HT Mockingbird--misogyny and nerd culture, with a rabbit trail into an Atlantic piece about how assortive pairing entrenches inequality

http://www.mbird.com/2014/06/misogyny-works-righteousness-and-nerd-culture/

A little piece riffing on a piece about nerd culture and the expectation on the part of some males that if you jump through all the right hopes the hot wife will be yours.  Interesting stuff in its own right but it reminded Wenatchee the Hatchet of this ...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/how-i-when-harry-met-sally-i-explains-inequality/283517/

... We used to live in a Mad Men world. Few men went to college, even fewer women did, and not many women, period, worked outside the home—not that they had many opportunities if they did. In 1960, 42.5 percent of married women hadn't graduated from high school. 39.6 percent had only done that. And just 37.7 percent of all women had or were looking for a job. The stereotype is that men married their secretaries, if their wives did work, and there's something to that—though highly-educated people did still pair up at high rates back then.

And that stereotype gets at what is called "marrying down", which is marrying someone in a lower social or economic strata than the one you're in.  When marriage was a business venture entered into for the purpose of long-term preservation of a family line or a family business or even in cases of "true love" the idea that you had to marry your soulmate did not mean your soulmate was in any sense broadly recognize as having to be your equal.

Sure enough, Matthew O'Brien puts this  point across explicitly:

... That made marriage a different institution back then. Men weren't looking for a soulmate, let alone someone to help pay the bills. They were looking for a good wife and mother. So they were willing to marry "down." Now, it doesn't look like that if you focus on how disproportionately likely college-educated men and women were to trade I-dos. But take another look, this time at the shaded areas. Men with a college degree were about as likely to marry women with only a high school degree as you'd expect by chance. And men with a college degree or more were twice as likely to marry a woman who hadn't finished college. This meant there were almost twice as many college-educated men married to women who weren't than were for the simple reason that many more women hadn't graduated from college than had.

To take even a cursory glance at writings about mating and dating, even among conservative Protestant circles, is to be struck these days by the primacy given to what may be dubbed status-matching.  Another way of putting it is to call it "assertive pairing":

5) More assortative mating. Take a look below at the same chart breaking down marriage by each partner's education, but updated for 2005. The first thing you'll notice is how much more likely high school dropouts are to marry each other than by chance. But look again. Every group is disproportionately more likely to marry someone like themselves than any other.

O'Brien winds up to an observation that all the things about marriage that make it more egalitarian with a newer set of expectations are precisely the things that entrench income inequalities.  Merely blaming Wall Strett wouldn't suffice, it's that college-educated sorts, regardless of formal political affiliation, tend to want to pair off with someone at their own level.  People are less like to marry down these days. 

Shootings even partly inspired by men who feel spurned by the women they believe should have embraced them literally and figuratively may not just be reflections of weird cultures in which men expect to jump through hoops and land a hot wife; men and women who feel they don't measure up may lash out against the culture for sending what seem to be signals that they aren't worthy enough to have a romantic partner and that not having a romantic partner is basically the same as saying one has not attained full and complete humanity.  Of course nobody will say it that bluntly but then if we have a culture in which some people want the movie Frozen to have a sexual subtext that crashes headfirst in the text of sibling relationships our culture may reveal how determined it is to boil everything down to the power of eros even when we're discussing a film about sibling conflict and affection.