Ok, first of all I’m a little wary about this post because it feels like the potential for misunderstanding is really, really high. So in anticipation I’ll say up front that I’m going to try and explain one reason I think men gravitate to, support, and even contribute to the idea of heterosexual sex scarcity in the face of considerable counter-evidence. A post titled “Outlet Malls: Location as Marketing Strategy” by Gwen Sharp of Sociological Images suggests that consumers who go to greater effort to purchase items appear to feel better about the “value” of those purchases even when the prices they pay are comparable or even identical to local prices. Because I’m feeling eek-y about it I just want to make clear I’m interested in how that might relate to men’s persistent conviction that a) women are “hard to “get,” but also that b) women who are “easy” instead of “hard to get” are somehow damaged, dysfunctional, undesirable, or otherwise wrong.

Those are part of the story. But there’s some interesting psychology going on, too, as Ellen Ruppel Shell explains in Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. It turns out that being difficult to get to is, in fact, part of the appeal of outlet malls. The fact that they often require a drive of an hour or more signals to consumers that they must have really good deals. That’s the payoff for inconvenience — it’s harder and more time-consuming than going to your local mall, but in return you’re getting a great bargain. Right?

Well… not really.

...

It turns out that the more trouble people go through to get to an outlet, the more they overestimate the amount of savings compared to prices at regular stores. The very fact that it was hard to get to convinces people that it must provide something fantastic; if you aren’t saving a lot of money by going there, why on earth would it be so far out of the way? And the more remote it is, the cheaper the products must be!

She said it here.

By itself Sharp’s post provides interesting insights into the way we value the things we obtain, with those things that take more effort to obtain being (or at least so we appear to believe) more valuable to us than those which are easy to obtain. The grass on the other side, in other words, appears to be valuable not for its own intrinsic “green-ness” but because of the effort required to get to the other side.

That’s fine, of course, for valuing and acquiring things.

People not being things, however, it’s a problematic way to value relationships.

Recognizing the impulse, though, does shed light on a couple of… interesting attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors of heterosexual men towards women inside the dominant paradigm.

• Why men so often dismiss women if they’re perceived as “easy.”
• Why it’s usually considered more of an insult to call someone a “slut” than a “bitch.” Or why even “whore” (i.e. someone who at least demands payment) is less of an insult that “slut” (i.e. someone who doesn’t even bother to charge.)
• Why men often profess willingness to cross burning deserts or swim shark-infested waters (though almost never to clean bathrooms) for love.

• Why men are consistently drawn to “attractive” women even though what constitutes “attractive” varies wildly from culture to culture and even decade to decade within the same cultures. (Hint: the standards that constitute “attractive” from culture to culture almost invariably also constitute features that are locally rare and difficult to achieve — weight in subsistence cultures, for instance, or slimness in cultures of nutritional abundance and automation, naiveté for the urbane and world-weary, worldliness when innocence is abundant, blonde-ness… or even better “natural” blonde-ness when fair hair is uncommon, or “exotic” “asian-ness” when hair coloring is common, someone who’ll give blowjobs when “sex” means almost exclusively intercourse, or someone who’ll have intercourse when blowjobs become mundane. You get the picture.)

Point being that since people really are pretty much uniformly alike, in the sense that what’s deemed most “valuable” in courtship is rarely what’s most appreciated in actual partnership, it’s a really bad idea to try and evaluate our relationships in terms of how much effort is required to form one.

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Hmm…

As my disclaimer up top says I initially thought, and I still (I think?) think Sharp’s point about effort and assessment of value provide insight into men’s objectification of women in relationships I’m suddenly wondering whether the “Cosmo” effect, where women are encouraged and/or possibly self-motivated to go to extraordinary lengths to be “attractive” might not have a similar component. (It’s not that being attractive isn’t nice, but consider the 19th Century phenomenon of women having ribs removed so they could cinch their corsets even tighter, or, oh, say, Vajazzling one’s already waxed pubis with glue-on cut crystals.) Standard criticism of the Cosmo effect says it’s driven entirely by insecurity. And the general editorial stance certainly seems to encourage it. But while I’d no more endorse striving to maximize relationship-forming effort in women than I did in men earlier in this post, I think looking performance of appearance in terms of effort to achieve something rather than insecurity to avoid it is probably both more generous and more often accurate.

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Oh well. I’m still not crazy about this post both in the sense that I’m afraid it’s really subject to misinterpretation and in the sense that I still don’t have a well-formed way to articulate how I think the very-real phenomenon of valuing relationships by the effort required to get into them dangerously alienates us from the actual people we form relationships with. But if I’m right that there’s something there, but don’t mention it, nobody will help move the conversation forward. And if I’m wrong but don’t mention it then nobody will say I’m being a knucklehead again and that I should drop it.

Update:

I wrote the above paragraph (and most of this post) on a plane bound for the east coast (I’ll be in D.C. and New York City all next week.) And since I wouldn’t have lot of battery left on this old laptop I also picked up Steve Johnson’s “The Invention of Air,” a biography of the 18th-Century scientist and philosopher Joseph Priestly that doubles as a very nice history of the late-18th-Century scientific revolution.

Anyway, while talking about the perceived importance back then of what we’d now call “open source” sharing of ideas Johnson quotes a letter by Ben Franklin about his own trepidations about sharing ideas before they’re properly incubated.

These Thoughts my dear Friend, are many of them crude and hasty, and if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some Reputation in Philosophy, I ought to keep them by me, ‘till corrected and improved by Time and farther Experience. But since even short Hints, and imperfect Experiments in any new Branch of Science, being communicated, have oftentimes a good Effect, in exciting the attention of the Ingenious to the Subject, and so becoming the Occasion of more exact disquisitions (as I before observed) and more compleat Discoveries, you are at liberty to communicate this Paper to whom you please; it being of more Importance that Knowledge should increase, than that your Friend should be thought and accurate Philosopher.

Pg. 71

Aside from sharing his tendency towards run-on sentences I’m no Ben Franklin, but that sentiment that somebody could make something useful out of it, even if I end up sounding like a bumpkin, is enough reason to press “submit.”

Men, like gravity in the 1600’s or air in the 1700’s, are woefully understudied. Like gravity they’re just assumed to be there, sometimes helpfully, sometimes to no purpose, and sometimes (as with gravity when you sit under an apple tree) under-studied effects can thump you on the head. At this point even tossing out new ideas that go beyond “they’re just there” might help.