Dollars and Sex

by Marina Adshade

  According to the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, 23 percent of men over the age of 50 who are sexually active report that their last sex partner was a “casual acquaintance” and only 25 percent of the men who had a new sexual partner, or more than one partner in the previous year, said they had used a condom the last time they had sex.

  Whether or not a couple chooses to use condoms during sexual intercourse depends both on how each weighs the expected costs of not using a condom against the benefit and how bargaining power is distributed in the relationship.

  The expected cost of unprotected sex depends on both the probability that the person you are having sex with is infected with a disease and the probability that, if they are, the disease will be transmitted during unprotected sex.

  Even as STD rates are increasing among older adults, they still have much lower STD rates than do younger adults; the syphilis infection rate of men between the ages of 20 and 24 is ten times higher than it is among men between the ages of 55 and 65, the gonorrhea infection rate is almost forty times higher, and the chlamydia infection rate is one hundred times higher. So unprotected sex between older adults exposes each partner to much less risk of infection than unprotected sex between younger adults.

  Having said that, older adult men are more likely than are older women to be infected with any of these diseases, so having unprotected sex with an older man is much more risky than having unprotected sex with an older woman.

  The transmission rates, which are the probability that a person will be infected with an STD when they have sex with an infected partner, are much higher for women than they are for men. For example, the likelihood that a man will get HIV from having unprotected vaginal intercourse once with an HIV-infected woman is between 0.01 percent and 0.03 percent while the likelihood that a woman will get HIV from having unprotected vaginal intercourse once with an HIV-infected man is between 0.05 percent and 0.09 percent. These probabilities may seem low, but HIV is just one of several diseases for which women are subject to higher transmission rates than are men.

  Infection and transmission rates are two good reasons why older women might want to insist on “no glove, no love,” but the declining cost of unprotected sex for men can make it difficult for older women to enforce that rule.

  Difficult, but not impossible.

  In fact, if older women prefer casual sexual relationships to committed relationships, then it should be easier for them to enforce condom use during casual sexual encounters than it was when they were younger. This is because they are no longer under any pressure to compromise in the hope that doing so will secure them a longer-term commitment from their partner. In this market, the men are the ones under pressure to compromise, that is, if they are looking for an end-of-life commitment.

  There is a solution to market imbalance created by differential life expectancies, and that is for older women to have relationships with younger men. The evidence suggests that I am not the only one who thinks that is the best way to resolve this situation.

  NO BROTHELS FOR OLDER WOMEN?

  It is men’s willingness to have sex with strangers—and their love of variety in sexual partners—that fuels the world sex trade, while women’s preference for fewer sexual partners and sex within a relationship has made the sex trade for female clients miniscule by comparison. Still, you have to wonder if, given the barriers faced by older women to finding partners for casual sex, there aren’t profits to be made in brothels for women that target that specific market.

  Sociologist Jacqueline Sánchez Taylor took to the beaches of the Caribbean (literally) to ask female tourists about their sexual interactions with local men and found that even among women who had casual sex with local men, and gave those men cash, none were interested in explicit market exchange of money for sex.

  Thirty-one percent of the women Sánchez Taylor interviewed admitted to having had at least one sexual relationship over the course of their holiday, with almost half of those admitting to having had several sexual partners and a few even confessing to having had sex with more than five men.

  Sixty percent of women with local sex partners admitted to giving their lovers either cash or in-kind gifts, a measure that underestimates the economic nature of these relationships given that the value of meals and hot showers, even small amounts of cash, is underappreciated by those from more privileged economies. And, because the information was collected partway through their holiday, this ignores the possibility that the men will wait until the holiday is over, or even until the women have returned to their home countries, before asking for money.

  When asked to describe their local sexual relationships, only two said they were purely physical, but more than 20 percent described their relationships as “real love.” Even women who gave men cash after one night of sex described their relationships as “holiday romances.”

  There is a sex trade for women, clearly, but would these women buy sex in a brothel in their home country? Probably not: 25 percent said that over the course of the holiday they had been explicitly offered sex in exchange for money, yet not one of those women accepted that offer.

  Female sex tourists are buying a service that can be cheaply provided only in underdeveloped (and low-wage) economies: the fantasy of romance. Even if this were a service that brothels in developed nations could provide, and even if it were affordable, would women really buy it?

  COUGARS AS A SOLUTION TO A MARKET PROBLEM

  When I was 36, I found myself in an awkward position at a dinner party. I had been lamenting the fact that no one seemed interested in playing matchmaker anymore when my hosts realized, to their great delight, that they knew the perfect man for me. Given their description, he appeared to be my polar opposite on every measurable dimension. So it wasn’t clear to me what exactly it was about him that made him my ideal mate, but (as I have already said) I like to keep an open mind when it comes to finding love. Having said that, I did put the brakes on the whole arrangement when they told me his age—he was 53 years old.

