105. Sexual Arbitrage

Here I explain why the concept of "Sexual Marketplace Value" is flawed. I seek to replace it with a more useful term and method to promote agreements between dating partners.

I introduced the concept of Sexual Arbitrage in my article explaining how Dating Apps work. While I’ve been describing dating apps as games publicly since at least 2016, in the Dating Apps paper I discuss how the app only initiates a process of arbitrage that will continue beyond the app and into the “real world” as participants try to get the best deal they can.

In 2016 a little noticed book was published that attempted to explain Sexual Marketplace Value. It seemed to be aimed at players (people who attempt to exaggerate their value to potential partners) and didn’t really take hold.

The concept of a “Sexual Marketplace Value” (SMV) was really established in the public consciousness by Kevin Samuels starting in 2020. This got my attention because he was trying to explain relationships in pseudo-economic language. I had hoped that he would evolve his language to the level I was using internally but when he started bragging about going to Miami to pleasure seek, I feared the worst would befall him. Sure enough, he was dead within months.

Recently a clinical psychologist and creator of the podcast PsycHacks, Orion Taraban, published a book taking the concept of SMV much further. I’ve watched some of his podcasts and feel his advice is usually sound. I would go as far as to recommend it.

The concept of SMV has some serious problems though. It implies there is a quantitative or qualitative value that can be assigned to each individual. That’s not how this works, because SMV is not a static value. It can vary wildly depending on who the customer is as preferences are as diverse as the population. Kevin would get in a lot of trouble when he would admonish women for describing themselves as “10s”, when he would retort that they were “a solid 5”. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

While someone might find you more interesting than someone else, we generally have some cultural concept of what a higher ranked person might present as. It is part of the American mythology that you can buy Manhattan for a few glass beads if you find someone exploitable enough to trade with. In fact, the whole society is built around this mythology. While it’s probably impossible to get such a deal (and probably never happened), people want to believe it. So when Kevin would challenge these beliefs, even if he meant well, he was stepping into a minefield.

The reality is that you might be an “8” to one person and a “4” to another. I would go a step further and say you might be a “6” to one person, and then be an “8” to that same person in a different circumstance just based on how you present yourself to them. This is part of the Arbitrage process, and why I think it is so critical that people understand how it works.

Thus the focus should be on Arbitrage, not SMV, as you aren’t born with the ability to negotiate: this is a skill. Knowing “your value” is perhaps useful, but really that’s only the first step. You can’t describe your value if you don’t know your value. But then you have to make your case to the other person by presenting that value to them. Even that’s not enough to know…

Let’s say all I had to offer was 10 houses. If I was negotiating with someone that I knew valued houses, I might only need to offer 3 houses to seal the deal. I wouldn’t even mention the other 7. If I disclosed all 10 and put them on my side of the Arbitrage scale, I’d be getting a really bad deal. This might happen when you go through 1000 profiles in the largest nearby city and you don’t find anyone that you would consider more than an “8”. So you go after the 8. But you don’t try to sell yourself as a 10. You try to sell yourself as an 8.

Of course you could attempt to dump them later if a “10” showed up, and try to Arbitrage with the 10. 10s are high maintenance so I would discourage this sort of behavior. I would even recommend you avoid 10s altogether as they will constantly be under pressure to do to you what you did to your previous partner. Sometimes loyalty is more valuable than that exciting opportunity in Miami. Note that this is coming from someone who is not philosophically monogamous. It just makes sense to be loyal to the people who matter the most to you.

Now I will attempt to break down the elements of Arbitrage as best I can, but there are so many intangibles that could be included here that the list could be infinitely long.

Sexual Desirability

This is how “hot” you appear to your target audience. This could be affected by a lot of factors like height, age, body type, fitness level, maybe even education (this can be a negative for some). Some people will wear skin tight “genital contouring” or even “rectal contouring” clothing to boost desirability. I see this as a big trend in the park when I’m out training.

I personally don’t want to see someone’s rectum when I’m out running, but that’s the fashion. I’d probably be arrested or worse if I tried to mimic this behavior. I attribute this trend to the highly competitive and ,er, fluid nature of the sexual marketplace in 2025. I used to tell my students that if you played professional football and the person across the line from you was doing steroids, you’d have to do them too or risk losing your job. Thus in the absence of regulation people will wear genital/rectal contouring clothing if they can and they feel they are in direct competition with others.

