Glints & Glimmers

The Going Rate

What Sex Costs, Who Sets the Price, and What the Market Can't Touch

This book is about the difference between the arithmetic that runs underneath a sexual or romantic exchange and the fact that almost nobody says the numbers out loud.

Nowhere to buy this yet

There's no store, no price, and no preorder for The Going Rate. The newsletter is the only honest way to hear when that changes.

Subscribe

The argument

There is an economy around sex that prices, allocates, and punishes almost everything about sexual life — except the thing at the center, which the market can't touch. The commercial sex market is the instrument rather than the subject: it's the one place terms get written down, which makes it useful for reading terms that stay invisible everywhere else, from marriage to a Tuesday-night refusal.

What's inside

54,980

Words

6

Parts

25

Chapters

3

Appendices

Every chapter closes on The Terms.

★ The honest section

Part Five — The Case Against This Book, Chapter 21: Refusal Is Not a Bid

A feminist critic's objection is put at full strength and left unresolved inside the chapter itself: “If not-wanting is a valuation rather than a reason, it is subject to revision by a better offer. And a person facing someone who believes that will find that every refusal opens a negotiation instead of ending one. She does not treat this as hypothetical. She points at sex manuals urging a no-decline rule, and at advice that people have sex out of mercy, obligation or commitment.[v109] Once receptivity is framed as relationship maintenance, declining becomes a failure of maintenance.” Her formulation of the bind: “once a woman is thought to have said yes to something, she can say no to nothing.” The chapter's own conclusion is that the answer is deferred to a later chapter, and if it doesn't hold, “this book has a hole in it that the rest of the argument cannot cover.”

Who it's for

This is for you if

You keep somebody else steady and nobody has ever called it anything.
You are fifteen years into something settled in the first year.
You own a shelf of these books and nothing changed.

This isn't for you if

You came for erotica or a technique manual — the book says plainly to stop reading now rather than later.
You think pricing anything about sex is itself the mistake — the book gives that argument its own chapter and doesn't fully answer it.

An excerpt

“Sexual life runs on terms almost nobody states. Who is owed what, what counts as a yes, what a no means, what the evening cost and who paid it, what is being exchanged and whether either person would call it an exchange. All of it operates. Almost none of it is spoken. That is not a scandal. It is the water. Most of what holds people together is unstated, and stating everything would be its own kind of disaster, which is a problem this book will come back to and will not pretend to solve. But leaving terms unstated has a price, and the price is not distributed evenly. It falls on whoever has the least power to name a term and have it hold. That is the argument, and everything else here is an attempt to demonstrate it.”

Part One, Chapter 1: Nobody Says the Number

If this was worth reading this far

You've read the argument, the structure, and the part The Going Rate admits about itself. This list will tell you if it ever becomes something you can hold.

Subscribe