NEW YORK MAGAZINE: How ‘Cheap Sex’ is Changing Our Politics

For those sensitive to gender stereotypes or charges of “essentialism,” the sexual exchange model can sound jarring. But it is crucial to understanding how our present differs from the past. For much of the 20th century and before, sex was heavily bound up with marriage — long understood as the normative goal of romantic relationships — and therefore family and childrearing (it was, as Regnerus puts it, about “production” of the next generation, rather than “consumption” on the part of the married individuals). Marriage in turn was anchored both by relatively stable male-female preferences as well as by what the economist Gary Becker referred to as “gains from trade.” Men, then and now, wanted sex, but they also needed a partner to raise their children and run their household while they earned a breadwinner wage. Women, then and now, on average preferred relationships to casual sex, but prior to achieving economic autonomy also needed someone who could provide them with resources while credibly promising not to abandon them in the future.

Both sexes, that is, had something the other needed, which tended to drive them together and make marriage a more stable arrangement. Since sex was one of women’s primary bargaining chips in this exchange relation, they had both a personal incentive to hold out for male demonstrations of commitment, as well as a collective interest in preventing individual women from selling sex too cheaply. (Women who did so were therefore stigmatized as unmarriageable.) The high price of sex, in turn, presented men with a certain set of incentives. Although illicit sex could often be purchased, men’s best shot at socially legitimate sex was to make themselves an appealing partner through achievement and social respectability. The fuckboy lifestyle — in which a man can be basically worthless yet sexually successful — was simply not viable.

Regnerus, though at times seeming nostalgic for this older arrangement, does at least acknowledge its more oppressive features: It required sexual double standards and tight restrictions on female sexuality; it was very difficult on those who made bad marriages; and it was often brutal toward sexual minorities. Sexual freedom was limited to the rich or Bohemian. The real value in Regnerus’s depiction of this older system, however, is to point out that our move away from it is not simply a tale of progress but of different sets of tradeoffs. A system that produces incentives for stable relationships and prosocial male behavior might do so at the cost of individual sexual autonomy, and vice versa.

This is precisely what Regnerus thinks has happened over the last few decades as the price of sex has collapsed in the face of a few overlapping trends, notably the increased economic and social autonomy of women, which has allowed them to pursue sex for its own sake rather than trade it in exchange for men’s resources. But Regnerus is most interested in how three technological developments have driven this change. The first and most important of these is contraception, which has separated sex from reproduction and allowed people to seek it for pleasure and self-expression. The second, the rise of online porn, has provided people — mostly men, though increasingly women as well — with an easy, low-cost alternative to sex. The third and final development is the advent of online dating sites such as OKCupid and apps such as Tinder. These have shifted the emphasis in early relationships toward sexual attraction while vastly increasing the efficiency of cycling through potential partners, not only making sex cheaper (because easier to find) but increasing the opportunity cost, in terms of foregone sex and relationships, of remaining with one person for any serious length of time.

These downward pressures on the price of sex, Regnerus argues, have essentially scrambled the incentives that used to promote the formation of stable, monogamous relationships. Instead, cheap sex has produced a new equilibrium in which, for the college-educated at least, the norm is low-commitment sexual exploration in one’s 20s before stable marriage in the mid- to late-30s (for the poorer and less-educated, it is more often serial relationships and unplanned pregnancies). Women no longer need to demand a high price for sex because they can obtain money and status on their own, and would have trouble demanding a high price even if they wanted to, since men can get sex elsewhere. As the material incentives for marriage have vanished, moreover, relationships have become (in Regnerus’s term) “consumptive,” geared toward the emotional and sexual satisfaction of the individuals within them. This is what Regnerus, borrowing from Anthony Giddens, refers to as the model of the “pure relationship” —one in which “a social relation is entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only insofar as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each individual to stay within it. ”

As a result, Regnerus writes:

The relationship histories that young Americans tell us about are growing increasingly predictable: plenty of sex, starting early (before expressions of love but not necessarily before feelings of and hopes about it), underdeveloped interest in sacrificing on behalf of the other (especially but not exclusively discernible in men), accounts of ‘overlapping’ partners, much drama, and in the end nothing but mixed memories and expired time.

It is among men, however, that Regnerus sees the most serious drawbacks of cheap sex. Some, of course, have benefited tremendously. Since there are far more college-educated women than men, the latter are often in a strong position to be choosy about when and with whom they settle down. The most attractive and socially skilled are able to rack up dozens of partners with ease, and even those who are less lucky now have access to sexual stimulation, in the form of pornography, to a degree almost unprecedented in human history. “Men,” Regnerus writes, “can see more flesh in five minutes than their great-grandfathers could in a lifetime,” and they can do so without giving up much in return.

Yet this seeming benefit is actually the core of the problem, as Regnerus sees it. “Virtually no one,” he says, “is happy with the state of maleness today, and yet the male behavior we witness today seems a rational, if short-sighted, response to their circumstances.” That is, by giving men too much of what they want in the short term, cheap sex is arresting their long-term development. Of course, sex is not the only motivation for male achievement, but it has traditionally been an important one. As long as sex was mostly bound up with marriage (or at least long-term relationships), the best way to access it was to demonstrate economic independence and emotional maturity. Regnerus believes, in essence, that cheap sex has removed one of the chief incentives for men to grow up, resulting in the plague of perpetually adolescent men that have become a fixture of the American dating landscape. And because he believes, following Giddens, that male sexuality has a latent tendency toward addiction and compulsion, he predicts that men reared on cheap sex and porn will develop habits and expectations — regarding female beauty, sexual variety, and the superfluity of sacrifice — that will be hard to break later in life.

Here as elsewhere, Regnerus is somewhat speculative. Although he deploys statistics wherever possible (one in four American men under 40 looked at porn yesterday or today) some of his most interesting assertions, such as that porn may be sapping men’s motivation to work and pursue real relationships, make intuitive sense but have only sketchy evidence one way or the other. Another criticism can be made of Regnerus’s relative disinterest in economics or political economy. It’s bad form to chide an author for not writing a different book, yet if we are attempting to explain why millennials are failing to settle down and start families, surely it pays to factor in economic insecurity, employment precarity, student debt, and the ballooning costs of raising children.

Finally, while Regnerus is up-front about his own politics and does his best to strike a tone of scientific neutrality, the moral commitments framing the book are unavoidably conservative and Christian. This is not a criticism, per se, but it does mean that for more liberal and secular readers, many of Regnerus’s concerns — that marriage is declining and men are failing to grow up — might seem like non-problems, or at least minor inconveniences compared to the conformity and oppression of yesterday. Is it really a crisis if some men watch porn every other day, or people cycle through more partners than they used to? Regnerus might say that many men report wanting to reduce their own porn use or that most people still want stable relationships and families. But ultimately, it depends on what you think humans are made for.