The same goes for orifice paint. Hyper sexualization/objectification has become so normalized that we just accept it now without even thinking about it. It’s even acceptable in the workplace. As I explained in my last paper on The Dopamine Diet, this is a signal to everyone that you have a dopamine addiction and you aren’t dating with the purpose of finding a “relationship”. The idea that you can lure someone in by sexually objectifying yourself, and then convert that to a “traditional” relationship is not realistic. You will pull a partner that wants to use you for a dopamine high. Since your mind/body compensates to reduce dopamine delivery as you repeat the same activity, you will get bored and replace that partner in some short to moderate time frame.

Even if that dopamine source is incredibly compelling, you will have to sideline them to re-sensitize after some time. This means you will probably enter into another relationship and then cheat on that new person with the previous one. This pattern can repeat infinitely. This is human biology, especially if you abuse your reward systems.

These people will find each other, bang, and then at some point complain about “where are all the good men/women/others?”. They were there, they just didn’t show off their genitals on the first date (or earlier).

Sexual Power

This is very different from Sexual Desirability. Sexual Power is essentially the inverse of how much you want sex. The less you want sex, the higher your Sexual Power. During Arbitrage the person who values sex the least will require you to put more non-sexual assets on the scale in order to make a deal.

Usually men need sex more than women do, so women tend to have Sexual Power during Arbitrage.

As I was prematurely sexualized at the age of 7, and read the Hite Report (1976, ~600 pages), Kama Sutra (~400 CE, ~320 pages), and Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response (1966, 366 pages) when I was 10 years old, I knew more about sex (at least theoretically) than most of my dear readers at that age. Word got around and I had high level contacts in the porn industry by the age of 12. Even though my parents treated me as an adult from the age of 7, they still tried to treat me as a child selectively and had no idea what I was up to. They never will as one is dead and the other has dementia.

Thus to me sex was always an interesting concept, but a bit passe. It was the emotional connection that I was most interested in as that didn’t exist in my environment growing up. Since women my age when I was younger were only interested in me for sex or money, I declined all of them. From my studies, I knew that women tended to be more interested in sex than men from about age 40 to 50. So that was my target audience right out of the gate when I hit 18.

I tended to seek women in powerful positions or who had money who could balance the scales with things I didn’t have, as I had sex on my side of the scale. This was especially true after my experience supporting the UCLA and USA Olympic teams as their trainer when I was 22 (I maintained absolute professional behavior during this period because I could). This is the opposite of what is gender-normal in our society as usually women have an unbelievable Sexual Power advantage in their 20s.

That said, I had a lot to learn and was still naïve for a while. When I was 19 and the youngest person in my nursing class (and the only strait male) I got objectified a lot and even assaulted repeatedly. This included by my instructors. I was secretly dating the top student in the class (I was #2 ranked) who was almost 40 with 2 kids who recently divorced her Hollywood executive husband. She did really well in the divorce.

I will call her “K”. K liked to brag that she charged her ex husband $3500 USD a night if he wanted action from her. That’s $10,500 USD in 2025 dollars. She banged me for free, but on the condition that I “didn’t get emotionally attached”. I didn’t really understand back then that this meant I was an “F-boy”. Fortunately I’m a quick learner. But since I was seeking emotional support, not sex, this didn’t work out for me. The various other women in my class who were assaulting me were not offering emotional support either.

I ultimately had to file a civil rights complaint against Santa Monica College and also had to drop out of nursing. The idea of men being assaulted was a novel concept back in 1985, and probably still is.

One woman that tried to jump me despite having a boyfriend, ended up married to a doctor a few months after that.

A few years later a female friend who knew me pretty well (we were both very busy and used to go on “laundry dates”) offered to give me tens of thousands of dollars in support if I would get her pregnant. I didn’t get the impression that she wanted me, just my genetic information to make a “super baby”. I turned her down even though I was broke, because I really wanted an emotional connection with someone and was tired of having been objectified for the last 20 years by that point.

I know this person reads my substack, and has known me most of my life, so I hope this better explains why I rejected her offer.

I mention these examples because I strategically enjoyed sexual power even though I was born male and present as a man. Thus I have an unusual view on what life is like as a woman. The Sexual Power they have can be a huge advantage in life. But it also means they have to endure a lot of objectification. The more they use their Sexual Power advantage, the more they will get objectified.

People who take advantage of this dynamic often then complain about being objectified. Clearly some of this is going to happen regardless, especially if you are fit/attractive. But you also have a lot of control over how you use that power and the consequences. It’s a bit harder for men in this role because men are always assumed to give consent so women usually don’t ask for consent or even know how to.

