I've often thought the reason women tend to be more religious than men is an evolutionary consequence of paternity uncertainty.
Until the recent advent of DNA testing, men throughout human history have never been able to be 100% certain that the children they were raising were theirs. (I suspect this fear also explains most of the behaviors we now classify as "patriarchal.") But most religions teach chastity, especially for women. So religious women, other things equal, make more desirable wives, because they're less likely to cheat. Of course, religious women also raise their children to be religious, particularly their daughters, and especially since it would make them more desirable in the marriage market. So it persists.
There's some truth to this. One study found that the primary predictor of religiosity across cultures wasn't cooperative morals, but desire for social support for a slow/high-investment/sexually restrictive reproductive strategy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513813000901
Thanks for your thoughtful piece. Not at all socially acceptable line of inquiry, but also quite important. As a father of three little girls, I'm particularly interested in this topic. I hope to be able to successfully help my daughters to navigate the minefield of sociocultural development in the coming years. Thank you for helping me to preemptively think through some things.
I'm familiar with some of the work you've drawn upon for your thought process here. The five personality traits/types is something Peterson brings up a good deal. It always smacks of Enneagram and Myers-Briggs to me, but I guess it is real. It ties into a larger concern I have with determinism. While I'm fine with certain correlative observations, there does come to be a sense that certain social levers can be pulled to achieve a desired result. While it doesn't seem exactly like rocket science to argue that tearing apart all institutions and value structures will result in an alienated population, it also has this sort of reductive affect on the conversation. I guess I don't always care about that very much, but in this particular scenario, I'm finding myself wanting to make the case for the activity and power of the Holy Ghost to counteract these and other phenomena that you'll be outlining in follow-up pieces. I have no doubt that the FBI, CIA, and other three-letter agencies believe they have worked out a system of social manipulation to keep us miserable, alienated, and turning on one another. I want to believe that, despite their powerful intervention in American public life, the power of the Holy Ghost can and will upend them. Sorry to go conspiracy theorist and religious extremist on you in the same thought.
Areas of engagement I notice between your article and other stuff I have read: overlap of birth control and anxiety/depression, mimetic learning of mental illness on TikTok, correlation of alienation with the transsexual impulse noted by Abigail Shrier, general critique on women thinking they are entitled to have it all pursuing career over family and then being distressed to find that they have missed the boat on a decent husband and healthy biological children, also the contrasting metrics of homeschooled children with those subjected to government schools.
Finally, I tend to believe that there are equal but different pathogenic byproducts for boys. While the things we are seeing in girls are distressing, I can't help but feel great concern for boys. I don't notice their right-leaning impulses to be particularly measured. And in many ways they seem to be more alienated, even if not as depressed, as women. None of this is offered in an argumentative spirit. Just letting you know where your writing put my headspace. Thanks for being a good writer and thinker, friend!
> The five personality traits/types is something Peterson brings up a good deal. It always smacks of Enneagram and Myers-Briggs to me, but I guess it is real
Yeah, the Big Five hold up psychometrically (test-retest reliability, confirmatory factor analysis, correlations with other measures, etc.) in ways that the other two tests you mentioned just don't. Real researchers use the Big Five constantly, but no serious research psychologist uses the Enneagram or Myers-Briggs. At least I've never seen one do so.
I also agree that the problem is just as severe for boys. It's taking me a long time to write articles these days (real bill-paying work and overdue academia research take most of my brainpower), but after I finish this series on girls' mental health I'll start another on boys'.
As my mother says, some people are not happy unless they're upset about something.
Mothers tend to have a pretty good notion of what "happiness" means. Mine did. Does. Even if she couldn't/wouldn't ever care to discourse on it formally, she nudged and cajoled and frowned and smiled us toward the right ends of life. Warmer... Colder...
Happiness, though different on the classical and the Christian views, was always an objective state of being. The pursuit of happiness was personal growth toward a known ideal. Not a feeling, nor a subjective experience. There was no such thing as a happy junkie, a happy hooker, a happy gangster, even if these got everything they desired. That's not happiness.
But is that what they mean when parents today say, "I just want my kids to be happy"?
So if there is no vision of maturity today—and I think it's brilliant to suggest that we no longer have one, and that this makes us unhappy, and that girls are the early adopters of this faith—then how can we attain maturity? How could we possibly be happy if we don't know what it means to be happy?
