Sexual economics
The theory purports to relate to how male and female participants think, feel, behave and give feedback during sex or relevant sexual events.
[3][4][5] Baumeister's proposal defines sex as a marketplace deal according to the highly controversial maxim (sometimes associated with a paraphrase of Donald Symons) that sexuality is "something that women have and men want".
According to this claim, women hold on to their bodies until they receive enough motivation to give them up, such as love, commitment, time, attention, caring, loyalty, respect, happiness and money from another party.
The first one involves destructive thoughts (also refers to "critical inner voice") dominant like "She's trying to fool you" or "You are not man enough if you don't control her in mind and body."
The other element contains a detrimental illusion (also refers to "fantasy bond"), it brings a sense that another person constituted a whole within the subject, and is essential for their happiness.
[28] While at first blush this finding seems to promote the universality of sexual economics, those utilizing the pornography argument for higher male libido as compared to women typically neglect to mention that there is significant variation between countries, with some nations having significantly more female than male Pornhub users, as well as the fact that even in western nations, the gap is closing rapidly.
According to the data derived by The United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime[35] in 2016, 51% identified victims of human trafficking were women, children made up 28% and 21% were men.
[40] In a workplace, attempted coercion of sexual activity may under the threat of two major types of punishment: negative work performance feedback/evaluation and withheld chances of promotions and raises.
It is a serious, widespread problem, and the person who has a sexual harassment experience can feel stressed, anxious and depressed, sometimes withdrawing socially, becoming less productive, and losing confidence and self-esteem.
It is a controversial topic for multiple reasons, including questions over the ethics of leveraging virginity as a "prize" in a patriarchal society, as well as issues of authenticity.
Sexual economics theorists attempt to use virginity auctions to prove that women use sex as a resource to trade financial help from men.
While this would seem to indicate that such processes do occur in western culture, once again this theory faces severe criticism from anthropologists and sociologists who point to non-western counterexamples where virginity is not valued, or where men are expected to render sexual services to women in exchange for favors (such as the Kabyle Amazigh of North Africa).
For instance, their samples neglect to include matrilineal or matrilocal societies, where sex differences in behavior are typically either minimized or reversed.
Cultural anthropologists working with Boasian methodology with an emphasis on participant observation and non-judgmental, emic evaluation of other societies have long warned of the dangers of reliance on quantitative methodology such as surveys (or any research method utilizing a primarily etic perspective) for adequately capturing the internal beliefs and behaviors of other cultures.
One major issue with the core claim of sexual economics theory is that it is philosophically and epistemically a western concept to its core, to the extent that most non-western societies have typically viewed male and female sexual drives as either the same[60] or else characterized by higher female than male libido[61][62][63][64] Historical studies have outlined a specific time and philosophical background when the modern western conception of "horny" male and coy female became dominant, pointing out that prior to the 18th century these ideas were not even widely believed in the west.
[65][66][67] Since there were no neuroscientific breakthroughs which occurred between 1700 and 1800, the change in opinion (and the source of the modern western belief that men have a higher sex drive than women) was ideological, not scientific in nature, related to the construction of a bourgeois morality which relegated women to a role as moral guardians who remained at home while men went out and "sowed their wild oats" (the so-called cult of domesticity).
Today, westerners continue to follow this paradigm and assume its validity a priori, despite lack of neuroscientific documentation indicating that men are biologically more hard-wired toward seeking sexual pleasure and a host of competing theories for this apparent "sex difference".
Self-report data typically finds that men report significantly larger numbers of lifetime sexual partners on average than women, which is a mathematical impossibility due to the near-equal distributions of the sexes in the population.
Studies using bogus pipelines in order to adjust for social desirability bias have found that women are just as likely as men to have sex with multiple partners and even to masturbate.
