The Sexual Habits of Highly Successful Men (Part 1)

People like to imagine what wealthy men's sex lives are like, so I talked to the men directly.

There is no group more fanfictionized in the gender wars more than wealthy men. Arguably, young/attractive women have their own share of fanfiction (or hate-fiction) written about them (for example, the idea that they’re all turning down 100 good men a week to get banged by 10 Chads in the club bathroom every Saturday) but wealthy men in particular seem to trigger much deeper, nuanced fantasies.

Just take, for example, the infamous discourse a month ago around a video of an attractive nanny on TikTok, and whether or not it’s marriage-safe to have such a nanny in your home. I wrote about that here. Many of the people involved in the drama were spinning up elaborate tales of wealthy men cheating on their wives with nannies. I even saw one person say “Many second wives were originally the nannies,” as if this was a well-established fact (their proof: “Why would it be a common porn plot if it wasn’t true?”) One tweet went viral for a wealthy man fanfic story in which the wife is out “girlbossing,” which apparently annoys the husband, who’s sitting on his ass at home with the nanny for some reason:

Of course, this is ridiculous for many reasons, first among them that many wealthy men actually want their wives to work, which I wrote about in my recent article, The Men Who Send Their Wives to the Email Mines. But this is just one example of the types of fantasies that people create about wealthy men and their sexual habits.

The main reason for this genre of wealthy man mythology is that (and I know this is a generalization) most men on the manosphere aren’t wealthy, or even upper middle class. You can kind of tell when they talk about how their dating scene is plagued by “freeloading single moms with four kids looking to trap a provider.” This isn’t the reality for your average upper middle class person living in a major metro area. This is also why you might see “status” as such a driver of what they believe makes men attractive, held in higher regard than almost any other attribute (this might not be as evident to young upper middle class women, who would gladly date a college classmate with no job—but that’s because men in their echelon have status baked in already.)

So when the topic of wealthy men comes up, a lot of the stories we hear are stories about what downwardly mobile men think they’d do if they were wealthy, because to many of them, status stands out as the key to unlocking the sex they want to have (and by the way, there’s nothing wrong with fantasizing—I’m not looking to denigrate them for not being born into status.)

I think this is one reason that Trump has historically performed very well with lower-income men. Trump is wealthy, but behaves almost like a cartoon version of a rich person. He’s got a golden mansion, he’s always wearing a suit, he has a supermodel wife, and he’s surrounded himself with attractive young women for most of his career, in a particularly in-your-face kind of way. I’ve heard liberals say that it’s hypocritical for lower-income folks to relate to him because he’s so clearly out of touch, but he’s actually not. He presents himself like the fantasy of a rich person that many not-rich people find relatable—much more than some frumpy Harvard graduate tech guy in a Patagonia vest.

But most wealthy men are not Trump. Most wealthy men do not like McDonald’s more than The French Laundry. But because most wealthy men are not engaging in these arguments online (I assume they are fairly busy with work?) I tried to reach them via a survey instead.

I decided to focus on men making $200K or more, so that I could focus on the top 10% of earners without limiting myself too much (I don’t think I’d have gotten many responses if I limited to billionaires.) There’s no guarantee my survey was 100% accurate, given that I couldn’t verify people’s salaries. However, my plan to make it more exclusive was to send it around to men in my circle who I suspected fit this description, and ask them to send it to their friends. I also posted it publicly, but only kept it up for a short period of time, which would hopefully close the survey before it got discovered by a brigade of phonies.

One piece of pushback I got was that this survey wouldn’t tell us anything about high value men, because income and attractiveness aren’t the same thing. That’s true, but two points:

• I asked the men to rate their own appearance, most of them considered themselves above average (median rating of 7.) Speaking generally, there is a correlation between wealth and good looks anyway.

• Most of the people making this argument were the same exact people who insist that women’s value is in their looks and men’s is in their money and status. So by surveying high-income men, I’m adhering to that worldview which is suspiciously invalid the second it’s under the microscope.

Another argument I got was that there’s no way for me to validate the incomes of the men filling out the survey. I’m fairly confident in the 450 responses I got, especially because I bucketed men by income bracket ($200K-300K, $300K-$500K and $500K+.) My instinct was that if someone wanted to brigade the survey, they would automatically select $500K+, but that was the least common response (17% of respondents) despite having no upper limit.