But I suspect that the case may actually be worse than that. Because there is ALWAYS an end in view, always a telos, functionally, even if we deny its existence. We seek some good. It is an a priori of moral behavior that we seek a/the good, and avoid the bad. We are moral animals.
What is our good then? Isn't it a state of discontent over the state of the world, sophisticated anxiety over the conditions of our hiero-, hetero-, patri-, supremo-, oligo- world? Maturity as perfect angst? Refined ressentiment?
"There was no such thing as a happy junkie, a happy hooker, a happy gangster, even if these got everything they desired."
As Peter Kreeft says, we don't normally tell people they're wrong about being happy, but they often are.
I don't think we can attain real maturity without clear standards and roles. The fact that most cultures are pretty lousy at actually offering these things doesn't mean young humans aren't invariably looking for them.
As a father of teenaged girls this one smarts. I really like the questions you raise but find the answers you hint at to be deeply unsatisfying.
Some tentative reactions below-
1. The factors affecting the trend might be different than the ones affecting base rates: Percent of teenagers feeling persistently sad or hopeless grew 21%->29% for boys, 36%->57% for girls from 2011 to 2021. And yet most of the gap in men and women self identifying as liberal showed up 2012 onwards. Why the uptick in angst for teenage boys who were part of the relatively more conservative cohort?
2. What if teenagers (especially girls) are more like overloaded engines rather than social barometers? They may be the ones doing the real cognitive reengineering for all of us. Struggling for ways to process the inconsistent, uncanny, and painful lessons of history while simultaneously seeing through the untenable traditional and liberal dogmas. What if they are the ones reaching for a more plausible tragic vision for humanity to imbibe -- against the advertising from priests and entrepreneurs alike? I can't point to any sincerely tragic voices amongst leaders of churches, temples, corporations, governments and universities in our world today. Isn't that a lot of pressure for young humans? Even if equipped with insta and tictoc.
3. What about economic thinking: It is surely not the best path to happiness. And it is a type of thinking that women have been imbibing to a greater degree over the past several decades (https://www.brookings.edu/essay/the-history-of-womens-work-and-wages-and-how-it-has-created-success-for-us-all/). Play acting as homoeconomicus is no walk in the park when you are actually working on ways to reenegineer and implement homosocialis in your down time.
4. Lastly, what if becoming smart smarts, period: Intelligence reveals problems before it offers solutions. Becoming intelligent might entail mental suffering. Might this not be a truth in what we are seeing? Maybe our youth sees that the grown ups don't know what the heck they are doing and will need to become intelligent sooner than before, and maybe this is the cause of their suffering? And maybe young women are finding the need to become smarter faster than young men? At least until a system and vision is established that allows us all to do a lot less thinking and become happier again. What if we are closer to such a vision than we can imagine? Teenagers are more important to history than we like to believe.
Thanks for reading. Sorry my answers aren't satisfying! I didn't imagine I would be inflating my popularity hugely with this one.
1. I think there are plenty of reasons for rising rates of mental illness among all young people and indeed in the whole population. We're seeing the fruits of that with the ongoing crisis of deaths of despair. So, given that practically everyone is facing higher odds of mental distress, what I'm interested in is why young women and girls are the leading edge. The fairly tight temporal association between the rise in depression for girls and the ideological divergence between young men and women provides one obvious avenue for exploration.
2. In a way, I agree — young people are weighed down with the enormous burden of having to invent a new culture as the one they've inherited falls apart around them. I also agree that what Unamuno called "the tragic sense of life" is given very short shrift in our contemporary anti-culture, but I don't think it's true at all that there are no religious leaders expressing this tragic vision. I mean, the central symbol of Christianity is a dead guy on a cross. In a this-worldly sense, Christianity is extremely tragic in its outlook. It's just that the religious voices who do express a tragic sensibility aren't given a platform in any of the high-profile media venues. It's almost automatically disqualifying. You might appreciate the writing of Paul Kingsnorth on this — he's an orthodox Christian with a decidedly tragic vision of the contemporary West: https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com
3. Sure, everybody is suffering as our values shift more and more toward money. But this doesn't explain why girls would be suffering more.
