Yesterday I mentioned a post by Fran Langum at Blue Gal about some of the absurdities that can arise when economists try their hand at pop-referencing prostitution. Fran mentioned that Echidne of the Snakes had taken a more serious look at the issue, and since Echidne’s a giant walking brain cell I took a more light-hearted approach.
Later I read Echidne’s post and confirmed that, yup, she tidily unmasts some of the pillars of the pop-reference approach. The whole thing’s a good read but I’d like to highlight one particular point. After quoting the authors of Superfreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Times Online column (from the Times entertainment section!) she digs in:
“Why has the prostitute’s wage fallen so far [in the last 100 years, with demand falling 80% as well]? Because demand has fallen dramatically. Not the demand for sex. That is still robust. But prostitution, like any industry, is vulnerable to competition.”
That competition, dear ladies, is you giving it out for free! So let’s return to the beginning of that quote: “ Since time immemorial and all over the world, men have wanted more sex than they could get for free. So what inevitably emerges is a supply of women who, for the right price, are willing to satisfy this demand. But what is the right price?”
So why would the supply of “free” sex have risen? What is so different from the new generation of women,eh? Are they rather stupid, not to realize that you’d make more by charging for fucking? Or let’s put it in reverse: Why was the supply of “free” sex so much less in the past?
Levitt and Dubner don’t seem to answer these questions for us (at least in the above excerpt I found). But they are very important questions, after all, and their answers have something to do with the way societies punished women who “supplied” “free” sex. You can still get stoned for it in a few places on earth.
By not answering these questions Levitt and Dubner make it sound as if men would always want more sex than they can get “freely”, whatever the societal setup. Yet the amount they appear to get has risen over time, and in theory, at least, it’s possible to imagine a society where the “supply” of “free” sex would be enough to cause the prostitution markets to die out.
Cool huh? If men’s “hard-wired” drive for sex really was insatiable then it wouldn’t matter how many women wrested their own sexual autonomy from social and familial control in order to have it when they wished because it would never be enough: there would still be as many prostitutes and they’d still be as busy as ever. And yet…
Y’know, given that so much of society is organized around the principle that men are biologically sexually insatiable and that women are sexually inadequate it’s kind of shocking to see the whole notion undermined in just a few paragraphs of a research paper.
What’s more shocking, however, is the durability of the ideas about insatiability and inadequacy even in the face of considerable evidence.
What’s even more shocking is the fucking authors themselves are so invested in the idea they don’t see its refutation in their own work!
That’s some powerful paradigm! Um, “no-sex” class much?
Submitted by 3255 (not verified) on Fri, 2009-10-23 11:56.
Not exactly. They don't directly refute their own work within their own work. There's nothing in there that states that men are insatiable, only that demand is greater than supply and they assume that this will always be so. It's only when you provide outside evidence that "will always be so" is not a reasonable assumption that the work becomes refuted.
[M'kay. Demand is down 80% over the last 100 years even though by all accounts average men, and and average women, are on average having substantially more sex than they did 100 years ago. The demand that remains is primarily niche markets: for high-risk or esoteric sex, and in areas where sex both in and outside of marriage and, especially, masturbation is more stigmatized. Rather than ask what happened to all the demand for plain old intercourse, which was once the staple of intercourse and would be still if demand *for sex* was consistently higher for men than women they careen off into extreme-case examples of very-low-end subsistence/street prostitution and very-high-end fetish care. That says to me they're missing a huge, giant, enormous part of the picture while continuing to insist that greater demand as a *universal* quality. --fl]
Submitted by 3255 (not verified) on Fri, 2009-10-23 17:08.
I never said they weren't suffering from severe tunnel vision. Their article is perfectly logical if you work from certain assumptions about sex and economics that a lot of people share, and ignore the effects of history and culture (which economists are very prone to doing). Of course since the assumptions in question are probably exaggerated or incorrect, and history and culture are *very* important in this case, it renders their logic entirely irrelevant.
I'm just saying that while they presented something that isn't too hard to refute, they didn't do it to themselves. Or maybe I'm just being too generous. Over the years I've seen a few political reports on the economy which say one thing but provide charts (or references to charts which could easily be found online) that even a math-challenged person can see says the exact opposite.
[Sorry if I sounded testy before, Nightfall. I was mostly in a hurry. You're right of course that *inside their assumptions* they're perfectly consistent. Sounds like we agree their assumptions are a bit... limiting. Thanks! --fl]
Submitted by 3255 (not verified) on Sat, 2009-10-24 05:57.
From the Times Online article:
Now, it seems to me that this is a case of not comparing like with like, so any conclusions drawn have to be questionable at best.
Later in the article, we have:
The article says that 60% were for 1hr sessions, which makes roughly $2,700 for a 15hr week; assuming the rest are normally 2hr sessions that adds another $1,500 to make a weekly income of up to $4,200 for the modern equivalent of a brothel sex worker. Over a 52-week year that means Allie made something close to $200k p.a. If we take out some time for holidays, it's still well in excess of $150k. Suddenly, it seems as though the premise that prices have fallen is just not true.
There were definitely street prostitutes in the world in the 19th Century (they were the target-of-choice for "Jack the Ripper" in 1888 London, for example, and those women most definitely did not pull in the equivalent of $76,000, judging by their living conditions!), and I am sure such women would have been working in Chicago, too.
So the meaning of this research changes significantly. The talk of women "giving it away for free" sounds suspiciously like simple slut-shaming.
Another thing that really does undermine the thesis about male desire for sex is this passage from the article:
["The talk of women "giving it away for free" sounds suspiciously like simple slut-shaming." Ya think? :-) From inside the sex-as-transaction frame they've trapped themselves in that's the only conclusion they can draw. The chumps. Excellent point, too, about the "quickie" vs. "date" customer experiences -- if it were really the case that men are all about volume that wouldn't be so. In fact if biological imperatives for "spreading seed" was all there was to it then there'd never *be* 4-hour "date" style prostitution. Of course the biological imperative is *not* all that imperative. Thanks, SE. --fl]