Dal course bares economics of sex

A new class at Dalhousie examines sex in an unconventional way -- through economic principles

Dal economics professor Dr. Marina Adshade teaches a new course called The Economics of Sex and Love. (Photo: Emilie Bourque)

You could call it sex-onomics.

An economics professor at Dalhousie University, Dr. Marina Adshade, has developed a course - the first of its kind, she believes - called The Economics of Sex and Love.

Adshade got the idea after attending a session on economics and sex at a conference in New Orleans.

"I started to think this would be a fascinating course, for students to take all the economic principles that we have and see if we can apply them to human behaviour when it comes to sexuality."

She pitched the idea to her colleagues, who loved it.

For Adshade, there's economics in everything. Economics gives us an explicit framework for thinking about things, she says, and she wants to show students that sex is no different.

How, exactly, can sex be understood economically? The course is broken into four sections. The first is how economists can interpret the sex trade, including stripping, pornography and prostitution.

An example of an economic principle at work would be the efficiency wage hypothesis - the notion that you pay people more than their market value to get them to work a little harder. A pimp, for instance, might pay a prostitute a higher wage than those who don't have pimps as an incentive to keep her working under his control.

The second topic is marriage. "People don't like to think about marriage as a contract, but marriage really is a contract," Adshade says. When two people marry they are, in effect, signing a contract to have sex exclusively with each other. That could account for the high divorce rate after one person cheats on another - a contract has been broken.

The third section of the course will deal with hard numbers on issues such as whether kids do well in school if they're promiscuous. Lastly, students will learn about sexual strategies from an evolutionary perspective, like how we ensure the survival of our children through dating choices we make.

Although this might take a lot of the mystery and romance out of sex and love, the teaching assistant for the course, Laura O'Hearn, thinks "it'll make the topic more relatable, because it's a subject that's more interesting to students."

Economics major Andrew Sapiano, 21, agrees. "I mean, who doesn't want to hear about sex? And who doesn't want to put a new spin on it from a new perspective?"

The course is a second-year elective, with the only prerequisite being the basics of microeconomics. Fifty students, including Sapiano, have signed up for January.

Adshade says although the topics are sexual, she doesn't think students are interested for the wrong reasons.

"I think sex is something that people want to understand. I don't think people are taking the course because they're going to think that it's scintillating."

It's not the first course related to sex offered at Dalhousie. Others are taught in history, philosophy and health promotion. But it may be the first to receive international media attention - newspapers from Britain to Taipei have covered it.

Comments on this story are now closed