The bitter pill?

There is an interesting and deeply flawed piece on the economics of contraception over at First Things.

The good stuff first, author Timothy Reichert asks some fascinating questions about how contraception may have changed our relative bargaining positions on sex, love and marriage as men and women. Even if you don't like his answers—and many people will hate them—you have to take his questions seriously enough to come up with serious answers to them. And if there is one thing our culture tends to do these days it is to avoid serious answers about the challenges of sex, love and marriage.

Reichert's piece has two huge failures common to a lot of Catholic thinking in this area. The first is its managerial approach. He talks about trends and behaviours as if the only solutions to the problems that concern him is to change the market conditions such that people will pay a huge price for not behaving the ways he thinks they should. This is a little like arguing against bankruptcy protection on the grounds that people took debt more seriously when the consequences of failure were ruin and slavery.

The second problem is funnier.

Here is how he sets it up:

If the arguments above are true, why do women agree to use contraception? More pointedly, why are so many women so vocal that contraception is a necessity—indeed, that it is their birthright?

Leave aside what the "arguments above" are for now (you can go read the piece later and decide about them). Let's just imagine we share Reichert's perspective and are looking for a solution and we'll also conveniently forget that we know that much of the impetus to develop the pill came from women in the first place.

So how does Reichert solve the problem? He uses the prisoner's dilemma. He thinks that women collectively chose to enter into contraceptive use solely because they believed they would lose more if they didn't enter. Here is how he sums it up:

Imagine, then, that chemical contraceptive technology is invented, and women suddenly face the choice of using contraception or not. Imagine the situation faced by younger women. Younger women who choose to use contraceptive technology now find themselves able to enter the sex market wherein they are the “scarce resource” and can command a high price for their services, relative to men. By contrast, young women who do not enter the sex market find themselves unable to benefit from the higher prices paid in the sex market and face a decrease in their share of the gains from marriage because they now are in relative oversupply in the marriage market.

That all sounds like fine reasoning but don't you think it leaves something out? Don't you think that it leaves out something rather important?

Just imagine another condition that might effect this "market". A condition that Reichert and Catholic thinkers on this subject seem to have a hard time imagining. Let's just suppose that most* women actually really enjoy sex. Enjoy it so much that they spend a lot of time craving it; enjoy it so much that they dream about it, scheme about it and fantasize about possible couplings. Wouldn't that also change the calculations above?




* The "most" here is very important. Some people (both men and women) don't like sex much.