Considering the willingness of many men to pay for sex with women, one might legitimately ask why women ever offer it for free. Yes sure they may enjoy it, but I may also enjoy my job; I still make sure that I am paid for it.
And indeed over the ages, women have had a sense that they had something that men valued and that they could leverage it in their own interests – whether it be with one man or with several. Thus was the commercialization of sex born. Together, no doubt, with the commercialization of everything else – the rise of the monetary economy and the scope it offered to organize society on a vastly greater, but also more inhuman scale.
These days it is hard to imagine a world in which money did not exist, so much do the concepts surrounding it impregnate our spirits and seem second nature to us. And yet, behavioral economist Dan Ariely, in Predictably Irrational, has documented that the non-monetary economy is alive and well – and even in many ways has the upper hand on its upstart young rival.
This should come, I guess, as no surprise to students of open source, Wikinomics and collaborative consumption.
In the non-monetary economy, goods and services are exchanged too – but according to quite different rules. And it is in this world that our sexuality arose and, as Sex at Dawn suggests, its social function is to be found. In this world, love has no price tag, but that does not make it “free”. When a woman makes love to a man, she expects it to mean many things – those things which have morphed into contemporary monogamous social norms, but originally had a tribal, polyamorous context – and still do if one delves beneath the surface. When it does not mean these things, she feels betrayed. And that’s normal – it hardly could be that sharing sexual intimacy creates bonds any weaker than eating together or other common social rituals, even if we have forgotten how it works.
My experience is the same: sexuality does not have to be monogamous to have a deep relationship to our innate sense of community.
I’ve just been reading through Dan Ariely’s “The Upside of Irrationality”, finished Sex at Dawn, and also exploring various polyamory texts and activities. I’m so glad you wove together this tapestry of a post from similar threads to those my of own inklings…(I hope that make sense…) Anyway, 3 thumbs up!