(hat tip to the Pervocracy)
Recently, the Washington Times has run one of the most sexist dating articles (and that is saying something) it has been my distinct misfortune to see. I’m not linking to them, because I don’t want to give them any more traffic than they already have; the Pervocracy’s takedown, done by our Holly [now Cliff– ed] Pervocracy, is far funnier. I would like to discuss two quotes and show exactly how misandric they are.
A fundamental principle of sexual economics is that “sexual activity by females has exchange value, whereas male sexuality does not,” Mr. Baumeister and Ms. Vohs wrote in their 2004 paper.
Essentially, this quote plays into the Myth of Men Not Being Hot. Both men and women in our culture tend to grow up not feeling physically desirable. Women are presented with a single attractive female body– the twentysomething feminine slender cis woman with large breasts, long legs, a round firm ass, a flat stomach, no body hair and an attractive face– and shamed when, inevitably, they cannot reach this ideal. There is a theoretical attractive woman; however, given that there is yet to be a real-life Photoshop filter, no woman can be her. Men, on the other hand, are usually taught that there is no such thing as an attractive male body at all.
Therefore, it is assumed that no woman can just want a man because he’s pretty and she’s horny. Maybe she wants him because he’s rich and can buy her diamonds; maybe she wants him because he has “game” and has tricked her into bed; maybe she wants him because he has traded for her pussy with its fair market value in love and commitment; maybe she wants him because he’d be a good father and she wants Teh Baybees. But the idea that a man can be desired is, as Figleaf puts it, “simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable.”
You would think all of the women having casual sex decried in this article would disprove that point, but no, apparently, according to the Washington Times, all those women just want to get married and have babies and are really, really bad at it. Fortunately, as a woman who has had casual sex, I can state the following as objective truth:
That’s bullshit.
Cock is awesome.
I have never met a woman who had casual sex because she thought that was how you got married, or because some dude tricked her into it. I have, however, met plenty of women who had casual sex because she didn’t want a relationship for whatever reason, but he had great tattoos, or really lovely hipbones, or a cute beard, or a soft warm chest, or nice muscles, or just this aura of being great in bed. (Also, quite a few women who had sex because he was available and she was horny, but that’s neither here nor there.)
That is because they are straight and bi women, and so they think men are hot.
Men’s rules of engagement play to their interests of having sex often, with many partners, in a more sexually permissive environment, without romance or commitment, he said.
Straight men, says the Washington Times, never obsessively stalk their crush’s Facebook or check their phones every five minutes to see if she has texted back. They never have their entire day made by seeing their crush’s smile, or go five minutes out of their way to happen to run into her on the way to classes.
Once in a relationship, unless it’s to obtain sex or get out of trouble, straight men never want to give compliments or presents or hugs to see their girlfriend smile, or take care of making dinner just because their girlfriend is tired, or even spend large amounts of time together just because her presence is unimaginably better than her absence.
Straight men never want to open up to a woman, to bare their souls. They never want to take care of a woman and have her take care of them, or get to know every random detail about her– her favorite color and her third-grade teacher. They certainly never want to spend a life together.
Straight men never stay up until four or five AM talking even though there’s school or work the next day because the girl is so fascinating they can’t stop themselves from wanting to talk to her more.
Straight men never want to cuddle.
Straight men never find a girl aesthetically pleasing without wanting to fuck her. Hell, straight men don’t even find some women attractive and some women not. If she’s available for casual sex, they’d totally fuck her, even if they aren’t actually attracted to her.
Because the only thing straight men need is a warm hole and sixty seconds.
At best, the Washington Times believes all men are polyamorous aromantics uninterested in relationships. I am pretty sure this is not true, however, mostly because my romantic life would be about twelve times simpler if it were. As much as I like to believe that my pussy is just so amazing everyone who comes inside it immediately wants to monogamously date me in order to deny other men this exquisite pleasure, I somehow doubt this is the case.
At worst, the Washington Times believes the true nature of male sexuality is using women as interchangeable Pussy Delivery Mechanisms, masturbating into a female body because a vagina feels better than your hand. And that is just fucked-up, misandric shit.
Thing of Things 
Out of curiosity, when did you figure out that you were nonbinary? I guess this post originally appeared in 2011? I was briefly confused by “Fortunately, as a woman who has had casual sex,”
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I’m guessing 2011 as well, because Cliff P is referred to as Holly.
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The link to Pervocracy includes a date in the URL. 2011 it is.
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I’m kind of curious about the idea of the sexual marketplace, because some of it doesn’t even sound wrong, it just sounds incoherent. What does it mean for sex to have exchange value, or not have exchange value? What are people exchanging? What does it mean to say that sex is cheap?
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Generally they tend to assume that men are exchanging commitment for sex (and vice versa for women) and that sex is cheap when women are having sex with very little commitment.
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I was reading into it, and I found this video (put out by a think tank run by Mark Regnerus of all people): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cO1ifNaNABY
Their theory seems to be that sex is more valuable to men than to women. So men have to give something in exchange, and in particular they offer committed relationships. The problem is that sex has become so cheap (because birth control and gender equality?) and this is bad for women because now men never have to give women marriage or committed relationships. They recommend that women collude to increase the price of sex.
My thoughts: Even supposing the economic theory is correct (it appears to be based on sheer assertion), so what? Why is it bad for sex to be cheap, and for marriage to go down? Isn’t that what men want, according to the theory? And who had the bright idea of suggesting collusion? Certainly not someone acquainted with economics.
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They recommend that women collude to increase the price of sex.
(If you’ll forgive me, Ozy) I think this is what I’ve always intuitively interpreted feminism to be about.
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That hypothesis seems to make sex-positive feminism very puzzling.
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Feminists do some things that (according to the theory) increase the cost of sex to men, and some things that decrease it. I think this is consistent with feminists not giving a shit about this theory.
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“My thoughts: Even supposing the economic theory is correct (it appears to be based on sheer assertion), so what? Why is it bad for sex to be cheap, and for marriage to go down? Isn’t that what men want, according to the theory? And who had the bright idea of suggesting collusion? Certainly not someone acquainted with economics.”
Agree, agree, agree, and on your final point, collusion implies conscious consultation which is plainly silly.
In any case there is a name for this kind of market-rigging. It’s called slut-shaming and the blame this on feminists is pretty disingenuous. Feminists have been denouncing slut-shaming for as long as I can remember, even the so-called “sex-negative” feminists too.
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To Anon: if you ever read people like Roissy, one who is all about sex on male terms (or rather on the terms of pick up artists), he thinks that feminism is great for players and feminists are the easiest women to bed.
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Here’s the idea:
In the animal kingdom, females typically exert selection pressure on males. That’s why peacocks have big colourful tails and peahens are plain brown. That’s why male bower-birds build big, elaborate displays as part of their courtship ritual.
A female of any species produces way, way, *way* less eggs throughout her life then a male produces sperm. Like orders of magnitude less.
Further, getting pregnant is biologically costly, and takes time. Whereas ejaculating is cheap and takes seconds.
So, females are choosey, because who wants to spend time and effort getting pregnant with any male but the *best* male.
That’s what I think it means to have a “sexual economy” where women are offering a womb in exchange for awesome genes. It maps quite well onto a “buyer/seller” relationship.
In humans (one could argue) things a little more complicated because we have *paternal investment* – men stick around to help raise the kids. This, so goes the theory, is because human babies are born more helpless then other species’ babies, because our big brains need big skulls which means we need to have a shorter gestational period so as not to kill moms as much. (Interestingly, Jay man hypothesizes that this is why there’s a reversal, and women are the more ornamented gender).