Anyway, with this study, my plan was to answer some of the following questions:

• Are wealthy single men more interested in marriage, or playing the field?

• How do the sexual habits of married versus single wealthy men differ? Who is having more sex?

• Who are wealthy men marrying? Are these women different from the women they date? What is the physical “type” of a wealthy man’s wife? Is there one?

• If a man is wealthy and single, why? Is it by choice?

• What kind of women are wealthy single men looking for?

• What are the risk factors for wealthy men’s infidelity?

• Are big asses or big boobs “aristocratic?”

So anyway, buckle up, this is going to be a lot! (and it’s going to be in two parts- so stay tuned for part 2 after this.)

The Respondents

First of all, let’s look at who filled out the survey. I had two separate survey paths: one for partnered men (including men in serious unmarried relationships) and single men, but I started with the same basic screener questions.

Most of the men filling out the survey were in their 30s and 40s:

Unsurprisingly, the most common income bracket was $200K-$300K. The breakout barely changed if I limited to men 20-40, as opposed to men of all ages. If I filtered this question for single men only, there was a boost in the $300K-$500K category.

90% of men surveyed had at least a bachelor’s degree, with 39% having a graduate degree:

Most men who filled out the survey were partnered in some way, and 25% considered themselves single:

After filtering for men over the age of 40, 17% were single, and the majority were married. This didn’t surprise me at all, but it might surprise those who insist that wealthy men are dropping out of marriage en masse due to fears of their resources being drained in divorce court. And as far as single men went, only 8% were interested in casual dating more than a serious committed relationship (36% were open to either scenario, and 56% wanted something serious.)

Self-Assessments

I asked partnered men how attractive they considered themselves physically. Most hovered around a 6 or 7 out of 10.

I also asked them how they would rate their level of rizz (charisma, for the olds) from 1-10. Generally the men believed they were of average to above average rizz, somewhat similar distribution to their physical self-ratings.

Now, single men. Single men rated themselves slightly lower on physical attractiveness but still solidly average to above average:

Single men also considered themselves less charismatic than partnered men, but not by much. This isn’t too surprising:

This is where things took a turn. Once they answered with their relationship status, the partnered men were redirected to different questions from the single men. So let’s get into the behavior of partnered wealthy men first.

Who are wealthy men marrying?

There’s a lot of disagreement about what type of women wealthy men are marrying. The narrative on the manosphere is that if a wealthy man agrees to get married (and remember; the perception among many in the manosphere is that wealthy men are turning away from marriage, which just to be clear, isn’t true) he would marry a woman who fit the following criteria:

• much younger than him

• less educated than him

• makes less money than him (or even better, doesn’t work)

• very physically attractive

• less sexually experienced, or ideally, a virgin

• unclear as to what body type they imagine her having- I’ve seen some postulate that slender, waifish women are “aristocratic” and other people saying that the preference for big butts and big boobs is universal among all men. But anyway…I got to the bottom (no pun intended) of that too.

Work and Education Status of Female Partners

First, let’s start with a slightly less sexy topic. Does your partner have a bachelor’s degree? In 94% of cases, the wealthy men were partnered with a woman who had at least a bachelor’s degree, often also a graduate degree.

77% of their partners worked:

Previously, when I brought up the topic of working wives, I was told this wasn’t a fair number because I wasn’t filtering for women who were married (not just partnered) and also moms. Except, fuck you, because I did do that! 56% of the partnered male respondents had children with their partner, and of those men, 70% of their partners worked:

If I filtered by only men who made $500K annually or more, the amount of working wives decreased from 70% to 59%, but was still the most common response. Of the men with wives who were SAHMs, about half of them said their wives planned to return to work eventually. As far as men’s stated preferences about their wives working, of the men with working wives, 90% wanted them to keep working. Of the men with wives who didn’t work, 70% did not want them to resume working. So for the most part, the majority of couples are aligned on what the wife is doing, men with working wives were slightly more likely to approve of the arrangement.

As far as number of kids goes, most respondents with children had one or two. Nobody had more than four.

Age of Female Partners

Now let’s talk about a topic that never gets heated at all- age.

The widespread assumption is that wealthy men marry women far younger than they are. This certainly happens, but the question is: how often?