Sex

You report that the “price of sex” has hit an all-time low. What does that mean, exactly?

I measure the price of sex in a couple of different ways. I didn’t write this theory personally, but social psychologists claim that men’s sex has no value per se. In the world of prostitution you never see women paying men for sex. Men pay women for sex, men will pay men for sex, but women don’t pay men for sex. You get a sense that she has something of value that he wants.

So how do we measure how people price this? A couple different ways: First, the time until they have sex in a relationship. A second measure is the number of sex partners that “sub-optimal men” have had. I define that group as men who are 22 years old, dropped out of high school and don’t have a full-time job — men who don’t have a lot going for them. We compare the number of partners they’ve had with the number of partners of a male college graduate who is employed full-time. Theoretically, if sex is valuable to her then she’s not going to trade it away to just some crummy man, and when we look at the data, we find that those sub-optimal men report a lot more partners than men who actually have a lot going for them.

In the book, we report that 35 percent of men’s relationships are reported to have become sexual within two weeks; and 48 percent become sexual within a month. That gives you an indication that it doesn’t take long for men to access sex, so it must not be all that valuable, right? That’s how we get an indirect sense of the price of sex. Now, let’s say sex was the highest possible cost. You’d see women never having sex with anyone until a man commits to marry her — that’s the most expensive thing you can charge. But that’s just not the way the world is today, and that’s not the way the world ever was — the price of sex has never been that high, but it was certainly higher than it is today. All he has to do is maybe buy her dinner and text her.

It seems counterintuitive that young women’s greater economic freedom has resulted in fewer romantic choices. How does this work?

It’s not that young educated women don’t marry — in fact they have the highest odds of getting and staying married — it’s that if you look at the whole relationship scene out there today, more than ever women feel like they’re competing for men. In American colleges, 57 percent of students are women and 43 percent are men. That’s a radical reversal of where we were 30 or 40 years ago. Presuming that people are attracted to people who are like them educationally, it means looking for secure relationships becomes challenging because the sex ratio is so imbalanced.

That’s a terrible environment to try to get men to commit. The women wind up competing with each other — not necessarily to marry because they’re not interested in marriage at that point — but they compete with each other to attract men. How do you compete with other women to attract men? Well, sex is the way to get his attention. It’s the opposite of a cartel effect where women would say, “All right, we need to band together and artificially restrict the price of sex and get it high, even if we don’t want to, in order to extract things from men.” It used to be women would shame each other for selling low.

People try to look for the message here about women — am I being hard on women, am I being soft on women? Neither one. I’m just saying women have had extreme successes — which is fantastic! — it’s just those successes don’t translate to success in the relationship field. Individual women can still have it all, and plenty do, but if you take a step back and look at the whole scene, women are not as successful in relationships as perhaps they once were.

It strikes me that your research could be revealing something about how the so-called boy crisis — where young women are excelling in academia, and later the work world — is impacting romance. Do you think that’s the case?

Exactly. It’s frustrating for women because you think that working so hard and being successful should translate into success here, and it almost is the opposite.

The challenge of facing a small pool of similarly educated men reminds me of what we’ve been hearing for a while now about the romantic predicament of African-American women.

They have one of the most profound challenges. Not only do they have this sex ratio problem in college but a sex ratio problem in their communities. Most of the rest of us don’t have a sex ration problem in our communities. So they feel the sex ratio problem most poignantly.

What’s the current state of hookup culture? Is it as wild and crazy as we’re led to believe?

In certain corners of the American population, yes. But in general, I would say it’s not quite as salacious as people might think. Hookups happen just as much outside of college as in, if not more. But colleges that have Greek systems, people are more likely to hook up. I mean fraternities exist for this purpose — this is a cartel of men who have covenanted together to try to help the brothers access sex cheaply and without strings. They sanction each other often when people take on a girlfriend or fall in love — that can really be a threat to what the others are trying to accomplish.

