Spherical Racehorses and Markets That Aren't
Irradiated by LabRat
Go here for a stellar rant by Ozymandias about a New York Post article that’s yet another in a series on a topic I rant about often, which is the transactional model of sex and the assumption that women who put out too easily are “destroying the sexual marketplace”, because men only have relationships or get married in exchange for sex and women only have sex in exchange for relationships.
I managed to go through several different versions of this post in my head ranging from one involving a lot of statistics to a (still may do this) examination of “evolutionary psychology” from the end of what that really currently looks like as done by real evolutionary biologists as opposed to the internet and fringe psychologists*, but in the end I think I’ll simply link to Ozy- which is a reaction to the depth of misandry buried in the article’s assumptions- and make a few more observations.
“Sexual marketplace” economic models are spherical racehorses. That is, if you haven’t read that old post, it’s a model that intentionally leaves out important variables that exist in reality in order to demonstrate principles or examine local effects, or effects in which those variables are, in that specific context, relatively homogenous. Since these models are intentionally built with important variables excluded in order to make a simple model that can be manipulated, as soon as you forget what they are and why they are that way, you can use them to draw all sorts of wrong conclusions while wondering why reality obstinately refuses to match your model.
If you’re looking at an environment in which men and women meet to have sex and negotiate for longer-term sexual arrangements- the fabled “meat market”- sexual marketplace theories work pretty well. Everyone involved is after the same relatively narrow range of things, everybody is likely to share the same outlook on sex as a transaction, and everybody has a similar set of expectations and understanding. However, it falls apart to greater and greater degrees the further away you get from a population of economically homogenous twenty-somethings in a bar; men do enter relationships for reasons other than securing a steady supply of sex, and women do have sex simply because it’s enjoyable.
Or, to put it in blunter terms: if your economic model shows a good that is given away for free thirty percent of the time but is still routinely paid for at a much higher price, either the market is in serious trouble and is about to collapse completely out of existence any day now, or your model is completely fucked for describing and predicting what you’re actually looking at.
*Here’s a hint: if you don’t know what sexual strategies theory is versus pleasure theory and how they relate to each other, the term “phenotypic plasticity” and how that relates to culture, you have not seen evolution-as-applied-to-psychology in much depth yet.
September 29th, 2011 at 10:10 pm
But why would I want to have sex with a spherical racehorse?
September 30th, 2011 at 11:17 am
And why would I _pay_ to have sex with a spherical racehorse?
On the flip side, to play a bit of devil’s advocate… Sex as a commodity, while not 1 dimensional as has been eloquently put, is part and parcel in a 3, 4, or multi-dimensional model.
A commodity given away for free, 30% of the time, and paid for otherwise, only means that the demand is higher than the is satisfied for by the free portion.
And sadly, “relationship for relationship, sex for sex” is simply a market with different valuations. There’s any number of counter examples to Ozy’s tit for tit model… Otherwise, sex wouldn’t sell for money. And people wouldn’t marry for money, or power. Sugar-daddy/momma wouldn’t be a word we knew in any practical extent…
September 30th, 2011 at 12:19 pm
The flip side to “it’s stupid to treat sex and relationships as commodities within an economic model with simple variables” is not “sex and relationships never behave like commodities”. Clearly they do sometimes, or else as you said neither prostitution nor marrying for money would ever happen. This is the purpose of spherical-racehorse models- they have a reason to exist, it’s just that they’re very limited in what they can do.
Using them, for example, to say that society is going to collapse because the sexual marketplace now prices sex too low remains fucking stupid.
September 30th, 2011 at 5:38 pm
It would be interesting to see a REAL take on this by professionals… Way too many sphericals are out there as ‘gospel’ when they really only represent one VERY small portion of a much larger data set. And when you start trying to sort out the sex issues, you’re screwed anyway (and not getting kissed either), since most do not take into account any morals/standards other than US… Having spent about 10-11 years out of the US, I will tell you sexual mores are totally different in Northern Europe, from Southern Europe, from SE Asia, from Asia, from Australia and New Zeland, from the Middle East… And each set of those sexual more/morals are deeply ingrained and accepted in those cultures
October 1st, 2011 at 1:00 pm
If anything, failure to teach civilization to kids is more of a reason for society to collapse.
