New Theory: Sex is a Resource Men Compete and Pay For

Last week, Salon ran a story about a topic of possible interest to people who follow evolutionary psychology, about male and female differences surrounding sexuality. The article was prompted by a talk given by Roy Baumeister at the American Psychological Association conference, which, judging from the Salon story, seems to have drawn on a paper he published with Kathleen Vohs in 2004 in Personality and Social Psychology Review.

The paper begins by suggesting that there have been two different approaches to sexuality recently: “One of these emphasizes biological determinants, especially as shaped by evolutionary pressures. The other emphasizes social construction…” (p. 339). They propose a “different discipline,” economics, to look at sexuality, drawing on Becker. The basic idea is reflected in the title of the paper: “Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions.”

Their new idea which they want to introduce is the novel notion that, in contrast to old, past ideas, you can think of sex as a good that females possess and that men wish to consume.

From this new, novel, unique notion, they develop what they call “Female Resource Theory,” which is the idea that access to sex is a resource that females possess and men want, making it possible to think about sex in economic terms. This idea leads to a number of new, novel “predictions” (p. 341) such as this one: “Men will offer women other resources in exchange for sex,” but not the reverse. (I was able to confirm this prediction was, in fact, true by Googling “World’s Oldest Profession;” Apparently this prediction was confirmed several thousand years ago. But then there’s Deuce Bigelow Male Gigolo, so….) The second part of the theory is that because sex can be understood as a scarce resource, it can be subjected to economic analysis, which provides tools for understanding how scarce resources are allocated. Baumeister and Vohs make the point that the price of bananas depends on demand for them and the quantity of bananas, which just might be right.

Readers of this blog will probably recognize the structure of the idea here from Trivers’ (1972) theory of parental investment. He explicitly linked sexuality and the economic concept of scarcity, writing (p. 140) that “…the sex whose typical parental investment is greater than that of the opposite sex will become a limiting resource for that sex….” Because males are frequently the less-investing sex, he wrote, sexual access to females becomes a resource: “The form of male-male competition should be strongly influenced by the distribution in space and time of the ultimate resource affecting male reproductive success, namely, conspecific breeding females.”  (Trivers, 1972, p. 159). (Oddly, I was unable to find a citation to Trivers in the PSPR paper, which is strange given how closely related the ideas in the paper are to Trivers’ ideas.)

Readers of this blog might also be familiar with Don Symons’ (1979) book, The Evolution of Human Sexuality. Drawing on Parental Investment Theory, and related ideas, he wrote:  “Among all peoples, copulation is considered to be essentially a service or favor that women render to men, and not vice versa…” (p. 27-28). He elaborates this point in a chapter entitled, “Copulation as a Female Service,” including a number of remarks about “the economics of sex,” (p. 272) and in particular the idea that sex is a female resource, as in his discussion of the fact that, cross-culturally, “copulation generally is a female service” (p. 271), which can be understood in light of the evolutionary ideas he advances.

This all makes it puzzling that while the authors of the PSPR piece concede that Symons “deserves recognition” for observing that men want sex and women provide it, they portray their ideas as new, writing that “applying economic principles to sex may seem novel…” and: “In our view, previous attempts to apply social exchange theory to sex have neglected one crucial aspect, which will be featured in this article. Specifically, sex is a female resource.”

Having said that, while I was unable to detect much that was new in the theory – certainly, economic analyses have been applied to this domain for decades – I would say that there is something novel about it. In particular, departing from existing theories, their theory brings to the table something the others don’t have: an inability to explain even the coarsest patterns of human sexuality.

Unlike Parental Investment Theory and Sexual Strategies Theory, the “new” “theory” can’t explain the origin of the preferences nor any of their texture. For instance, Baumeister and Vohs discuss the value of female virginity, but one needs Parental Investment Theory to explain this male preference. They assert that having sex for the first time “signifies the commencement of adult sexual activity and therefore may be an especially important step and choice,” a non-explanation for the value that men place on female virginity. The issue of paternity certainty, of course, makes this crystal clear.

They also claim that their theory can explain the data on infidelity because “Female sexual infidelity involves giving away a precious resource that the husband wants for himself, whereas male sexuality has no inherent value.” (p. 348). However, their theory doesn’t say anything about sexual exclusivity; nothing in the model says that female sexuality is something men want to monopolize, only something that men want to consume. Again, one requires Parental Investment Theory to explain the proximate psychology.

Their theory can’t explain the most basic aspects of mate preferences, such as why sex with women of a particular age is favored over sex with the elderly, or any of the other preferences that have been well documented. In short, the theory is unable to accommodate existing findings, and “predicts” – really, post-dicts –  empirical patterns well explained by other theories.

References

Baumeister, R. F., & Vohs, K. D. (2004). Sexual economics: Sex as female resource for social exchange in heterosexual interactions. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8, 339–363.

Trivers, R.L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man: 1871– 1971 (pp. 136–179). Chicago: Aldine.

Symons, D. (1979). The evolution of human sexuality. New York: Oxford.

Also, for one analysis of sexuality from the perspective of women as a scarce resource, see:

Guttentag, M. & Secord, P. F. (1983). Too Many Women? The Sex Ratio Question, Beverly Hills: Sage

Finally, for a brief analysis of how evolved psychological mechanisms give rise to the laws of supply and demand ( “…natural  selection’s invisible  hand  created  the  structure  of  the  human  mind, and the interaction  of  these minds is  what  generates  the  invisible  hand  of  economics: one invisible  hand created the other,” p. 328), see:

Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1994). Better than rational: Evolutionary psychology and the invisible hand. American Economic Review, 84 (2), 327-332.

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