4. I usually don't like to see teenagers or young people as the saviors of society. They're just kids, which means they're (putting it delicately) idiots, just like I was when I was a teenager. I don't want 16-year-olds guiding the course of history. It's far healthier for us to treat young people like *minors* — people who need a little guidance, and need encouragement to commit to a way of life that's being offered to them — than to hold them up as the ones who will solve all the problems grownups have supposedly caused. Because the latter is how hippies raised their kids, and we all know how well that turned out: https://cultureuncurled.substack.com/p/my-mother-the-hippie
Thanks as always for your challenging and thoughtful response.
Bah, just keep on keeping on! You raise important questions and have the courage to hypothesize a plausible causal explanation. At the threshold of a tsunami of algorithmically tuned language spamming the likes of which we are incapable of imagining, the discount rate on popularity should inflate pretty soon.
I need to think more, but I am getting closer to understanding what I think about this:
1. I agree that better understanding causal explanations for higher rates of mental health issues in young women is an open and important question (growing symbolic intelligence, labor force participation, and epigenetics --including diet-- may be more or less important than differential receptivity to liberal brainwashing -- we really don't know)
2. "the (best of the) world is not enough": Is this a tragic world view? Tragedy when done right can feel like a call to transcend -- use history, *act*, go beyond history. Or it might turn into a fatalistic anti-agentic dose of imposter syndrome (if He couldn't then what chance do I have?). “Wear the world like a loose garment”: words of St Francis of Assisi that might have also been said by The Buddha. Teenagers seem to want to do this instinctively -- grown ups neither speak nor act this way anymore.
3. There is something more practical than monetary values: Only 20% of women were in the workforce in 1920. We are close to parity now. In practice, women carry more of the tension between career and kids than men. "The second shift" is real. That should be worth a few percent points of mental health gap between young men and women?
4. Finally, growing up in India, I felt a lot less coddled and thankful for it. According to Tomasello, by 8 years of age human children across societies are normatively held accountable for their actions. They surely aren't fully independent until much later -- like 15 or so across cultures according to him -- but we may well be messing with teenagers agency in unprecedented ways. Here's Barzun on teenager's contributions:
"Teenagers' cultural contribution is more varied and better recorded, and the thought it brings to mind is the marked difference between earlier times and our own in the feeling about age. When the 19th century novelist George Sand at 28 declared herself too old to marry (by custom she had been an old maid since 25) or when Richard II, 14 years old, alone in a large field, faced Wat Tyler's massed rebels and pacified them with a speech, attitudes were taken for granted that are hard for us to imagine. Nearly to the beginning of the (20th) century, society accorded teenagers roles of social responsibility. ...Cultural expectations were based on early mortality and spurred the young to live up to them. Melanchthon wrote an acceptable play when not quite 14 and Pascal's essay on conic sections, written at the age of 15, won the praise of Leibniz and other mathematicians. Halley - later famous for his comet - was a serious astronomer at age 10."
I remember reading that passage in Barzun and feeling terribly ashamed. Here I am in middle age finally, and just barely, working my way out of the long adolescence we inflict on young people in Western society. Not only couldn't I have faced down a crowd of rebels alone on a field when I was 14, I couldn't when I was 30. I agree that there's far too much coddling, and in fact teens are probably justifiably reacting in part to our condescending attitudes — people, girls and boys, like to be treated like mature people and held to high standards. Societies that ask a lot of young people will tend to be rewarded by loyalty, while societies that treat their youth like precious clients will receive disdain and disloyalty. Kids want to test the boundaries, and I think they — especially boys — need to know that the boundaries will hold. When they don't hold, you stop believing in the competence and legitimacy of the elders.
As for the tragic sense, here's a talk by the iconographer Jonathan Pageau you might like. He's an Orthodox Christian and uses Christian language, so I think it counts as a good example of a religious public figure calling people to the kind of asceticism that I think you're correct to intuit that many kids crave, but which our broader culture denies them and in fact is unable to comprehend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPgV2yNEkcM&ab_channel=JonathanPageau
I've often thought the reason women tend to be more religious than men is an evolutionary consequence of paternity uncertainty.
