The potentially offensive language regarding men that Judge Jennifer Sargent used at the "Proud to be a Woman" dinner ("Dinner Kicks Off V-Time Festivities," Feb. 15) has obscured the more important point that Sargent was making in her keynote speech. According to The Dartmouth's article on the event, she was pointing out that unhealthy competition over men pits women against themselves, when women should be uniting against trends that are harmful to them as individuals and as a group. Obviously, sexual abuse is the most harmful feature of male-female relationships that still persists on this campus. But we would be wrong if we denied that there are more subtle aspects of the Dartmouth culture that are rooted in the abuse of women.
Although relationship decisions are made on an individual basis, they are also formed by larger cultural norms that govern these activities. In particular, economists and social scientists have long understood that sex, dating and marriage form a kind of market that has its own currency and rates of exchange. Today, some experts who look at these issues from an economic perspective are noticing disturbing trends indicating that the dynamics of this market have shifted in a manner that is detrimental to women.
The market for romantic male-female relationships has always existed, but historically it was ordered in favor of women. Women came out ahead in the relationship exchange because men competed for women. This situation allowed women to raise the price of marriage, dating and/or sex by making their competitors exhibit more devotion in competition for them. Often, though of course not always, women drove up the price of sex to the highest it could possibly be: marriage. Only men who were willing to pay that high a price were given access to sex. This ability to set the "price" gave women choices, security and stability in their relationships and disciplined the tendency of men to sleep around too freely.
However, social scientists like Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin have noticed that market dynamics have been inverted, especially at elite academic institutions like our own. The proximate cause of this inversion is the time during and after the sexual revolution when the relationship market became flooded with sex. Today women compete for men, which gives men control of the pricing mechanism. Where women once "charged" stable relationships for sex, men now "charge" sex for relationships. The new price of sex is thus very low.
There are several problems with this inversion. First, women who don't want to have sex except within a long-term, committed relationship are often forced to lower their standards for sex to compete with other women for men. Because sex has become so cheap on the dating market, women who try to make it more expensive (by trying to extract commitment before having sex, for example) are often boxed out of the dating scene. The market then becomes subtly coercive against women, because any woman who tries to "charge" more for sex than her female counterparts has fewer prospects and less access to the emotional goods of being in a relationships.
This process in turn pits women against each other, because the woman who sells sex for a lesser commitment will probably have the most potential buyers. The final consequence of the new dating norms is that many women have less stable relationships. Without market dynamics forcing them into committed relationships, men can more freely mistreat women while still securing sex on a market that is flooded with it.
Of course, many men wouldn't want to price sex at zero many guys would not want to date someone who is considered too willing to have sex. However, most men would prefer that sex be more attainable than it has been historically. Furthermore, the problem is not only that the exact price upon which men and women haggling for sex will eventually settle. The greater problem is the fact that the wide availability of sex has given men the greater bargaining position, so that they often wind up setting the terms of the deal.
I do not know what the solution to this problem is, especially in the context of the hook-up culture, where any restrictions on sexual indulgence are accused of being irrational and outdated. However, it seems clear that no solution will be possible unless women join together in solidarity to find it. As a group, women would have strong collective bargaining power with men to change the market dynamics so detrimental to their interests. Now is the time for women to band together and seize back the historical prerogatives that the sexual revolution robbed from them.
