Analyzing the Environment of the Sexual Market Place

Analyzing the Environment of the Sexual Market Place

Environmental analysis examines the conditions in which a company operates and the risks and opportunities they create. An oil company, for instance, may be affected by energy policy, economic cycles, attitudes toward fossil fuels, litigation, and climate change. The author extends this business approach to dating; the usefulness of that analogy depends on its assumptions.

Corporate analysis often separates external conditions from internal choices. The two overlap, and their importance varies by industry. A company’s own strengths may not compensate for a major change in its operating environment.

The author treats dating as a sexual marketplace and cites disputes over "rape culture" and "affirmative consent" as examples of social and legal concerns. The account asserts that false accusations and campus hearings increase men’s risks, but supplies no evidence for the size of that increase and does not establish how particular laws or procedures work.

An unspecified UK law is cited as a measure that could classify approaching women in public as harassment. Without a law, date, jurisdiction, and factual context, that statement cannot establish what conduct is prohibited. Environmental analysis is useful for identifying questions; it cannot substitute for answering them with reliable information.

Analytical models and the Sexual Market Place

The analysis has three levels: wider social conditions, the people and alternatives in a particular setting, and the individual’s own goals and choices.

PESTLE offers a checklist of political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors. Categories can overlap: a policy change may have both legal and economic effects.

For each category, identify changes that could affect the decision, then assess their relevance and uncertainty. In business, this often starts as a brainstorming exercise before ideas are evaluated.

Political issues

Political conditions depend on place and time. The examples below reflect the author’s concerns; they do not establish general legal rules.

Risks

Marriage laws The author raises common-law marriage and possible financial consequences after a relationship ends. The account does not identify a jurisdiction or establish that living together alone creates a marriage. Those are questions to resolve with specific legal information.

Child custody and support The author claims that child support can function as 18 years or more of disguised alimony and that courts are biased against men. These are broad assertions, not conclusions demonstrated here. The relevant analytical questions concern the actual rules, responsibilities, and circumstances of a particular family.

Sexual market legislation The account discusses "yes means yes" policies, also called affirmative consent, and the possible consequences of campus proceedings. It does not establish that an intoxicated encounter was consensual or that a campus process and a criminal prosecution use the same rules. Its examples require more context than the account supplies.

The author recommends documenting encounters to defend against possible accusations. That recommendation does not establish what a record would prove or whether collecting it would be appropriate. The framework’s useful question is which rules and processes apply to the setting under consideration.

The account gives an age-of-consent range of 14 to 18 and mentions a person aged 25 or older with a younger partner. These figures do not establish the law in any particular place or situation. The example illustrates why broad ranges are insufficient for a legal conclusion.

Feminism The author presents feminists’ involvement in judicial and political institutions as a risk to men. The account provides no basis for assuming that a person’s political identity determines whether they will act fairly. That assumption should be separated from evidence about a specific institution or process.

Economic issues

Beyond the relationship-related costs discussed above, the economic checklist covers income security, debt, taxation, and living expenses.

Lifestyle security One proposed approach is to keep living costs manageable rather than pursuing "keeping up with the Joneses" consumption. Spending more to match other people’s lifestyles can create financial pressure.

A second proposal is to develop alternative income streams. A company receiving 80% of its revenue from one client illustrates concentration, while an employee may receive 100% of their income from one employer. These situations have different costs and risks. Additional income sources are not automatically more secure or more tax-efficient.

A man will struggle to focus on becoming his best self if he is struggling to pay his bills and keep a roof over his head.

Social issues

Social risks are very varied and depend very much upon context. The social aspects of a relationship in the United States or Europe will differ compared to South America or India, based on cultural and historical aspects.

Social questions include attitudes toward divorce, premarital relationships, different lifestyles, and the age at which people marry. These patterns vary within countries as well as between them; national averages do not determine an individual’s preferences.

Career attitudes The author assumes that career-focused women are less interested in family life. That conclusion does not follow from career ambition alone. In applying the checklist, distinguish observed preferences from stereotypes about what a group wants.

