Wednesday, September 9, 2015

"The Economics of Sex: Why are There No Good Men Left?"

"...in his 1953 book Childhood’s End Arthur C. Clarke had predicted that the development of reliable contraceptives and a foolproof paternity test would end marriage and sever the connection between procreation and sex: it would bring Western Civilization (and thus everyone else) into a culture of sex for pleasure and recreation unrelated to marriage and child raising." - Jerry Pournelle

This was written by Gannon LeBlanc and is from his site.


Everyday it seems we hear about women complaining that there are no good men anymore. Even the Wall Street Journal is complaining about there not being any good men left. So what happened, who’s to blame, and how can we fix this problem? One thing that needs to be understood about this topic is that it’s not political, sexist, or based upon any philosophy. The answers to this dilemma are strictly based in cold economics. The reason there are no good men left is because of birth control, the rise and success of feminism, and rational self-interest. Women, primarily feminist, are not strictly to blame for the lack of good men. However, their righteous and just cause has inadvertently created the good man shortage. In economics, we call this a negative externality.

How has birth control and feminism eliminated many of the good men from the dating market? By making the “price” of sex, very cheap. When talking about the price of sex we are not talking strictly about a dollar value. We’re talking about effort. Back in our grandparents days before birth control, women collectively kept the price of sex very high. They made men work, and work hard, to have sex with them. Most women expected or even demanded that men had a good job, education, honor or reputation and that he would be a gentleman that deserved her. This high standard existed because if the woman became pregnant, she would want that man to stick around and be a good father and husband. There was no hook up culture and very few promiscuous women were around.

With the introduction of birth control, women didn’t face this issue. They could virtually unshackle themselves from the biological chains of pregnancy and become more promiscuous. While this was great in the eyes of feminists, who believe that women should be equal to men and shouldn’t be shamed of wanting or trying to initiate sex. It has had negative side effects in the dating market. By allowing women to be more promiscuous women increased the supply of sex available to men, yet the demand for sex from men never changed. When supply skyrockets and demand doesn’t move, price plummets. This is called a supply shock.

Women have set the price of sex so low that men have no incentive to become better men. Unlike their forefathers, they don’t need to have a solid job, good manners, be in top physical shape or have a strong sense of honor to get sex. More often than not, taking a girl out to dinner and inviting her back to his place can be enough. Granted having even a slight amount of any of the previously mentioned qualities helps men stand out and get more sex, it doesn’t incentive any of them to become committed. In fact, it has the opposite effect. The more successful the man is with women, the less incentivized he is to enter a committed monogamous relationship.

This is where biology becomes a major aspect in why young men are non-committal. Men can bear children decades longer than women. Women have a narrow window in their lives for when they are able to bear children. Once women enter menopause around age forty, they can no longer produce children. The window is even more narrow for their optimal time to produce children which is only between age of 20-25. Because men can bear children far later in life and the price of sex is so low now, they have no incentive to settle down and become committed at an early age. A young man in his twenties can expect another decade or two of being able to sleep around with many women and still have a marriage and children down the road. He can have it all in the current market.

Women however are on a more strict biological clock. They need to find a husband quicker than men need to find a wife. However, women are viciously competing against each other. Women no longer have each others back, in fact many women view other women as direct competition and can be openly hostile towards each other. It use to be that women had an unspoken agreement between themselves to keep the price of sex high. That agreement has been destroyed and women are becoming their own worse enemy.

Women are not demanding better men in society. Because women choose to keep having sex with men that don’t strive to be good men, they remove any incentive and any motivation for men in our society to be better. Women’s standards is what creates good men. That sentence bares repeating. Women’s standards are what creates good men.

Men, like women, are rational self-interested beings. If women give them the choice of being able to get sex at a low price or having to work hard to earn sex, of course men are going to pick the former option. It’s not that they are lazy or evil, it’s simple economic incentive. Once women demand a high standard, or no sex, men will have to rise to the challenge. Men are willing to work hard like their forefathers for sex, but women have to ask for the high price. The difference between the price men are willing go pay for sex and low price women are demanding is called a consumer surplus and right now men have a massive surplus.

