Save the males! Sex has become too cheap for them

A topic that is not new by any means to this blog and, as a male, I am not sure whether it is my pleasure to add one more post to that collection, or whether I ought to regret this :)

Hanna Rosin, about whom I have blogged before, is getting ready to publish her book, which means, naturally, we can expect quite a few opinion essays like this one that she has authored in the Wall Street Journal.  Rosin writes there about how sexual freedom has transformed women's success:

In the 1970s the sexual revolution was really mostly about sex. But now the sexual revolution has deepened into a more permanent kind of power for women. Young women in their sexual prime—that is, their 20s and early 30s—are generally better off than young men. They are better educated and earn more money on average. What made this possible is the sexual revolution—the ability to have temporary, intimate relationships that don't derail a career. Or to put it more simply, to have sex without getting married.

If women are more ready than ever to have sex with men without forcing them to get married, then there is an important corollary: the evolutionary argument is that males have to work a great deal to have sex.  If they don't have to work hard to gain sexual favors, then, well, they don't have to, for instance, work hard for their grades and try to have successful careers, do they?

sex is clearly cheap for men. Women's "erotic capital," as Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics has dubbed it, can still be traded for attention, a job, perhaps a boyfriend, and certainly all the sex she wants, but it can't assure her love and lifelong commitment.

Rosin writes that this lack of love or lifelong commitment doesn't hassle women all that much.  Their unhappiness comes from having way too many choices now, in the bedroom and on their way to the boardrooms!

Someday, the GOP, too, will begin to understand that we are way past the Eisenhower era :)