The default, once you stop teaching civilized behavior, and allow trust-based civilization to fade, is tribalism … and tribalistic cultures are astoundingly fragile. The bigger they get as tribals, the harder they fall.
The Mayans and the Cahokian mound builders are gone.
October 2nd, 2011 at 3:21 am
There is one VERY simple corollary that disproves the whole theory. Any Marriage where sex drops off due to children, illness, or life-in-general must end in divorce, or quickly be “On the rocks”.
Another great example is it seems that most people have had the “Crazy” Boyfriend/Girlfriend. Where the sex was fantastic, but overall they were considerably less than ideal partners in every other way.
Why would people be glad to be free of this fantastic sex machine if sex was the primary “commodity”.
Yep, Bravo Sierra.
October 3rd, 2011 at 1:18 am
“women who put out too easily are “destroying the sexual marketplace”, because men … have relationships or get married in exchange for sex and women … have sex in exchange for relationships”
Congratulations on that discovery! In further developments, the sky is blue, grass is green and the Sun rises in the East.
Note the exclusion of the word “only.” It is excluded because noone, not even the advocates of “player philosophy,” believe that anyone does anything “only” for sex or vise versa. Using “only” is a cheap attempt to turn a realistic observation into an absolutist strawman.
It is obnoxiously obvious to state that Noone does anything for just one reason. It’s also obtuse to pretend that these psychological factors and instinctive motivations are nonexistent, or are not overwhelmingly powerful influences on the interaction between the genders.
This all is just a restating of something your great great great grandparents knew in THEIR day: no man will buy the cow if he can get the milk for free. This is NOTHING. NEW.
You can whine about how it’s insensitive and unprogressive and unenlightened to say but all your bellyaching doesn’t change the fact that it’s TRUE.
October 3rd, 2011 at 11:28 am
You can whine about how it’s insensitive and unprogressive and unenlightened to say but all your bellyaching doesn’t change the fact that it’s TRUE.
Legions of married women who slept with their partners long before, and with no solid intention of later permanent commitment, including me, are staring at you wondering what planet you live on.
Again, this is not theory you’re arguing with, which is one reason we’re so vehement. It’s direct overwhelming personal experience of how the world works. Nothing, including amazing sex, will induce a man to have relationship who does not want a relationship. Sometimes men want relationships from a strictly casual-sex arrangement. Lots of sex with no particular string attached turns into a relationship if both parties want it. For you to stand there going “WELL THAT’S JUST HOW IT IS” isn’t illusion-shattering, it’s just directly contradictory to normal life.
October 3rd, 2011 at 6:10 pm
RHJunior:
My own personal experience has generally been that I have sex because it’s fun, not because I have any expectation of getting a relationship out of it. In fact, if I was only going to go off of my own personal experience, I would think that men are the ones who are very concerned about having a committed relationship with their sexual partners, while women would be just as happy to fuck around with no strings attached. That’s not true, either, because both men and women are people, and people vary as widely within their own gender as they do from the opposite gender.
I didn’t sleep with the guy who would become my husband because I thought it would make him want to marry me; I slept with him because it was fun, I liked him, and there wasn’t much chance of horrible dire physical or social repercussions. On the same note, getting in my pants outside of wedlock didn’t prevent him from asking me to marry him. We’re not unusual in those respects.
October 3rd, 2011 at 6:20 pm
I wanted to comment on this one for a while, but didn’t quite have my thoughts in order.
I think I’ve got part of it now.
The decision isn’t simply sex-or-not-sex. It also isn’t merely what-will-sex-cost-me-this-time. It also isn’t only does-this-mean-I’m-in-a-relationship?
The question is some blend of these, plus the question what is considered normal/acceptable in my social circle.
(I suspect that is where RHJunior is coming from…he is coming from a social circle that doesn’t include any of the instances you mention.)
