Dollars and Sex (36 page)
Authors: Marina Adshade
This result for heterosexual couples (that the older spouse has more bargaining power) is counterintuitive if we believe that it will be easier for a younger spouse to remarry in the case of divorce. One possible explanation is that the older spouse is more often than not the husband, and the authority associated with being both older and male, trumps any advantage had by a younger wife. A second possibility is that for legally married couples, exercising their outside option is very costly and, as a result, the influence of those outside options on bargaining power is significantly diminished.
BOOB JOBS INDICATE A PERKIER ECONOMY
In
chapter 6
, I said that watching the market for sex toys could help predict recessions; people spend more on sex toys when they need a cheap way of feeling good in hard economic times. In the same way that lubricants could be a leading indicator of recessions, there is another market that indicates that the economy is improving
â
the market for boob jobs and other cosmetic surgeries.
According to a 2011 press release by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), demand for perkiness, or perhaps I should say youthfulness, was on the rise with increases in face-lifts (up 9 percent), breast lifts (up 3 percent), lower body lifts (up 9 percent), upper arm lifts (up 5 percent), and thigh lifts (up 8 percent).
The ASPS claims that this increased demand indicates that consumer confidence is on the rise (hence the usefulness of the boob job as a leading indicator of economic booms) and that some of this increase in demand is the result of pent-up demand from the two preceding years of economic turmoil.
There is an alternative explanation though. It is possible that a portion of the aging workforce took a long, sad look at the state of their retirement funds and decided that they had a few more years left to spend in what has become, and will no doubt continue to be, a very competitive labor market. And so, they have invested in taking up the slack, so to speak, in order to maintain their position in a market that, as we know, rewards the appearance of youth and virility.
If that is the case, it isn
'
t consumer confidence that is driving up demand for plastic surgery. In fact, it seems more likely that plastic surgery is the direct result of a lack of confidence, rather than the other way around.
Among same-sex couples, there are fewer barriers to dissolving a relationship (the data used here was collected in 2000, before there was any legal recognition for same-sex marriage) and neither partner has a socially determined authority over the other based on gender. In this respect, same-sex couples operate far more like a free-market economy, allowing us to observe the outcome that economic theory predicts; younger partners hold the balance of power.
A second issue around age differences in marriage is whether big age differences between marriage partners lead to happier marriages. Rebecca Kippen, Bruce Chapman, and Peng Yu answer this question using Australian data. They find that the greater the age difference in married couples, the more likely it is that their marriage will end in divorce.
For example, they find that a marriage in which the man is as little as two years younger than his wife is 53 percent more likely to end in divorce than a marriage in which the man is between one year younger than his wife and three years older. This increase in the probability of divorce when there is an age difference isn't just an issue in marriages in which the wife is older; a marriage in which the man is nine or more years older than his wife has double the chance of ending in divorce than a marriage in which he is between one year younger and three years older than his wife.
A GENUINELY HAPPY ENDING
A few years ago, a truly creative (and brave) researcher by the name of Hugo Mialon collected data from sixteen thousand men and women so that he could tell an economic story about their orgasms. He didn
'
t want to talk about the dopamine-induced euphoria of genuine orgasms, however; Mialon wanted to know what causes women and men (I
'
m surprised, too!) to regularly fake ecstasy.
Approximately 26 percent of men have faked an orgasm in their current relationship compared with 72 percent of women. Men fake orgasms relatively infrequently because they overwhelmingly feel that they wouldn
'
t get away with it if they did. No one likes to get caught deceiving his or her partner and, since the expected cost of deception is a function of the probability of being caught, the cost of faking an orgasm is higher for men than it is for women.
One question this research raises is this: When a woman fakes an orgasm, who exactly is being deceived? Is it the man, because she has fooled him? Or the woman, because she only thinks she has?
The majority of men in the survey (55 percent) claim that they are not fooled into thinking that their partner is ecstatic when she is not. Statistically, at least half of these men must be in a relationship with women who are faking orgasms. At the same time, only 24 percent of women say they believe their partner can tell when they are faking (a percentage that includes women who said they did not fake). The only explanation for these statistical discrepancies is that either the men believe that the women are not faking, when they really are, or the women believe the men cannot tell they are faking, when they really can.
Do men not let on when they know their partner has tried to fool them? Maybe, but according to the Center for Sexual Health Promotion, 85 percent of men reported that their partner had an orgasm the last time they had sex compared with only 64 percent of women who reported that their most recent sexual experience had that particularly happy ending.
By the way, want to know who fakes the most? Older men fake more frequently than do younger men, perhaps because they experience the real deal less often, and better-educated men and women fake more frequently than less-educated men and women.
Hugo Mialon postulates that educated people are either better liars or better actors, and so can fake without being caught. My students think that educated people don
'
t have enough time for the real deal, which makes me wonder why they are investing in an education if the cost is a life so busy that they won
'
t have time for twenty seconds of ecstasy.
Regardless of how well marriages function when one partner is much older, if it were true that only significantly older men are interested in me at this stage of my life, then my dinner hosts that night would probably be right in thinking that if I want to be in a relationship, then I have to accept that I can't get what I wantâwhich is a man who is closer to my own age.