Reputation risk This can stem from other issues within this analysis, for instance a man who is accused of rape tends to carry that label like a scarlet A for a long time. This could lead to losses in almost every category. Men who start to practice pick-up artistry in small local communities likewise may harm their reputation as a result of failing early on, or becoming known as a pick-up artist.

Life aspirations The author contrasts a family-centered upbringing with admiration for the "Sex & the City" lifestyle. Early influences may be relevant, but this contrast cannot reliably predict an individual’s later aspirations. Those aspirations need to be understood on their own terms.

Demographics The age distribution, relationship status, and size of a local population affect whom someone is likely to meet. The author treats these as market conditions. Population patterns alone cannot establish who is available, interested, or compatible.

Technological issues

With the growth of services such as plenty of fish, Tinder, and social media the dating game has changed. It is not uncommon to watch people out on dates mindlessly staring at their phones. Technology is more of an opportunity than a risk factor, as it opens up new avenues to line up plates, and communicate.

Communication The author describes a shift over 20 years from telephone calls toward texting and services such as Snapchat. The practical question is which forms of communication the people involved prefer, rather than whether one historical pattern still holds.

Time and resource management Staying updated on technology also allows you to utilize spreadsheets and time management tools to keep track of time spent with your plates, time dedicated towards building yourself and your life. Countless apps can assist with productivity and resource management for just about every phone in existence.

Devices The account describes changes over 30 years from landlines and desktop computers toward mobile devices. Its concern is divided attention: devices can help people communicate while also distracting them from the people around them.

Men who walk through their life wearing headphones, with their face buried in a tablet computer are bound to miss out on countless opportunities in the sexual market place.

However, the advent of such apps and sites as Tinder, Plenty of Fish, Match.com and others has created both risk and opportunity to open rapidly many different women, for a numbers game strategy.

Legal issues

Some of the legal issues covered under political category apply here as well in addition to the following.

Sexual harassment law The author portrays workplace rules and HR departments as hostile to men. The account does not substantiate that generalization or identify the rules of a particular workplace. An analysis needs the actual conduct standards and processes, rather than assumptions about the people administering them.

Environmental issues

The author gives environmental factors little attention. Whether they matter depends on the question; the checklist does not require every category to be equally useful.

Industrial Analysis within the Sexual Market Place

The idea behind industrial analysis is that different industries have different characteristics that are outside of company control and therefore must be taken into account at all stages of corporate planning. As with environmental analysis, failures to take into account the context of a company within its industry can be dire. In undertaking such an analysis the Five Forces framework is often used, however other models do exist.

The Five Forces model is a heuristic developed by Harvard Professor Michael Porter, outlining five important areas of focus during market analysis, to which a company must pay careful attention. In the sexual market place, the various aspects of the five forces analysis gives you an idea of the environment that you are about to enter.

The focus shifts to barriers to entry and existing competition, with the proposal that a person’s perceived attractiveness can vary between settings. This is a contextual comparison, not a measure of an individual’s inherent worth.

Los Angeles and Miami are used to illustrate settings in which wealth, appearance, and status may attract attention. It generalizes about what women in those cities want without supplying evidence. The example is an assumption within the analogy.

Barriers to entry

Barriers to entry in the business world exist in the form of regulations, legal requirements, economies of scale, high capital requirements, and learning curves that ensure that a competitor would have to spend both time and resources in order to compete within the market.

High barriers of entry often facilitate high profits, as the flow of capital into an industry is often impeded, permitting longer periods of above average profitability. Low barriers of entry often facilitate little in terms of sustained high profits as the emergence of high profit immediately leads to increased competition.

In the sexual market place, this becomes a function of performance burden. The higher your sexual market value, the higher the barriers to entry become for your competition. If you have spent 15 years maximizing your sexual market value, then a new competitor seeking to achieve your level of sexual market value will have to make large investments to achieve the same value.

On the other hand, a person with no sexual market value will face fierce competition from the masses who also have not put thought and effort into increasing their sexual market value.

