The Darkly Comic Economics of Sex: What Science Gets Right (and Wrong) About Transactional Intimacy
Wednesday, November 5, 2025.
The first recorded transaction of sex for resources probably involved a goat, a fire, and a cave with decent acoustics, and lewd drawings on the wall.
Today it’s a seedy Motel 6 with a backdrop of porn on demand.
A new review in the Archives of Sexual Behavior by Hungarian psychologist Norbert Meskó revisits this eternal arrangement.
He calls it sexual-economic exchange—a term so intellectually neutral it sounds like it was workshopped by international diplomats.
His argument: to understand why people keep swapping sex for stuff, you can’t pick a favorite discipline. Biology, psychology, and economics all have a stake in the bedroom.
The Rebranding of Desire
Meskó ditches the word prostitution (too moral), and sex work (too political).
He prefers sexual-economic exchange, which could just as easily describe a marriage, a sugar-dating contract, or an unusually strategic situationship.
It’s the umbrella term for every arrangement where intimacy and resource flow meet halfway. Which is to say, most of them.
He proposes a multiple-perspectives model, hoping to unite the moralists who want to abolish the practice, the feminists who can’t agree if it’s liberation or exploitation, and the economists who insist everyone’s just behaving rationally in satin.
Biology’s Version: Mating as Resource Management
Evolutionary theory arrives first, as usual, smug and efficient. Females invest heavily in reproduction; males compete for access. It’s not romance—it’s logistics.
Across species, from chimpanzees trading grooming for mating rights to penguins bribing partners with pebbles, the principle is clear: reproduction favors reciprocity. Human courtship is just the deluxe edition—same instincts, more paperwork.
But Meskó reminds us: biology provides the motive, not the justification. Our mating strategies might be ancient, but our rationalizations are bespoke.
Psychology’s Turn: Schemas, Trauma, and the Long Echo
Psychology interrupts to say, “Hold my attachment style.”
Meskó reviews decades of research showing that many people who enter sexual-economic exchanges carry histories of trauma—abuse, neglect, abandonment. These early experiences shape schemas, deep mental blueprints about love, safety, and worth.
If you were taught that affection must be purchased with compliance, you’ll spend adulthood negotiating those invisible terms.
Some offer nurture, some offer beauty, some only offer silence. All of it a sort of cultural currency.
Not everyone is a victim. Agency often coexists with adaptation. A sexual partner can conceivably be both self-directed and scarred—two truths that share a bed more often than anyone admits.
Economics Joins the Party—Uninvited, But Intrigued
Economists have always envied the poets, so they invented their own love language: supply and demand.
Psychologists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs proposed that heterosexual dynamics operate like a market: men want sex more, women control access, society sets the price. When women outnumber men, sex becomes “cheap.” When men outnumber women, the price spikes and everyone pretends it’s virtue.
Modern dating apps have simply digitized this process. Sugar dating platforms, OnlyFans, influencer “soft life” content—they all run on the same ancient algorithm: trade appeal for provision, status for attention.
If the cave wall once held charcoal drawings of desirable mates, Instagram now does it with filters and affiliate links.
Policy: Where Morality Meets Futility
Lawmakers, Meskó notes, oscillate between purity crusades and laissez-faire shrugs. The Nordic Model criminalizes buyers. The Soviet Union criminalized everyone. Both still had thriving underground markets.
Prohibition makes it dangerous; deregulation leaves it hollow.
The only real solution, he says, is the least cinematic: address trauma, poverty, and inequality.
But trauma therapy doesn’t make for a catchy campaign slogan.
The Therapist’s Angle
In couples therapy, the “sexual-economic exchange” doesn’t usually involve cash. It’s subtler: one partner trades peace for approval, affection for chores done, intimacy for reassurance.
Nobody calls it prostitution, but some partners have been reduced to essentially bartering.
They come to therapy saying, We’ve grown apart, but what they mean is, The terms of the agreement have changed.
Transactional love isn’t always exploitative—it’s often just exhausting.
You can’t build trust while running a quiet emotional economy in your head. But naming the unspoken bargain is the first step toward ending it.
Culture’s Mirror: Desire for Sale
Today, bestowed attention itself is the resource. The marketplace is global and open 24 hours.
OnlyFans monetizes fantasy, dating apps turn attraction into data, and emotional labor gets repackaged as the “girlfriend experience.”
What used to be whispered in alleys now trends on TikTok.
We call it empowerment, but it still obeys the old math: who gives, who gains, who pays in silence.
Final thoughts
Meskó’s model posits that sex-for-resources isn’t a moral glitch—it’s the operating system. Every era just updates the interface.
Biology supplies the appetite, psychology negotiates the rate, economics handles the paperwork.
Love pretends it’s above all that—and then checks the dinner bill.
It isn’t that money corrupts love; it’s that love was never a charity in the first place.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Meskó, N. (2025). The Multiple Perspectives Approach to Understanding Sexual-Economic Exchange. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-025-03259-3