So what men now have to offer is good genes + paternal investment, or some mix of the two. And… it gets complicated from there.
So, I think the crux of the disagreement is that traditional conservatives want to say “human are still basically animals who follow mating instincts! That’s why courtship & marriage are the best – it civilizes those instincts!”
And progressives want to say “That’s bullshit! We have birth control so we’re done with that nonsense!”
In Haidt-ian terms, I think also maybe progressives see sexual freedom as a “sacred value” that conservatives are contaminating with their cynical economic metaphors.
In Hanson-ian terms, it totally maps onto farmer/forager values also.
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roe, Regnerus and his buddies do not want humans to be like animals. They have strong religious beliefs about the innate nature of men and women. Men need to be civilized by the love (and pussy) of a good woman, women need to be protected and guided by a strong man, blah de blah, because that’s what God ordained. So, like the Intelligent Design folks, they try to file the Bible-y serial numbers off and tart it up as Science in order to peddle it to a wider audience.
Also, the idea that there is a single mating strategy used and perfected across the entire animal kingdom is….not tenable. As is the belief that humans have had a single mating strategy used and perfected across all of history and time.
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mythago – Yes, I agree, which is why I described conservative values as institutions like marriage & monogamy having civilizing effects on our instincts. I also agree that a lot of conservatives see m&m as religiously ordained, but that’s not universal among conservatives. I count myself as a non-religious conservative who somewhat agrees with the broad narrative that institutions like marriage leveraged our sexual instincts into pro-social, civilization-supporting trade-offs. I’m also just progressive enough to be aware that the ground has shifted.
I also agree with your second point – I thought my description had enough qualifiers in it to suggest this but maybe not. What I think is human mating is complex and varied, but understandable. And tethered, in someway, to adaptive instincts.
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It sounds like you were just cutting for time, but if I’d go with a little more Chesterton’s gate (which is basically a big part of conservatism’s priors in a nutshell). The argument would go like this.
– Over the last few millenia, society did relatively well by having nuclear families raise children. Relatively more sexual exclusivity arguably encourages the formation of child raising couples who stay together and are sufficiently invested to do a usually adequate job of seeing that kids absorb some values and education, are fed, and generally emerge onto the scene with some preparation.
– As conservatives, they’re concerned that alternative models of child-raising (more involvement by the state; raised by the more involved parent, possibly with some assistence from the other parent or from current romantic partners) won’t work as well, and will have unintended negative consequences.
– Therefore, and for a bunch of similar reasons, conservatives feel that on average, society, women and men would do better if more of the energy of sexuality were directed to cement long-term parental and romantic relationships.
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Nuclear families? You mean extended families, surely?
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@ozymandia: It’s rather funny how rarely modern American conservatives understand that the 1950s were really fucking weird when compared to American history prior to that point, to say nothing of Western history generally.
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@Ozy – thanks, you’re being more charitable than I deserve.
I was thinking of the nuclear family because that’s the part that’s arguably cemented by channeling sex, but now that I think about it, I guess it ties in the extended family somewhat as well.
I definitely shouldn’t have overlooked the extended family, but they’re likely to be involved in almost any model where we don’t forcibly separate kids from their relatives, so they’re on both sides.
(Parent A’s parents and siblings are more likely to be involved if Parent A is, although involvement from an otherwise relatively uninvolved parent’s family is defintely not unknown.)
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@roe, I think we pretty much agree.
@osberend: I remember vividly how petulant David Blankenhorn was during the federal ‘marriage cases’ trial when he was forced to admit on the stand that the dominant marriage form throughout history has been polygyny, not monogamous pair-bonding.
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@osberend:
“It’s rather funny how rarely modern American conservatives understand that the 1950s were really fucking weird when compared to American history prior to that point, to say nothing of Western history generally.”
Yup.
“Liberals are people who push millennia-old scams by claiming that this time they’re totally edgy and rebellious; Conservatives are people who push their untested reworking of society by claiming things have always been this way.”
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I think a lot of this Sexual Marketplace nonsense can be explained by people’s failure to understand how Evolutionary Psychology works. From the moment I first read about Ev-Psych as a child I understood that creatures were Adaptation Executors, not Fitness Maximizers. I understood that people do not have a conscious or subconscious desire to spread their genes. Rather, people simply evolved values that led to gene-spreading, but had those values for their own sake.
Apparently I was one of the only people on Earth who did this. Nearly everyone else just heard “people unconsciously desire to spread their genes.” As a result they treat evolutionary incentives that natural selection responded to as incentives that men and women are actually making explicit utility calculations about and responding to.
Men are not trying to get as many genes into women’s wombs as quickly as possible, and women are not auctioning off their wombs to the highest bidder. Humans don’t work like that.
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Quoth you: “I understood that people do not have a conscious or subconscious desire to spread their genes. Rather, people simply evolved values that led to gene-spreading, but had those values for their own sake.”
I’m unclear what the claim is here – sexual desire isn’t an adaptation for (among other things) spread genes? The our (traditional) values viz. sexuality have nothing to do with gene spreading, or who gets to spread their genes and why? These are weird claims, to me (if I’ve interpreted it correctly, which I probably haven’t).
“men and women are actually making explicit utility calculations”
I think the proponents of the “sexual marketplace” theory are pretty clear that the utility calculations are implicit.
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Sexual desire is the product of an adaptation for spreading genes, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a manifestation of a subconscious desire to spread genes. If it were, then consciously non-reproductive sex would not appeal to it.
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I read his comment as support for the sexual marketplace metaphor.
I imagine many markets are driven by “evolved values that led to gene-spreading.”
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>>I’m unclear what the claim is here – sexual desire isn’t an adaptation for (among other things) spread genes?
What I am saying is that humans do not value spreading their genes. They value sex and love and children. The reason we evolved to value these things is probably that creatures that valued them were more likely to spread their genes. But humans themselves do not value gene-spreading.
If humans really valued spreading our genes we would be using PCR machines to make as many copies of our genes as possible, and then tile the planet with refrigerators full of genes.
The reason this is so important to keep in mind is that if evolution were a person, we would rightly consider it to be cruel and sociopathic. So if a person thinks that on an implicit, unconscious level humans have the same values as evolution and are making utility calculations to optimize those values, they will think everyone is a horrible person deserving of contempt.
And this happens all the time. There are tons of PUA and MRA blogs where people rail on about how women are horrible because they’re trying to get betas to raise cuckolded children with alpha genes or something like that. That’s hogwash. Humans do not think like that.
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Ghantanathoah – Right, but I’m still confused why you think Regenerus & Baumeister don’t understand all this.
Quote: “There are tons of PUA and MRA blogs where people rail on about how women are horrible because they’re trying to get betas to raise cuckolded children with alpha genes or something like that”
Although paternity fraud is an MRA issue, I don’t think they think this.
The PUA claim is quite strong, but have you read Gangestead & Simpson or Haselton on mating preference shifts in women? They are almost certainly a thing, and that’s a weird thing to have to explain if you think cuckoldry isn’t a part of our evolutionary history.
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As far as I can tell, their actual claim is that women sleep with alpha men in their sexual prime, then exploit beta men when they want to settle down and have kids.
This, of course, is beyond the pale, as beta men are denied sleeping with women in their sexual prime.
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This is the best comment on the original post I’ve read thus far. This explains to me why the naive approach of evolutionary psychology applied to sexual politics doesn’t make sense. I didn’t have that before. Bravo!
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“Maybe sex and love aren’t matters of supply and demand, but humanity and joy.”
Both.