The feminist movement, which was established to help empower women and make them equal to men has done many good things for society. However it has also greatly empowered men in the sexual market by convincing women to drop the price of sex and enter into dog-eat-dog competition against each other. The solution to this issue is for women to collude better and start working together more instead of tearing each other down. Women have the potential to bring the price of sex back up and force men to higher standards. They would see more commitment, better efforts from men to gain her attention and admiration and more successful and lasting marriages.

Sex is controlled by women. It’s up to them to decide what kind of men there are in the market. Let’s see more women take control of their bodies and be the equal and empowered individuals they have worked so hard to become and demand that men rise up to earn these new and empowered women. This should be the focus of the future feminist movement; to demand better men.

While this doesn’t address the topic of polygamous relationships, homosexual relationships or partners who don’t want children or marriage, these are considered minority groups that are outside the general scope of this small article. For more in-depth answers on the topic, there are many books and videos on the subject of the economics of sex.

24 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why are there no good men that want to get married?

Another reason: The marriage and divorce laws that favor women and are extremely biased against men. Inexplicably this blogpost is devoid of any mention of this issue.

With a 50% divorce rate, men who marry are very likely to be setting themselves up for a really bad outcome for themselves.

little dynamo said...

"The feminist movement, which was established to help empower women and make them equal to men has done many good things for society."


Another quisling. He's either a liar, ignorant, or both.

That's not why the feminist movement was established, nor has it done ANYTHING that is 'good for society'.

The western world teems with men who don't know jack shit. Promoted by their, ah, equals. They assume they have The Answers but can't even parse the questions.

Anonymous said...

During the Post World War II baby boom, there were more girls born than boys and boys were also more likely than girls to have disabilities which rendered them unmarriageable in adulthood. This left a surplus of young women during the 1960's and 1970's with few marriage prospects, and many were willing to do things they might not be willing to do if there were more available men around.

Robert What? said...

Besides decreasing the value of sex, women have generally lost the abilities and skills that make them valuable even beyond sex: nurturing, cooking, loyalty, discretion, affectionate. Basically the only thing a modern young woman brings to the table is sex. And that has been commoditized.

On a separate note, I see @Ray has started the circular firing squad in his quest for ideological purity.

Elusive Wapiti said...

I'm afraid I must differ with my good friend Uncle Bob in a couple of places.

First, as others have noted, I don't think the feminist revolution was a net positive for our society as a whole. That said, I do, however, think it was more or less inevitable, a part of that cycle of empires that Glubb and others have explicated so well. Female autonomy comes from the comfort of not having existential threats, and successful societies spawn within them the cancer which lays them low, sowing the ground for the cycle to begin anew.

Second, while I agree that women appear to be selling themselves quite cheaply, the very premise of this post smacks of FI. It seems to me that the process for making good men is independent of whether or not women give away the milk cheaply for teh tingelz. Moreover, I posit that it is a mistake to permit "good man" to be defined by a dude's utility to womenfolk. Thus, while incentives do matter, and easy sex cannot help but corrupt, upright men are made by other men, not by women.

Next, while women are the gatekeepers of sex, unmentioned in this post is the fact that men are the gatekeepers of commitment. It is this commitment women covet with their sex; thus, rather than reconstituting the sex cartel, I think we'll more likely see (for women who reject the "helpmeet" concept and instead view men as a means to an end) increased efforts to coerce the resources that follow from commitment. For the fact remains that women on their own don't have the resources to matriculate future generations; they need to appropriate those resources from men, who easily generate far more resources than they need to survive. If not through marriage, then women will need to capture these through some other means, such as a welfare state.

Last, as far as "demanding better men", I'm rather fond of Spengler's Law of Universal Gender Parity...that the men and women of each age deserve each other. Thus it seems to me that feminists have no hope of having better men so long as they decline to make themselves better ladies.

Gigalax said...

The article makes some good points but is mostly nonsense. As Roger F. Devlin correctly notes, the sexual revolution has actually made sex less obtainable for the majority of men. What is really happening is that female hypergamy has been unleashed in the worst way possible. and women are now chasing after the Christian Greys of the world. This is why the "manosphere," with all of its bad advice on gaming, is so popular and why young men increasingly use pornogrpahy. Far from having low standards, modern women have unrealistic standards.

