Of course there are people who prioritize status and people who prioritize looks and people who prioritize every other thing you could possibly prioritize, but that doesn't mean the world is inherently divided into strata based on those things. There isn't some final, overarching ranking of how worthy each of us is, and there's no such thing as the "top 25%" or the "bottom 10%" of either men or women. There are just people, a lot of them, and they are all fallible, and what they want is sometimes confusing and sometimes misguided and very often not what they have. The women who look for money and status and the men who search for the prettiest girl — we can call them shallow, and we won't be wrong, but maybe we can also recognize that something in them is deeply not present or wounded if that's the closest they can come to understanding what might make them happen. Judging them and deciding they're lower on some alternate scale of worth is no better than the Alpha/Beta ranking, and it just adds weight to it.

Just because most people, both men and women, are unaware of the mechanics of status hierarchies doesn't mean that they don't exist. "Associative mating" is as established a concept in sociology as one could be. Everyone does it, which is why it's extremely rare to see a wealthy man with a plain wife or, as Illka has said, supermodels with homeless midgets. The fact that men and women both engage in associative mating does "mean the world is inherently divided into strata"; laws that govern the world of human beings don't have quite the status of physical laws, but the phenomenon exists every bit as much as say, the fact that Irish Catholics drink more than Baptists or the Protestant ethic is involved with the spirit of capitalism. Wishing that they would go away won't make them do so.