Competitive Rivalry

The existing competition within the sexual market place can be viewed from two perspectives. One is that rivalry is high in aggregate as you have many men seeking sex, the other being that if you are differentiated enough from the pack, you barely face real competition.

High competitive rivalry tends to drive down price as the actors within the market fight to get as much profit as possible. Low competitive rivalry tends to be conducive to better profits, as each company is able to maintain higher margins.

In the model, competition concentrates around people described as high-SMV Alpha men and young, attractive women. The account does not establish a universal distribution of preferences or opportunities. Those assumptions would need to be tested in the setting being considered.

Bargaining Power of Buyers

The bargaining power of buyers in traditional analysis is a function of how many options they have to buy similar products. In a monopoly, the bargaining power of buyers is extremely low; in a situation of perfect competition, it is high.

In situations with high bargaining power, the companies in the market will struggle to achieve profits, due to widespread customer choice. In a situation with low bargaining power, the companies often realize above average profits because of consumers having few options.

In the sexual market place, the dynamics shift based on sexual market value. An Alpha male with many options to choose from among high quality women results in those women having a lower bargaining power and thus the male can realize a higher benefit. A Beta, Gamma or Omega male on the other hand, has fewer options to choose from and thus the power shifts towards the female.

Bargaining Power of Suppliers

The bargaining power of suppliers is about the input to your production. If a company builds an item that requires a component that only one supplier is able to produce, then that supplier has a strong bargaining position, whereas if the company uses a generic component the supplier bargaining power is non-existent.

Suppliers with high bargaining power will influence the cost of production negatively as they are likely to demand a higher price for their input. A supplier with low bargaining power can be a source of higher margins for the purchasing company, especially if the purchasing company is a large client.

Threat of Substitute Products

A substitute meets a similar need in a different way. Coca-Cola and Pepsi illustrate competing brands more directly than substitutes for an entire industry. The dating analogy uses substitution more loosely to mean alternative partners or relationship arrangements.

Perceived alternatives vary with what someone wants from a relationship. His account assumes that women’s preferences shift predictably with age toward a provider. That is part of his model, not an established rule about individual women.

The term oneitis describes fixation on one potential partner. Within the analogy, believing that no alternative exists can weaken a person’s willingness to leave an unsatisfactory situation. The commercial language does not capture the distinct preferences and choices of both people.

The Takeaway

The five-force analogy encourages attention to context, alternatives, and the assumptions behind perceived competition. It can be used at different geographic scales, but it does not establish that competition is always intense or that personal development removes it.

A mistake often made within the corporate world is the focus on who can actually remember all of the five forces, rather than who put in the necessary time to perform the analytical exercise. A second frequent mistake is to view the heuristic as a complete analysis.

A practical proposal is to seek settings in which a person expects to connect more easily with others. That is a hypothesis to test through experience, not a guarantee of longer or more positive interactions.

Company Analysis in the Sexual Market Place

The company analysis extends the same metaphor to the individual. It borrows market growth and market share from the growth-share matrix to describe perceived opportunities and attention.

A company situated in a growing market is in a situation where the rising tide lifts all the boats, and thus has additional help from its circumstances. Maintaining growth can be a challenge in the long term however, and unless the company has secured a large market share, it can rapidly decline once the tide no longer lifts it.

The growth share matrix consists of these two values, market growth and market share. Within this frame of analysis, there are four archetypes of companies.

A Star has high relative market share in a growing market. It may require substantial investment to sustain that position; growth and share alone do not guarantee high profits.

The Cash cow is a company that has a large market share, but operates in a slow or non-growing market. A cash cow is often a former Star, within a market that has reached maximum penetration or near maximum penetration and thus growth can only be attained through achieving a higher market share.

Question Marks have low relative market share in a growing market. Some may become Stars by gaining share. If the market matures while their share remains low, they may become Dogs.

Dogs have low relative market share in markets with little growth. The classification prompts a review of their role, prospects, and resource needs; it does not by itself establish that liquidation is the best choice.

