As inequality deepens across Western societies, patterns of childbearing are shifting against the backdrop of declining fertility. We are quietly reverting to an older reproductive order: some men father many children, while others remain childless. Yet the old polygamy of simultaneous wives is being replaced by a new form—sequential polygamy. A man passes through several relationships over his lifetime, and each partner bears him children.
By its very logic, this pattern is concentrated among the affluent (setting aside specific welfare-dependent subcultures). A wealthy man can afford three successive marriages and provide for the children of each. But this arrangement assumes a world where nearly all women are poor, most men are poor, and only a small minority of men are rich. In reality, wealth today is distributed across both sexes. There are rich women as well as rich men.
A wealthy woman may pursue a wealthy partner, seeking to consolidate family fortunes and influence—but she has other options as well. Those options have been examined in detail by evolutionary psychologists. I will return to their findings shortly.
For now, consider the underlying question: how does a female behave when she can secure her offspring’s survival without male support? What is her optimal mating strategy? In nature, the peahen offers a vivid model. She selects by beauty—not because she enjoys the sight of the peacock’s feathers, but because she prefers a mate who is attractive to other females. Her goal is indirect: to produce sons who will, in turn, attract many mates. Her lineage continues not through prudence or good sense, but through appeal.
There may once have been peahens who chose mates for intelligence or resilience. Their sons might have survived longer and in better health—but if they failed to attract females, the line ended. The genes for prudence died out; the genes for glamour prevailed.
At first glance, this might seem to vindicate the “incel” diagnosis—that women today are becoming ever more fixated on male looks. But this is too simplistic. Women who follow this strategy seek not beauty for its own sake, but social proof—the man desired by other women. In human societies, such non-material attraction seldom rests on physical beauty. It rests on prestige.
When the wife of director Jiří Menzel chose a respected professor of Egyptology as the father of her child, she was following this precise evolutionary script. Another example is Václav Klaus Jr.—hardly a matinee idol, and not the heir of a vast fortune, yet certainly a man of status and intellectual renown.
In today’s landscape of inequality, the advantage in passing on one’s genes belongs not only to the rich, but to the admired—the prestigious, the respected, the socially validated. Wealth and beauty may fade; status endures long enough to reproduce itself.