The Joy of Sexonomics

If you enjoy getting puzzled or leering looks from strangers in public places -- and frankly, who doesn't? -- just tote around the book Dollars and Sex as you go about your daily errands. I guess people think I'm reading a vocational guide to prostitution, judging by the pointed "That's... interesting" I got from a creepy older guy staring first at my book, then at my chest, while we were waiting for our coffee at Starbucks.

The full title of Dr. Marina Adshade's fascinating book, based on her blog, is Dollars and Sex: How Economics Influences Sex and Love. An economist and a divorcee trying to make rational sense of dating and mating behavior, the author teaches economics at the University of British Columbia. While *I* find economics sexy, I will concede that most people do not. To get her bored students to pay attention in class, she started illustrating the principles of economic theory with examples related to love and dating. Imagine how interesting the typical 18- or 19-year-old might find the concept of opportunity cost when it's explained using the standard example of a factory making widgets. Dullsville. But opportunity cost, when it's explained in the context of dating, is much more compelling, because most of them have weighed those very costs every time they ask someone out or turn someone down. Her approach was so successful, she now teaches an undergraduate course called "Economics of Sex and Love," a class as wildly popular as Ira Glass at a Seattle dinner party.

With an economist's bias that "almost every option, every decision, and every outcome in matters of sex and love is better understood by thinking within an economic framework," the author explores the topics of dating, cohabitation, marriage, divorce, monogamy, and birth control. Some of her findings seem intuitively logical (e.g. why do older unattractive guys like Donald Trump always have beautiful young wives? Well, duh...it's the age-old trade of youthful beauty for the big old wallet). But there are many insights that are counterintuitive, and those are the most interesting. In economic hard times, one might think divorces would increase due to the stress of keeping or losing a job. But in actuality, the divorce rate goes down when the economy is weak because people don't like to walk away from economic losses (e.g. selling a house when its market value has gone down), and will instead choose to ride it out until the economy improves.

While I did not have the luxury of learning economic theory taught through the titillating lense of sex, my interest in understanding the subject was jolted by my intense desire to prove a point to a jackass in my class one semester. One day early on in the course, Jackass made a comment, which I rebutted. My friend -- a man -- noticed that Jackass just bristled whenever I (or indeed any woman) spoke up in class, which he took as evidence of Jackass's reputed misogyny. Well, that's all it took. If you think I'm stupid, that's one thing. Depending on how I feel about myself that day, I might not disagree with you. But if you think I'm stupid just because I'm female, that's *quite* another. Jackass had no idea he was in a match race with a stubborn old mule like me.

From then on, my goal was to litigate any points Jackass made in class, which meant I had to know the material better than I knew my own name. In one memorable exchange, the professor talked about how government can pass laws to affect outcomes and the performance of the economy. Jackass -- who was the original Dwight Shrute 20 years before that character showed up on tv in The Office -- was so put out by this idea, he rambled on and on about how unfair and arbitrary it was to big business to have the rules change. His argument was that in order to "play the game," the rules governing sports were sacrosanct, and so should be the laws regulating business. I disagreed with him, arguing that rules change all the time, "helpfully" pointing out that even basketball had just adopted the three-point rule. Since Jackass also fancied himself a sports nut, it was particularly sweet to use an example from basketball -- *his* sport -- against him.

And so it went all semester, the battle of the sexes fought point by point on the court of microeconomic theory. Most days I walked away feeling like the Billie Jean King of Econ 102, while I suspect he walked away feeling not like Bobby Riggs, but more like H.L. Mencken -- his low opinion of women confirmed by the obstreperousness of my relentless mouth. All these years later, I wonder what he would think of me now. It pleases me to think he would *not* approve of this blog. Women shouldn't have opinions, you know.