Applied Sex Economics and Its Underground Followers

With the campaign and election of Trump, a number of phenomena with roots in the hidden corners of the internet gained greater visibility in the public sphere – meme culture, troll wars, the crypto-fascism of the alt-right, YouTube intellectuals, etc. One of the interesting online subcultures that has attracted the attention of even mainstream media such as the Guardian are the so-called r/TheRedPill and MRA (Men Rights Movement) movements, which began as a counterbalance to today's all-powerful "third wave" feminism.

r/TheRedPill and MRA

As much as the two groups are similar on the one hand – they try to solve certain problems of the modern man in Western society – they are also very different. Here are the dividing lines.

r/TheRedPill is a channel on the popular online platform Reddit. Its name comes from the infamous red pill that Morpheus offers Neo from the movie The Matrix, which has the power to take him out of the delusion of the illusory world in which he exists and show him the harsh truth about the real world. In this sense, r/TheRedPill offers men who come to them to learn the secrets of romantic and sexual relationships, to understand how a man can achieve a higher SMV (Sexual Market Value) and what is the Disney matrix of romantic relationships, pushed through upbringing and pop culture to young Western dudes.

This Reddit movement is essentially an extension of the PUA (pick-up-artists) movement that was popular since the beginning of the century – gurus and schools dedicated to teaching guys with no experience in attracting female attention how to be more successful with the opposite sex. The secret culture of PUA made its way into the mainstream through Neil Strauss’ book “The Game”, which presents the author’s (partially fictionalized) experience in the world of philosophies, seminars, manuals and approaches of some of the top teachers in the field at the time.

MRAs, on the other hand, are more distinguished by their focus on political activism related to promoting and seeking solutions for men in North America. Here, the focus is on the onerous divorce laws that place a man in a financial burden on his ex-wife, the unequal distribution of parental rights that leave fathers without any access to their children, and the state-promoted discrimination against men in order to achieve “gender equality” when it comes to rising in the professional hierarchy.

The topics addressed are philosophical – the aggressiveness of modern politicized feminism or the low price placed on male life in the modern world when it comes to fulfilling public roles such as soldiers, policemen, firefighters, miners and a whole host of other dangerous professions. The work of these activists is well-demonstrated in the recently released film The Red Pill (although it bears the name of the above group, the subject is entirely about the MRA).

Sexual Market Value (SMV)?

One of the interesting initiatives in this underground movement for sexual enlightenment is the attempt to measure and influence something called sexual market value. Or in other words – an indicator of the sexual attractiveness that an individual has in the eyes of the opposite sex.

A man's SVR is influenced by his income, social status, physical characteristics and personality traits (in that order). A distinction is introduced (borrowed from biology) between so-called alpha and beta males – the former logically having greater access to females. A characteristic of male sexual market value is that it is longer in time than female and, as can be seen in the graph, has its peak at a later stage of life. This is where one of the popular TRP "theorems" comes from, that a man should not marry before the age of 30 in order to find a wife who will match his highest personal SVR.

At the same time, according to Reddit theorists, women's SPS is largely determined by appearance and age. Logically, it follows that the highest value of the female indicator is at an earlier stage of life, when youth contributes to a more pronounced attractiveness. Somewhat contradictory, but it is believed that a woman's education, career and income do not have a strong positive impact on her SPS - on the contrary, in certain circumstances they can harm her. In fact, this inability to replace physical beauty with status, which is present in men, makes women's SPS have a different curve, as can be seen in the illustration above.

Sex Economy

The popular and therefore attacked by the feminist movement (for being heavily patriarchal) article by Baumeister & Vohs (2004) views sexual relations between men and women as a marketplace in which men seek to obtain sex from women in exchange for other resources. For this reason, societies define the roles of men as buyers and women as sellers of sex, respectively—hence the reason for the added value historically placed on female chastity and virginity.

At the heart of economic theory are two assumptions – that voluntary exchange on the sexual market is mutually beneficial for both parties and that the bearers of the resource sought to be acquired on this market are women. The reason for this inequality comes from the stronger male libido proven in the academic literature and, above all, from the evolutionary biology of our species. In humans, the father can relatively easily avoid all the burdens associated with the mother's pregnancy, respectively, with a single sexual act he receives all the positives with almost no negatives. The woman has to cope with nine months of pregnancy and raising a child.

From these circumstances also arises the role of the woman as a "guardian" of the resource and, accordingly, the selection of partners, which is even instinctively directed towards such men who can provide a larger amount of resource for the woman (and the possible small ones). Here is the role of social institutions - such as marriage - developed over time, aimed at forcing men not to waste women's sexual resources (if you get your girlfriend pregnant - get married) and at the same time women not to waste their own (the public shaming of women who have too many partners).

The connection with the CPS is obvious, since anything that functions in a market is influenced by supply and demand and changes under the influence of various factors over time. And going back to the beginning of this material, the truly remarkable process is that of self-organization and information seeking on topics that are largely taboo and in which the layers of social accumulations (obscuring the real picture) can be stripped away to an analysis that is as systematic as any other economic one.

Sources:

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, 339–63

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