Wife or Whore

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Forbes Editor rips women who have a career.


Article by the executive news editor for Forbes Magazine.

"The Economics Of Prostitution"

Michael Noer - American business writer and editor.

Wife or whore?

The choice is that simple. At least according to economists Lena Edlund and Evelyn Korn, it is.

The two well respected economists created a minor stir in academic circles a few years back when they published "A Theory of Prostitution" in the Journal of Political Economy. The paper was remarkable not only for being accepted by a major journal but also because it considered wives and whores as economic "goods" that can be substituted for each other. Men buy, women sell.

Economists have been equating money and marriage ever since Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker published his seminal paper "A Theory of Marriage" in two parts in 1973 and 1974, also, not coincidentally, in the Journal of Political Economy.

Becker used market analysis to tackle the questions of whom, when and why we marry. His conclusions? Mate selection is a market, and marriages occur only if they are profitable for both parties involved.

Becker allowed nonmonetary elements, like romantic love and companionship, to be entered into courtship's profit and loss statement. And children, in particular, were important. "Sexual gratification, cleaning, feeding and other services can be purchased, but not children: Both the man and the woman are required to produce their own children and perhaps to raise them," he wrote.

But back to whores: Edlund and Korn admit that spouses and streetwalkers aren't exactly alike. Wives, in truth, 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. But the implication remains that wives and whores are, if not exactly like Coke and Pepsi, something akin to champagne and beer. The same sort of thing.

As with Becker, a key differentiator in Edlund and Korn's model is reproductive sex. Wives can offer it, whores can not.

To be fair, Edlund and Korn were merely building an admittedly grossly simplified model of human behavior in an attempt to answer a nagging question: Why do hookers make so much money? Prostitution is, seemingly, a low skill but high pay profession with few upfront costs, micro miniskirts and stiletto heels aside.

Yet according to data assembled from a wide variety of times and places, ranging from mid 15th century France to Malaysia of the late 1990s, prostitutes make more money, in some cases, a lot more money, than do working girls who, well, work for a living. This held true even for places where prostitution is legal and relatively safe. In short, streetwalkers aren't necessarily being paid more for their increased risk of going to jail or the hospital.

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," Edlund and Korn conclude.

Ouch.

Another zinger: "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)." Guys, nothing says "Happy Valentine's Day" more than "low cost provider."

Of course, it's easy to pour cold water on some of the assumptions made in Edlund and Korn's mathematical model. But these so called "stylized facts" are supposed to predict human behavior; they don't necessarily pretend to mirror it.

In particular, the assumption that there is no "third way" between wife and whore is problematic, if not outright offensive: "The third alternative, working in a regular job but not marrying, can be ruled out, since we assume that the only downside of marriage for a woman is the forgone opportunity for prostitution."

Be sure to let all your married friends know what they're missing.

Also, the emphasis on the utility of children is puzzling. In most Western democracies, fertility rates have plummeted as wealth has increased. Empirically, men not only buy fewer whores as they get richer, but they have fewer children.

Still, 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 Becker. 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.

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Response to Forbes Magazine article advising men against marrying working ladies.

The Sunday Times

Guys, a word of advice

There’s a huge hoo-ha in America about an article published on the business website Forbes.com. It starts off like this: “Guys, a word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.”

The writer, Michael Noer, cites at length a piece in Social Forces, a US research journal, that has apparently found marrying a working woman dramatically ups the risk of having a difficult marriage and that “professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. Even those with a ‘feminist’ outlook are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner”.

So that’s nice, especially the incredulous quote marks around the “feminist”. And working your butt off as a cashier at the supermarket doesn’t count, by the way: to qualify as a career woman you apparently need to have been to university, work more than 35 weeks a year outside the home and earn a minimum salary of 30,000 dollars(just under 16,000 pounds, a weirdly low figure, surely?).

Marrying these women is, according to the research Noer quotes, “asking for trouble”. If they abandon their job to raise children “they will be unhappy”. If they make more money than you “they will be unhappy” and “you will be unhappy” too. Husbands of career women are also more likely to fall ill, it appears, and to have dirty houses (again strange, as one of the joys of a double income is that you can afford to hire any number of cleaners).

