Why Do Men Have Sex with Women?

Is sexual violence a logical outcome of capitalist relationship-as-economy?

Why do men want to have sex with women?

Duh. Dumb question, right? I don’t think it is.

As a sexologist and sex coach, I know people have sex for many reasons — for connection, for pleasure, for stress relief, to release tension, for validation, among others. I know that people have sex for different reasons at different times — sexuality is dynamic, fluid, and a beautiful, natural part of being human and alive.

That said, something else is going on. Following the #MeToo phenomenon, after reading about the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, assault, and rape against Harvey Weinstein and other men like him, it is important to dig deeply into this question. I think heterosexual men also have sex as a means to amass power, control, and freedom in the eyes of other heterosexual men. I believe this phenomenon can be well-explained by a Marxian analysis of relationship-as-economy, where sex with women becomes a mechanism of a certain type of capital accumulation.

Why would kudos from her heterosexual male friends be more valuable than a pleasureful, connected experience?

I’m writing my Master’s thesis on a Marxian analysis of Pick Up Artist relationship-as-economy.

I wrote about my ideas on the units of value underpinning relationship-as-economy. However, I suspect this view is incomplete.

If we take the Pick Up Artist view on relationship and translate that to capitalist economy, what would it look like? How would we differentiate capitalistic relationship exchanges from more natural exchanges?

Marx starts Volume 1 of Capital by exploring commodities. For something to be a commodity, it must pass from producer to consumer by means of a market. Plenty of things are produced and consumed without involving a market (you might cook a meal and share that meal with your friends without a market exchange, for example), and plenty of systems that are not capitalist in nature also involve market exchanges.

Marx defines the direct circulation of commodities in a market as something looking like this:

Commodity — Money — Commodity

A producer comes to the market with a commodity, exchanges it for money, and then turns around and buys a different commodity. Here, money is a proxy, a store of value. The transformation that happens in this exchange is a qualitative one — one type of good is exchanged for another type of good; money facilitates that exchange. It’s what happens in a barter economy except money means you don’t have to cart your commodities with you everywhere in order to trade.

There’s something natural about this type of exchange. It makes sense to most people.

What goes on in capitalism, for a capitalist, is somewhat different. It looks like this:

Money — Commodity — Money1

The capitalist enters the market not with a commodity, but with money. They buy commodities, do something with them, and sell them in order to leave the exchange with both the money they began with and an excess. Money used this way is no longer just a proxy but becomes capital. The single objective of capital is to grow — to continuously and without end make more of itself.

According to Marx, the way a commodity can be bought for one price and sold for more can happen in a few ways — you have merchant capitalists, who buy goods, perhaps they know where they can pick something up cheap, and then turn around and sell for a profit. You’ve got the financial capitalists, who lend money and make a return through charging interest. Then, you have industrial capitalists. The way they generate profit is by transforming a commodity through labour power to add more value to it. The added value is made by the worker — the worker is paid less than the value they add.

This looks a bit like this:

Money — (Raw Materials & Commodities [transformed by] Labour) — Money1

What if this is mirrored in exchanges between heterosexual men and women in sex?

Sex, kind of like the direct circulation of commodities, is a really natural part of being human. There’s something intrinsic and instinctive in knowing and understanding that people desire sexual connection in the same way they desire food to eat. We can have sex with ourselves, in the same way that we can prepare all of our own food. If we desire a qualitative change, though, in the food we eat or the sex that we have, that involves the negotiation of an exchange with someone else.

But what happens with a capitalist, or aspiring capitalist, approach to the market? What if it’s not a qualitative exchange but a quantitative one that is pursued?

What if the equation looks something like this:

Alpha — (Sex [transformed by] Female Sexual Market Value) — Alpha1

In this illustration, a capitalist arrives to the marketplace with an amount of Alpha. Alpha is a term used by Pick Up Artist communities to describe a type of masculine power, defined as confidence and commanding respect from male peers. It is seen as desirable to be as Alpha as possible. It’s opposite is Beta — a certain type of masculine weakness, often defined in terms of being more feminine, less confident, and attracting ridicule from male peers.

Pick Up Artists assert that the more alpha you are, the less difficulty you have in getting women to have sex with you. In this illustration, sex is the raw material, the natural resource. It is, in and of itself, nothing special, in same way that a log is nothing more than a felled tree.

What transforms sex and imbues it with surplus value is the labour power of the woman involved, specifically the power she has depending on her sexual market value. Sexual market value is dependent on how well she adheres to the socially defined feminine gender role. According to Rollo Tomassi’s detailed breakdown of SMV, a high SMV woman is young, beautiful, slim, submissive, malleable, and with a low number of previous sexual partners.

What you leave with at the end of this exchange is Alpha1 — more Alpha than you entered the marketplace with.

In capitalism, what do you get when you exit the marketplace with more money than you entered it with? More power, more control, and more freedom.

In Pick Up Artist relationship-as-economy, what do you get when you exit the marketplace with more Alpha than you started with? More power, more control, and more freedom — among heterosexual men.

In this view, sex would not principally be about pleasure, or connection, or scratching an itch, or intrinsic validation. It would be a raw material, transformed by the value added by the woman involved. Anything else would be an externality to production. Sex would therefore principally become a means to amassing power in the eyes of other men.

This model would explain Lindsay’s motivation for sleeping with the beautiful blondes that she’s not that into. It would explain the escalation of conduct over time of men like Weinstein — because there is never enough and always more to be had.

This model would also explain some of the hateful squabbling between women, and between nerds and feminists. Women would be in competition with each other, not for love, but for nominally necessary exploitation. Beta men would view the feminists agitating for greater rights as threatening their chances to accumulate Alpha.

All this strife never addresses the real problem. This model of exchange is fundamentally flawed because it is not the way to a fulfilling, connected, pleasurable sex life. It’s instead a mirror of oppression that we accept elsewhere.

And we’re all affected. It is hard to see how to survive outside of this system. Most of us deeply desire direct exchange, and at the same time, most of us also engage in Alpha accumulation. We do both. That leads to confusion, harm, and disconnection. It leads to good people doing bad things.

Why do YOU have sex with people? This could wind up being the most important question of them all.

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