October 4th, 2011 at 4:09 pm
Hell, if all that were true, I would be married to myself… Good thing it’s not.
October 4th, 2011 at 7:55 pm
Men TEND to want casual sex more than women. Both want commitment, both want sex, if somebody happens to turn them on. What they want out of a committed partner tends to differ. What turns them on differs spectacularly. There’s some overlap. But compare gay male sexual behavior to lesbian sexual behavior: The two are very profoundly different.
All men differ from each other. All women differ from each other. But there are clear trends. Here’s an illustrative analogy that might help: Men are taller than women on average. However, some men are shorter than most women. I’ve known a couple of guys who were about five feet tall; I’ve known one woman over six feet tall, and one just under. But on the whole, men tend to be taller than women tend to be. When I say that, am I saying that ALL men are taller than ALL women? No. But the fact that there is considerable variation WITHIN groups does not mean that there can’t be meaningful overall differences BETWEEN groups.
Nobody’s saying women don’t like sex. Ma’am, please step AWAY from the strawman! Nobody’s saying women don’t like sex before marriage, just that their ideal scenario for premarital sex is much less likely to be a different anonymous partner every week.
Men and women differ, and your attempt to prove otherwise has some weirdly obvious errors. Nice attempt at intimidation in the last paragraph, though it won’t work on anybody who understands that the existence of Hervé Villechaize doesn’t prove that women and men are the same average height. I mean, by then you’d already put you foot in it pretty bad. The jargon doesn’t get you off the hook. Appeals to authority are pretty weak, and weaker yet when the authority you appeal to is yourself, and also doesn’t appear to understand the position she’s arguing against.
Seriously: The “sexual marketplace” idea is one cooked up by people who have paid very long, very careful, very practical attention to relations between the sexes. Their practical grasp of the interpersonal dynamics is scarily accurate. I’m not always so impressed with their hypotheses about what underlies it all, but their pragmatic model of the female mind appears to me to be correct, because it makes sense of everything I ever saw women do that didn’t make sense to me, and because when I act on the assumption that it is correct, I get the results it predicts. What their model predicts, you can bet the farm on. I’ve tried it their way and I’ve tried it your way, and I’ve observed a lot of men who’ve tried it one way or the other, and they are right.
Evo-psych may very well just be a lot of vaguely plausible stories (evo-psych has always seemed like tennis without a net, to me), but the model works. Hell, Ptolemy’s model of the solar system was a steaming pile of horse epicycles, but it generated valid predictions.
I’m in a relationship with a real woman; I don’t absolutely require a perfect theory. What I need is to know what to do day in and day out, in concrete terms, to keep her from getting all cranky and dissatisfied and screechy and making both our lives hell (I’ve been there). When she says something out of the blue that seems designed to rattle my confidence, I need to know how to respond so she giggles happily instead of going silent and resentful. The eeevil satanic PUA model shows people how to keep relationships healthy, fix broken ones, and make each other happy. Oh, those rotten bastards!
Never mind the “men’s rights activists”; they’re bitter a-holes and losers. Anybody who dislikes women as a group is defective and boring. If they knew enough about women to tell us anything worth hearing, they wouldn’t be so resentful and frustrated.
October 4th, 2011 at 8:53 pm
Nobody’s saying women don’t like sex. Ma’am, please step AWAY from the strawman!
For a dude who’s accusing me of strawmanning you are leaving a remarkably long comment that’s apparently based on a post that exists more in your imagination than it does here. Read for context, not for the mindset and argument you apparently think I’m making because I’m all feministy and stuff from this angle.
The premise of the article I’m attacking is that sex/dating/romance are a marketplace in which women trade one commodity (sex) for a different commodity (relationships) from men. It then goes on to assert that women having casual sex are damaging the sexual marketplace by setting a too-low price for sex. My actual argument is twofold: first, applying a simple transactional model to all human sexual behavior and expecting to be able to predict large-scale results is stupid, and second, even if you treat it as an economic model it still fails an economic model.