It’s also more likely to happen at elite private universities. In part it’s because these are high-strung, high-octane kids who study hard and have great success, but it’s like, what do you do with sexual desire? You have to segment it, compartmentalize it and keep it from being a threat to your larger intentions. So it makes sense that hooking up as a short-term solution is more popular in the most elite universities.

I’m not sure if you remember this book “Unhooked” by Laura Sessions Stepp, a [former] Washington Post journalist …

Oh, do I!

I’m not surprised that she got really depressed after writing it, because all she did was study Duke and George Washington, and some of these high schools in D.C., and that is sort of the pinnacle of where the hooking up mentality tends to happen. You go to the University of Nebraska or something and it’ll be there but it’s not necessarily the most common thing.

You found that on average young women are less satisfied with “no strings attached” relationships than men. So why are they having casual sex then? Are they doing so with hopes that it will keep the guy around longer?

There’s plenty of that mentality of “Well, if I give him what he wants then he should stay.” I think women feel they have to compete with each other, and that if they stick to this script it will eventually work out for them. But I think we’re seeing increasing numbers of women who are saying, “I don’t like this script, it sucks.” The problem is it can be difficult to express that to their peers. Say you have a college dorm room with four girls living in it and one refuses to sleep around at all, the other two are in steady relationships and the fourth prefers to hook up. The one who doesn’t participate in this at all, her odds of meeting a man who doesn’t operate like this gets slim because of her peer who is content to operate like that. When people sleep with each other it’s a data point for a future pricing of sex. There is no completely discreet sex.

What is the answer, then, for young women who are sexual beings but also want a relationship?

Oh, I wish I had one.

Is there a way for them to better navigate this sexual minefield?

This is where I get a little bit controversial and people don’t like what I have to say. I don’t think it’s in women’s interest to play the field for a long period of time. It can get depressing, not only about their relationships but to see the pool of men in their 30s who are available. My advice is if you find somebody who you love and who loves you, make it work, whatever it takes! To always think that something better is down the pathway, you might be mistaken.

I think it’s a bad idea for women collectively to compete with each other for men and to just sort of say I’ll do whatever it takes to be in a relationship with men. Women need to somehow reacquire control over the direction of relationships. They feel like they don’t have control. They feel like he calls the shots. That is most unfortunate. Part of that, I think, involves — and this is what some women don’t want to hear — the artificial restriction of sex until later in the relationship. You might not feel like doing that but it’s for a greater future goal. Men who have sex early in a relationship feel little impulse to make strong commitments. Women desperately want that to not be true, but it is. Men and women make relationship commitments very differently. It doesn’t sound modern and it doesn’t sound natural, but I don’t care what it sounds like, I’m telling you how things work. Giving it away early gives a great deal of power to him.

But how much bargaining power does an individual woman have in terms of withholding sex if other women are not?

Right. I wish I could say, “Oh, an individual woman will get what she wants by withholding sex,” but that is not the case when it’s not the case collectively, when there are lots of other women happy to underbid her. She’s in a bind, which is why a lot of women don’t restrict it because they feel, “Oh, he’s just going to go to my roommate or the other woman at the end of the bar,” which is true. But I still think you have better odds of succeeding, especially if you’re attractive, if you don’t give in, if you make him work hard, get to know you, make commitments — all that stuff that seems pretty basic. This is not about getting sex. Women can get sex whenever they want. Post it on Craigslist and you can have it within the hour. This is about getting commitments.

The question of why the money shot has since then, ahem, exploded in popularity is more complicated. The most obvious explanation is one of pure mechanics. “It has to do with the real physiology of orgasm and ejaculation,” says Lisa Jean Moore, author of “Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid.” “The way that male orgasm is external, as opposed to female orgasm, which is internal, it sort of lends itself well to cinematic capture.”