In the sexual market place there are similar archetypes that represent the cash cow that generates high interest from women with little reinvestment requirements without much growth, the star that generates high interest from women, has higher investment requirements, but still experiences reasonable growth. The Question Mark that gets some attention from women, but it tends to be random, unpredictable and leading to long dry-spells, and the dog that could not get a woman's attention if they tripped her on the street.

Cash Cows - The Mature Alpha

In the sexual market place, the cash cows are the mature Alphas, they have reached or are very close to their peak sexual market value, and due to diminishing returns, achieving a higher SMV will require disproportionate investment. The mature alpha is a market leader that has his pick among women, as a result of having the highest sexual market value of any male.

The public images of actors Jack Nicholson and Sean Connery serve as examples of the Mature Alpha category. Celebrity images do not establish a general pattern of attraction or describe current circumstances.

As he grows older, and sees his sexual market value, diminish, he will be replaced by Stars transitioning into their Cash Cow Phase. It is not uncommon for such man to have a myriad of affairs, as even when they are in long-term relationships, the female attention is difficult to reject.

Stars - The young alpha

In this taxonomy, the young Alpha has qualities the author expects to develop into those of a Mature Alpha. He places that transition between ages 35 - 50, with celebrities as exceptions who gain income and public attention earlier. The age range is the author’s assumption, not a developmental rule.

The Star category is attributed to an early advantage or substantial effort in personal development. Effort can change some circumstances, but it does not guarantee movement between the model’s categories.

There are many former stars who got married young, find themselves back on the market in their late twenties to mid-thirties, in some truly sad cases, their mid-to-late forties and find that their sexual market value is all but gone as a result of the factors outlined in the chapter on relationship cost accounting.

Question Marks - The Potential Alpha or Beta

Question marks, unlike Stars, have an uncertain future. They have some characteristics that may lead to them becoming Alpha, but also have a lot of Beta traits. The question mark may be a conditional Alpha. For instance, a police officer who appears Alpha due to his vocation, or a local musician who appears Alpha when performing and that gains social proof due to their career choice. This group of men can go either way: they can develop into Alphas, but this will require dedication, time, and effort. Most men fit into this category, in that they have the potential to become an Alpha, but fail to maximize their SMV due to lack of knowledge, lack of effort or lack of desire.

A Question Mark may, in this model, face one dominant obstacle, such as social difficulty, health concerns, or beliefs about relationships. He also predicts divorce and a return to dating 3 - 10 years later for some men who settle into relationships. The account supplies no evidence for that timeline or for treating those outcomes as a general pattern.

Most dutiful betas are question marks, yet most of them fail to capitalize on their value, instead opting for the easy way out and accepting the first merger or acquisition deal that comes their way. The challenge for these men is to hold out for the better deal, and selecting the hard option rather than the easy option.

Dogs - The Hopeless

The Dogs in the SMP are men who fail to invest in their sexual market value, and often invest in other areas instead. The Dogs may be former Betas who elected to withdraw completely from the sexual market place because of a bitter divorce, utter failure to perform or a complete lack of game. The reason for a man ending up in this category, are varied, it can be voluntary, by force or nature or by failing to target the market correctly.

The Dog category describes people the author considers unsuccessful in dating, whether because they withdrew, faced constraints, or pursued an unsuitable setting. The label does not establish their potential, their motives, or the causes of their situation.

The Takeaway

Within the analogy, the author favors the Star and Cash Cow positions because he associates them with more attention for the effort invested. Individual relationship goals may differ from that objective.

Presenting an image that does not match one’s circumstances can undermine the plan. A "Gap analysis" compares a current position with a desired one, then identifies possible steps toward it. The exercise can support planning without guaranteeing the outcome.

The strategic analysis models, consisting of environmental (overall), industrial (competition) and company (self) permit three levels of analysis that together should inform future action.

The practical recommendations concern exercise, diet, social skills, dress, and grooming. A personal gap analysis asks which changes serve a concrete goal and which are feasible. His phrase "low-hanging fruit" refers to changes expected to offer a useful benefit for relatively little effort.