Dollars and Sex (8 page)

Last year in one of the buildings where I teach, I saw a poster that was recruiting students to participate in an on-campus psychology study. The poster's heading posed the question: “Why do you drink?” Below this heading, someone—presumably a student and not a faculty member—had written, “So I can get laid.”

This story raises a third possibility, and that is that students don't get drunk and make poor choices because they are drunk, but rather that students get drunk so that they can make poor choices. If this is the case, then the question is not how elastic is the demand for drinks, but rather how elastic is the demand for sex in response to an increase in drink prices. Given how much people are willing to pay for sex on the market (i.e., the market where sex is explicitly bought and sold), it is unlikely that a few dollars for a drink will do much to reduce the demand for random sex for those who want, and can afford, it.

SEX FOR THE PRICE OF A JÄGERBOMB

I like to play the following game with my students: I give them a scenario in which two people are having a sexual relationship, and they tell me whether or not the individuals are involved in prostitution. I start with the obvious: one party gives the other party money in exchange for sex. Of course, they all feel that that is prostitution. I then move on to more subtle cases: a woman has sex with her landlord instead of paying him rent. Most students, male and female, feel that is also prostitution. A woman has sex with a man in exchange for being taken to New York for the weekend. Fewer students agree that is prostitution, with a growing divide between male and female students. The game always ends with: a man buys a woman drinks all night in a bar, and she has sex with him because she feels obliged to do so.

Well, at this scenario my class protests loudly. The female students look horrified and say “No!” When I ask them why, they tell me that the woman is not contractually bound to have sex and could walk away if she wanted. I remind them that in each of the scenarios the woman could do the same, but this does not sway them in their belief that this behavior is not in any way prostitution.

What I find interesting, though, is the response of my male students. They are largely undecided, and before they are willing to answer, they generally have one question: how expensive were the drinks?

The results of a recent experiment conducted by psychologists Susan Basow and Alexandra Minieri is consistent with the observation from my simple classroom exercise that female students feel less obligated to have sex following a date than male students feel they ought to be. The most interesting result in this research, if you ask me, is that while the female participants in the study may not feel that paying for an expensive dinner entitles a man to sex, they do feel that his entitlement increases with the price of the date. If this is the case, then this explains why my male students want to know how much the man had laid out for the drinks before deciding how obliged the woman was to having sex with him.

In this experiment, university students were asked to read a vignette in which a man (John) and woman (Kate) go out on a date. In the story, the man returns to the woman's apartment at the end of the night and has sex with her despite the fact that she has clearly rejected his sexual advances.

After reading the story, the students participating in the study were asked to respond to a series of statements, including “Kate should have expected John to insist on sexual intercourse” and “John should have expected Kate to desire sexual intercourse.” The responses to these statements were indicated on a scale of 1 to 6, where 1 indicated strong disagreement and 6 indicated strong agreement.

In order to tell if the price of the date mattered to whether or not Kate should have felt obliged to have sex with John, and if John was right to have expected sex from her, the students were split into four groups. In two of these groups, the date was expensive and either paid for by John or split between Kate and John. In the other two, the date was cheap and again either paid for by John or split between the two.

The average response by male participants to the question that asked if Kate should have expected to have sex with John when he paid for the expensive date was 3.21 (where 6 denotes strong agreement), while the average response for female participants to the same question was only 1.85. Not surprisingly, men feel more strongly than women that Kate should have expected John to want sex when he has paid for a pricey date.

The response to the question as to whether or not John should have felt entitled to sex, however, was closer for males and female students: 2.93 for male participants and 2.15 for female participants. When John paid for the expensive date, the men in the study clearly thought that Kate should have felt that she owed John access to sex at the end of the night, and both the men and women in the study, to varying degrees, felt that he was right to have expected it.

The economic implications of this research become interesting when we consider how these results change with the price of the date, specifically when the date is cheap, and John and Kate split the bill. The average response by male students to the question that asked if Kate should have expected to have sex with John when they split the bill for the cheap date was 2.27 (down from 3.21 with the expensive date) and for female students was 1.37 (down from 1.85 with the expensive date).

The results for the question as to whether or not John should have felt entitled to sex when the date was cheap and the price shared fell to 2.20 for male participants (down from 2.93) and to 1.53 for female participants (down from 2.15).

What this evidence tells us is that even if female students, on average, don't feel Kate was obliged to have sex with John, or that he was right to expect it, they certainly seem to think that her obligation and his expectations are directly tied to how much John spent on their date together. So, the difference between male and female students' expectations about sex is not whether or not men are entitled to have sex after paying for a date; the difference is in how much the man has to pay before he is entitled.

That brings us back to where we started.

To say that it is a buyer's market for men on university campuses implies that on the campus market for sex the supply exceeds the demand. If that is true, then the price of sex should be falling. As I said earlier, the use of the word “price” does not imply that men need to compensate women to have sex with them; it could simply imply that they don't need to invest in a relationship in order to get laid. I also said that on campuses with more men than women, female students went on far more traditional dates than on campuses with more women than men. If a date is costly for a man, either in terms of his time or his money, then it isn't that surprising that in a buyer's market there is less traditional dating. It is entirely possible that both men and women in such markets revise down their expectations of how much a man should have to pay to sufficiently oblige a woman to have sex with him.

It might also be true that raising the price of drinks in student bars could actually increase promiscuity if it means that women feel a greater obligation to have sex with a man who has not only been buying her drinks but has been buying her expensive drinks.

At the beginning of this chapter, I told you that I have a hard time convincing my students that, on average, they have sex less frequently than people their own age who are not in school. Given how much promiscuity there is on university campuses this may seem just as unlikely to you as it does to them, but the surprising fact is that this is true.

The explanation for this is simple: people who have multiple one-night stands have sex less frequently, on average, than those in committed relationships. The DeSimone research I mentioned earlier finds that students who had had sex with more than one person over the past three months had sex less frequently than those who only had one sexual partner. In fact, those who had sex more than twenty times in the last month were much more likely to have had only one sexual partner than they were to have had multiple sexual partners.

If women outnumber men in college, and if sex markets are essentially closed (students have sex only with other students and nonstudents sex only with nonstudents), then in the population of people aged 19 to
25 who are not students, there must be more men than women. We have already shown that when men outnumber women there is more traditional dating, which would explain why nonstudents have sex more frequently than do those operating on the college market; it is because they are more likely to be in a relationship than their college counterparts.

FINAL WORDS

Poor Sarah! It is too bad she didn't see this evidence before her disastrous first term. Maybe then she would have understood that while she was freely making her own sexual decisions, she was also subject to market forces that were beyond her control. This is good information for students, parents, colleges, and governments to have if they want to make informed decisions around promiscuity on college campuses.

For example, parents who worry that promiscuity will impose a high cost in the long run on their college-aged children would be well advised to look for schools in which male students outnumber female students. That argument probably seems counterintuitive to those parents whose daughters are college bound, but when seen within the economic environment, it makes sense to avoid putting your daughter in a position in which she needs to compete with many other women on the market for college dates.

Likewise, colleges that worry that the cost of student promiscuity imposes too high a cost on the institution—for example, when it leads to high rates of student attrition—might consider if they are giving preferential admission to female applicants. If they are, then eliminating that bias should raise the “price” of sex on their campus (measured in terms of the investment needed to secure a sexual relationship) by making male partners less scarce. Raising the price of promiscuity should reduce the overall level of casual sexual relationships on campus.