You can imagine the outcry the article has caused. Women readers aren’t happy and the website has now posted a spirited riposte by one of its female correspondents alongside Noer’s original feature.

What is interesting about all of this is that I suspect Noer’s central point, that working women are trouble and that you’re better off with a docile little breeder or, indeed, a trophy wife, is more widely held by men than you or I might imagine. It’s not a viewpoint they like to trumpet in mixed company, obviously, but I’ve heard it expressed more times than I care to remember in private.

It stems in part from a sweet but inane desire for alpha malehood, me man, me provide, me gain big eyed gratitude for ace wage earning skills, and from chronic sexual insecurity. If your nice little wife is safely at home all day, instead of running around the boardroom with men who might, the horror, be somewhat more alpha than you, she’s more likely to admire your manly skills and talents when you come home at night, and not realise what she’s missing.

That’s the theory, anyway. The practice, I have observed over the years, is somewhat different. Men love nothing more than coming home to an ordered house, sleeping children, dinner in the oven and a cocktail waiting on the table, but they don’t necessarily go a whole hog on the conversation that goes with it: “Such a funny thing happened at playgroup”; “The queues in Sainsbury’s were awful today”; “I’ve found that if I purée the broccoli, they don’t really notice they’re eating it”. And so on. Then women are all surprised when men seem not to listen, or to be distracted, or suddenly find themselves “working late”.

Besides, as we all know, the domestic fantasy outlined above is usually only achievable with a vast amount of paid help, which means a double income. Without it the children are still running amok, the dinner’s burnt, the missus has dark circles under her eyes and she’s downed the cocktail in one herself to try to calm her nerves.

She doesn’t want to talk about broccoli either but her brain seems to atrophy more and more with the birth of each child. She wants to watch Newsnight but she’s too tired. How can she be tired, the husband wonders, when she’s at home all day? What does she do? She’s not the one who had to get up at 4am to catch a flight to Zurich. And now he’s feeling frisky but she’s already snoring. Despite what Noer and his “research” might claim, it’s hard to see this scenario as the best advert for marital bliss.

I don’t want to get drawn into the unproductive name calling that passes for debate on the question of working versus stay-at-home women. I’ve been both and I liked both. I prefer working because I can’t imagine not having my own money and because I like being able to pay other people to do the stuff that bores me.

The point, surely, is that women should have the freedom to do exactly what they wish to do with their lives, and that very freedom is only real if it originates from women themselves. If a woman doesn’t want a career at any point, fine. The problem arises when that option is put to her by a man; less an option, actually, than an instruction: “There’s no need for you to work, I can support us both. And isn’t it about time you got pregnant?”.

So I would say this: Girls, a word of advice. Marry handsome men or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blonds or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a man with a complex. Marry a man who is happy for you to be you, happy whether you do or don’t work. Marry a man who loves you as you are and who doesn’t think taking the rubbish out is beneath him. Marry a man who can put the children to bed when you’re running late and make dinner too without feeling he is the victim of an emasculating conspiracy. Never marry a man who is stupid enough to use feminist as a term of abuse. Don’t marry Michael Noer.

Nice to see Victoria Beckham cracking a smile for a change, even if she was allegedly tiddly after a night out. One of the mysteries of our age is why Posh, in her wisdom, thinks the “sultry” pout she usually adopts at all times is somehow cool or aesthetically pleasing rather than reminiscent of a teenage goth experimenting with surly facial expressions in the privacy of her bedroom.

Another Posh related mystery surfaced last week. In the advertisement for the Beckhams’ his and hers fragrances, Intimately Beckham, Victoria sports an enormous derriere. Well, enormous in the context of her emaciated frame, at any rate. The new bottom is rather like Barbie’s bosom: you have the feeling that if its owner were actually to try walking with it they’d fall over, helplessly beached until someone came and pulled them up.

What I want to know is: does the J.Lo style bottom owe its existence to the wonders of digital manipulation or does Posh really own a pair of prosthetic buttocks? There is no way the huge bottom is hers: even implants wouldn’t give the desired silhouette. As far as I am aware, the only places that sell fake bottoms are shops catering to pre-operative transsexuals. I knew Posh liked shopping, but this is ridiculous.


Comment: If you want a good wife and a good mother for your children, then stay away from working girls. They are bad news. Working women lay rotten eggs.

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