But, in a way, I’d lied to him without realizing it.

See, the critical assumption in this model is the first one: that there are roughly equal numbers of men and women. As mentioned above, that is mostly true in the general population — the U.S. ratio is almost exactly even among people between 25 and 54, and aside from a few labor-heavy countries in the Middle East the ratio is never more than 30% away from equal on the national level — but need not be at all true on a subpopulation level.

My math program, at a state university at home in Florida, was pretty small. I can’t find any explicit statistics on the program as a whole, but it was pretty heavily skewed towards men; I’d estimate around 75% male. Considering that the student body at that university is only 45% male, that’s quite a significant bubble, and when we return to our playing-card analogy, we can see its effects.

Suppose, for a moment, that instead of taking the entire suit of hearts, we only took (say) the queen, the nine, the five, and the ace, and then try to pair them off with the ace through king of spades. This setting, which is 76% male, closely approximates the math department I attended.

The queen of hearts seeks out the highest-status partner available to her, and pairs up with the king of spades: she’s ‘dated up’ by one level. The nine of hearts does likewise, and ends up with the queen of spades: she’s ‘dated up’ by three levels. The five of hearts pairs with the jack of spades (+6 levels) and the ace of hearts pairs with the ten of spades (+9).

A romantic market in a space dominated by men (spades). Women (hearts) in this setting CAN ‘date up’.

If you’re a man in a male-dominated field (or a woman in a female-dominated one; we’ll get to that in a moment), this is what your local world looks like. If you’re the eight of spades, you’re desperate: you’re doing nothing wrong, you’re a decent guy, and yet the ace of hearts can date the ten of spades and you’re all alone? Maybe, if you’re really lucky, you might get the chance to date the ace of hearts, but even the five (who is significantly less desirable than you in a vacuum) is not realistically in your reach.

Within this local bubble, the belief that women hold all the cards (no pun intended) is quite true: all the women here can date men higher-status than themselves, and will likely never want for a partner unless they themselves are extraordinarily undesirable (and can likely find one even then).

What’s worse, status as a romantic partner isn’t just about looks — it’s about personality. The ace of hearts here might be — in fact, probably is — a terrible person (because some people are going to be terrible, and this lowers their status as partners, so you’d expect the lowest status partners to generally be terrible people as well as having other undesirable traits). So if the eight of spades does manage to go on a date with her, he might very well deal with ‘crazy’ or mean behavior, or be taken advantage of in any number of ways. After all, the ace of hearts does not have to fear for her romantic prospects, because if she takes advantage of the eight of spades, she can always go out with the seven or the nine.

None of this is to say that the eight of spades should become a misogynist. But we know people have a natural cognitive weakness to bigotry and overgeneralization, and we know people tend to judge the world based on their local bubbles. So it’s not surprising that in a lot of cases, the eight of spades does start to trend towards misogyny, and it doesn’t imply any special weakness on his part if he does so (only a weakness found in nearly every culture almost everywhere).

If the eight of spades starts trending towards misogyny, the situation gets even worse, because guess how many women want to join a misogyny-dominated space? He’ll quickly find himself in an environment where almost no women are even present, and the ones who are will tend to be extremely low-status, creating a closed loop that further confirms his views.

In the end, the eight of spades — and everyone below him — is likely to end up lonely, sad, and angry through a loop that doesn’t in any way involve the eight being a uniquely bad person.