  Why this event was so memorable was not that they wanted to set me up with a high school–educated rural tradesman who was almost old enough to be my father; it was the looks that my dinner companions gave each other when I said that I didn’t think I would be interested in someone who was seventeen years my senior. Those looks clearly communicated, “Which one of us is going to tell this babe that she is never going to do any better?”

  I honestly wish I could tell you that this was a one-time experience.

  Big differences in age can be problematic in long-term relationships. If you remember Jane’s story in chapter 6, you will recall that being the much-younger spouse meant that she had very little say in the decisions that many couples make together and that her lack of bargaining power contributed to how unhappy she was in her marriage. John and Jane’s inability to sustain their relationship over the long term was not directly the result of the differences in their ages, but the empirical evidence shows that age differences do matter in how successful marriages are in the long run.

  Earlier I argued that household bargaining power within a marriage depends, in theory at least, on the relative opportunities outside of marriage. Relative ages are one factor that determines those outside opportunities. For example, in a market in which younger women are in greater demand than older women, a 25-year-old woman married to a 40-year-old man should have more bargaining power than would a 40-year-old woman married to a 40-year-old man, everything else being equal.

  That theory suggests that, since Jane was much younger than John, and therefore had more outside options for remarriage, she should have had more bargaining power and not less. According to research by Sonia Oreffice, however, this is the most common experience in heterosexual marriages—the younger partner has less say in household decisions. What is really interesting about this research, though, is that in same-sex marriages, the relationship between age and bargaining power is entirely consistent with the ec
onomic theory.

  One of the decisions that households make together is how members allocate their time between working on the labor market and either working on home production or simply not working at all (economists like to call this “consuming leisure”). We assume that the person with the most bargaining power will spend fewer hours on the labor market (after controlling for factors like the number of children at home) and that the person with the least bargaining power will supply more; how much more depends on just how low their bargaining power is relative to their partner’s.

  Sonia Oreffice finds that if a wife is five years younger than her husband, this one factor will increase her annual labor supply by ten hours and decrease her husband’s by almost eleven hours. This says that the older spouse (in this example, the husband, but this is true regardless of gender) holds more bargaining power in that they are able to negotiate fewer hours on the labor market for themselves and more for their spouse because of their superior age.

  Within lesbian and gay couples, the dynamic works in the opposite direction and is much larger; the younger spouse holds more bargaining power and, as a result, is able to negotiate less time working on the labor market.

  A woman who is five years younger than her (female) partner supplies twenty-one hours less of labor a year and her older partner supplies twenty hours more. A man who is five years younger than his (male) partner supplies twenty-two hours less on the labor market and his relatively old partner supplies twenty-three hours more.

  The same relationship is found when we look at income transferred between partners instead of time spent working; in same-sex couples, the bigger the age difference, the more income the older partner transfers to the younger partner ($2,200 in lesbian couples and $1,500 in gay couples when there is a five-year age difference), while in heterosexual couples the income is transferred from the younger spouse to the older spouse ($900 when there is a five-year age difference).

  This result for heterosexual couples (that the older spouse has more bargaining power) is counterintuitive if we believe that it will be easier for a younger spouse to remarry in the case of divorce. One possible explanation is that the older spouse is more often than not the husband, and the authority associated with being both older and male, trumps any advantage had by a younger wife. A second possibility is that for legally married couples, exercising their outside option is very costly and, as a result, the influence of those outside options on bargaining power is significantly diminished.

  BOOB JOBS INDICATE A PERKIER ECONOMY

  In chapter 6, I said that watching the market for sex toys could help predict recessions; people spend more on sex toys when they need a cheap way of feeling good in hard economic times. In the same way that lubricants could be a leading indicator of recessions, there is another market that indicates that the economy is improving—the market for boob jobs and other cosmetic surgeries.

  According to a 2011 press release by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), demand for perkiness, or perhaps I should say youthfulness, was on the rise with increases in face-lifts (up 9 percent), breast lifts (up 3 percent), lower body lifts (up 9 percent), upper arm lifts (up 5 percent), and thigh lifts (up 8 percent).

  The ASPS claims that this increased demand indicates that consumer confidence is on the rise (hence the usefulness of the boob job as a leading indicator of economic booms) and that some of this increase in demand is the result of pent-up demand from the two preceding years of economic turmoil.

  There is an alternative explanation though. It is possible that a portion of the aging workforce took a long, sad look at the state of their retirement funds and decided that they had a few more years left to spend in what has become, and will no doubt continue to be, a very competitive labor market. And so, they have invested in taking up the slack, so to speak, in order to maintain their position in a market that, as we know, rewards the appearance of youth and virility.