The problem is that the preconception that older men are looking only for younger women is actually false. Don't get me wrong, older men want younger wives, but remember the wise words of the one-time economics student Mick Jagger: you can't always get what you want. When it comes to dating, older men may want younger women, but what they often get is a woman closer to their own age.
Psychologists Sheyna Sears-Roberts Alterovitz and Gerald Mendelsohn found, using data collected from Yahoo! Personals, that as men age, they seek women who are increasingly younger than themselves. For example, between the ages of 20 and 34, men seek women who are on average younger by only one year; between the ages of 40 and 54, they seek women who are on average five years younger; between the ages of 60 and 74, they seek women who are on average eight years younger; and men 75 and over seek women ten years younger than themselves.
As women age, they also seek increasingly younger men; very young women seek men who are about three years older than themselves, but as they age they tend to seek men who are increasingly closer to their own age. By the time women are between 60 and 75, they are mostly looking for men who are their age. By the time they are over 75, they are mostly looking for men who are, on average, three years younger.
I took a look at the U.S. Census to see what the market looked like when it closed and found that in many of the marriages that took place between 2008 and 2010, the husband was, in fact, much older than his wife; about 50 percent of newly married men between the ages of 40 and 65 married women who were five or more years younger.
On the flipside, however, many women also married younger men.
About 17 percent of newly married women ages 40 to 65 married men who were more than five years their junior. This is a big change from not that long ago; at the end of the 1970s, only 3 percent of marriages involving women under the age of 60 were between a woman and a man who was more than five years her junior. Thirty years later, the share of these “toy-boy” marriages had risen to 8 percent. More recent evidence suggests that in the ten years since this data was collected, the rate of toy-boy marriages has grown much larger still.
A recent economics paper by Melvyn Coles and Marco Francesconi argues that this trend in women marrying younger men is the direct result of women becoming better educatedânot just better educated than they were thirty years ago but also better educated than the group of men from which they are choosing their marriage partners.
It appears that when given the choice, some men, at least, would prefer to have a wife who is perhaps older but more economically successful over a wife who is younger and less able to provide financial stability. According to the evidence, a woman who is better educated and in a higher occupational class than her husband has a 45 percent better chance of being married to a man more than five years her junior than does the average woman.
FINAL WORDSWe started this chapter talking about the
Newsweek
article that warned that women who spent time in school when they should have been looking for a man now had next to no chance of ever finding a husband. I have wondered over the years how many women gave up hope at that point and just didn't bother looking for love; sure, 68 percent of women who were single and age 40 in the year the article was written eventually did marry, but was there another 5 or 10 percent who would have married had they not been discouraged? Or rushed into bad marriages for fear of being left on the shelf? Or underinvested in their education for fear that the cost of a college degree was the lost opportunity to have a family?
As an economist, I know that the numbers do not look good for older women. When we add the assumption that older men will date only significantly younger women, I am not surprised that many older women believe they are destined for lives of lonely social exile. But just as the
Newsweek
predictions gave educated women a false sense that they would never marry, these statistics that report the skewed ratio of men to women in the seniors market give older women a false sense that they have no market power. And perhaps, just as dangerously, give older men exactly the same impression.
Personally, I keep a postcard-size picture of the
Newsweek
cover pinned above my desk as a constant reminder of the power of statistical evidence to distort public perceptions in a way that is potentially damaging to people's lives.
Economic markets only function properly if all the players have all the information. If men overstate their market power, then some are bound to be disappointed in the long run. This probably isn't an issue for men who
are both wealthy and healthy; those types of men will always be in demand on a market where women (like my mother's friend whom I mentioned previously) are apprehensive about dating men who may end up being a physical or financial burden. But wealthy and healthy men represent only a small fraction of men available on the later-in-life market.
Let me give you an example of how this perception of market power by men can prevent the market from clearing properly. I have a friend who is in her mid-70s and is single and searching online for a relationship. She is, on every dimension, a catchâshe has a good income, multiple recreational homes, she is healthy, very attractive, and knows how to have a good time. She told me recently that she had responded to an expression of interest she had received from a man through an online dating site with a standard “Hello, it's nice to meet you” message. His response to her simple note was to send an angry diatribe in which he rebuked her for her lack of effort and informed her she should have considered herself lucky that he had messaged her at all. (Incidentally, it later turned out that he was, in fact, ten years older than he had claimed to be in his profile, making him ten years older than her.)
In this case, two people continue to be single because one mistakenly believes that he holds all the market power and the other, who mistakenly believes that she holds none of the market power, would rather stay single than lower their relationship standards.
I want to finish off with a little piece of evidence that I think speaks to the difference between what men and women get from their relationships later in life. In a study undertaken on sexual behavior of people over the age of 50, researchers found that the last time they had sex, men found the experience more pleasurable if their partner was a man or woman with whom they were having a committed relationship; 91 percent of men who had sex with a relationship partner had an orgasm compared with only 80 percent of men who had sex with a friend or casual acquaintance.