I find it funny when some people start talking about marriage is if it were an advanced form of prostitution, with women manipulating men by restricting sex and holding out for prince charming. This is not modesty but vanity. The whole point of marriage is that women need to have realistic expectations, be good wives and mothers and submit to decent but realistic men because men take on a huge risk and burden simply by getting married.

Gigalax said...

Also the correct question to ask is where all the good women are. There are plenty of good men, but they just get ignored.

Terrific said...

@Elusive Wapiti: Too many good points to mention! But I must make note of your oh-so-correct observation that it is NOT a woman who makes a man a better man. It is another MAN. Another man, an OLDER man, can challenge a young man in a way a woman cannot because she WILL not. It is downright proverbial that a mother loves her son UNCONDITIONALLY, while a father EXPECTS GREAT THINGS from his son!

I am in the middle of this with both my son and my perhaps future son-in-law. My daughter's boyfriend/almost-fiance seems downright eager to spend hours talking with me about every subject in the world. And I hope I am steering him in a good direction. Of course I believe I am, but we will see.

My son, on the other hand, was always a mama's boy but thankfully with a ragged edge of wannbe-masculinity. When she divorced me when he was 18, he moved across the country with her where she was able to poison him against me for the next five years (my daughter told me this. I naively never thought she would do that to me, but she did). Now he can not stand to talk to me yet I somehow live in his brain rent-free! Everything he does is in some way a reaction to something he thinks I would or would not approve of! Fortunately it doesn't involve crime or evil-doing, merely choices of career, living arrangements, the goals for his life. He is desperate to impress me but he doesn't know how and will not humble himself enough to ask.

It's an interesting dynamic to watch these days. I pray for him quite regularly.

Glen Filthie said...

There is no such thing as 'cheap' or 'free' sex. The author and anyone that thinks so is in a world of peril. How many times to we have to see the phony rape/spousal abuse allegations? Tell any husband that pays alimony that the tail he got was 'cheap'. Note the plethora of hinky paternity suits.

And I have problem with the idea that good men are a disappearing breed. Where are all the good men? Why - they're MARRIED, ya fuggin putz! And look at our divorced men: 80% of all divorces are driven by women. The vast majority of them are cases where women 'just aren't happy anymore' and it's OBVIOUSLY all the man's fault. Only a tiny fraction of divorces are truly legit, where one of the spouses is abusive, or addicted to drugs and/or booze, etc. The rest are all unhappy women. My problem with THAT is this: at some point those cunned stunts saw something in the man they were with to marry him. So...? What happened to it? Most women can't answer that in any intelligent manner.

Ask women what's actually WRONG with men today - and they start reaming off a bunch of crap that none of them can agree on, and most of the behaviours that annoy them most are ones they won't hesitate to engage in themselves. If we are gonna have true equality - then let's have it. Say chickie...why don't YOU have a high paying steady job? And instead of going out with the girls, or going to yoga, or the day spa - how about YOU stay home and help around the house by fixing the lawn mower, doing household repairs? After you come home from a 13 hour day, chickie - bitch to your hubby THEN about wanting to go out for supper and a movie.

No, the problem here is the women. They weren't happy in the home so we let them into the workplace. They're not happy there either, and reconciling a job (which they now HAVE to have) with the duties of a mother and wife is extremely difficult...and they are not bearing up. And - because our women are hurting we are all hurting.

A lot of men make the same mistake our author did - when their women aren't happy they take it personally and internalize it. I think the horrible truth of it is - judging from the feminists, the lesbians, the creepy female liberals and activists...a lot of women are very, very unhappy creatures and there's bugger all us guys can do about it.

Anonymous said...

"There is no such thing as 'cheap' or 'free' sex."

Married men pay the most for sex.

Anonymous said...

Glen Filthie,They saw something in the man they were with to marry him.
When women look at a man they do so with the expectation they can change him into
the kind of person they want.If she fails then,according to her,he fails.This has
always been so.
Men,on the other hand want the wife to remain the girl they knew before marriage.
This has also always been so.
What I don't like about this article is that it implies that women are so much more important than men that the witholding of sex becomes a weapon.It's about time men got real and stopped thinking with their pricks.How can you win a war against people from whom you are basically begging?

Mindstorm said...

Anon above, laws of supply and demand answer your final question. In countries with legalized prostitution what you ask is much easier to achieve.

Terrific said...