I think there is a notion of the sexual marketplace that remains valid. Amongst young people at least, most women’s sexuality *is*, factually, worth more than most men’s. See numbers of messages on OKC, or the entire industry built around selling it, or… almost everything about sexual interaction. You don’t have to think that men never fall in love, or that women never like casual sex, to think that the concept of supply and demand still exerts an important influence on things. There only has to be some systematic difference, whether cultural or biological.
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I’m fine with the marketplace model of sex/romance to a degree, but I get frustrated because a lot of the people who use it then immediately segue into saying that this is somehow biologically determined and couldn’t possibly be at least somewhat socially contingent.
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So if there is a marketplace, how does one start up a ponzi scheme for unwitting traders? 😉
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“Dear Betas, gimme your Bucks, and soon you’ll be drowning in pussy! My Secret Sexy Seduction Seminar will return over 9000% on your investment! This is your one-time opportunity to live the Alpha life you’ve always dreamed of! All my previous customers swear it’s soooo worth it! Here’s Jimmy: he gave me 1500 Bucks, and now he’s fucking 5 HSE HB10s per week!”
😉
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This is just perfect. I never thought of redpillers as participants in a Ponzi scheme before, but it works.
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> …and now he’s fucking 5 HSE HB10s per week !
Should I be proud or ashamed of the fact that I have no idea what that means ? It sounds like Jimmy is having sex with the Digikey parts catalog, or something…
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Haha 😀
It’s “five high self-esteem hot babes*, each rating 10 on a scale from 1 to 10”. The “high self-esteem” part indicates that these ladies are not just drop-dead gorgeous, they’re also confident and classy, because their self-image is in line with their “sexual market value”.
* ‘Some PUAs prefer to use the alternative term “hunny bunny,” because they feel it is more empowering.’
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“Ah, what an elegant and mature young lady you are; it’s rare to see such wisdom and kindness these days. Thank you for the pleasure of this conversation. Of course, being a millionaire, I can afford anything money can buy — but money can’t buy good company. And that’s exactly what my soul craves, as I have only a few months left before I die… of cancer.
No, don’t be sad! My life has been lit up by the glorious sunshine of your smile, and even my pain recedes while we’re together. I had never even hoped to meet someone so wonderful. If only… No, never mind. I couldn’t ask you to bind your life to mine, to grant me a night of passion and a few weeks of marital bliss. That would be too selfish.”
The downside with this one is that you have to pitch to each target separately.
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Watch a late night chatline ad . . .
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Ye gods, I’ve never seen an issue so tangled up in the normative versus the descriptive.
So, focusing on the descriptive: Does anyone here really think that the sexual marketplace metaphor is dead wrong? I’m not asking whether you think it explains the entirety of human sexual/romantic interaction, just whether you categorically deny it has any validity at all. Because it seems to me that doing that is about on par with denying the validity of a marketplace model of anything. The stock market does not behave like a perfectly free medium of exchange; people are not perfectly rational investors, there are all kinds of edge cases and exceptions and counter-intuitive trends, etc. But no one is going to point at those things and say, “See? The stock market isn’t a ‘market’ at all, so stop calling it that.”
Male sexuality is not valueless, but it clearly has less value than female sexuality. The evidence is everywhere. There are very few men making a living as porn stars or prostitutes or camdudes, and the ones who are have a predominantly gay clientele. There is no feminine equivalent of PUAs selling get-laid schemes to romantically unsuccessful women. Men, historically, are the gender with less emphasis on virginity and chastity, the gender who pursues rather than is pursued, takes absurd risks or even commits crimes (rape being the most obvious) for any chance to have sex, etc. There are various evo-psych explanations for this that may or may not be accurate, but whatever you think of the theory, the fact is damn near irrefutable.
What baffles me about this is that I see feminists tacitly acknowledge it all the time! Women are more likely than men to be judged on their looks, right? What do you think that implies? This is where the normative aspect starts to sink its hooks in. I understand that feminists don’t like the sexual marketplace, and to a large extent, I don’t blame them. Not liking something doesn’t give us license to pretend it doesn’t exist. If there’s a wasp in the room, pretending it’s actually a fly is not helpful!
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That’s about reproduction, not sex as such. Perhaps, in their pursuit of the perfectly trustworthy mate, men have selected for genes and memes that result in a lower demand for their sexuality? Anyway, this seems like a bad outcome for many people today, so perhaps we should try to counteract this situation, not roll with it.
Uh, that our sexuality is not in such high demand after all, since we still have to jump through hoops to “sell” it?
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You’re conflating the descriptive with the normative, there. Stating the way things are is not prescribing them as the way things ought to be.
You still have to compete with the other people who are selling similar goods.
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Descriptively, I think the theory really needs some work. Say that everyone puts a value on sex and relationships, and that value varies by person. How is the efficient pricing determined from that? As for the idea of exchange, giving someone commitment is not the same as giving them money. With money, any benefit to them is matched by an equal cost to you. With commitment, both parties stand to benefit.
Normatively, it seems like the proponents of this theory are using it as a way to say “sex is cheap” like it’s a bad thing. But upon further investigation, “sex is cheap” just means that it’s becoming more equitable among genders, and that the idea of women as sellers is becoming less valid. It’s a sloppy theory, and it’s being used to complain that people aren’t doing enough to conform with the theory.
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Efficient pricing is determined the same way it always is: by what people are willing to pay. Men are willing to pay more for sex with women than women are for sex with men, by and large.
The payment isn’t necessarily commitment. It could be costly signaling (Romeo risking death to court Juliet), resource sharing, labor, or, in modern societies, money. And, of course, some men are willing to take by force what they’re unable or unwilling to purchase.
One major exception is the practice of dowry, which seems to be an adaptation to the labor demands of agriculture.
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Needs more math. Given all the preferences of a single individual, how do we calculate what they’re willing to pay, or what payments they’re willing to accept? How do we justify the “payment” metaphor if the disutility to one party is unequal to the utility gained by the other party (or if both parties are benefiting)?
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Siggy, it’s a semantic issue – to people like SMK and me, that’s a barter market in non-fungible goods, but it’s still a market. If A propositions B, and B accepts, presumably they both think they are likely to be better off. They both experience opportunity cost (each might have had the option to be with someone else, or to read a book), which we can assume they believe is likely to be worth it.
This leaves out altruistic sex (A wouldn’t otherwise have sex with B, but does so out of sympathy for B).
It’s entirely likley that the market framework leaves out a lot, but it also captures a lot.
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Right – hypothetically, let’s give the theory just enough credence to say that it accounts for *some* of statistical decline of marriage rates. And let’s say it’s mostly women who are complaining about this state of affairs (at least, this is what I see – ie. “Where have all the good men gone?” – am willing to be corrected).
The solution isn’t to re-establish the sex cartel, the solution is to make commitment attractive to men in other ways.
Or, women could have children without husbands and we get alloparenting. Which also seems to be happening.
(Conservatives think this last thing is a disaster. Maybe – it’s a pretty big, experimental restructuring…)
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“Descriptively, I think the theory really needs some work.”
It’s superficial, for one thing, and it’s narrow for another. it probably adequately explains the trophy wife, but how representative is that? It also explains the whole engagement ring, Valentine’s day lopsidedness of who gets and who gives, but again, does that adequately explain the real dynamics of these relationships?
There are a lot of cultural memes around this – “Why is he going to buy the cow if he can get the milk for free?” – but I think they are unfair slanders in both directions.
And for every custom where the husband “buys” an agreement to marry there are plenty more where the bride or her family have to come up with some kind of dowry. Now you can construe the dowry as an investment stake in the marriage commensurate with the man’s earning capacity – in the past one of its functions was to keep people to marriage partners “of their own station” – or you can call it buying a husband. If you go with the second, isn’t that the sexual marketplace in reverse?
