Be honest. Is "mail order bride" one of your reactions?

bodice ripper wrote: »

and you believe sleeping with someone for their money is bettering yourself, if you are female?

There's quite the bit of diff between sleeping with someone and marrying them.

Forget money here for a sec and take physical looks. The plain fact is a man or woman going with/marrying someone very good looking is "bettering themselves". Like with money, it isn't the whole picture and it's dodgy if it is, however it's a part of that picture, quite the large part at the start. Good looking = reproductive fitness, an outward expression of genetics and growth in formative years. Goes for both men and women. The only difference between men and women is that men can more easily "earn" reproductive fitness. Being wealthy means any children that are produced have a better start and more options in life. This went double in the past when women were unequal, though even today it still tends to hold. The richer a man is the wider net he can cast and the more beautiful a woman is the wider net she can cast. Now that will likely change somewhat as more and more women become richer and it'll balance out but it seems pretty dug in as a tendency.

From this wiki link .

"Studies of heterosexual mate selection in dozens of countries around the world have found men and women report prioritizing different traits when it comes to choosing a mate, with men tending to prefer women who are young and attractive and women tending to prefer men who are rich, well-educated, ambitious, and attractive.[8] Evolutionary psychologists contend this is an inherent sex difference arising out of sexual selection, with men driven to seek women who will give birth to healthy babies and women driven to seek men who will be able to provide the necessary resources for the family's survival."

But this may change:

"Social learning theorists, however, say women value men with high earning capacity because women's own ability to earn is constrained by their disadvantaged status in a male-dominated society[citation needed]. They argue that as societies shift towards becoming more gender-equal, women's mate selection preferences will shift as well. Some research supports that theory,[9] including a 2012 analysis of a survey of 8,953 people in 37 countries, which found that the more gender-equal a country, the likelier male and female respondents were to report seeking the same qualities as each other rather than different ones"

However even among the more educated and accomplished the old saw seems to still hold:

Townsend (1989) surveyed medical students regarding their perception of how the availability of marriage partners changed as their educational careers advanced. Eighty-five percent of the women indicated that "As my status increases, my pool of acceptable partners decreases" (p. 246). In contrast, 90% of men felt that "As my status increases, my pool of acceptable partners increases" (p. 246).[11]

That's one helluva contrast.