Why your economist doesn’t want you to give it up to everyone.
By Danielle Zacarias
Illustrations by Dara Gold
Look, I am not an economist, but I know a thing or two about supply and demand. Simply put, if the supply exceeds or even exactly matches the demand for it, the thing being supplied will not be valued nearly as much as it would if it were in short supply. If you apply this to yourself and sex it translates into: you have to turn a few (if not many) people down in order to maintain or inflate your perceived value.
That sounds simple, right? Sleep with a few, reject many more – how much simpler can you get? Wrong. In order for you to be able to artificially inflate your value by rejecting people you need three things: 1) something people want in the first place; 2) a filtering process; 3) publicity.
Something people want in the first place
If you are hot, have a great personality, and something to be passionate about that makes you interesting, then you are already set, skip this whole section. If you are not, then you have two options: 1) improve yourself or 2) attempt niche marketing.
Improving yourself is obvious. If you are not hot, go to the gym. At the very least you can be in shape and have a decent body. If you are evil, work on creating a façade of niceness that will last long enough to keep people interested. If you are boring and have no passions, go read a book or something.
Niche marketing in contrast to self improvement is less obvious but that much easier. Once you have found a market you are set. Successful niche marketing will make you like Seven of Nine or Riker at a Star Trek convention. You will be mobbed, albeit by nerds, but mobbed nonetheless. The idea here is to find a place where people of the same sex (or orientation) are a minority, or just not as hot, cool, good looking or funny as you thereby reducing your competition.
Filtering process
You slutty slut you. You want to sleep with them all, don’t you? But you can’t because you have to restrict the supply of you. So now you must decide who to turn away and who to get down with. The best way to do this is to only screw around with people who are close to what you would want in a serious partner, thereby setting you up to possibly find someone along the way that will be more than a roll in the sack.
But like all things that involve sex or love, that’s not as easy as it sounds. It is easy to confuse what you think you want with what you actually want and then confuse that with what you need. More than likely the people you have sex with will not be like the person you end up with; they will merely have helped inform your taste instead of being perfect expressions of it. Also, if you are lazy, like me, you will want a simple way to decide these things. The best way to go about this, then, is to figure out what you want most when you have sex with someone: Hot body? Great sex? Cuddling afterward? Breakfast in the morning?
If you just want someone who is hot, that’s pretty easy – but I warn you, hot people are lazy in bed. They think they are so hot that they don’t actually have to try. Granted, this is not true for all of them, but is true of a significant number, enough so that some other kind of standard is necessitated for those of us who need more to cum than hot abs or perfect asses.
You might want to try matching hotness with low self-esteem – hard to find, but not impossible. Finding someone who is hot and athletic is probably another good way to go. It’s all about stamina, baby.
Publicity
All your work will have been for naught if you are not able to communicate the fact that you have been turning people down. You cannot simply brag about it because being conceited is unattractive. You also cannot rely upon the people you turned down to tell their friends they got turned down; no one likes telling the whole world he or she got shot down. A certain percentage of them will go and mouth off, but the publicity earned might not be the good kind anyway. What you need is a way for people you want to sleep with to see that you have standards and will turn away people who do not meet them. Doing this in public at a club or at a house party of some kind, politely but firmly, is probably a good way to set yourself up as someone with standards. You might also want to try “confiding” in people who will communicate your standards for you.
Reaping the rewards
Once you have done all this, you will have managed to inflate your value. More people will want you and will try harder to get you. Your self-esteem will go through the roof. Be careful, though, not to be too severe with the filtering process, or what becomes your most attractive quality will be the fact that you won’t touch anyone. That kind of over-filtering really only works with the creepy religious types and fanatics. And that is one niche you don’t want to touch, no matter how desperate you are for a market.