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Ginko – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry#Origins – NB: Dowry is associated with how sexual division of labour is parcelled out in different cultures.
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@Jossedley,
I’m sure it is true that you can model it as a bartering economy in some trivial sense. But what does that tell us?
Perhaps I am just not familiar with models of bartering economy, but it isn’t at all obvious that it predicts a widespread transfer of value from men to women. Maybe it just predicts that a small fraction of men will do it? I don’t know, because I haven’t seen the math.
I’ve also been glancing through the “seminal” paper (“Sexual Economics” by Baumeister and Vohs, 2004), and I think it’s a lot more sweeping of a theory than you imagine. Not only do men want sex more than women, women want commitment more than men, and a wide variety of cultural attitudes are attempts to lower or raise the price of sex. I get the sense that they are just making a bunch of predictions in hopes that they will confirm the reader’s social prejudices.
For example, on male rape victims: “A milder version [of the exchange analysis] holds simply that female coercion of male victims lacks an important dimensions, namely theft of the resource, and so the trauma and victimization are less severe.”
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@Siggy – totally agree (except for the part about “trivial” 🙂 ). I agree that when you’re in semantics, it’s more helpful to drop the contested term and go back to core concepts.
Whether you call it a market is not that relevant. However, as I understand it, Ozy’s arguing against the proposition that it is desireable for women to exchange sex for committment and support; Ozy suggests that exchanging sex and possibly companionship for sex and possibly companionship is both possible and desireable.
Both positions are voluntary beneficial exchanges between willing participants – can we call them them that instead of markets?
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I agree with Siggy, more work needed. I disagree with his call for “numbers,” as this should really be modeled as some kind of order-relationship, perhaps a preorder, which is a mathematical object, but not a numeric object.
But this also mean that all the nice curves you see in a micro-econ textbook will have no analogs here, cuz they need a total-ordering. A true free-exchange barter model needs a order relationship unique to each agent, although computationally you’d likely use statistical distributions here, along with ways to model relevant motivations: desire for sex, desire for intimacy, desire for commitment, economic factors, social status factors, etc.
This would be fun software to write.
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StillNotKing, two quick thoughts:
1) Using your model (which is also the one I prefer), Ozy’s response translates to “There doesn’t have to be, and isn’t always, a marketplace where men trade committment and support for sex. There is also a marketplace where men trade sex and companionship for sex and companionship.”
Now, the red pill hypothesis is that if you switch to a sex for sex marketplace, you end up with a structure where a smaller group of men are getting most of the action, whether that’s reproductive or just sex. I have no idea whether they’re right.
2) There’s a separate model where collective action is viewed as non-market. I don’t think it applies – IMHO, most sex isn’t altruistic, but is premised on the idea of mutual gain. But I could easily be overlooking something.
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Actually, prior to the Victorian era it was women, not men, who were viewed as the more sex-crazed gender.
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Also, you can easily explain the phenomena you’re talking about with purely social explanations.
– In a patriarchical society, almost all fiction, and thus almost all people portrayed as attractive, will be women because of the male gaze and so on. Most professional writers of mainstream fiction are men.
– Women face more danger in having casual sex, both socially (slut shaming) and physically (being raped, more likely to get STDs than men, pregnancy).
– Women are often judged much more harshly for valuing attractiveness too much in men than the reverse by both sexes.
– Casual sex is less likely to lead to an orgasm for women than men.
– As for prostitutes, again I think it is social stigma plus safety concerns (there’s a social stigma against men using prostitution, too, but that’s counterbalanced by the pressure to get laid).
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Ah yes. “All witchcraft is the result of carnal lust, which is, in women, insatiable.”
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“There is no feminine equivalent of PUAs selling get-laid schemes to romantically unsuccessful women.”
Umm, Cosmo? I think the total amount of money spent on women’s fashion, glamour and lifestyle magazines in the US, even if you pro-rate it by only the fraction that is specifically “how to be sexy” advice, completely and utterly dwarfs the amount of money spent on PUA books and seminars.
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Yes, the metaphor is dead wrong, because (as others have pointed out) it assumes a kind of Libertarianesque paradise that does not exist, where every individual person is their own enterpreneur, free to buy or sell sex without any constraints other than their own interests and the willingness of another person to make an exchange with them. Which is….not in any way how the real world works, or has ever worked.
The theory also assumes that “sex” is a fungible and identical item of exchange in all cases, which it’s not. Paying someone to perform a sexual act on you one time is different than negotiating with a particular woman for regular and exclusive long-term sexual access, for example.
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@mythago,
The actual marketplace doesn’t occur in a “libertarian paradise”, nor has it ever, so that hardly disqualifies the sexual marketplace from being a market. Also, markets can exist without a fungible and identical item of exchange, such as barter markets. (Even money is not truly an identical item of exchange, due to differing state prices on the value of money between people in different situations, but that’s getting into theoretical finance.) And plenty of illiquid markets exist without fungibility, even outside barter systems.
You seem very decided that market analogies are wrong, yet your reasons are extreme and contrived – if it doesn’t perfectly emulate a theoretical marketplace, even one actual marketplaces have never achieved and never will, no using the term!
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Yes, I agree very strongly with stillnotking. From the title of this thread, I thought it was going to be about something else.
The OP seems to make an absolute association between believing in the “sexual marketplace” and a kind of religious motivated, sexually conservative variant of Red Pill-ism. As neither a social conservative nor a Red Pill-er, that part’s easy to go along with.
But there is clearly some sort of sexual marketplace, even if it doesn’t manifest in the form of male commitment for female putting out. At the very least, supply and demand analogies clearly seem to work in a lot of situations. Most people have complained at least once before about the gender ratio at a venue (and this applies to gay people too, just with the genders reversed), which is fundamental supply-demand complaint. That’s the simplest example, but there are a lot more detailed complaints than that.
There is an ongoing attempt by some elements of the cultural left to instill a soft ban on economics analogies on the singles scene. This pre-dates Red Pill-ism, which is a very recent phenomenon; the reasons why they oppose it seem to shift, but they all agree on the outcome, and the one constant is the gender politics of the people trying to do the banning. I agree with them, and the OP, on that the way this marketplace manifests, and the values it enforces, can be anti-man, and anti-woman. That doesn’t mean, however, that talking about it or acknowledging it is wrong. Enforcing it is wrong. Talking about it is the first and huge step toward dismantling that enforcement.
What really seems to be the driving factor, due to a common thread between this stance and their stance on a whole host of similar issues, is that they don’t want this area of life critiqued, analyzed, “politicized”, or conceptually systematized in any way (because that’s a prelude to critical analysis). I think this is because they suspect that the people they sympathize with most have certain structural advantages in the market as it exists now, that they don’t want to see counteracted, equalized, or critiqued. Meanwhile, of course, they have no problem breaking this rule of “no politicization” when it’s people they care about on the shit end of the stick in the sexual marketplace. (For instance, complaints about the gender of ratio of available singles past a certain age.)
Other than that, we’re supposed to believe that every other instance of the singles marketplace at work is just individual individuals making individually individual choices like the unique snowflakes that they are, and that there’s no “market” or “society” about it. (Except again when it isn’t, because someone they actually care about is being hurt.) As if there are no broad, eminently predictable trends that we can predict just from knowing a few superficial facts about someone.
Sorry, but if you deny reality to such an extent, it makes you* seem untrustworthy to a lot of people, who will only wonder what it is that you’re so defensive of.
*General you. The OP has been on a roll lately, I think hir of a good and compassionate person, and I don’t want to always come across as a curmudgeonly, you, you, you, you believe this, you’re wrong about that, type of scold. What I do think is ze often speaks on behalf of people whose views I find distasteful, and it’s to them that I’m directing my more pointed remarks.