This rests on an implicit presumption that sex is not a valued good in and of itself for the women who “sell cheaply”, i.e. they’re selling something for a stupid price instead of making a self-interested exchange for the thing they want right now. (Again, a broken view of sex and relationships, but remember my second point was this fails even taken purely as is.) Put very briefly, this is “women don’t like sex in and of itself”, or at least not enough to count as a valued good to them. Not my strawman, underlying premise of the model.
Men and women differ, and your attempt to prove otherwise has some weirdly obvious errors.
Perhaps if that were what I were trying to prove, that would bother me. Perhaps it should, however, bother you that you cannot read for context.
Had you been reading here longer, you might know that I already believe men and women are different, for a variety of reasons social, cultural, and biological. What I have a problem with is the assumption that those differences obviously map to early 21st century anglo-Western gender tropes or else, I don’t know, you must think that women and men are the same.
Seriously: The “sexual marketplace” idea is one cooked up by people who have paid very long, very careful, very practical attention to relations between the sexes.
…Hey, wait a minute, weren’t you lecturing me one paragraph up about the general fail of appeals to authority? This has got to be some kind of mistake, someone who gives every impression of having a browser tab with a logical fallacies list open as he composes would never do something that hypocritical.
I’m going to skip the next few paragraphs because you’ve already brought up Ptolemy’s epicycles and mentioned that a model can be complete horseshit when it comes to acccurately describing the way reality is while still having predictive value.
What you don’t mention is that it has predictive value because they people who built the model did elaborate mathematical backflips to fit every single observation they made within the model. Does it not occur to you that this is what the PUA/evo-psych people do, and they don’t even need math when basic bullshit artistry will do, or do you just not care?
I’m in a relationship with a real woman; I don’t absolutely require a perfect theory.
Yes. It’s a real relationship, with a real person, as each and every relationship is. This is why it matters to me when models contain assumptions that are fundamentally wrong and especially when they contain assumptions that are also fundamentally misandric or misogynist, like “men are only in it for the sex”, or “women are only in it to lure men into relationships”. That’s a hell of a thing to think of someone you like or even love, just to have a predictive model that predicts in ways that seem to make sense to you.
What I need is to know what to do day in and day out, in concrete terms, to keep her from getting all cranky and dissatisfied and screechy and making both our lives hell (I’ve been there). When she says something out of the blue that seems designed to rattle my confidence, I need to know how to respond so she giggles happily instead of going silent and resentful.
Maybe she likes traditional performative gender roles, if so mazel tov and enjoy, people with similar worldviews should date each other. However I happen to think a vastly superior approach is using basic observational skills to figure out what the person you are with or want to be with likes or doesn’t like instead of starting with the entire opposite sex and extrapolating from a general theory that may be made of purest bullshit.
The eeevil satanic PUA model shows people how to keep relationships healthy, fix broken ones, and make each other happy. Oh, those rotten bastards!
PUA is only evil when it rests on a profoundly misogynistic worldview, which a disturbing amount of the time it seems to. Also I have never actually SEEN a PUA model that showed people how to have healthy relationships as a goal, I’ve only ever seen models designed to allow men to sleep with as many numerically rated women as possible, and/or how to operate a woman like a pinball table if you want to go for a “relationship”. Granted this is likely because I’ve seen the worst of the worst because one tends to look for the worst in models one suspects to be bullshit and not entirely harmless bullshit at that, but it’s right there in the title: “pickup”, not “love and maintain”.
Sometimes it does do that? I’ll grant mayhap it does. You know what else does? Therapy and self-help, and they usually skip the numbers, the negging, and the depersonalization.
Next time you want to leave a long pro-PUA condescending screed, try reading for the argument I was actually making. I don’t need men and women to be the same, I do believe they are different, and I do believe they are different in ways that are sometimes fairly consistent. Remarkably, I don’t even care if a healthy slice of the population does behave this way- part of the point of the goddamn post was that these models are very accurate when applied to narrow, homogenous slices of the population they were originally designed to describe. But when they obviously fail in serious ways when applied to the population as a whole, the model is not worth sour owl shit for broad societal predictive power and articles such as that should not be taken seriously.