Sexual Power can be a very easy way to generate wealth, but there are long term consequences. I talk about those consequences in my paper on the subject.

Special Advice to “Sugar Babies”

I got involved once with a wealthy woman in Topanga Canyon, one of those very expensive parts of California that just burned to the ground. She had a mansion that was built originally for one of the Bangles. So if you are from the area, you know who I’m talking about.

I made it clear I wanted a relationship, and would put the brakes on things if I felt objectified. She said of course. The first time I said “no” to her when she got on top of me, about a month into the relationship, she lost her mind and told me to get out. In the 10 minutes it took me to round up all my stuff she was already on the phone calling everyone in Topanga to tell them that I turned out to be a “control freak”. This was a person who presented herself as a very active civil rights activist that was out on the curb protesting this or that almost every day.

That didn’t stop her from trying to rape me and then gaslighting me to everyone, Harvey Weinstein style. She let me stay at her mansion for free, and covered food. But I never asked her for money. So I wasn’t as transactional as modern day Sugar Babies. And, to be honest, if she was paying me $3500 or $10,000 a night, I would not have said no to her. I probably would have been like “oh! Let me go get some toys!!”

If you go that route, realize that you are going to end up 100% an F-boy or F-girl. You can pretend otherwise, but the moment you say no you are going to get replaced.

The next time I got in a relationship with a woman with a mansion I had learned my lesson. I got my own room in her town and courted her properly for 3 months and got used to her kids before moving in. That ended up being a proper relationship and it only ended because I got hired by Wargaming and had to relocate. She got too jealous with me living in Austin while she was in Connecticut.

Reputation

If the person you want to date has a lot of fame or otherwise a much stronger reputation than you do, that can be worth a lot. I recently saw a video of 11 young women complaining because they all tried to date the same young man at the same time who had 1.8M followers on YouTube. They were clout chasing. So when he ended up posting pictures of the one woman he had picked (who presumably had to really sweeten the deal to get him to declare), these 11 young ladies lost their minds and tried to get him cancelled.

Reputation can be very valuable. Like with employers, people only want you if someone else already has you. Monogamy goes right out the window faster than you can sneeze. If you are clout chasing someone with a much bigger reputation, then you are going to have to dig deep to find all sorts of things to pile onto your side of the scale to make that work for any duration.

It’s become an urban legend that if you want to chase Leonardo DiCaprio, no matter how hot you are he’s going to dump you when you turn 25. Don’t get bent, this is how the game is played. When I first met “M”, I could tell she was a very exceptional woman. She was highly respected in the community and taught a very popular self help course. But no man could get near her. She had been single 10+ years. They called her “The Ice Queen”. But when I found out she almost made the Olympics in gymnastics (it showed, she was incredibly graceful), I knew I had a chance since I was Olympic family.

When we started dating people were shocked. But now people who ignored me before suddenly wanted me. And, people who assumed she was off limits were now making plays on her even though they knew she was with me. This is the power, and the curse, of reputation. It can ruin people. She was the first to break (she smoked, so her discipline was already eroded by addiction) and had an affair with a coworker. I forgave her but the days were numbered. If she had said “let’s make the relationship open” I would have been fine since I now had a lot of options. But she didn’t want me to do what she did.

If you are clout chasing you are in perilous territory. If you plan to just use the person for hypergamy and then plan to jump to someone else after the merit transfer, that can work. It’s a bit ruthless. If you are trying to make it work long term, you both need to have that conversation early about how you are going to deal with it when one of you slips.

Again, if they have Reputation and you don’t, you are really going to have to work it to balance that scale. Reputation is worth more than money in this influencer/attention economy. Of course that Reputation rubs off on you, so later on you might be able to renegotiate a better deal.

Money

If you put money down on your side of the scale, you really limit what that relationship can be from the very beginning. This is not an enviable situation. You are essentially agreeing to be with someone that is going to be your prostitute. If the money dries up, they will be gone.

Even if the money doesn’t dry up, you’ve hitched your horse to someone that will divorce you (or otherwise sue you) and cash out even more as they walk out the door. This is really a bad situation. I never recommend this, in either direction. If you are the one asking for money, then you are a sex worker and are subject to all the hidden consequences I write about in that paper.

That said, money is a very important part of Arbitrage. In any country men are generally expected to pony up money in the relationship. I even went to the effort of quantifying how much being a male will cost you in my Gender Wars paper. I even went into the anthropological reasons why you are just kind of screwed by being born male and you need to get over it.