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Eh, I think Veronica already mentioned this, but I’ll formulate my own version.
Not every social interaction is best modeled as a market. There are plenty of ideas in economics, mathematics and their intersection (e.g., game theory) that people could use to capture the features of real-life romantic relations with more fidelity, but for some reason they tend to stick to the one idea they remember from their freshman economics class.
For instance, a market model is completely unnecessary to explain why people dislike a lopsided gender ratio.
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@Nita,
Analogies are meant to be simple; I’d be really surprised if the broad public made any intellectual analogy to an everyday topic that didn’t rely on concepts from “freshman classes”. These things are meant to be accessible. This is the framework people chose because it gives the best balance of accuracy and comprehensibility, and people use analogies to conceptualize things.
Our positions are not equal. I’m not stopping you from trying to come up with other analogies. You’re trying to get us to stop using one in particular. (As always, general “you” applies. Maybe not you in particular, but the side you’re representing.) Why? And if not, then what are you doing here? I highly doubt you go around trying to push back against overly “freshman” concepts and analogies on every topic as a general rule.
For instance, a market model is completely unnecessary to explain why people dislike a lopsided gender ratio.
It was a paraphrasing on my part. People also often add on this that some people intentionally seek out favorable gender ratios so that they can get more than they could otherwise – whatever “getting more” entails for them.
I think you have to reaaaalllyy stretch to claim that you don’t see the obvious supply-and-demand analogy here, which is why so many people do make that comparison, and why most people do seem to use economics and transactions-based analogies to the singles scene. (Phrases like “shopping around”, “pricing yourself out of the market”, “don’t sell the cow for free”, etc. I’ve heard people use.) The only people who don’t seem to be ideologically motivated not to, while everyone else in general seems to see their validity.
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@ pocketjacks
My objection to the markets model was not that it’s ‘overly “freshman”’, i.e., not sophisticated enough. On the contrary — romantic interaction has less underlying structure than trade (e.g., the market value of any two trade-able goods is always comparable, unlike the romantic/sexual value of any two persons), so, in an effort to make it work, people end up smuggling in unwarranted assumptions. And then they draw novel conclusions from this model: “Of course SMVs are always comparable! It’s a market, after all!”
So, one problem is lazy/motivated reasoning and relying on the “mathiness” of the argument for persuasion.
The other problem is that people don’t want reductionism applied to their feelings and choices. Even if we imagined a perfect, meticulously validated model, many people would find it distasteful. Similar unpopular ideas: “love is just chemicals”, “there’s no free will”.
Perhaps you’re being a little hasty in ascribing nefarious political motivations to your opponents.
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On the contrary — romantic interaction has less underlying structure than trade (e.g., the market value of any two trade-able goods is always comparable, unlike the romantic/sexual value of any two persons)
This isn’t true of all markets. Illiquid markets do not have stable or observable prices, by the definition of illiquidity. Unless you count “historical prices” of comparables, i.e. a lot of people passive taking their cues from a handful of movers. And the sheer subjectivity and potential biases involved in what constitutes a proper “comparable”. Yes, I think an illiquid market is an excellent model for the singles scene.
The other problem is that people don’t want reductionism applied to their feelings and choices. Even if we imagined a perfect, meticulously validated model, many people would find it distasteful. Similar unpopular ideas: “love is just chemicals”, “there’s no free will”.
Perhaps you’re being a little hasty in ascribing nefarious political motivations to your opponents.
The issue is, most analyses by their nature tend to be reductionistic. This seems to be effectively saying that no analyses of the singles scene is allowed. Not only is that anti-liberal, it is not a principle that’s followed anywhere near consistently. Every complaint that anyone makes that allegedly governs the scene can be argued to be “reductionist”.
I understand the mindset that you’re talking about. The problem is, people are naturally inclined to think that the status quo in a certain area of life is the result of free, spontaneous self-organization of people’s feelings and choices – when they’re the ones who benefit from it. The exact same sort of dynamic becomes something society enforces, or prejudicially or politically motivated, if it’s working against them. By the exact same line of reasoning used by anti-SMP partisans, we can argue that criticism of beauty standards goes against people’s feelings and free choices, is reductionistic, etc.
The dividing line between “feelings and choices” vs. “prejudices and socially enforced norms” is itself so arbitrary and determined by people’s self-interest, that I don’t find it morally persuasive. The better way is to allow reductionistic analysis of every area of life, and let the chips fall where they may. Remember, criticism is not “force”, and the existence of a strain of criticism is not forcing anyone to do anything.
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I guess I’ll say this: I don’t mind folks using the tools of economics and game theory to analyze the dating scene. Just, be aware of the history of such endeavors, how bad they typically are. Put (quite) bluntly, most of this stuff seems to come from angry sexist men who hate pretty women, hate successful men, and probably hate themselves. It’s fucked-up, rambling non-science by broken people.
That’s strong language. But seriously. “The Redpill” actually happened. Strong language is called for.
I guess I’m calling for some basic Popperian science here. What are your controls? How do we find out if you are full of shit? If your model is crap, do you want to discover that?
(Remember our mantra: if this is true, I want to believe it. If this is false, I do not want to believe it.)
Few things impress me as much as a person who says, “Yeah I thought this thing, but then I looked around and saw it wasn’t really quite that way.”
There is an obvious way that “supply/demand” should apply to dating. On the other hand, supply/demand curves meet at one point, which is measured in dollars. Is that really how you think attraction works?
Better economists have better models, to deal with actually irrational people in complex situations where markets do not “clear.” But that math is difficult. To actually get it right would be a lot of work. But why do that work when a simple, clumsy model will meet their goals?
And what are their goals? What are the purposes of these models? Again strong language: the *purpose* of these models is seldom to truly explain. Instead, these are pacifiers for unsuccessful men, a way to rationalize their failure to get the girl.
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@Veronica: I’m rather fond of another mantra: All models are wrong. But some models are useful.
An Econ 101-level understanding of the sexual marketplace is certainly not maximally useful, as it misses a lot. But it seems almost certain to be more useful (if actually applied in a goal-directed fashion, rather than just used as a source of rhetoric for endless whining) than the model that it’s frequently replacing, which is (AFAICT) that pairs of people are intrinsically “right for each other” or not*, and that when two people who are “right for each other” meet, this will be obvious to anyone who isn’t willfully blind.
That model doesn’t really offer any suggestions about how to improve one’s romantic prospects beyond (a) wandering aimlessly through spaces with many singles in them in order to maximize one’s chances of happening to make eye contact for someone who is “right for them” and possibly (b) desperately trying to make one’s willfully blind bitch of a soulmate realize the truth. (Seriously, this is a pretty fucking terrible model here.)
One the other hand, the Econ 101 model suggests that one should do things that increase one’s value (some examples**: practice basic hygiene, get a good job, save up some money, get better at offering emotional support) and learn how to make that value more evident when interacting with people (e.g., appear confident rather than desperate, since you’re (apparent) self-perceived value is a/n (imperfect) predictor of your actual value). It also suggests, to be fair, looking for ways to diminish a potential partner’s self-perceived value without being obvious about it (since being obvious would diminish one’s apparent “source of emotional support” value) or doing permanent damage (since that would decrease their actual value, thereby defeating the entire point). Still, it’s a damn big step up from the “just right for each other” model.
It also can be extended in obvious ways that increase its usefulness further. As you note, there are economic models that are better that the Econ 101 model, and thinking in terms of markets suggests the possibility of using them in a way that not thinking of markets does not. It’s true that the math is hard, but qualitative observations can still give use-value, e.g. that varying preferences mean that one should seek to enter niche markets where one has comparative advantage over other men.
