148. Evolution of Power: The Sexual Supermarket

Understanding history, anthropology, and the distribution of power, allows us to understand the inevitable global commodification of sex.

The more we change, the more we stay the same. For 96% of our time on Earth, the human species lived in Tribes. Their life was merit based, full of excitement, and nutrition and stimulation were balanced at healthy levels. Humans didn’t disrupt the environment or significantly harm other species. We were the masters of adaptation. We didn’t kill our ancestors, for instance the neanderthals or cro magnon. We mated with them and we are the modern evolution of them. We know that now because with modern science we can see their DNA in our DNA.

Hunting was dangerous, and when times were tough greater risks had to be taken for the survival of the tribe. Hunting was almost exclusively a male role, as was defence against attack from predators and other Tribes. Medicine was extremely limited and knowledge of the body was primarily superstitious. As a result men died earlier in life than women did. While women did sometimes die in child birth, as Adam Smith pointed out in the 18th Century the (“primitive”) Scottish Highlander women (I’m proud of my Scottish ancestors) could be counted on to have 20 live births each. Conversely, “high born” (sedentary) women would be lucky to produce one child.

The result of the difference in death rates by gender was that there were more women of reproductive age than men. Our biology is such that this is not a problem as you don’t need a lot of men to supply the sexual needs of a tribe. Thus a 3:1 adult gender ratio (women:men), which is normal in 97% of mammal species, was typical. What wasn’t normal was monogamy, just as it isn’t normal for other mammals. Mating clusters of 3 women to every man were likely stable with the men being territorial versus other males in regards to their regular mates.

This wasn’t just because of the male shortage, women are wired to want to mate with the best male they can get. Men they consider inferior are essentially invisible to them for mating purposes. Thus women would prefer to share than to settle. 240,000 years of evolution promoted this orientation. Even today on social media you can see innumerable videos of women telling each other not to settle. When they all do this, the result is sharing. Which they also complain about but keep doing. Up to 80% of men won’t be shared, or even touched, and statistically you can see this is the trend. But, I’m getting ahead of myself…

Agriculture and the Birth of Power

Between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago humans adopted agriculture and stopped roaming. They traded food diversity for food security. The result was malnutrition, loss of height (~13-15 cm), and the cultivation of disease. But men stopped dying in greater numbers than women, which was probably considered a good thing at a time when everyone knew everyone else and every member of the Tribe was your family.

With one man for every woman, life had to fundamentally change.

The biggest thing to change with the advent of agriculture was that now food could be stored, preserved, and transported. This also meant it could be stolen and/or concentrated.

The concept of Power was created. Now people were no longer equal or valued on their merit. The measure of power was how big your grain store was, or how many herd animals you owned. Those who accumulated power wanted to secure that power, so laws were created. Hammurabi, the King of Babylon, is often cited as having created the first laws and codification of caste and power about 38 centuries ago.

The advent of Power meant that while most humans still strived for survival, for a few in the upper Caste the game was all about Power and control over others. While the means to that end have become more sophisticated over the last 38 centuries, the goals of the game have not changed.

Key laws included the promotion of monogamy, often under penalty of death. This was important to the ruling class because if men fight over who they can mate with, productivity drops and rulers who could not control their servants would be replaced by rulers who could.

What probably looked like a good thing to early adopters of agriculture became a cage. Then a gilded cage. And now in the 21st Century the cage is digital and almost invisible. But, the cage has never been stronger. Here of course I’m talking about all us common folk, what Adam Smith would call “Freemen”. Smith talked about how it was more efficient to work a Freeman to death than to lose a slave, because the latter involved a loss of capital.

Adam Smith’s master work, The Wealth of Nations (1775), was the ultimate instruction guide for the master class to optimize the concentration of wealth/power and to build better cages. Today we call all of this “economics” as it sounds much more pleasant.

Modern Day: Matriarchy vs. Patriarchy (the Big Lie)

Smith gave his masters improved systems for creating, transporting, and concentrating wealth. This would ultimately allow for a Master class with less members, but much more wealth per Master than was possible before. Sometimes we call this wealth disparity. You know it is working when the wealth disparity is very high, and generally we regard the standard of life for commoners to be highest when the wealth disparity is lowest.

