The Nature of Sexual Capital

This paper offers a conceptual scheme, an economic approach, by which sexual behaviors can be analyzed, showing how sensible the relationships are among a person’s preferences, capabilities, actions, and satisfactions regarding sex. The paper makes analytic sense of these relationships, it explores how preferences, resources, and habits are related to several sexual activities and it links these, in turn, to outcomes. There is no formal model proposed although the elements of the sexual landscape are organized through the lens of a traditional economic model of product demand. There are no “policy implications” discussed here as the empirical relationships are correlational and at best only suggestively causal. Much of the literature regarding sexual behaviors is wholly descriptive, and while description can be valuable, a cohesive intellectual organization of the sexual activities, feelings, experiences, and beliefs is itself a step forward. That is the step taken in this paper, first through a discussion of the several aspects of sexual behaviors and attitudes, and then through an empirical investigation using measures of most of those concepts and showing their cohesive organization. The data file used contains sexual- partner-specific information about sexual practices and outcomes; it is constructed from the publicly available National Health and Social Life data set collected in 1992.