*If every individual is assumed to belong to exactly one such pair, we have a “soulmates” model, but that’s not a required assumption.
**I’m going to assume heterosexual male model-holders, since that’s the group we’re mostly debating the virtues of the models held by, but a lot of the same basic logic applies in other contexts as well.
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I don’t want to equivocate on what we mean by “model” here. In this case, I mean something formal, with interacting goal-driven agents and all of that. Basically, if there is not enough specification to write a software simulation, I’m not sure if you have *what I mean by* a “model”.
Sure, you can come of up non-formal models, which I think everyone does anyway all the time. Which is fine. But those models are hard to test.
In any case, your examples, such as hygiene and confidence, do not seem to require a formal model, insofar as plenty of people reach those conclusions using informal models. For example, all those suggestions appear in Mark Manson’s (ironically titled) book Models: Attract Women Through Honesty. However, that book does not contain the sorts of models were are talking about here. Instead, it talks a lot about self-improvement and not “faking” confidence, cuz you reach a place where you are genuinely confident with your real life. Which requires no math.
(Well, in my case it required math, since I’m a math girl. But I’m perhaps a special case.)
In any case, I think formal models would be cool, insofar as I’m curious about the world. However, far more people seem interested in spinning up models that reflect their biases than who appear interested in *testing their models*.
(I guess the PUA crowd did a kind of testing, at least of the “can this get me laid” variety. However, that has obvious methodological flaws if our goal is to produce real knowledge.)
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Let me add, the “soulmate” model is rubbish. Likewise, the “just be yourself” model is — well — I think I *am* being myself, but I have way more romantic success these days than I used to, and that is cuz I changed things about myself and now like myself more and I kinda assume that others will like me and they usually do, which is totally the opposite of how I used to be back when I was a shy loser-girl. So anyway, maybe be your best self. Or something.
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R.E. “Straight men never find a girl aesthetically pleasing without wanting to fuck her.”
I would guess that this is actually true for more than 50% of straight men.
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Setting aside that 50% is a long way from “never”, there are all kinds of reasons that straight men can find a woman nice to look at but not actually want to have sex with her, ranging from “she’s really not my type” to “she’s a blood relative”.
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I’m a straight man for whom that is the case (depending on what is meant by wanting, can it be conditional on hypotheticals?), but I have no idea how prevalent that is.
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Can you interact with a tasty cake (or whatever food you like) without actually “wanting” to eat it?
I find that beautiful women are a bit like tasty cakes.
If I was a cook who makes tasty food all the time, my mouth would probably salivate often, but that doesn’t mean that I’d “want” to eat the food I was making instead of serving it, or that this experience would be oh so terrible because my natural instincts are being frustrated. On the contrary it’s quite pleasant to be around tasty food even if you don’t eat it.
I have a lot of friends who are beautiful women. I do not “want” to fuck them. Even if I may have an accidental erection now and then, that’s no different from accidentally salivating when I handle food I have no plans of eating. It doesn’t mean that I care particularly about fucking them.
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Hypothetical:
The woman is very physically attractive/aesthetically appealing.
She is also an irredeemable piece of human garbage, in every way having the most unappealing personality possible short of being actively, maliciously criminal.
Would you still think that 50+% of men would want to have sex with her?
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Speaking for myself, when someone is as you describe, it’s amazing how creatively and dramatically my mind magnifies even the slightest flaw in her appearance (halo effects and all that). So the situation rarely arises, though I admit that rarely /= never, and it is true that I wouldn’t want to have sex in that case. So it is only almost but not quite true of me personally that I want to have sex with any woman I find aesthetically appealing. No clue what the overall percentages are for men in general.
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R.E. “Straight men never find a girl aesthetically pleasing without wanting to fuck her.”
I would guess that this is actually true for more than 50% of straight men.
This is very untrue for me.
There are many women who I can see why other men would find them hot, and who I find aesthetically agreeable in a lot of ways as well… but I have trouble finding them sexually attractive. A celebrity example of this for me is Natalie Portman.
The converse is of course also true. There are some who aren’t conventionally attractive, but who I find very sexually attractive. Admittedly, some of this just comes down to body type – I’m an ass man, and a girl with a nice ass and what society would regard as a so-so face, I’d be into, 9 times out of 10. (Of course, the more I get to like her the more attractive I’ll find her face; see below.) But there are definite “can’t quite describe why” cases as well. Like athletes with no standout physical gifts for their level who somehow manage to put what they have together to become a devastatingly effective player on the field. And then there are athletes like that who perform exactly as their lack of physical gifts would predict – the point is it’s impossible to predict which one is going to be which.
Furthermore, who I find aesthetically pleasing can depend and vary – aesthetics are, after all, subjective and fluid. I disagree with Crimson Wool only in the sense that except in the most extreme of circumstances (Scarlett Johansson or Katie McGrath being huge bitches in real life), someone who disgusts me in a nonphysical way will eventually come to disgust me in a physical way as well. It’s not just that I won’t sleep with them, it’s that my aesthetic opinion of them will go down as well. Meanwhile, if I like you, I start seeing you as better. I think of all my female friends as prettier now than when I first met them, not that they weren’t before.
I’m sex-positive and not being judgmental; if the opposite is true for you, I’m not saying that that’s wrong. I would suggest, however, that there’s a lot of social pressure to uphold society’s standards of hotness – if you start gagging a bit at the thought of a hot girl who’s been mean to you, that’s just sour grapes, if you start extolling the virtues of a girl who’s been nice and is more accessible to you, that’s loser talk brah, for guys who can’t get the hot ones.
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I think there’s a bit of an unintentional equivocation going on.
On the one hand, using the term “marketplace” as a metaphor, or a model, could be justified in many cases. For example, in software engineering, the “producer/consumer” model is very useful for facilitating distributed communication among many actors. Similarly, one could argue that the patterns of sexual behaviors in humans could be modeled (with some limited degree of accuracy) as a market where multiple producers and consumers compete for market share.
On the other hand, you can always take the metaphor too far. Asynchronous threads are not literally passing tiny little coins around to each other; nor do they own microscopic piggy-banks. Men, women, and other assorted actors are motivated by a variety of desires, but when they have sex, they very rarely do so because they desire to exchange money for sexual services (though obviously that situation does occur sometimes).
Or, to put it in a more applause-inducing way, “The Map Is Not The Territory”.
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Thank you so much for writing/reposting this, Ozy. I think I really needed to read it.
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I think that this model is driven by the fallacy that all human cooperation is either marketlike– that is, defined by definite exchanges of things at given, pre-arranged prices– or pure altruism (giving things to other people with no expectation of anything in return).
In fact, lots of ordinary human cooperation is based on a kind of loose mutuality and reciprocity. Think about your relationships with your close friends or family. If the nakama/family isn’t dysfunctional, the group’s members will help each other meet small-scale needs and do small favors for each other all the time, without demanding anything in specific exchange. And as long as nobody’s being a free rider, the group’s members tend not to call each other out on stuff. A lot of anthropology suggests that most humans living in Dunbar’s Number-sized tribes have this kind of relationship with other members of their tribe. (See: David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years.”) Despite the just-so stories that Adam Smith made up in “The Wealth of Nations,” market behavior and formal trade wasn’t a normal part of life for most people for most of history– it was just something that you did with members of outgroups.
Most relationships and sex partnerships are obviously grounded in something more like reciprocity. Good partners tend to try to meet one another’s needs for sex, love and support in ways that are flexible, but on the whole, generally equitable. Because people’s needs and abilities to provide various things people want in relationships can vary a lot, the flexibility is really necessary– a genuinely contractual marketlike relationship or sex partnership would have horrifying failure states– what if one partner or the other “defaults”?
