Abstract
Sociologist Ryanne Pilgeram and media scholar Russell Meeuf discuss the hijacking of public debate by private research organizations, using the viral video “The Economics as Sex” as an example.
Keywords
Journalist Nicholas Kristof recently lamented the declining presence of academics in public debate, claiming that professors have embraced “a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.” At a time when slashed state budgets mean higher teaching loads, bigger classes, more bureaucracy, and little time for public engagement, it’s easy to blame academics.
Meanwhile, private organizations are happily filling the vacuum, aggressively marketing their research to media outlets. These for-profit public intellectuals frequently have questionable motives and funding sources.
A 2014 video, “The Economics of Sex,” produced by the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture, shows how privately financed viral videos now frame public debates on key social issues.
Deploying a whiteboard-drawing animation style that makes it seem hip and fresh, the video depicts the dating market as an economy of exchange. It claims that the introduction of the birth control pill destabilized the U.S. dating market, making the “cost” of sex cheaper and allowing immature young men to put off marriage.
The YouTube video was released just before Valentine’s Day to fit into the romance-themed news coverage of the holiday. At the time of this writing, it has been viewed over 800,000 times and was reported on by a variety of media outlets.
Not all of the media coverage of the video bought into its claims, of course. Business Insider posted a lengthy criticism of the video, and the popular feminist websites The Frisky and Jezebel found its likening of sex to an economic exchange problematic.
But only one site, Slate, pointed out that one of the video’s key researchers—Mark Regenerus—was embroiled in a 2012 scandal after his research on children of same-sex couples made claims his data didn’t support. (Additionally, Philip Cohen’s Family Inequality blog offers a very detailed takedown of almost all of the video’s research inaccuracies).
The Austin Institute used the publicity it generated to frame the media debate about family, marriage and sex—and feminist sites such as Jezebel took the bait. Instead of discussing marriage, the video’s critics were now talking about sex and the rules of supply and demand. Missing from the debate were the video’s spurious claims about women’s sexuality and marriage.
The video assumes that the “sex market” is the key variable impacting how and why people get married. It tosses aside race, religion, education, socio-economic standing, age and a host of other factors that impact the decision to marry. By assuming a neoliberal vision of marriage and sex, it concerns itself with privileged individuals in the “free market” of dating, and fails to acknowledge how structural factors may influence the marriage rate.
It is as if the video was based on the TV show Friends, telling the story of white, economically-privileged, heterosexual individuals in an urban center where minorities are conspicuously absent and all other aspects of social life are subordinated to the pursuit of romantic relationships.
But sociological research indicates a variety of causes for the decline in the marriage rate: the delayed age of marriage, changes in women’s employment opportunities, increasing rates of cohabitation, racial differences in marriage rates tied to economic opportunities, changing laws about the rights of children born out of wedlock, and a variety of other factors.
But instead of examining economic inequalities (why, for example, are marriage rates among African Americans much lower than whites? why has the marriage rate declined globally, even in countries with vastly different dating and sex cultures than the United States?), the video insists that we should simply be talking about sex and women’s individual choices.
Today, the decline of quality newspaper and television journalism means that there are too few journalists covering too many topics, making it difficult for journalists to follow complex social issues with depth and nuance. That’s one of the reasons flashy videos like “The Economics of Sex,” manage to get noticed.
Kristof is right that the United States needs more public intellectuals to help shape public opinion. But rather than give way to for-profit sources of opinion, it’s time for universities to help faculty play a role in public debate about issues that matter.