumption. “Liberation” is redefined as the ability to exchange one form of servitude (domestic dependence) for another (corporate exploitation).
In this schema, hypergamy becomes not merely tolerated but celebrated: a woman who secures the wealthiest partner is framed as savvy, empowered, “winning.” The system reinforces this by making survival precarious for those who do not play along. Capitalist feminism thus colludes with patriarchal capitalism to reproduce hierarchy under the guise of choice.
The Personal Experience of Illusion
It is here that my distaste emerges. I see women who confuse manipulation for agency, who mask transactional logic as love, who believe themselves emancipated while enacting the system’s script. I do not hate them as persons, but I resent the machinery that has reduced them to operatives of capital’s code.
The tragedy is not that women are “naturally hypergamous.” The tragedy is that an entire civilisation has drilled hypergamy into them as survival, while convincing them it is empowerment. Women then carry this coding into relationships, making them the frontline carriers of a system that enslaves them even as it uses them to enslave others.
Transcendence as Counterpoint
If freedom is ever to be real, it must be anchored in transcendence. Without transcendence, every “choice” collapses into contract, every relationship into transaction. With transcendence, however, love ceases to be a commodity. It becomes theophanic—the appearance of the Divine in the beloved, beyond calculation, beyond commerce.
True liberation will never be found in contract negotiations with privilege. It will only come by shattering the capitalist-patriarchal spell and restoring transcendence to human relations. Until then, what passes as female freedom in the West will remain hypergamous captivity, enforced by a system that has stripped women of the sacred and made them slaves to privilege while convincing them they are free.
Conclusion
Critical hypergamy, then, is not an attack on women but a critique of the conditions that have made women its operatives. It unmasks the way patriarchal capitalism has weaponised female desire, reducing it to a survival strategy that reproduces the very structures it claims to escape. The women I encounter daily, trapped in this cycle, may embody the problem, but they are not its source. The source is a civilisation that has erased transcendence and sold enslavement as liberation.