Until the recent advent of DNA testing, men throughout human history have never been able to be 100% certain that the children they were raising were theirs. (I suspect this fear also explains most of the behaviors we now classify as "patriarchal.") But most religions teach chastity, especially for women. So religious women, other things equal, make more desirable wives, because they're less likely to cheat. Of course, religious women also raise their children to be religious, particularly their daughters, and especially since it would make them more desirable in the marriage market. So it persists.
There's some truth to this. One study found that the primary predictor of religiosity across cultures wasn't cooperative morals, but desire for social support for a slow/high-investment/sexually restrictive reproductive strategy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513813000901
Thanks for your thoughtful piece. Not at all socially acceptable line of inquiry, but also quite important. As a father of three little girls, I'm particularly interested in this topic. I hope to be able to successfully help my daughters to navigate the minefield of sociocultural development in the coming years. Thank you for helping me to preemptively think through some things.
I'm familiar with some of the work you've drawn upon for your thought process here. The five personality traits/types is something Peterson brings up a good deal. It always smacks of Enneagram and Myers-Briggs to me, but I guess it is real. It ties into a larger concern I have with determinism. While I'm fine with certain correlative observations, there does come to be a sense that certain social levers can be pulled to achieve a desired result. While it doesn't seem exactly like rocket science to argue that tearing apart all institutions and value structures will result in an alienated population, it also has this sort of reductive affect on the conversation. I guess I don't always care about that very much, but in this particular scenario, I'm finding myself wanting to make the case for the activity and power of the Holy Ghost to counteract these and other phenomena that you'll be outlining in follow-up pieces. I have no doubt that the FBI, CIA, and other three-letter agencies believe they have worked out a system of social manipulation to keep us miserable, alienated, and turning on one another. I want to believe that, despite their powerful intervention in American public life, the power of the Holy Ghost can and will upend them. Sorry to go conspiracy theorist and religious extremist on you in the same thought.
Areas of engagement I notice between your article and other stuff I have read: overlap of birth control and anxiety/depression, mimetic learning of mental illness on TikTok, correlation of alienation with the transsexual impulse noted by Abigail Shrier, general critique on women thinking they are entitled to have it all pursuing career over family and then being distressed to find that they have missed the boat on a decent husband and healthy biological children, also the contrasting metrics of homeschooled children with those subjected to government schools.
Finally, I tend to believe that there are equal but different pathogenic byproducts for boys. While the things we are seeing in girls are distressing, I can't help but feel great concern for boys. I don't notice their right-leaning impulses to be particularly measured. And in many ways they seem to be more alienated, even if not as depressed, as women. None of this is offered in an argumentative spirit. Just letting you know where your writing put my headspace. Thanks for being a good writer and thinker, friend!
Thanks, Jeff!
> The five personality traits/types is something Peterson brings up a good deal. It always smacks of Enneagram and Myers-Briggs to me, but I guess it is real
Yeah, the Big Five hold up psychometrically (test-retest reliability, confirmatory factor analysis, correlations with other measures, etc.) in ways that the other two tests you mentioned just don't. Real researchers use the Big Five constantly, but no serious research psychologist uses the Enneagram or Myers-Briggs. At least I've never seen one do so.
I also agree that the problem is just as severe for boys. It's taking me a long time to write articles these days (real bill-paying work and overdue academia research take most of my brainpower), but after I finish this series on girls' mental health I'll start another on boys'.
As my mother says, some people are not happy unless they're upset about something.
Mothers tend to have a pretty good notion of what "happiness" means. Mine did. Does. Even if she couldn't/wouldn't ever care to discourse on it formally, she nudged and cajoled and frowned and smiled us toward the right ends of life. Warmer... Colder...
Happiness, though different on the classical and the Christian views, was always an objective state of being. The pursuit of happiness was personal growth toward a known ideal. Not a feeling, nor a subjective experience. There was no such thing as a happy junkie, a happy hooker, a happy gangster, even if these got everything they desired. That's not happiness.
But is that what they mean when parents today say, "I just want my kids to be happy"?
So if there is no vision of maturity today—and I think it's brilliant to suggest that we no longer have one, and that this makes us unhappy, and that girls are the early adopters of this faith—then how can we attain maturity? How could we possibly be happy if we don't know what it means to be happy?
But I suspect that the case may actually be worse than that. Because there is ALWAYS an end in view, always a telos, functionally, even if we deny its existence. We seek some good. It is an a priori of moral behavior that we seek a/the good, and avoid the bad. We are moral animals.