Years ago, during the last year or so of my first marriage, I drove a cab in Vegas. A great job, by the way. Too many hours but a lot of fun.

One night I picked up a stripper at Treasures, a high end club with a free buffet and private rooms, etc. (they got busted for prostitution once, which is very serious in Vegas, by the way). This stripped got into my cab and the first words out of her mouth were, "Well, at least it wasn't "Cheetahs!" Cheetahs is a low-end, working class club just down the street.

At that time I knew nothing about strip clubs and had never been in one until I started driving a cab. So I asked her, "No? You worked at Cheertahs? Why didn't you like it?"

She said, "Last night there was this Asian chick in the VIP Room giving out handjobs at $100 a pop and the men were just lining up with their stuff hanging out, waiting for a handjob. It was disgusting!"

Now I'm not going to go into my reply to the stripper, which was very funny. But the next day I told my wife that story. She exclaimed, "A hundred dollars for a handjob? I'm in the wrong business!" She had just finished school for respiratory therapy, which I paid for.

I said, "You want to get paid for providing sex? Ok. I've got an idea. From now on every time I want to have sex you have to service me just like a hooker would, no bitching or excuses and you have to pretend to enjoy it, and I'll PAY YOU for sex."

I wasn't surprised she said OK! But then I said:

OK. I'm going to draw up a list of sex acts that I will pay for (I had a copy of the "menu" from the Chicken Ranch they gave out to taxi drivers), and how much."

"Sounds great," she said.

"And I'll also divide the entire household budget in two and from now on you will have to use the money you make from sex to pay your half of the bills."

I was born shocked and amused by her INSTANT reaction.

"No Way! I can't afford that!"

I said, "Then you're just going to have to hope I want a lot if sex!"

"No way," she said again. "The money I make is MINE! You still have to pay all the bills like you already do! That's your JOB!"

"Bullshit!" I said. "I'll pay you for sex but you have to pay your share of the bills!"

Need I say she never became my whore? Well, she hadn't been my lover in years.

So it's true. Married men pay the most for sex.

Anonymous said...

"Married men pay the most for sex.'

And married men get the worse quality for their money. Women hit The Wall and get worse with age.

Thinking about marriage? Look at her mother. In 20 years (or less), that's what you will be sharing your bed with - Can you handle that? (And by the way, pay attention to how her mother treats her dad too, because that's going to be you when you get their age.)

Unknown said...

If you can't wake up next to her every morning for the rest of your life, don't marry her.

Glen Filthie said...

Anonymous:
"...It's about time men got real and stopped thinking with their pricks.How can you win a war against people from whom you are basically begging?"
---------------------------------------------------------------

Good grief. Are you going to tell me that from the divorce stats, fully 50% of men are thining with their pricks? I might accept a figure like 15~30% of men...but 50%?

No way. That would assume 50% of women are pure as the driven snow in the divorce stats and I KNOW for a fact that is not so. I have just seen way too many friends get hosed by feral, stupid women to support that.

As far as women getting older and uglier - you boys don't really want to die on that hill. Look at yourself in the mirror when you're 50, HAR HAR HAR! I dunno about you but I am turning into an ape! There's fur everywhere! I dunno if I will ever be able to wipe my bunghole clean, HAR HAR HAR!

Not trying to be a dink - but waking up beside a loving, intelligent woman - regardless of her declining looks - beats the hell out of waking up alone.

little dynamo said...

Robert What? -- "On a separate note, I see @Ray has started the circular firing squad in his quest for ideological purity"



How does disagreeing with the assertion that 'the feminist movement has done many good things for society' constitute a Circular Firing Squad? What you really mean is, I have to agree with you and Bob Wallace that feminism did a lot of good, or else I'm the Bad Guy. That's really what you mean, isn't it?

So in truth, it is YOU that is participating in the Circular Firing Squad. And you are participating in defense of the Feminist Movement. With one isolated target. Gee I haven't seen any of THAT from feminists and their punk manginas over the past four decades.

I hate ideology, in all it's forms. Keep your emasculated projections to yourself, boy.

I haven't even started shooting, yet. When I do, you will know.

Rusty Shackleford said...