That doesn’t mean you can’t be smart about it, however. As I point out, it’s going to cost you $600,000 USD over your lifetime, on average, to be born male. If you are heterosexual. So unless you can go gay, I recommend you start to budget and figure out what’s the best deal you can get for your $600k. There are countries with high quality women that are not in the West that can give you a lot more value for $600k. But then you likely have to learn a new language and culture. Is it worth it to you? Can you work remotely? That’s getting easier all the time with remote work and translator options.

[Being lesbian is a really harsh situation. Not only do you give up the bonus “I was born female” $600,000, but since violence against women is not under reported, as opposed to violence against men, statistically lesbian relationships experience the highest rates of intimate partner violence (IPV).]

As Western women push their men overseas, eventually they are going to have to expect less. Or be single. Or ride the dopamine carousel and become an addict. A little compassion goes a long way. With great power comes great responsibility. If you don’t abuse your power you can find a great partner.

I hope my advice helps!

Synergies

There are too many skills and personality traits to list here, that could be of exceptional value to a small number of people. I’ve had two partners (including my Connecticut millionaire partner) who had crippling back pain when I met them. The other one, a nurse, was on disability when I met her and could not work.

In both cases I fixed them and their quality of life (and income) went way up with me in their lives. This is an example of a synergistic relationship. This is really the ideal situation. I mean you might think that great sex is a synergy and you wouldn’t be wrong, but normally that type of synergy is pretty easy to transfer to another person. It might not help create an enduring relationship.

In my paper on How to Dominate Dating Apps I urge users to prioritize synergies you can identify with someone else over just raw attractiveness. Chances are that if you find someone super attractive, others will also. That is unless you have an unusual physical preference. I met a woman in the park who was running one day in Austin, that only had one leg. Though she tried to hide it, I could tell she had heavy scars over 80+% of her body. I got up the courage to stop her and ask what happened to her. She said she had been hit by a train! I was in love at first sight! What a strong woman. Someone like that synergized with me: if you can handle that you can handle pretty much anything. I’m aware that most people wouldn’t have this view on the situation and don’t value inner strength the way I do, so that’s why it would be an unusual synergy.

Alas I had a moment of shyness and didn’t shoot my shot. So she got away. I didn’t want to come across as creepy but you never know how she would have reacted. If you think someone is a “10” but you realize that the vast majority of people might see them as a “3” or something, that’s an ideal situation. Hopefully for both of you. It’s worth risking the chance of crashing and burning, especially if you are sincere and this isn’t just a dopamine fetish.

Kids

You are presumably single if you are dating, and for whatever reason you have kids. Your partner could have died prematurely. One of you might have had an economic incentive to cash out early. That’s harsh but normal. Or maybe your partner was truly unbearable (or maybe you were!).

The problem here is that’s a huge liability in Arbitrage. Now the other person has to agree to a relationship with you (that is presumably sexual) and a relationship with your kids (that is presumably not sexual) and that gets very complicated. Even if the other person really likes your kids, that’s just all the worse for them. Because when you break up that other person has zero right to the relationship with the kids (even if they are adults at that point) and may never see those family members again.

When I was with the nurse, for 9 years, I ended up raising her two daughters while she worked graveyard shifts at the hospital. When she got bored of me (I had gone back to Uni for economics and she didn’t see much of me) and dumped me, she stole my tutoring business and gave it to her oldest daughter. I never saw her again and she had all my clients. It seemed she had planned the merit transfer well in advance.

She lived a very high dopamine lifestyle and just could not handle a lull. This is normal too.

What I want to impress here is that if you have kids (whether your are male or female or whatever), you aren’t entitled to a backup parent. That’s a lot to ask of another person. Tons of statistics indicate that children raised by one parent do much worse in life, especially if that one parent is the mom.

Choosing to be a single parent, if you have that luxury, is a serious thing that you should consider carefully. If you are in that situation and you are looking for a new partner, and especially a new parent, then that’s a significant malus that you are going to have to make up for in Arbitrage. If you just want one night stands and the dopamine carousel, fine. But if you want to negotiate for a relationship you are going to have to make your side sufficiently attractive to get the other person to feel good about the deal.

Of course if they have kids too, that might be an example of a Synergy as discussed above. If you want kids but can’t have them yourself, that might also be a Synergy on the other side. But then you might want to create a situation where you legally adopt the kids so they don’t just disappear when your partner gets bored.

I think I covered the main Arbitrage assets here, and their associated complications. A lot of other relationship assets fit in one of the above categories. If you have questions or need advice, hit me up in the comments.