Where the hell you read that and got “men and women are the same!”, other than a reflex in your knee, I have no idea.
October 6th, 2011 at 5:38 am
Hey, I just remembered this thread and suddenly realized how you got it so utterly wrong: You think the “sexual marketplace” is a market where people sell sex for money. That’s why you say sex is “free”: Because it’s not a financial transaction.
But “market” doesn’t mean “money”. If people exchange goods for each other without money, it’s still a market: The goods people want most are still in greatest demand, and so demand the most in exchange.
So, when Jennifer Anniston was the It Girl of the World in the 90s, she landed Brad Pitt instead of, for example, me. She was so desirable, she could hold out for one of the most desirable men on Earth. Personally I’d like one of the most desirable women on Earth, but in reality I have to settle for a woman about as desirable as I am. There are of course some women who marry purely for money — great wealth adds a lot to a man’s desirability, in a lot of women’s eyes — but it takes a hell of a lot of money to land a 10, and in turn, a rich man looking for a trophy wife is not going to settle for a woman who isn’t beautiful.
Lots of factors contribute to your value in the sexual marketplace, and different people emphasize different factors (thank God!). Money is only one factor. Did you see that Big Internet Fuss recently about the girl at Gawker who dissed a hedge fund manager because he was a famous Magic player? Money isn’t everything. Of course, some women do value great skill at Magic, and the hedge fund guy will end up with one of those. But lots don’t.
When the “SMP” crowd advises men to increase their value in the SMP, they talk about radiating confidence, not talking too much or too little, working on your social skills, learning to be more extroverted, dressing decently, getting in shape, learning that women notice your shoes — none of it is about money. All of it is very important. Nobody tells men this stuff when they’re kids, it’s all just “be yourself!” Which is useless. When your SELF needs to fart in a job interview, “be yourself” is lousy advice. For example.
Anyhow. I used “PUA” as shorthand, casually and as it turns out disinformationally. Those folks have a model of what women want from men. It also states that what women want from a nightclub hookup is different from what they want in a long-term relationship (see Athol Kay, who is solely concerned with LTRs). The model probably isn’t perfect, but it produces the desired results very reliably.
The PUAs ALSO, and much more visibly, have volume after volume of techniques for picking up overdressed hot blondes in nightclubs in major metropolitan areas: Palm reading and pickup line scripts and god knows whatall. I don’t live in New York, I dislike nightclubs, and I am not interested in that kind of women. So I should not have said “PUA”, because the most visible 95% of what they have to offer is not the part I was referring to.
Negging, well… it only works with quite high value women who have inflated enough egos to need deflating — otherwise, it’s just mean and therefore a turnoff. If negging turns a certain kind of woman on, then they must like it, so what’s the problem? You don’t like it? Well, I guess you might not be a blonde party girl with a brain the size of a walnut, who looks like a professional model, and fights off a dozen slobbering men every time she walks into a room. Women like that are used to dealing with men socially. They can look after themselves.
But if a woman thinks she’s out of your league, then instead of sucking up to her, you slyly and amusingly take her down a peg. The men who ARE in her league don’t suck up to her. Audacity, always audacity.
Anyway, there’s nothing in the PUA worldview that’s meaner or more dehumanizing than the way women regard men in the sexual marketplace. Take the masks off, and there’s a lot of ugly practicality on both sides. Well, we’re mammals. And the stakes when it comes to reproduction are the highest stakes there are.
October 6th, 2011 at 9:28 am
Oh look. Rule holds true. This is my shocked face. Let me quote another pillar of Things Which Need Saying, the great Cosgrove:
Hey. Knock it off, you idiot.
October 19th, 2011 at 1:47 pm
How about purchasing and then leasing or renting out? Interest rates are pretty low so purchasing is much more possible for a lot more people these days. I’d even say now is the time to do it. I personally would wait a little longer before selling.