What is our good then? Isn't it a state of discontent over the state of the world, sophisticated anxiety over the conditions of our hiero-, hetero-, patri-, supremo-, oligo- world? Maturity as perfect angst? Refined ressentiment?
Some people aren't happy unless they're upset.
"There was no such thing as a happy junkie, a happy hooker, a happy gangster, even if these got everything they desired."
As Peter Kreeft says, we don't normally tell people they're wrong about being happy, but they often are.
I don't think we can attain real maturity without clear standards and roles. The fact that most cultures are pretty lousy at actually offering these things doesn't mean young humans aren't invariably looking for them.
As a father of teenaged girls this one smarts. I really like the questions you raise but find the answers you hint at to be deeply unsatisfying.
Some tentative reactions below-
1. The factors affecting the trend might be different than the ones affecting base rates: Percent of teenagers feeling persistently sad or hopeless grew 21%->29% for boys, 36%->57% for girls from 2011 to 2021. And yet most of the gap in men and women self identifying as liberal showed up 2012 onwards. Why the uptick in angst for teenage boys who were part of the relatively more conservative cohort?
2. What if teenagers (especially girls) are more like overloaded engines rather than social barometers? They may be the ones doing the real cognitive reengineering for all of us. Struggling for ways to process the inconsistent, uncanny, and painful lessons of history while simultaneously seeing through the untenable traditional and liberal dogmas. What if they are the ones reaching for a more plausible tragic vision for humanity to imbibe -- against the advertising from priests and entrepreneurs alike? I can't point to any sincerely tragic voices amongst leaders of churches, temples, corporations, governments and universities in our world today. Isn't that a lot of pressure for young humans? Even if equipped with insta and tictoc.
3. What about economic thinking: It is surely not the best path to happiness. And it is a type of thinking that women have been imbibing to a greater degree over the past several decades (https://www.brookings.edu/essay/the-history-of-womens-work-and-wages-and-how-it-has-created-success-for-us-all/). Play acting as homoeconomicus is no walk in the park when you are actually working on ways to reenegineer and implement homosocialis in your down time.
4. Lastly, what if becoming smart smarts, period: Intelligence reveals problems before it offers solutions. Becoming intelligent might entail mental suffering. Might this not be a truth in what we are seeing? Maybe our youth sees that the grown ups don't know what the heck they are doing and will need to become intelligent sooner than before, and maybe this is the cause of their suffering? And maybe young women are finding the need to become smarter faster than young men? At least until a system and vision is established that allows us all to do a lot less thinking and become happier again. What if we are closer to such a vision than we can imagine? Teenagers are more important to history than we like to believe.
Thanks for reading. Sorry my answers aren't satisfying! I didn't imagine I would be inflating my popularity hugely with this one.
1. I think there are plenty of reasons for rising rates of mental illness among all young people and indeed in the whole population. We're seeing the fruits of that with the ongoing crisis of deaths of despair. So, given that practically everyone is facing higher odds of mental distress, what I'm interested in is why young women and girls are the leading edge. The fairly tight temporal association between the rise in depression for girls and the ideological divergence between young men and women provides one obvious avenue for exploration.
2. In a way, I agree — young people are weighed down with the enormous burden of having to invent a new culture as the one they've inherited falls apart around them. I also agree that what Unamuno called "the tragic sense of life" is given very short shrift in our contemporary anti-culture, but I don't think it's true at all that there are no religious leaders expressing this tragic vision. I mean, the central symbol of Christianity is a dead guy on a cross. In a this-worldly sense, Christianity is extremely tragic in its outlook. It's just that the religious voices who do express a tragic sensibility aren't given a platform in any of the high-profile media venues. It's almost automatically disqualifying. You might appreciate the writing of Paul Kingsnorth on this — he's an orthodox Christian with a decidedly tragic vision of the contemporary West: https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com
3. Sure, everybody is suffering as our values shift more and more toward money. But this doesn't explain why girls would be suffering more.
