New research suggests that men — not women — are the ones who tend to view sex as if it were a commodity to be exchanged. The findings appear to debunk a theory known as sexual economics.
“In concert, the findings support our reasoning that sexual economics is a vestige of patriarchy rather than a system that women are invested in,” researchers Laurie A. Rudman and Janell C. Fetterolf of Rutgers University wrote in their study.
The theory of sexual economics holds that women use sex as a commodity, which they exchange to gain resources from men. This market for sexual relationships behaves like the market for any other commodity and follows the law of supply and demand, according to the theory.
“Put another way, cultural systems will tend to endow female sexuality with value, whereas male sexuality is treated by society as relatively worthless,” Roy F. Baumeister and Kathleen D. Vohs explained in a 2004 article. “As a result, sexual intercourse by itself is not an equal exchange, but rather an instance of the man getting something of value from the woman. To make the exchange equal, the man must give her something else in return and his own sexual participation does not have enough value to constitute this.”
Earlier this year, the Austin Institute published a video on YouTube in hopes of popularizing the theory. The video claimed that women used sex to gain drinks, attention, and even marriage from men.
But the new study, published May 21 in Psychological Science, casts doubt on the theory of sexual economics.
The researchers suggest the theory has more to do with outdated “patriarchal ideas about sexual norms and behavior” than scientific evidence about sexual relationships. They found that men were the ones who treated sex as a commodity, not women.
“Even if men are willing to purchase sex as a commodity, it does not necessarily follow that women ‘buy into’ sexual economics, or that they are motivated to decrease the supply of sex (e.g., by discouraging other women sexually). Nonetheless, SET is a testable theory — one that the present research did not support.”
Using implicit and behavioral measures, the study of 225 students found that women were less likely than men to associate sex with money and to favor advertisements promoting sexual exchange. The study also found that men — not women — were more likely to discourage women from having casual sex, the opposite of what theory of sexual economics claims.
In another blow to the theory, the study found that men and women were equally enthusiastic about sex.
“Portraying women as using sex to barter for male resources dehumanizes women because it signifies that their bodies are the most precious resource they have to exchange in a close relationship,” Rudman and Fetterolf wrote. “The most sobering implication of the present results is that young adult men are still prone to dehumanizing women in precisely this way, which compromises the future of sexual equality.”
