When you are married, you might as well wake up every morning, go look at yourself in the mirror and say, “Fuck you. Fuck your dreams, your ambitions and anything else that is important to you. It’s all about her.”

-Chris Rock

In our efforts to understand and quantify women‘s power, we are hobbled by the fact that our culture has very, very limited ways to articulate the nature of that power. In fact, we live largely in denial of the massive amount of muscle and sway inherent to being female, and are under any number of cultural pressures, reinforced by massive societal denial, to act as though that power does not exist.

What would seem to be a minor example of this at work can be seen every time your spell check redlines the word misandry. Though this is actually not so minor. A culture that refuses to acknowledge that a perfectly legitimate word exists on paper, is in effect denying its existence to the collective consciousness. And when such prejudicial elimination of ideas runs unchecked, it not only has the power to skew attitudes and perspectives, but also to shape law and policy, education and public awareness. Misandry runs rampant because misandry does not exist.

Women need empowerment, and always will, because women’s power itself does not exist.

We do have one exception to this. It is the “I am woman, hear me roar,” exception. We are bound as members of this society to proclaim women to be powerful, capable equals to men, even as we are also shackled to the opinion that women are the subjugated victims of oppression by the men who they are supposedly equal to. In its own ironic and completely contradictory way, the “I am woman,” exception is just a publicly mandated, schmaltzy affirmation of the Stuart Smalley variety. We are all compulsory grrl power cheer leaders, chanting therapeutic mantras at women about a kind of power they do not have, and never have had.

And it only serves to lead us further astray from the very real power that they do possess.

We don’t have common expressions like “female dominance,” or “matriarchal oppression,” and despite their absolute legitimacy, as sure as we use them 98% of the public will roll their eyes in summary dismissal, thus demonstrating another aspect of overarching female power that bears no name, and therefore does not exist.

It is like trying to describe a cloud without being able to use the word itself- to a world that does not believe in clouds. We are limited to talking around the subject; we present our meanings in metaphors and similes and anecdotes. We may describe how the power of accusation from women often ruins innocent men, or how men go in to family court at a complete disadvantage by virtue of having a penis, rather not having a vagina, but we really have precious little language to address all this directly. As a result, much of what we say is dismissed as hyperbolic and overly reactionary.

It’s the female advantage to have power that is at once overbearing and invisible; everywhere and nowhere.

But this is beginning to change, thanks to the MRM. Growing numbers of men and women are now aware of misandry, despite their spell checks continued ignorance of it. And with the furtherance of the use of that word, we are not only pushing another addition to the lexicon, but some very key ideas that go with it.

Women can, and do, irrationally hate every bit as much as men.

Women can be sexist, and many are.

Men can be self hating, and many are.

That is the power of a single word, and the more it is forced into mainstream use, the more, albeit slowly, that attitudes begin to change. We are not there yet, but the day is coming that misandry will take its place alongside misogyny in the collective consciousness, and people will have a hard time thinking of one without a cognizance of the other. Language is the locus of social change.

In that spirit, I am continuing the Zeta Game series with a focus on not only reversing the polarity of the power flow between men and women, but on attempting to infuse some more meaning and clarity into the language we use when doing it. And I can best start by taking a word that has been popping up in the Game dialog for some time now.

Hypergamy.

The word is literally defined as the custom of women marrying up, or marrying men who have a higher socioeconomic status than women possess on their own. Gamesters have already expanded on it to describe women’s natural inclination to be sexually stimulated in the presence of powerful men. I read a recent comment in another forum saying that even the most committed of married women will get the ‘gina tingle in the presence of such men, even when ugly ass Henry Kissinger walks into a room.

I have no doubt it is true.

But there is much more to hypergamy, and at the very least it serves the purpose of men well to revise and expand upon our understanding of it, and include that into our common language.

First we should consider that the literal definition of hypergamy and the Game definition both point to the same outcome- women with access to, and use of, the power generated by men.

That power can come in many different forms, and will be pursued differently by different women, especially at different points in their lives.

A younger woman may be attracted to the immediate presence of personal power via thug attraction, while an older, more sophisticated woman will be turned on by a successful man of means. There is, in the biological sense, not one iota of difference between the two women. Both get hot and bothered by what they hope to eventually have control over.

So whether the ‘gina tingle is sparked by a guy on a Harley or a guy with a Harley factory, they are tingling over essentially the same thing.

Both women will enter the relationship in honeymoon phase, but will eventually use the tried and tested methods of sexual manipulation and/or emotional blackmail to put the man on a leash and start assuming ownership of everything he produces, including money, home and personal time.

The average woman will become increasingly demanding and insistent that the energy all revolve around her, and the standard response is for the man to acquiesce. And as I wrote about in my essay, “A Prayer for Joe Bob,” this is where we also see the man lose more and more of himself to her wishes and whims.

Women don’t just marry up. They are on constant alert to better deal themselves, even within, especially within, their current relationships. They enter relationships with the intent to eventually exert total control over them. I saw a woman wearing a T-shirt once that said it as succinctly as I have ever seen it.

More me. Less you.

To illustrate the point further I am reminded of one of the questions I used to ask in the men’s groups I facilitated.

“How many of you,” I would ask, “have ever had the feeling that you wanted to pull all of your hair out by the roots and scream bloody murder because no matter what you did, she was not happy with it and wanted more?”

The roughly 5% of men who answered this question in the negative were all gay.

Even men that claimed to be happily married were able to relate to this frustration, and indeed many of those men attributed their “happy marriage” to the fact that they gave their wives whatever they wanted with no questions.

I call this hypergamy in action, and it is a form of exercised power that is unequaled in its ability to control a man’s life- and it is all but universal to the male experience.

For men who desire the ability to avoid that trap, giving hypergamy an expanded definition (and yes, I can do that if I want to) is in order.