In terms of evolutionary biology, the money shot also triggers sexual competition. Ogi Ogas, author of “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” a book that explores human sexuality through popular porn genres, says, “The penis itself is a sperm competition cue, unconsciously triggering arousal designed to motivate a man to have more vigorous sex with a woman than the man who just finished,” he says, drawing on theories in evolutionary psychology about sexual competition. (For example, one study showed that heterosexual men produced more potent ejaculate when masturbating to images of two men having sex with a woman, compared to porny shots of three women together.) “The sperm might also function as a sperm competition cue in the same manner,” he says.

It’s also simply the case that viewers desire proof that the pleasure they’re seeing performed on-screen is authentic — and in the age of Viagra, an erection itself isn’t convincing enough. “The money shot actually implies that what we are seeing is real,” says Cindy Patton, a professor of sociology, anthropology and women’s studies at Simon Fraser University.

The irony is that such proof actually requires suspension of disbelief, because “the male pornographic film performer must withdraw from any tactile connection with the genitals or mouth of the woman so that the ‘spending’ of his ejaculate is visible,” writes Williams. “Within convention, viewers are asked to believe that the sexual performers within the film want to shift from a tactile to a visual pleasure at the crucial moment of the male’s orgasm.”

In recent years, in a bizarre sleight of … penis, some “pornographic videos, and particularly the cover photographs that entice one to buy, feature partially concealed artificial yet very realistic phalluses that shoot decidedly unrealistic quantities of artificial semen when squeezed,” writes Michael Thomas Carroll in “Popular modernity in America: experience, technology, mythohistory.” He explains, “This desire to provide the ‘evidence’ of male sexual pleasure has given way to ‘natural magic’ and illusory spectatorship.”

Some cultural commentators have paradoxically argued that the money shot is the result of the relative invisibility of the typical female orgasm. “The problem of an equally irrefutable and visible proof of female orgasm, at a physiological level, both leads to the convention whereby male orgasm stands in for female orgasm and to attempts to convey female orgasm by more indirect means,” argues Bill Nichols in “Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary.”

Williams writes in “Hard Core,” “While undeniably spectacular, the money shot is also hopelessly specular; it can only reflect back to the male gaze that purports to want knowledge of the woman’s pleasure the man’s own climax.” She calls the cum shot “a poor substitute for the knowledge of female wonders that the genre as a whole still seeks.”

Some would rather explain this gender divide in terms of sexism. In heterosexual cum-shot porn, Carroll argues, chauvinism is evident in the “domination of the standing male/kneeling woman stance that is one of the most popular forms of this image, but also in the implied degradation of the phallus ‘spitting’ on the woman’s face — that part of the body which is most closely associated with one’s individual dignity and personality.” (It’s worth noting that a similar dom-sub dynamic plays out in gay porn, too.)

In some but not all contexts, Moore sees the money shot as a way of “marking” a partner as “territory or property.” In a paper titled, “Cocktail parties: Fetishizing semen in pornography beyond bukkake,” she and co-author Juliana Weissbein wrote, “The most prominent type of [cum shot] video on X-Tube … was of disembodied males masturbating to ejaculation onto a still photo of a female,” they explain. “The women in these photographs, often difficult to see, are described variously as ex-girfriends or ex-wives, famous models or actresses. Ejaculating onto photos of a specific woman allows the man to claim her as his property.”

Perhaps most important is the impact of AIDs and HIV since that seminal moment in “Deep Throat” four decades ago. “In heterosexual contexts, women have avoided semen for a long time, partially to prevent pregnancy,” as well as various STDs, says Moore. But the AIDS and HIV crisis gave ejaculate an even greater “toxifying, disease-ridden” image. “Semen is something we’ve tried to sanitize and protect ourselves from in a prophylactic sense — we’re covering the body up, or covering the penis up, figuring out ways to avoid contact,” she says.

The funhouse mirror of sexuality often eroticizes that which we most fear and abhor, thus “a fantasy develops about somebody actually wanting [semen], and they want it so badly that they want to drink it and they want to slather it all over their bodies and they want you to wipe it all over their faces,” Moore says. “The messages that are so adverse and make semen to be this abject, disgusting substance have had this other effect of making male spectators want to live out the fantasy that women and men actually want it and are celebrating it.”

