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Hard Bargains: The Politics of Sex

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"Hard Bargains: The Politics of Sex" is an eminently readable and fascinating analysis of male/female sexual relationships from a new vantage point--bargaining theory. While there is plenty of research and scholastic documentation covering both historical perspective and fresh and daring contemporary isights, the book reads like a novel. The familiar paradigm of bargaining theory is surprisingly applied to the most personal and intimate of human relationships with logic and insight. The results are rigorous and very provoking This book traces the legal history of women and sex from ancient times forward to the present day. The middle chapters are fundamentally shocking as they show the pervasive extent of misogyny that legal scholars built into the very foundations of our Western legal system. With incredible quotations from the 'fathers' of our modern legal system the reader gets to see the systemic bias -- bordering on evil -- that has colored legal thought to this ver;y day. The combination and intertwining of bargaining theory with a vast historical perspective leads the authors to some dramatic suggestions for legal change. The goal is to give men the legal tools to more adequately negotiate their most personal lives from a more equally balanced bargaining position. This book is powerful in scope and dramatic in its implications for today and the future. Every young person, and not so young person, should read it. Their life and the law will never quite be the same!

Hirshman and Larson, law professors at Brandeis and the University of Wisconsin, see a remarkable transformation in American politics: private sexual negotiations formerly dominated by men have become public negotiations with recourse to public standards of justice and fairness.

Unfortunately, the authors' optimistic vision is distorted by an objectionable reductionism. Hirshman and Larson rely on game theory, the methodology of rational self interest beloved by economists and by political scientists enthralled with the celebrated "prisoner's dilemma."

Much of their book is based on a variant of the prisoner's dilemma, namely "The Battle of the Sexes". Thus Hirshman and Larson conclude that the participants' bargaining positions structure consensual heterosexual sex: they argue that while both partners typically prefer sexual intercourse to masturbation, the male bargains for "her fidelity and his freedom" while the female holds out for "sex on terms of equal fidelity."

Although Hirshman and Larson consider their attempt to propel game theory "beyond the bedroom door" thrillingly audacious, their theoretical enterprise cannot address the true emotional depth of either sex or love. The politics of sex encompasses so much more than hard bargaining over costs and benefits, but this fact cannot be accommodated within a game theoretical perspective.

This is not to say that the analyses in this book are uninteresting. Nor are the authors slavish adherents to social science reductionism: at times, they introduce humanistic perspectives from philosophy (Aristotle's ethics, Michel Foucault's analysis of power), from history (ancient Greek law, Puritan sexual morality), and especially from political theory (Plato's Republic, Hobbes' Leviathan, Rawls' A Theory of Justice). Unfortunately, these refreshing interludes cannot overcome Hirshman and Larson's disappointing over-reliance on a trendy but ultimately sterile methodology.

A scholarly, in depth study of sexual politics. Of no interest to me, an 80 year old grandma with an RN and PhD in Health Education. I bought it wanting a resource for sex education with teens at church. It was not what I needed.

This book represents another step in the reduction of human affairs to legally arbitrated exchanges and misses the unique quality of sex. The very power of sex lies in its connection to a hoped-for reciprocity, a spontaneous and unstoppable expression of passion or love. Such an expression cannot be compared to, for instance, the exchange between a merchant and client. In such an expression there is no buyer and seller, personal walls break down. Hirshman's humorless account of sex does violence to the emotional and spiritual experience of the act, missing, in fact, that it is not an act at all, but an event.