Normally apartheid/colonized states have the greatest wealth disparities, and officially South Africa has the highest rate in the world with white households having 20 times the wealth of black households. The ratio in the USA is about 18:1 white:black ($110K vs $6K). The Palestinian to colonist ratio prior to the most recent war was 14:1. In Australia, where income disparities are relatively low, average household wealth was $1.46 Milllion in 2023. I have to say, having moved to Australia 6 years ago, the difference is remarkable. I can’t work here because of my perceived ethnicity, but I definitely benefit because of all of the parks, public transportation, and other public services. Fortunately, it is normal for me to work remotely.

The objective of this paper is to explain how the relationship between Power and Sex has changed over the last 4000 years, when Power was institutionalized. Before that time there were no slaves, freemen, commoners, servants, whatever you feel comfortable calling those on the wrong end of the Power dynamic. That includes me (though I had ancestors on both sides of my family in the Master class as recently as the early 20th century) and I am very pro-merit. I’m not a fan at all of power accumulation as it is inefficient and dystopian.

The key to understanding Sex and Power in modern times is to understand that there are two societies here, one on top of the other. You could even call it an invisible apartheid system. If you can’t make this distinction, you will be easily confused and controlled. For 99% of people, you are in the Common Class. Rules are made for you, and apply to you. For the 1% of people in the Master Class, rules are made by them but don’t apply to them.

This is about power, not gender. If you watch any sort of media, you will see those in the Master class daily breaking the rules with zero consequences. Those rules were made by them, to apply to Commoners not Masters. The Master class is still mostly men, though that’s changing. For Commoners, at least in the West, we live in a Matriarchy as I explained in my Gender Wars paper.

When I point out, both qualitatively and quantitatively, with the real numbers, that we live in a Matriarchy, people will counter with “But men have most of the wealth”. While this is true, the error in analysis comes from thinking that you are on the same side of the Wall as the Masters. They rarely comingle and exist in separate and unequal economies/legalities.

The rules for Commoners are created by the Masters. Every metric: education rates, hiring rates, wealth transfers, home ownership, spending rates, death rates, victims of violence rates, incarceration rates, incarceration durations, dating options, “freedom” of speech, how likely they are to be believed, etc etc. All these metrics in society favor women, who are strongly empowered compared to Common men. The “income earned” is an illusory metric because men are required to transfer a large portion of that income to women before it can be spent. I go over how that works in the Gender Wars paper.

Yes, if a commoner wants to compare themselves to a Master, yes you are totally screwed at a scale that would be difficult to comprehend. That is not a fair comparison. Over 10 years ago I made a comment in one of my papers while I was talking to the community. I told them that I was born a servant/serf and that I was okay with that and I’m at peace with my relationship to our Masters. My readers were shocked that I said the quiet part out loud. Here I am not resisting, I’m educating.

So yes a huge amount of the world’s wealth is held by a handful of men. And those Master men think even less of Common Men than they do Common Women. It’s crystal clear in the rules they hand down and enforce. So locally, meaning on the same side of the Wall that Commoners live on, that’s been set up over the last 50 or so years to now be a Matriarchy, a system that advantages women over men.

Sure, you step into a different world if you cross the Wall. Most often this happens when some sort of sex work is happening. I’ve lived in a few mansions in my life, and trust me I wasn’t the owner. And no, I doubt it was because of how smart I am. Being able to walk into a room full of Masters and being able to cosplay a Master meant I could escort them to events without embarrassing them. But I doubt that was the main reason I got to live in those mansions.

Social media is full of young women bragging about being allowed to cross the Wall. It’s a modern demonstration of female virility. If you can work it, you go girl. I certainly can’t judge since I did that myself. But the better you are at keeping your mouth shut, the longer you will be allowed to stay. And don’t be getting fantasies of being a Master. You have crossed the Wall to perform some sort of service, as a servant, and have been deemed valuable enough in that service that you were rewarded for it.

