sexual marketplace

English

Noun

sexual marketplace (plural sexual marketplaces)

  1. A notional place where people's desirability as sexual or romantic partners is evaluated.
    • 2000, Christina Hoff Sommers, Frederic Tamler Sommers, Vice and virtue in everyday life‎, page 196:
      Central among the institutions she must encounter in her life is that of the sexual marketplace, where human beings are viewed as having a price, and not a dignity, and where the price of women is fixed in a particular way. Women, as things, as items in the sexual marketplace, have a market value that depends in part on whether they have been used. Virgins fetch a higher price than second hand goods.
    • 2008, Kathleen A. Bogle, Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus‎, page 197:
      They argue that people possess a collection of qualities that place them on a continuum of desirability in the sexual marketplace.
  2. (euphemistic) Prostitution; the sex work industry.
    • 1996, Far Eastern Economic Review‎, volume 156, page 6:
      The chart that lists United Nations estimates of the number of persons under 18 working as prostitutes does not distinguish between freelance or professional girlfriends and those in an organized industry, between those who enter the sexual marketplace voluntarily or who are kidnapped, raped and exploited, and between sexually mature persons, adolescents and children.
    • 1999, Amalia L. Cabezas, “Women’s Work Is Never Done: Sex Tourism in Sosúa, the Dominican Republic”, in Kamala Kempadoo, editor, Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean, →ISBN, page 100:
      The third category envelops all the clients that women service in the sexual marketplace. These encounters are temporary sexual transactions that do not involve more familiarity than necessary.
    • 2011, Michael D. Smith, Christian Grov, In the Company of Men: Inside the Lives of Male Prostitutes, →ISBN, page 45:
      The Internet has become a clearing-house for information about the possibility of male sex work and on how to enter the sexual marketplace should one be interested in doing so.
  3. A location or situation in which people are looking for sexual or romantic partners.

See also
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