Carroll argues that it “is not merely a carnal fantasy; it is also an emotional one — a fantasy of ‘unconditional acceptance’ in which the female” — or male, presumably — “seems to say ‘I exist wholly for you. I will never reject you. You cannot disappoint me.”

A few years later, after a stint teaching sex ed at an after-school program, she started Boinkology, a site about sex and pop culture. That got her noticed by the folks at Fleshbot, which has always specialized in a mix of sexy content from both porn and mainstream entertainment (for example, a red-carpet shot of a celebrity with a see-through dress or a sex scene on “Weeds”). She quickly rose from a contributor to associate editor to editor in chief.

The recent split with Gawker was a result of the fact that “Fleshbot required all this special attention,” she says, because everyone from advertisers to banks are scared of being associated with an adult site. “They couldn’t devote the energy to optimizing it, and it wasn’t bringing in enough to justify the problems it was creating.” In an interview last year, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton, who recently reported a record of 35.6 million unique visitors across all his Web properties, said Fleshbot accounted for only 5 percent of the company’s traffic.

So Denton put it up for sale. Alptraum can’t go into details because of “some nondisclosure stuff I signed,” but says, “Basically, they had a really short timeline on a sale, and there were interested people who just couldn’t make an offer in time. So it ended up going to me, basically.”

Now she’s the 29-year-old CEO of an adult site, and one of a growing number of women taking the helm of everything from porn production houses to sex toy companies. That said, the industry is still dominated by old white guys. But that’s slowly changing. Quentin Boyer, who has been in the industry since 1997, says “the shift in the ‘porn executive demographic’” began “in the late ’90s, when Internet-based companies began to assert themselves in the adult entertainment market.” Says Boyer, the public relations director for Pink Visual, a porn production company that advertises on Fleshbot and also happens to have a female CEO: “In my view, Lux is part of the wave of new talent that has arrived in the adult entertainment industry as a direct result of the industry’s ‘webification,’ if you will.”

Alptraum agrees. “I’m someone who’s kind of a Web native and who comes from a sex positive background of not necessarily embracing the dominant narrative of what’s sexy,” she says. “I’m kind of like the embodiment of what the Internet has done to porn.” By freeing up the means of production and giving direct access to niche audiences, the Web has empowered all sorts of people who don’t fit the typical porn mold to enter the business, and from all angles.

Women have slowly made progress outside the alt and Internet-based sectors of the industry too. “There are several video companies that have females in high-ranking positions,” says Mark Kernes, a senior editor at Adult Video News. For example, heavyweights Wicked Pictures, Vivid Entertainment and Digital Playground. Miller says, “Certainly the assumption from outside the business is that it’s male dominated, and that’s the majority still, but women have made a big impact in recent years.”

Much like Alptraum, Fleshbot is unusual within the industry. “They have tapped into a unique niche within the adult media and publishing world,” says Dan Miller, executive managing editor of XBIZ, an industry news source. “They’ve been able to dip their toes a little bit into both worlds.”

The site’s also unusual in terms of its “feminist and respectful ethos,” argues Alptraum. “It’s not vulgar, it’s not treating these performers in a degrading way,” she says. “We never shame anybody’s body because we believe that anybody who’s willing to put themselves forth as a sexual object is worth celebrating.”

But the biggest thing setting Fleshbot apart from other porn blogs is that it publishes straight and gay content side by side. “From a marketing perspective, that’s a real departure from the industrywide tendency to categorize and segregate content starting with sexual orientation as the first point of separation,” says Boyer. Instead, Alptraum sees the site as a collection of “anything that we feel could be hot.”

It’s a decidedly Internet-era mindset of plurality and pansexuality. “The reason why I’m able to run Fleshbot, and the reason why Fleshbot is in ascendance, is the same reason why alt porn became popular: the Internet is dramatically transforming the adult industry,” she says. “It’s not so much of a top-down dictation thing anymore.”