You can call what exists on the other side of the Wall a “Patriarchy”, but I don’t really agree. If you are in that exclusive club, you are treated like you belong. They don’t have to swim up stream to spawn like the Commoners do. The fish come to them. I’ve served more women Masters than men Masters in my life, it’s my brand going all the way back to when I was requested to served the women on our Olympic track teams. I never applied for that job. If you have an exceptional skill, and can keep your mouth shut, Masters of any gender will treat you appropriately.

The Sexual Supermarket

If you can grasp the concept of an economic apartheid that Commoners are vaguely aware of but can’t fully grasp unless they cross the Wall, then you are ready to discuss the Commodification of Sex. I began studying online dating and dating economics around 2010, and by 2020 I had interviewed ~150,000 women. As I’ve publicly disclosed, I’m on the asexuality spectrum and my interest here was academic. That said, on a few occasions female Masters made me offers I could not refuse and I found the experience very educational. On other occasions, I did refuse.

I increasingly noticed that the rules I grew up with were being quietly modified and relationships were increasingly being monetised. While romantic love still existed, the strong financial incentives would generate opportunity costs that would have a “crowding out” effect on romantic relationships.

Let me give an example. When I was a sperm donor in the early 1990s (direct to lab, no sex involved) I was paid per donation. I had to stay celibate during this time because the first thing they would check would be spermatozoa density, and if I was not celibate, my donations would be watered down. Thus unless someone was paying me more than the lab, I was very reluctant to get involved with them. This is equivalent to the “bar fines” in Thailand. The result is that I turned down a lot of romantic offers, and only initiated such things under the most extraordinary of circumstances.

With millions of the most fertile (i.e. aged 18 to 26) women in the USA flocking to Sugar Dating sites like Seeking dot com, or sex streaming platforms like OnlyFans, this is almost always the highest paying work available to them: sex work. And the rules handed down to us have allowed this to become legal and normalized. Why were the rules changed? Hold that thought.

Because these (mostly women) are paid so much for sex work, even if it’s non contact (streaming), there is an opportunity cost generated if they try to engage in sexual activity with anyone for non professional (i.e. “romantic”) reasons. Men often get jealous or territorial and will cause trouble once they realize the woman is a sex worker. They might be quite willing to hit it once, but that’s not what I would describe as romantic.

In order to engage in transactional sex as a primary form of income, a certain emotional disconnect is required. It’s work, you can’t take it too personal. Often more clients will pay better than less clients, which will crowd out even the paying partners that you like. Getting attached is very problematic because these people are paying for you to not get attached, often because they are married and need a low risk/drama option in a marriage that may have become sexless years ago. This is especially true on the high end with customers that might be willing to pay $400 per hour or some multiple of that.

Even yesterday someone with a PhD asked me “what about romantic love?” You’d be hard pressed to be more of a hopeless romantic than I am. Go read my paper on Soulmates if you don’t believe me. The rules of engagement have changed. The Masters have spoken and now intense pressure is applied to all of us (even the Masters) to switch to commodified sex. This is happening globally, and one of the results is a huge drop in birth rates.

Getting pregnant is a real problem if you are paid to have sex. The loss of income could be catastrophic. Thus one way or another, our most fertile women are not going to be having children. If they decide to “retire” in their 30s to have children, their biological clock is already ticking. Those three decades old eggs (all eggs are formed before birth) aren’t looking too happy. Realize, Tribal women didn’t usually live past 30 so genetically we just aren’t set up for such late births.

That of course assumes you can even find a partner that has no issues with your sex work past. If you find such a unicorn, the situation might turn out to be less than romantic. Work is rarely seen as romantic.

I have a friend in Austin who is perhaps the top Madame in the city. She looks pretty normal, you’d never guess her occupation. Our relationship is platonic though I used to provide some emotional support back when I still lived there. The last time we hung out I asked her “your clients are all older guys right? Because it isn’t cheap.” She nodded, and realize I was referring to all of her employees also since she was a Madame and trained over a dozen elite escorts to do BDSM work. Then I asked “well if increasingly the top women go into this line of work, what’s going to happen to all the young men who can’t afford ‘love’ ?” I could tell she didn’t like the question, and I didn’t get an answer. I suspect she’s thought about it before I brought it up.

The answer is, in a commodified sex market, devoid of romantic love, young men are pretty much screwed. Their opportunities will be crowded out by older wealthier men.