4. I usually don't like to see teenagers or young people as the saviors of society. They're just kids, which means they're (putting it delicately) idiots, just like I was when I was a teenager. I don't want 16-year-olds guiding the course of history. It's far healthier for us to treat young people like *minors* — people who need a little guidance, and need encouragement to commit to a way of life that's being offered to them — than to hold them up as the ones who will solve all the problems grownups have supposedly caused. Because the latter is how hippies raised their kids, and we all know how well that turned out: https://cultureuncurled.substack.com/p/my-mother-the-hippie
Thanks as always for your challenging and thoughtful response.
Bah, just keep on keeping on! You raise important questions and have the courage to hypothesize a plausible causal explanation. At the threshold of a tsunami of algorithmically tuned language spamming the likes of which we are incapable of imagining, the discount rate on popularity should inflate pretty soon.
I need to think more, but I am getting closer to understanding what I think about this:
1. I agree that better understanding causal explanations for higher rates of mental health issues in young women is an open and important question (growing symbolic intelligence, labor force participation, and epigenetics --including diet-- may be more or less important than differential receptivity to liberal brainwashing -- we really don't know)
2. "the (best of the) world is not enough": Is this a tragic world view? Tragedy when done right can feel like a call to transcend -- use history, *act*, go beyond history. Or it might turn into a fatalistic anti-agentic dose of imposter syndrome (if He couldn't then what chance do I have?). “Wear the world like a loose garment”: words of St Francis of Assisi that might have also been said by The Buddha. Teenagers seem to want to do this instinctively -- grown ups neither speak nor act this way anymore.
3. There is something more practical than monetary values: Only 20% of women were in the workforce in 1920. We are close to parity now. In practice, women carry more of the tension between career and kids than men. "The second shift" is real. That should be worth a few percent points of mental health gap between young men and women?
4. Finally, growing up in India, I felt a lot less coddled and thankful for it. According to Tomasello, by 8 years of age human children across societies are normatively held accountable for their actions. They surely aren't fully independent until much later -- like 15 or so across cultures according to him -- but we may well be messing with teenagers agency in unprecedented ways. Here's Barzun on teenager's contributions:
"Teenagers' cultural contribution is more varied and better recorded, and the thought it brings to mind is the marked difference between earlier times and our own in the feeling about age. When the 19th century novelist George Sand at 28 declared herself too old to marry (by custom she had been an old maid since 25) or when Richard II, 14 years old, alone in a large field, faced Wat Tyler's massed rebels and pacified them with a speech, attitudes were taken for granted that are hard for us to imagine. Nearly to the beginning of the (20th) century, society accorded teenagers roles of social responsibility. ...Cultural expectations were based on early mortality and spurred the young to live up to them. Melanchthon wrote an acceptable play when not quite 14 and Pascal's essay on conic sections, written at the age of 15, won the praise of Leibniz and other mathematicians. Halley - later famous for his comet - was a serious astronomer at age 10."
Via: http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2011/03/education-related-excerpts-from-jacques.html
I remember reading that passage in Barzun and feeling terribly ashamed. Here I am in middle age finally, and just barely, working my way out of the long adolescence we inflict on young people in Western society. Not only couldn't I have faced down a crowd of rebels alone on a field when I was 14, I couldn't when I was 30. I agree that there's far too much coddling, and in fact teens are probably justifiably reacting in part to our condescending attitudes — people, girls and boys, like to be treated like mature people and held to high standards. Societies that ask a lot of young people will tend to be rewarded by loyalty, while societies that treat their youth like precious clients will receive disdain and disloyalty. Kids want to test the boundaries, and I think they — especially boys — need to know that the boundaries will hold. When they don't hold, you stop believing in the competence and legitimacy of the elders.
As for the tragic sense, here's a talk by the iconographer Jonathan Pageau you might like. He's an Orthodox Christian and uses Christian language, so I think it counts as a good example of a religious public figure calling people to the kind of asceticism that I think you're correct to intuit that many kids crave, but which our broader culture denies them and in fact is unable to comprehend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPgV2yNEkcM&ab_channel=JonathanPageau
Thanks for all the references.
Yup, Barzun did that to me too. Even his personal example, all the way past his century mark. Gentleman earthquaker!
I look forward to your future installments.
To be fair, most people male or female don't do a lot of independent thought.
On hypergamy, you might be interested in Scott Alexander's latest. He thinks the evidence for educational hypergamy is mostly overrated, although it does seem to be there for income: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/hypergamy-much-more-than-you-wanted
My wife would have some words to say about it if there were!