  If that is the case, it isn’t consumer confidence that is driving up demand for plastic surgery. In fact, it seems more likely that plastic surgery is the direct result of a lack of confidence, rather than the other way around.

  Among same-sex couples, there are fewer barriers to dissolving a relationship (the data used here was collected in 2000, before there was any legal recognition for same-sex marriage) and neither partner has a socially determined authority over the other based on gender. In this respect, same-sex couples operate far more like a free-market economy, allowing us to observe the outcome that economic theory predicts; younger partners hold the balance of power.

  A second issue around age differences in marriage is whether big age differences between marriage partners lead to happier marriages. Rebecca Kippen, Bruce Chapman, and Peng Yu answer this question using Australian data. They find that the greater the age difference in married couples, the more likely it is that their marriage will end in divorce.

  For example, they find that a marriage in which the man is as little as two years younger than his wife is 53 percent more likely to end in divorce than a marriage in which the man is between one year younger than his wife and three years older. This increase in the probability of divorce when there is an age difference isn’t just an issue in marriages in which the wife is older; a marriage in which the man is nine or more years older than his wife has double the chance of ending in divorce than a marriage in which he is between one year younger and three years older than his wife.

  A GENUINELY HAPPY ENDING

  A few years ago, a truly creative (and brave) researcher by the name of Hugo Mialon collected data from sixteen thousand men and women so that he could tell an economic story about their orgasms. He didn’t want to talk about the dopamine-induced euphoria of genuine orgasms, however; Mialon wanted to know what causes women and men (I’m surprised, too!) to regularly fake ecstasy.

  Approximately 26 percent of men have faked an orgasm in their current relationship compared with 72 percent of women. Men fake orgasms relatively infrequently because they overwhelmingly feel that they wouldn’t get away with it if they did. No one likes to get caught deceiving his or her partner and, since the expected cost of deception is a function of the probability of being caught, the cost of faking an orgasm is higher for men than it is for women.

  One question this research raises is this: When a woman fakes an orgasm, who exactly is being deceived? Is it the man, because she has fooled him? Or the woman, because she only thinks she has?

  The majority of men in the survey (55 percent) claim that they are not fooled into thinking that their partner is ecstatic when she is not. Statistically, at least half of these men must be in a relationship with women who are faking orgasms. At the same time, only 24 percent of women say they believe their partner can tell when they are faking (a percentage that includes women who said they did not fake). The only explanation for these statistical discrepancies is that either the men believe that the women are not faking, when they really are, or the women believe the men cannot tell they are faking, when they really can.

  Do men not let on when they know their partner has tried to fool them? Maybe, but according to the Center for Sexual Health Promotion, 85 percent of men reported that their partner had an orgasm the last time they had sex compared with only 64 percent of women who reported that their most recent sexual experience had that particularly happy ending.

  By the way, want to know who fakes the most? Older men fake more frequently than do younger men, perhaps because they experience the real deal less often, and better-educated men and women fake more frequently than less-educated men and women.

  Hugo Mialon postulates that educated people are either better liars or better actors, and so can fake without being caught. My students think that educated people don’t have enough time for the real deal, which makes me wonder why they are investing in an education if the cost is a life so busy that they won’t have time for twenty seconds of ecstasy.

  Regardless of how well marriages function whe
n one partner is much older, if it were true that only significantly older men are interested in me at this stage of my life, then my dinner hosts that night would probably be right in thinking that if I want to be in a relationship, then I have to accept that I can’t get what I want—which is a man who is closer to my own age.

  The problem is that the preconception that older men are looking only for younger women is actually false. Don’t get me wrong, older men want younger wives, but remember the wise words of the one-time economics student Mick Jagger: you can’t always get what you want. When it comes to dating, older men may want younger women, but what they often get is a woman closer to their own age.

  Psychologists Sheyna Sears-Roberts Alterovitz and Gerald Mendelsohn found, using data collected from Yahoo! Personals, that as men age, they seek women who are increasingly younger than themselves. For example, between the ages of 20 and 34, men seek women who are on average younger by only one year; between the ages of 40 and 54, they seek women who are on average five years younger; between the ages of 60 and 74, they seek women who are on average eight years younger; and men 75 and over seek women ten years younger than themselves.

  As women age, they also seek increasingly younger men; very young women seek men who are about three years older than themselves, but as they age they tend to seek men who are increasingly closer to their own age. By the time women are between 60 and 75, they are mostly looking for men who are their age. By the time they are over 75, they are mostly looking for men who are, on average, three years younger.

  I took a look at the U.S. Census to see what the market looked like when it closed and found that in many of the marriages that took place between 2008 and 2010, the husband was, in fact, much older than his wife; about 50 percent of newly married men between the ages of 40 and 65 married women who were five or more years younger.