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Brave to leave the link to Hugo Schwyzer intact
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“Because the only thing straight men need is a warm hole and sixty seconds”
Out of all the male stereotypes, this one has always made the less sense to me. According to society straight men all want sex, all the time, any where, any time and will do anything to get it. But the moment they get sex. They need to get through it as fast as possible. What?
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Some men think of sex simply in terms of orgasms. It takes a short time to get a male orgasm and afterwards, you rest until you feel that you’re able to orgasm again.
“Foreplay” or “lingering” feels superfluous to such men.
From that perspective, the fact that a sex session is quick, sounds like a positive thing, because it means that the woman is willing to give you an orgasm without forcing you to “pay” for it with foreplay that feels like torture to a horny man who just wants to orgasm.
Of course not all men are like this; and I always felt that it’s ridiculous (I’m a man with a high sex drive but to me it means that I want sex sessions to never end) but it’s a view of sex that is present in most men at least in the back of the mind.
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“I have never met a woman who had casual sex because she thought that was how you got married, or because some dude tricked her into it.”
Great scientific reasoning there.
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The modern sexual marketplace rewards attractive men and attractive women but in different ways. Firstly attractive men become more exclusive and even more elite as women gain positions of authority. So if in previous generations 50% of the men were seen as attractive, now it’s been reduced to 20%. Those in the 20% reap incredible rewards for getting there. They tend to be able to set terms for the women beneath them in looks and usually this equates to tons of casual sex. This also means marriage with an attractive partner, often on their terms meaning that the female must live up to the male’s expectations rather than vice versa. Additionally they are offered the opportunity to create bastard offspring more often than normally. Also unlike their 80% male peers they do not encounter long stretches of sexless celibacy, nor are they tied to the female schedule of providing sex. So when they are in a relationship they have it more than once a month unlike how females tend to deny their henpecked husbands and boyfriends. What most average people see from this massive imbalance is more “looksmatched” couples walking around. Since more women than men are naturally good-looking, the whole phenomenon of “looksmatching” indicates an imbalance of dating preferences as women gain access to males they otherwise would never have a shot at and share.
For women what happens in a deregulated sexual marketplace with a highly regulated marital marketplace is average women and higher have to settle for marriage with a less than ideal mate, and unattractive women (comprising roughly 50% of all females) have to settle even further. Understand when the sexual marketplace is unbridled but the marital marketplace remains advantageous for the female, in the way of easy divorces and large alimony payouts, then all males become more cautious when it comes to dedicating marital resources. Due to this cautiousness the highly sought after males in the 20% are much less likely to be marital minded than the bottom 80% of males. But when they do select to marry they will most likely choose a female from the upper 50% available and most likely from a 20% equivalent (looksmatching rears its head again.) Due to the fact that women in the upper 50% of attractiveness know that they may have a shot at a 20% guy they often wait for years until the last minute to give themselves to their first choice guy. If he does not accept then they must accept second choice males or they have bastard offspring with the chosen male (known as leaping off the cock carousel)
However for the 80% of remaining men they are in descending likelihood: forced to either wait for the upper 50% of women to accept marriage from them, accept a secondhand 50% woman with offspring from another man or accept marriage from the lower tier 50% female. Each option represents a compromise that the 80% male must accept if they are to find marriage. The first option usually results in long stretches of celibacy, with the other two options marking the man as low status and unworthy of respect from other men. Being in the 80% cohort as we can view it is a grueling existence for these men and it is no wonder that they set up a movement online to complain about the state of affairs. Nearly 50% of the females now regard them with contempt and the other lower 50% represent a destruction of the male’s status and bloodline. Additionally minority males seeking to use interracial marriage as a reflection of their status will probably find even greater resistance to this as they and their minority female pairs are shoved down to the lower 50% and 80% pool forced to choose among each other (slowing down integration.)
By giving women undue support in marriage with payouts from divorce this simply raises the stakes for marriage and makes 50% of unwanted women even harder prospects for marriage. So in a sexual marketplace with incentives curtailed in strange ways this affects the gender populations of attractive and unattractive in different ways in particular when it comes to their psychological motives.
“Straight men, says the Washington Times, never obsessively stalk their crush’s Facebook or check their phones every five minutes to see if she has texted back. They never have their entire day made by seeing their crush’s smile, or go five minutes out of their way to happen to run into her on the way to classes.” That’s nonsense tons of guys do that. Heck wasn’t this the plot of every Seth Rogan movie ever made?
“Once in a relationship, unless it’s to obtain sex or get out of trouble, straight men never want to give compliments or presents or hugs to see their girlfriend smile, or take care of making dinner just because their girlfriend is tired, or even spend large amounts of time together just because her presence is unimaginably better than her absence.” This is actually true. Once guys sex none of these things are important. These behaviors are actions from Friendzoned males.
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[citation needed]
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I went back and read the Washington Times article, and I think the essential premise for the argument is the descriptive claim that men on average want more sex than women do. I don’t know if this claim is true, but a lot of people seem to believe it.
I think Regnerus explicitly agrees with Ozy’s point that many women enjoy having sex with hot guys, and I doubt that he disagrees that men enjoy being in emotionally supportive relationships. He just argues that women could theoretically get more in return for sex than they’re currently getting.
I still think he’s wrong, or at least making an uninteresting point – basic economics says that (a) it’s really hard to form an effective cartel, and (b) if women are voluntarily having sex, I think we can assume they believe that it’s a better choice than the alternatives.
Also, most people would find the argument offensive if Regnerus argued that, for example, women might want to form a cartel and demand $50 for each sexual encounter with men, so it’s not 100% clear why his argument that women might on average be better off if they held out for more resource commitment is a lot better.
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One of the best ways to collude is to make laws. For example, by making it less attractive for men to have sex outside of relationships, through affirmative consent laws, capricious Title IX prosecutions, etc.
Now, I don’t think that the proponents of these laws and policies have cartel forming as a goal, but my experience is that people usually end up in positions that benefit themselves due to bias, limited empathy with the other/outgroup, etc. It’s objectively true that these laws/policies are disproportionately used against men, when compared to victim surveys.
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Semi-Related: I think “Sexual Marketplace” is a useful metaphor in some situations, and in particular, I want to suggest that “market”-like conditions can produce strong effects based on a fairly moderate average difference between the sexes*. For example, while the men Ozy discusses in the last paragraph wanted relationships more than Ozy did, I doubt Ozy ever felt the impulse to imply ze might be up for a relationship in order to persuade them to have sex (and not just for moral reasons), and it’s unlikely any of them reluctantly agreed to unpleasant sex in hopes of getting a monogamous relationship**.
*In this sense I not only think Regnerus’ point is either wrong or useless, he’s part of the stereotype that people who use the term “sexual marketplace” and talk about men wanting sex and women wanting relationships have simplified and sexist views, which greatly annoys me as someone who finds it a genuinely useful metaphor specifically to avoid expressing stereotypes.
**I mean desperate people wanting any monogamous relationship at all. Ozy in specific is very cool and the market exchange rate of a monogamous relationship with them is infinitely high. The same effect applies to people already in monogamous relationships or the like, which come to think of it matches my own experiences perfectly.
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[This was always one of my favorite conversations on this blog]
In any case, looking back, I find this quote from Pervocracy the most important:
It seems as if a lot of “lonely nerds” struggle with this idea, that they look at the meeting/getting-to-know-them stage is an onerous task, past which is the blissful dating/fucking/having-a-partner stage. The thing is, these blend together. Being good at the first part is an essential aspect of the second part. They are the same.
