A planet full of Angelina Jolies

I read this the other day in The Week: "The female half of the species is getting more beautiful with each successive generation, while most men remain no more attractive than their cavemen ancestors, evolutionary biologists say. University of Helsinki researchers base that conclusion on a study of more than two thousand American men and women who were tracked over decades. Women rated as beautiful had, on average, sixteen percent more children than their more ordinary counterparts and more girls than boys. Handsome men, however, had no more success in reproducing than the average guy. Since men choose mates largely based on attractiveness, beautiful women have a much better chance of passing on the genes for physical beauty to the next generation of girls. Women, on the other hand, tend to choose as breeding partners men of high status and wealth, who offer protection and security for them and their children. 'Historically, this has meant rich men tend to have more wives and many children,' said British psychologist Gayle Brewer. That's true even if they look like Donald Trump or Aristotle Onassis."

Reminds me both of my "Sugar Babies" post and of an article I saw several years ago citing, I believe, somebody's dissertation that supermodels drive commerce, the theory being that a man sees wealth as the surest--if not, in cases of the most handsomeness-challenged, only--way to mate with "the ideal" of the species, the resulting drive to increase one's wealth being then the pistons in the market engine, or so to speak. I can't find the article, but while looking, I did find this interesting Forbes piece discussing a recent paper, "The Theory of Prostitution," published in the University of Chicago's Journal of Political Economy by economists Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn. The study, which included a survey of working girls' wages "from a wide variety of times and places, ranging from mid-15th-century France to Malaysia of the late 1990s," makes some memorable and often audacious points in comparing the economic utility of wives vs. whores, among them:

Mate selection is a market, and marriages occur only if they are profitable for both parties involved. Wives and whores can be considered as economic "goods" that can be substituted for each other. Men buy, women sell.

Wives are superior to whores in the economist's sense of being a good whose consumption increases as income rises--like fine wine. This may explain why prostitution is less common in wealthier countries. Another key differentiator in Edlund and Korn's model is reproductive sex. Wives can offer it, whores can not.

Notwithstanding Jerry Hall's quip when she was married to Mick Jagger, about being "a maid in the living room and a whore in the bedroom," one normally cannot be both a wife and a whore. "Combine this with the fact that marriage can be an important source of income for women, and it follows that prostitution must pay better than other jobs to compensate for the opportunity cost of forgone-marriage market earnings. This begs the question of why married men go to prostitutes (rather than buying from their wives, who presumably will be low-cost providers, considering that they can sell nonreproductive sex without compromising their marriage)," Edlund and Korn observe. Guys, nothing says "Happy Valentine's Day" more than "low-cost provider."

The economic analysis of marriage explains one age-old phenomenon: gold digging. "In particular, does our analysis justify the popular belief that more beautiful, charming and talented women tend to marry wealthier and more successful men?" wrote [Economist and Nobel laureate Gary] Becker [in an earlier, seminal study, "A Theory of Marriage"]. His answer: "A positive sorting of nonmarket traits with nonhuman wealth always, and with earnings power, usually, maximizes commodity output over all marriages." In other words, yes, supermodels do prefer aging billionaires. And Gary Becker proved it mathematically decades before The Donald married Melania.

As my wife's trip has gone on, I've found myself missing her more and more. On the one hand, this hasn't always been the case in the past, so I see it as a positive for the overall relationship. On the other, I've found that, while admiration of her as mother to our children, fond feelings of companionship and other generally platonic sentiments have swirled in the mix, sexual desire for her (I'll circle back to "for her" momentarily) is central to this low-level separation anxiety. I've weighed this at length, wondering how much of the want percolating in me is because she's "attractive, generally available, fair game" and how much of it is everything else. And even if the scale is tipped toward the former, certainly there are worse things than a man wanting sex, and channeling those desires toward his wife. Right? Right?

Incidentally, the Forbes article makes me smile to think of how the marital utility factor plays out in our--or at least my--thoughts and actions, even at times on a subconscious level. Just yesterday, I emailed my wife with an update on something I'd done (what it was doesn't matter), and reported my motivation as being in part so that she would be "...more inclined to think of me as a breadwinning red-hot lover."