And here especially I mean the Masters. Masters can afford $400 an hour. They can afford $4000 an hour or $30,000 for an escort for an overseas vacation. I’ve done a bit of research (purely academic!) and top escorts will advertise in multiple cities and even multiple countries. That’s because if a Master calls them and is willing to pay Masters rates for a multi day trip, that can pay a young person’s bills for 3 or more months even with a lavish lifestyle. They will certainly get on a plane to make that happen if they are requested in a country other than the one they are in currently.

The Masters’ Game

So why did the Rules change? Rules don’t change unless they benefit the Masters, because they make the Rules. You may have noticed that the Masters are obsessed with AI. They seem totally fine with diverting unlimited amounts of energy away from Commoners (even resulting in blackouts) in order to feed AI development. In their perfect world they can replace Commoners with AI and they are going about doing that.

In the meantime, what does a Master that can afford anything want? If you asked Elon Musk or Jeffery Epstein, I think I know what they would say. Since Seeking Arrangements was created in 2006, this really started the shift towards building a global Sexual Supermarket. I found out about that site much later in perhaps 2015 because I was working for a Master that had just had a nasty and expensive divorce. He asked me how to date. I did some research and helped him create a profile and coached him so that he could get what he wanted: Some sort of epic rebound that would erase the pain of his divorce.

That site is now called Seeking, they dropped the second word on the advice of myself and others as it created some legal issues. Sites like that and escort sites are aimed at Masters and those who would like to live that lifestyle once in a while. Just that one site has 46,000,000 users, the vast majority (~90%) of them being service providers. For reference, if EVERY woman in the USA between the age of 20 and 30 signed up on Seeking to do sex work, that would only be 21 million people. Then you have “content creators” on sites like OnlyFans, which had over 4 million “creators” in 2023.

If you asked me how many women today were doing sex work globally, I would put that number at between 300 and 500 million if you include part timers. There are 600 million women on Earth between the age of 20 and 30, and demographic collapse means that number is going down.

So if AI is causing mass layoffs, and this is anticipated ahead of time, what are you going to do to keep those people employed? If they are women, I think you have a pretty good idea already. But what about men? Clearly the demand is a lot less for men, and this goes all the way back to Tribal times when we only had 1 man for every 3 women. If you are a Master like Elon Musk or Epstein or any of their close friends, you can put a few zeros behind that 3.

If you are a Commoner Man? I hope you like computer games. I’m working really hard to create games that would provide substitutes for relationships, since I’ve seen this coming since at least 2010. Elon says “Let them eat AI”, so you are going to get AI girlfriends too. Who will record EVERYTHING you ever do with them. That’s the equivalent of Soylent Green for Common Men. Or, if they keep rounding people up it could literally be Soylent Green.

I get very frustrated when I see people on LinkedIn with their “Down with the Patriarchy!” articles. I know they mean well, but it’s really tone deaf. Their ire is typically directed at Common Men who are already pre-screwed, so unless they plan to go after the Master class, whatever they have planned is just going to make things worse for them. I can’t say that going after the Master class would work out well for them either.

You could move to Australia like I did, but I beat the rush since I knew what was coming. For the rest of you, good luck with those ever tightening visa requirements. I would also urge some compassion for the Common Men since they really are screwed in the modern economy and are only going to get more screwed until at least two thirds of them die off. Which, I think could take less than a generation the way things are heading. Russia and Ukraine are trend setters since they have probably already hit that quota, while their women flood the escort sites world-wide.

A final note: When Matt Gaetz famously was the only Congresman to vote against human trafficking legislation in 2017, and would also notoriously run around sharing photos of all the women he was sleeping with, with his fellows in Congress, none of his peers had an issue with his interactions with the women. Trafficking laws don’t apply to Masters and his fellows knew all about the Supermarket, even if some of them didn’t use it, regularly. The issue was, the first rule of the Sex Supermarket is you don’t talk about the Sex Supermarket. Of course this is also the second and third rule of the Sex Supermarket.

Of course it goes without saying that we also don’t talk about private islands in the middle of nowhere with a lot of traffic and Masters from all over the world lining up to visit.