I think this is an anxiety response. And look, I get it, but it seems like a big part of why people struggle.
Regarding market models, there is an obvious sense that being better looking, more confident, with a better personality, perhaps a better job, etc., will all help everyone in the “dating market” — but I suspect that too much focus on the analytics of this is unhelpful. Which is to say, it takes a couple sentences to point out that grooming helps, that body shape matters, or that “being charming and confident” is a worthwhile goal. Fine. But 20,000 words written on a “market model” won’t help anyone.
It my experience it becomes an exercise in sour grapes and self-destructive behavioral ruts, which take people further from their goals.
In other words, it is analysis paralysis in romance.
In the end, most people seem to muddle through. Some do really well. Some struggle muchly. Some fall into misery.
If you’re the latter sort — well good look I guess. There is a mantra from DBT: “People may not have caused all of their own problems, but they have to solve them anyway.”
The question is, how can you make your life work?
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There can be substantial differences, especially for people who prefer relationships that are different from the default dating scenario.
You have to keep in mind that dating is not something that people figure out completely on their own. There is a strong narrative about how dating should be, both by society in general, as well as by feminists.
The result is that counter-normative dating strategies are far less successful than if there were better social norms, where people use strategies that fit their personality, rather than feel forced to impersonate other personality types (this goes for women too). The exact same thing that SJ people often complain about, like LGB people feeling forced to act straight or being treated as straight because of ‘defaults,’ is just as true for non-normative men and women in dating.
If I remember correctly, you have said before that you greatly enjoy meeting new people in bars, flirting, etc. So you seem to have a personality that is compatible with the default dating strategy, which makes you highly privileged in this specific context.
When you beg the question, your conclusion is obviously correct for the premise. ‘Too much focus’ is unhelpful because otherwise it would be ‘just enough focus.’ Similarly, too little focus is similarly unhelpful.
You don’t really define the appropriate level of focus, so you are direction pushing rather than target hitting, which makes your advice little more than a bit of advice that is useful for some of the readers, but with no guidance by which people can determine if this is true for them.
Furthermore, the consequence of high intelligence and/or being a system thinker seems to often be that these people have analytics as a coping strategy for life in general. So telling them to limit this strategy can mean that you are telling them to adopt a strategy that they have never used before. Treating this as easy is like telling a person who keeps ending up with abusive partners to ‘just be attracted to non-abusive people’ or an autistic person who has trouble fitting in to ‘just stop stimming’. On one hand that is absolutely true, but on the other hand, you are completely ignoring that the person’s problem is not that they fail to see that their behavior has bad outcomes, but that they have an issue with changing their strategy.
None of this general knowledge is actually actionable. You need to actually know what grooming, what body type and what behavior is appreciated by the people you want to be in a relationship with. Then you need to figure out to what extent you can become this.
Some people are just screwed. A little while back, I read a comment by a very sensitive, book-reading, introverted guy that looked like the Hulk. He was constantly stereotyped as a ‘bro’ and few women could look past his body type. This problem seems unsolvable.
PS. Some people decide that their ‘market value’ is so low that their best option is to opt out, given the expected value, acquisition costs, etc of seeking a relationship in current society. In itself this is a valid choice.
PS2. It is also perfectly valid for people to have sour grapes when their believe that society artificially reduces their market value, lowers the expected value of partners (for example, by social norms that make people behave in bad ways), increases their acquisition costs, etc. SJ people should be the last ones to blame others for having sour grapes, IMO, as their entire philosophy is based on demanding that society changes, rather than that they should adapt to society.
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@Aapje — I don’t really disagree with what you are saying. A couple clarifications tho. First, I do okay in bars and similar, but I am terrible at going from “friendly chat” to “dating situation.” The fact is, I have a huge mental block between being “basically likable” and feeling “desirable.”
At least, I was that way in the past. I’m getting much better. It’s hard work. I’ve worked hard.
I cannot say what is the correct level of focus on social analysis, inasmuch as I don’t even know what units I would use to measure, perhaps milli-Hansons? But you are correct when you point out that people use this stuff as a coping mechanism. However, that is kinda my point, actually. The thing is, a narrative that works wells as a coping mechanism will perhaps not work well as an actionable model. Knowing the difference is important.
I cannot tell each person the difference, inasmuch as no one here is paying me to be their therapist or life coach, so that is an unfair demand. I would, however, encourage people to be skeptical of totalizing theories about the “dating marketplace” and their position within its frame. Furthermore, there is much that can be said about the tension between “unproductive” coping mechanisms versus painful, but perhaps more productive, “hard work.”
I cannot choose for you. I can ask, “How’s that working out for you?”
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Fair enough. I just have a more general frustration that so much dating advice suffers from the typical mind fallacy.
The result of all this advice combined seems like a cruel joke played on people with certain personalities, where they get pushed into damaging experiences until they hopefully find some new advice, which just pushes them into a new damaging experiences, until they hopefully figure out a sufficiently solid tactic that more or less works.
Of course, this is not intentional and partly a consequence of the complex nature of finding matches involving many variables and limited information. However, there also seems to be a major issue where most people are unwilling to admit to themselves that their preferences are large part monkey brain and thus not necessarily all that progressive/virtuous/nice. So even the typical mind fallacy advice is highly distorted and gives advice for how people think dating should work, rather than how it does work.
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BTW. On SSC there is a discussion right now about various interview questions, like: what is your weakness? Of course, you see the cynical and correct advice that you should frame a strength as a weakness, as a sort of humble brag.
This same kind of cynicism is far less present in dating advice, presumably because employers are an easy outgroup, but whole genders are not. And you have benevolent sexism working, the issue that sexual performance is far more important to self esteem to humans than their work performance or performance as an employer, etc.
So hard truths appear far more threatening. People seem far more willing to concede* that they deceive/exploit/etc others in a work or job interview context, than in a dating context.
* To themselves as much as to others.
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FYI: you’re discussing a different divide from the “sex vs. relationships” here, and one which doesn’t have the same gender imbalance.
@ Veronica: Am I correct that by “friendly chat” you mean more like in a bar and not “spend weeks or months getting to know someone as a platonic friend and never show any sign of romantic interest, possibly find out they’re gay or asexual”? If it’s the latter then your experience actually matches mine as a “lonely nerd” (just not bitter about it) very well- I enjoy hanging out because these are people I would enjoy being friends with anyway, there’s a block in actually making sure they know I’m romantically interested and finding out if they are, then dating/sex/having a relationship is fun.
If not, then again generalizing from my experience I think you’re misjudging where nerds put the “onerous task/enjoyable” boundary… although I actually have never approached a woman at a bar or otherwise approached a stranger outside of match-based dating sites (Tinder), so I can’t speak for the nerds who have gotten to that point.
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@alex — I’ve been in both positions, although I was talking more about the “meeting random people at clubs” scenario. That remains past my level of self confidence. By contrast, I’m getting pretty good at avoiding the “long term platonic” thing. If I wanna hookup with someone I know on a long term basis, I tell them.
That used to be incredibly hard for me — like mind bogglingly hard. Now it is easy. In fact, I’ve become downright flirty. I don’t know what changed.
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veronica- to be clear, tying this to your initial post, do you consider talking to people at clubs to be “part of the fun of later stuff” but you’re *also* nervous about it, or are the things you find hard “onerous tasks”?
My experience is that some parts of dating are either emotionally stressful or hard to get started on/figure out how to start; I haven’t tried devoting enough time to it (or been able to?) to find anything “onerous”.
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On the “onerous” parts versus the “fun parts,” I’m referring back to conversations I’ve had in the past. However, since no one here is making those points, I think I’d rather let it slide.
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