What exactly is a "good man" by American female standards and beyond that why should men even care? It's not something that the author even tries to define. If you've read dating profiles, women typically have a laundry list of genetic, financial, academic, demographic and professional prerequisites that they expect from any potential suitors which maybe only 5-10% of the male population actually meets. And I've known men who were good and were doing well by any standard, who were still divorced by their wives.

So, to get back to my original question, why even bother worrying about these crazy bitches and their crazy problems? They're crazy. A fundamental precept that you have to bring to this discussion is that American women are literally batshit crazy. 1/4 of them are on psych meds. Why doesn't anyone care about the legions of men who actually are perfectly good by any reasonable, objective standard and the problems that they have? They're the ones who have to deal with and live in the sexual dystopia that feminism has created.

Anonymous said...


Here is another reason for men not to get married:

Women are evil:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd7FkSjJHXU

Rusty Shackleford said...

A few other things that this article doesn't even touch on:


Young people are having less sex on the whole, but the winners and losers are more clear cut than in the past. As wide scale social bonds collapse in the face of multiculturalism and individuals become ever more atomized, the big losers are introverts. The whole point of game is to improve the success rate of introverts, but this butts up against the nature of introversion itself. Shyness and introversion are features not bugs. It's good for a society if men can form deep, lasting bonds with women.

In European populations there are 105 male births for every 100 female births. Due to a decline in dangerous working conditions and high casualty wars, there are now a surplus of males relative to females. This isn't even quite the whole story because men from every other race in the US are also competing for white females, which makes things even a little tougher for white males. This exacerbates legal and financial conditions that allow women to be fickle in marriage and divorce, and makes greater social ties less stable. I could suggest that an easy way to fix this problem would be to start handing out tens of millions of visas to young, unattached foreign women from a list of favorable nations, but that won't happen.

Of course feminism has been a total disaster, but what has allowed such a crazy ideology to be taken seriously or have any influence at all in the first place? A related question might be why is Germany welcoming a million immigrants who can only make Germany worse in every way? Germany seems to have lost any will or morale, and it is now helpless in the face of foreigners who are not ashamed of their race, their religion or their ancestors. If you watch German news, you see German women gathering en mass to welcome these immigrants in the same way they might once have gathered for their own men in war times. Slovakians, who are proud of their customs and their little nation, have no problem saying, "No, that's really crazy. We're not letting all those people in." In the vacuum created by a loss of faith and pride, which is the state of all the western nations, you always find feminism, moral relativism and multiculturalism flourishing.

Glen Filthie said...

I suspect that in the next couple years it will be "Mutiny On The Bounty" in Germany. You literally may see Africans and Moslems getting death marched out.

And - I fully intend to sit WW3 out! If the Germans want to make lamp shades and soap out of Moslems I am just peachy with it - it's not my problem...

Quartermain said...

"And - I fully intend to sit WW3 out!"

Glen, you're not going hippy on us are you? Heh Heh Heh Heh!

Unknown said...

"I have to agree with you and Bob Wallace that feminism did a lot of good,"

I don't think feminism did any good at all. Just because I post an article doesn't mean I agree with all or even most of it. But it was an interesting article because of the influence of economics on relationships.

Anonymous said...

"If you've read dating profiles, women typically have a laundry list of genetic, financial, academic, demographic and professional prerequisites that they expect from any potential suitors which maybe only 5-10% of the male population actually meets."

I'm amazed by even the most plainest American womens' notion of what kind of man they think they can get for marriage: "He has to be at least 6 foot, 8 inches tall, have an MBA from Harvard and manage a top hedge fund, have an M.D. from Johns Hopkins and be a cardiac surgeon, and, lastly, he has to be an NASA astronaut. That's a short list, I'm being perfectly realistic!" And the woman is like 5 foot, 2 inches, and weighs 250 pounds with fat rolls, and has a horse-face. Unbelievable.

As these women age, their appeal to men abruptly drops right through the floor just like Wyle E. Coyote running off of a cliff in a roadrunner cartoon.

I've seen very plain looking and even below average-looking women reject decent guys - guys that these women should be on their hands and knees being grateful that these guys would even consider them. It's crazy. These women completely lack awareness of how their appeal to men drops as they age. Women can't run their lives like men and wait until they are aged 35+ to start getting serious about finding a husband - and they will not be able to compete with the smarter, younger prettier women when that time comes.