The Online Right's Fairy-Tale Gender Politics
Would wealthy men really choose a Waffle House waitress over a girlboss?
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.
"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 marry. Repeat until you've found someone to go steady with."
While the post received plenty of ridicule—one user even attempted this plan, unsurprisingly finding that rural truck stops were full of old men, not pretty young women—it also typified an incredibly common attitude on the online right. Education and careerism have ruined women; the only "good ones"—i.e. sexually inexperienced, young, and submissive—are out there in the hinterlands.
"Women will never understand that 'would you rather marry a 35 year old 9/10 with a great job and 20 past sexual partners or a 22 year old 9/10 grocery clerk with no past sexual partners' have very different average answers for men and women," reads another viral post from May. That month, Matt Walsh posted a popular tweet of his own decrying marriages where the wife makes more than the husband as "Totally inverting a system that has worked across all of human civilization since the dawn of humanity."
And some women are getting in on the action as well. Last week, former The View co-host Jedidiah Bila argued that "Men do NOT care about your career, ladies. I'm sorry, they just don't," adding that "They will date a waitress at Applebee's over a corporate executive if they treat them right and make their lives easier." A popular comment agreed that "Many modern ladies may not want to believe it, but men tend to be attracted to women who are willing to have babies rather than be a boss-babe. That's why the Applebee's waitress is more desirable."
These tweets sound almost like modern-day fairy-tales—the wealthy businessman who traverses diners in small-town America in search for a worthy bride to pluck from obscurity. It's a common enough story in popular culture, appearing in various forms from Cinderella to Shakespeare. The first major English novel, Samuel Richardson's 1740 epistolary novel Pamela, concerns a beautiful and virtuous servant girl who marries her employer after successfully fending off his aggressive sexual advances. And the Hallmark Channel is notorious for churning out direct-to-TV movies about self-absorbed businessmen won over by small-town girls who just love Christmas (though such films feature plenty of girlbosses who ditch their careers to marry similarly Christmas-obsessed small-town men).
The difference, though, is that fairy-tale inter-class marriages have typically been a fantasy for women. It is the poor girl of unremarkable birth who dreams of catching a prince for a husband, not the prince who laments that all the noble ladies of the kingdom hath been run through by Sir Chad, necessitating he find a fair maiden who works in a tavern. In these stories, the wealthy man cannot help but fall in love with our protagonist because he is so overcome by her virtue and her beauty that she essentially transcends her class limitations—she is a noblewoman in spirit, born of peasant parents. In Shakespeare's highly underrated 1611 play The Winter's Tale, this troupe is literal. A prince falls in love with a shepherdess, only for her to be revealed to be a long-lost princess.
But the class politics of the right-wing "trad bro" are entirely different. Instead, they outwardly pine for the virtues that apparently only uneducated and poor women can possess. The wealthy and educated women—the "girlbosses"—are assumed to be corrupted by what makes men "high value": ambition, expertise, and self-knowledge.
Some of this comes down to the fact that many of the men repeating this stereotype aren't wealthy themselves. Substacker Cartoons Hate Her pointed this out last year: "The main reason for this genre of wealthy man mythology is that (and I know this is a generalization) most men on the manosphere aren't wealthy, or even upper middle class," she wrote. "This is also why you might see 'status' as such a driver of what they believe makes men attractive, held in higher regard than almost any other attribute (this might not be as evident to young upper middle class women, who would gladly date a college classmate with no job—but that's because men in their echelon have status baked in already.)"
For that reason, there's an unmistakable hint of resentment in this fantasy. All over the manosphere, it's easy to find men delighting in the idea that the women who rejected them in their 20s will end up miserable and alone by their 30s, the point at which they hit "the wall" and stop being attractive. The idea, then, that such women would be rejected by men of similar age and education in favor of "worthy" (i.e. young and submissive) women only completes this fantasy.
And then, of course, there's the fact that the kinds of men who end up as manosphere gurus don't tend to like women very much—especially on an interpersonal level. The idea of having a relationship with a woman that goes beyond sex doesn't seem to register to many of these accounts. To them, it is unfathomable that a man, especially one so rich and well-connected as to theoretically attract just about any woman he desires, would do anything but select for the most sexually attractive (and, again, submissive) woman. Why would you marry a 35-year-old corporate lawyer when America is bursting with hot, GED-toting 22-year-olds? I don't know dude, because you love her?
But Stone's research reveals these constructions to be entirely fantastical. Most heterosexual men and women are not gender fatalists; they want to—as one oft-maligned saying goes "marry their best friend." The cynical transactionalism of online trad bros (and their female equivalents) doesn't translate in reality. The median rich man's marriage looks a lot more like Mark Zuckerberg's than Donald Trump's.
But despite the obvious flaws, this particular theory of gender relations just won't die. Thankfully, those most likely to believe in it are stuck on their phones or at their computers, while the rest of us are living in the real world.
