Abstract
Mark Regnerus has never published in Men and Masculinities. And I would be surprised to hear that he had ever submitted anything for consideration. And the book reviewed in this symposium, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy, pursues claims that have been made before. It shares common ground with books like Lionel Tiger’s (1969) Men in Groups, Steven Rhodes’s (2004) Taking Sex Differences Seriously, Robin Baker’s Sperm Wars (2006), Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s (2000) A Natural History of Rape, and John Gray’s (1992) Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus written (in order) by an anthropologist, a political scientist, two biologists, another anthropologist, and a pop psychologist. All this is to say that this is an argument produced by a diversity of (often) men across a wild variety of disciplines and throughout popular culture. Importantly, the arguments in each have also been challenged and subjected to sustained criticism within each discipline as well. But I have no doubts that Regnerus’s iteration will be followed by others.
Politically, Regnerus suggests that the current crisis of the family is that women say “yes” far too often and easily. On the face of things, this claim contrasts sharply with Thornhill and Palmer’s (2000) scandalous use of evolutionary psychology to suggest that men would not have to turn to rape if only women said “yes” more often. There is a contradiction even among those leaning on evolutionary psychological claims. What these claims share in common is that women are presented as at fault. Research relying on evolutionary psychology is steeped in lending pseudoscientific credence to bromides that play on stereotypes of gendered actors and action. In Cheap Sex, Regnerus joins an interdisciplinary collection of authors subject to this critique.
Cheap Sex is a book about masculinity, gender, sexuality, family, inequality, and more. In it, Regnerus makes bold claims about the fate of marriage and the family, men’s and women’s sexual desires, normative claims about what those desires ought to be, and how transformations in what he frames as a world historically constant (until now) arrangement between women and men has shifted a delicate balance of power further in men’s favor as women demand less from men in exchange for sex. The questions pursued in Cheap Sex are not new and neither are the answers. So, you might ask, why review it?
I hope that the symposium is useful as scholars from a range of disciplines who might consider the book of interest seek to make sense of Regnerus’s argument and what he frames as discoveries. Beyond this, reflections on this book offer an opportunity to consider how we have navigated similar arguments in the past and what we can learn from that work. Toward those ends, I invited a group of scholars to assess Cheap Sex, the theoretical framework on which the argument rests, the facts upon which it is based, and the use of evolutionary psychology and biological determinism necessary to make sense of this argument. I invited sociologist Paula England to assess Regnerus’s use of and reliance upon exchange theory, applied to sexual relationships and sexual exchange. I asked anthropologist and National Public Radio (NPR) science blogger, Barbara J. King, to evaluate the biologically deterministic and evolutionary arguments made in the book. And I invited sociologist Philip N. Cohen to consider the data Regnerus marshals to support the theoretical contribution he proposes. All three examine Cheap Sex from different angles and address different kinds of flaws with the book. I hope this collective consideration of the text produces new dialogue as we continue to challenge an old argument.