sexual market value

Market value is an economist’s phrase, and the market it names is older than the slang. In 1973 Gary Becker published “A Theory of Marriage” (opens in a new window) in the Journal of Political Economy, modelling marriage as a market in which each person tries to do as well as possible and the whole reaches equilibrium. He won the Nobel prize in 1992 (opens in a new window). Evolutionary psychology kept a parallel measure, mate value (opens in a new window): the traits that make a person desirable as a partner, summed. Both describe how a population pairs off, in aggregate.

The dating economy added the word sexual and removed the population. On pickup forums, and then on blogs, market value became a rating for one person. By June 2012 The Rational Male was publishing posts on it (opens in a new window), and the book that followed in 2013 set it out as 2 curves (opens in a new window), one for each sex, plotted against age. A figure economists used to describe how millions of people pair off became something a man could be told his was, and sold a way to raise.

Under load, it gives rejection the manners of a market. A price that doesn’t clear says nothing about the buyer or the seller, only that the number was wrong. So a declined invitation reads as a valuation and an accepted one as a bargain, and neither party can find out which the other thought they got.

This file keeps an instrument of its own. The form for each date carries a panel of 11 dimensions, from travel to questions asked, and scores whether the other party was in each column. It rates evenings and not people, which is a distinction I drew myself and am in no position to certify. The pickup forums needed 1 number. I needed 11 columns, a basis for every figure and 19 forms, and I have not found the equilibrium.