Is Buying Dinner for Women Defecting Against Other Men?

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There were a lot of reactions to my 10 Rules for Sleeping With Women post that I would like to respond to¹, but one in particular stood out to me, in part because I sympathized with the perspective. From Ruby on twitter:

A “bad equilibrium”, interesting. I asked her what sort of bad equilibrium and she linked the following:

So, if I’m understanding Ruby correctly, she sees men paying for dinner as a kind of prisoner’s dilemma. All men could coordinate to make sure that they split dinner or use some other more equitable protocol, but each individual man, when he faces the decision of whether to pay, improves his own odds of scoring if he insists on paying. That decision comes at the expense of cementing an expectation that men should pay for dinner on dates.

If I did see things that way, I would probably at least be persuaded that I should not insist on paying for dinner on every date (whether I would actually stop is a different question). It’s not exactly that I disagree with Ruby here. Many men probably do see having to pay for dinner as an inconvenience and perhaps even as somewhat inequitable, and I don’t think they’re being crazy. But I do think they might be missing something.

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I see insisting on paying for dinner on a first date as aiming for a different socially good equilibrium: appropriately compensating the suppliers of a valuable good. Most people who do not suffer from libertarianism², or low disgust response, high decoupling, autism, whatever you want to call it, feel discomfort with trades that involve certain kinds of goods being exchanged. Sex being traded for money, organs being traded for money, organs being traded for sex, etc. They find all of it disgusting.

Unfortunately for them, markets will market whether you want them to or not, and so civilization must find ways to equalize supply and demand. If you do not allow buyers to compete for goods by bidding up prices, they will find some other way to compete with each other. The classic examples of this are increasing search costs, queues, bringing gifts, and so on.

In the sexual marketplace, there is generally much more demand from men for sex with women than there is demand from women for sex with men. Every time a woman has sex with a man, there is also an instance of a man having sex with a woman, so there is no way to make the quantity of heterosexual sex with women supplied not equal to the quantity consumed. However, generally speaking, men want to have sex with women much more than women want to have sex with men. Since the low decouplers insist that men should not simply pay women for sex (this often includes the very men and women involved in the transaction), men must provide value in some other way.

One of the key ways to covertly compensate women for sex that our civilization has settled on is having men pay for dates. To be clear, most men and most women on a date do not think about whether the man should pay in terms of covertly compensating the supplier of a valuable good, and most would be horrified to hear that their date did think of it that way. It is importantly covert even from them. If it weren’t, then those who are not afflicted with severe libertarianism would have a much harder time dating.

Nonetheless, the woman knows that having sex with her is a valuable experience, and that there is only so much of it to go around. She could decide to give it to another man who is not the man currently on a date with her. The man knows this as well. He is trying to get the woman to choose to sleep with him instead of someone else, so he wants to impress her and provide value for her.

This is a market that is ripe for price discrimination on the part of both men and women. Men cannot arbitrage cheap sex by reselling it at higher prices to other men, and different women (and men) vary in desirability. There is no open free market, so there is no reason for our civilization to settle on one price. Nonetheless, analyzing it as a market seems fruitful. It’s the oldest profession, after all.

That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t address the question of whether I am defecting against other men when I buy dinner for a woman I am on a date with. I think you can certainly analyze the situation that way. The payoffs do functionally work out that way, putting aside the complication that I and some other men intrinsically enjoy buying dinner for a date. But it’s a strange kind of defection.

Imagine that you were the seller of a unique service. All of your customers could band together and coordinate to refuse to pay you any more than some capped price they agree on. Does that mean that when they end up paying you different prices that they individually negotiated with you, they are defecting against their fellow customers? Well, sort of. The payoff matrix does shake out to be a prisoner’s dilemma. But that word “defect” has a certain moral, or at least non-cooperative, connotation that doesn’t seem deserved in this case. Sure, it’s functionally analogous to the move called “defect” in a prisoner’s dilemma, but it seems like there is more at stake here than that.

Relatedly, it is of course a case of intrasexual competition among men, but so is bidding up the price of a good a case of competition among consumers. In fact, that latter case can be analyzed as a prisoner’s dilemma just as easily.

There is also a social good being generated as a result of this kind of “defection”: the overall amount of sex between men and women increases. If men were to coordinate in this way, there would end up being less sex in the world. In effect, we would end up with more deadweight loss. Transactions that all parties would have been happy with, if they were permitted to happen, will fail to happen, and so surplus is lower.

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There is another complication that Ruby brought up that I would also like to respond to. In my rules for sleeping with women, in rule 8, I mention that you should pay for dinner while not expecting anything in return. That seems to be at odds with the transactional model I posit above, and of course it sort of is.

The model is not just that men paying for dinner on dates is a way for them to compensate women for sex. It is also key that this remains covert even from the parties involved in the transaction. So while it is true that you should appropriately compensate your dates, it is also true that you should not make it very obvious that that is what you are doing.

There are two other ways I think about it that help. One is that I am not actually buying dinner in exchange for sex. I am buying dinner in exchange for an interview during which I will be assessed for sex. Interviewing me in that way is plausibly costly. There are other things she could be doing with her time. The other is that I am paying for a sort of lottery that sometimes pays out in sex and sometimes doesn’t. It would be silly to put money into an investment that I think has about a 10% chance of paying out and then be upset when it doesn’t pay out.

I guess ultimately I am not buying dinner expecting literally nothing in return. What I am expecting in return is to be assessed, and for that assessment to have a reasonable chance of paying out. If I took a woman out on a date³ and she already confidently knew that there was no chance of us sleeping with each other before we got to the date, I would consider it a bit of a defection on her part to not offer to split the bill. But I still wouldn’t make a huge deal of it.

I should perhaps have warned you that this post is a bit of an info hazard, since if you buy it, it might become harder for you to continue to compensate your dates in a way that is sufficiently hidden from yourself. The way I deal with this is by being totally transparent. I think I am just lucky enough to be charming enough to be able to say something like, “Yes, of course I wouldn’t buy you dinner if I didn’t think it would improve my odds,” and have it go over well. I’m not sure how you should deal with it. Perhaps you should develop a fetish for paying for dinner on dates.

My recommendation here, as always, is to try to see things clearly and then remain sane and wise regardless of what you see.

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Edited to add:

Here is a screenshot a partner sent me of a conversation between us a few months ago. This post immediately reminded her of it. I include it for ammusement.

1. I am particularly excited to respond to both the accusations that I am a deranged red pilled incel or whatever and the accusations that I am a cucked feminist soy boy. It pleases me greatly to be accused of both for the same piece.

2. As you may have guessed, I suffer from severe libertarianism myself, both in my policy preferences and my personal choices.

3. To be clear, I only call things dates if I am sure that they are, which is why I ask women out on dates instead of asking them out to dinner. I don’t consider it a date unless there is common knowledge that it is a date.