This one is pretty lengthy and girthy, just how yall like it. I'm not even done with the full article yet but I've read enough to bring up the main point.

Soapbox time

My line in the sand is this. If you lean blue pill, are against gender roles, etc then sex is a equal exchange and thus you can't get used in exchanging something of equal value with someone else. However, if you lean red pill then you don't view sex as equal exchange and thus getting used for sex is consistent with that value system. Ok now onto the show.

For me, I want things to be blue pill where sex is an equal exchange between men and women.

Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions Personality and Social Psychology Review 2004, Vol. 8, No. 4, 339–36

This article puts into more rigorous and formal terms many of the concepts and ideas I see debated here daily. So lets exam this together.

Sexual activity is often regarded as among the most private of activities, negotiated by two individuals on the basis of their own individual desires and values. Idealistic treatments describe the two individuals as potentially equal and interchangeable.

This is the blue pill leaning I was referring to. However we are going to look at all this through the lens of economics, buyer and seller, (very red pill) and we provide justification for doing so.

This article turns to a different discipline, namely economics, to elucidate a theory of sexual interactions. Although applying economic principles to sex may seem novel, psychology has invoked economic theories in other contexts. Social exchange theory has been used to analyze a broad range of social interactions (e.g., Blau, 1964; Homans, 1950, 1961; Sprecher, 1998), based on the assumption that each party in an interaction gives something and gets something in return. Analyzing the costs and benefits of various inter- personal behavior furnishes a useful basis for making predictions about how people will think, feel, and choose to act.

And lets get the main idea out of the way now:

The central point to our social exchange analysis of sex is that sex is essentially a female resource. When a man and a woman have sex, therefore, the woman is giving something of value to the man. In that sense, the interaction is one-sided—unless the man gives the woman something else of comparable value.

As a result, sexual intercourse by itself is not an equal exchange, but rather an instance of the man getting something of value from the woman. (rejection of blue pill) To make the exchange equal, the man must give her something else in return and his own sexual participation does not have enough value to constitute this. How much he gives her in terms of nonsexual resources will depend on the price (so to speak) set by the local culture and on her relative standing on valued sexual characteristics .

When sex happens, therefore, it will often be in a context in which the man gives the woman material gifts, consideration and respect, commitment to a relationship as desired by her, or other goods

This is where women come away feeling that they got "used for sex". Because they agree that sex is a resource they give men and they didn't enough extra in return. To these women, sex is not an equal exchange. So much for getting rid of gender roles right? Lets keep going.

Women will receive other valued goods in return for their sexual favors. Male sexuality, in contrast, cannot be exchanged for other goods. Put another way, women become the suppliers of sex, whereas men constitute the demand for it and play the role of purchasers and consumers. Even though in one sense a man and a woman who are having sexual intercourse are both doing similar things, socially they are doing quite different things.

Thus, the first prediction based on the social exchange theory of sex is that interpersonal processes associated with sexual behavior will reveal a fundamental difference in gender roles. Men will offer women other resources in exchange for sex, but women will not give men resources for sex (except perhaps in highly unusual circumstances). In any event, the bottom line is that sexual activity by women has exchange value, whereas male sexuality does not

The hilarity is how many anti-rp women just read that part and nodded in agreement. Now at this point some of you might be asking, "ok lets say that I agree with this for sake of debate/argument, so what? What are the implications of this? Well lets look at what things fit into place using this framework:

There's the sexual market place and associated smv.

One crucial feature of the social exchange analysis is that all the sexual activities within a community are loosely interconnected as part of a sexual marketplace. Sex is therefore not entirely a private matter between two consenting adults. Rather, sex becomes part of an economic system, just as the sale of a house is not purely a transaction between two parties but is tied in to the local economy and housing market.

Why all the fuss about n-count?

In fact, having sex with different partners would be a problematic strategy for a woman. As social exchange theorists emphasize, the value of any commodity rises and falls with scarcity. Even such fully renewable resources as praise can rise or fall in value as a function of how widely they are distributed (Blau, 1964; Jones & Wortman, 1973). Sex would have high value if the woman has had few lovers or is known to be reluctant to grant sexual favors, whereas the same activity might have less value if the woman is reputed to be loose or to have had many lovers. The amount a man would be willing to give to have sex with the woman would therefore differ as a function of her (perceived) sexual history. In this respect, the woman’s sexual favors are not a fully renewable resource and the woman will have some incentive to grant them only sparingly.

Thus, a woman’s sexual favors lose value as she distributes them widely. In consequence, she has an incentive to be selective in her sexual partners and to maintain a reputation for having relatively few partners.

In contrast, her reputation is a nonrenewable resource. A fully rational approach to social exchange would therefore cause the woman to care less about what she actually does than about what she is perceived by the community as doing. Whenever she engages in sex, she should seek to keep it somewhat secret and deniable, so that her reputation is that of someone whose sexual favors are highly exclusive and therefore of high value.

Gender roles:

For example, if Mary finds herself dating Jim and having more desire for sex than he does, we should not expect this couple to reverse the usual gender roles, so that she asks him out, pays for his food and entertainment, and brings him gifts, while he holds back and if necessary slaps her hand away. The community sets the gender roles based on the typical conditions in the market, including greater male desire. Put more simply, Mary’s greater sexual desire may lead her to offer Jim sex at a significantly reduced price as compared to the average, but it does not seem likely to reverse the exchange so that she ends up giving resources to him.

There's more. The article is well worth a read as there are even more gems to pull out.