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These Men Want to Know Their ‘Sexual Market Value’

The idea of putting a dollar figure on attractiveness has bubbled up from obscure corners of the internet.

Last year, subway cars in New York City were emblazoned with advertisements for a new dating app called Bidsy. It promised a new way for people to connect with one another: “Introducing dating built on bids, not bios,” a placard on an F train read. “Discover your true dating market value.”

Not everyone was thrilled with the ads, which threatened to turn the dating scene into an auction market. “Boiling people down to a dollar value feels really dark,” said Matt Storrs, a comedian who saw the ads on an N train. “It made you consider other people solely as objects with a price.”

As things turned out, the idea of a dating app based on bids went too far even for its founder, Ryan Beswick, who started it as a spinoff of his main company, Couple, a more traditional dating platform.

“We had this sort of wacky idea on the whiteboard: What if you had to bid?” Mr. Beswick said. Describing the result as “a transgressive app experience,” he added, “We actually decided not to pursue it long-term.”

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Although Bidsy didn’t last long as a dating app, the idea of attaching a dollar figure to potential mates has bubbled up to the mainstream after a lengthy period of development in obscure regions of the internet. Writers and commenters in those online niches commonly refer to it as “sexual market value.”

The transactional view of romance inherent in the term may seem like something from the age of the dowry, but it has gained traction in this century. The idea informed Neil Strauss’s “The Game,” a 2005 best seller focused on male pickup artists, and received new life in 2012, when the manosphere influencer Rollo Tomassi posted a graph tracking the supposed appeal of men and women over their lifetimes on his blog, the Rational Male. According to Mr. Tomassi, men hit their peak value in their late 30s, and women’s scores decline precipitously after age 30.

“These ideas are becoming more prevalent in dating now,” said Mariel Barnes, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies gender and politics. She added that the increasingly common term “sexual market value” had once been limited to misogynist web forums and social media accounts.

Certain men will go to extremes to improve their rating. On a recent podcast episode, the “looksmaxxing” avatar Braden Peters, known as Clavicular, considered a $150,000 surgical procedure to add four inches to his height. He eventually decided his sexual market value was fine as it was. “It’s not really necessary because of how I’ve popped off on social media,” he said. “I’ve sort of replaced that metric.”

Some influencers have tried to capitalize on the sexual insecurities plaguing young men. In a video posted last year, Casey Zander, who has nearly 650,000 YouTube subscribers, stands at a whiteboard crowded with scribbles as he describes the type of man who is much sought-after: “He cares zero what people think of him,” Mr. Zander says. “Therefore, she sees that he is strong in his own identity. His lack of emotional care for love toward her also signals high sexual market value.”

The boiling down of sex and romance to numbers is part of an increasingly quantified world in which apps track everything from cardiovascular health to social interactions. In trying to determine their own worth, some young men are assigning themselves numbers based on their jawlines, incomes and other factors.

Austin Dunham, a 30-year-old influencer, sells a sexual market value calculator that asks men to rate themselves from 1 to 10. Questions in his survey include: “Where do you see yourself on the social ladder?”

In several videos, Mr. Dunham likens men to stocks in the sense that their sexual market value can go up and down. “All it really means is your dating power and the amount of leverage you have in the dating marketplace,” he said of the term.

In 2024, Mr. Dunham posted a video in which he rated his followers’ supposed sexual market values live on camera. After an 18-year-old participant rated himself “about a four,” Mr. Dunham asked him to take off his shirt so that he could judge his physique and assign it a number.

The casual use of the 1-to-10 score to rank attractiveness goes back at least to the 1979 Blake Edwards movie “10.” And the concept of dating “up” or “down” — “hypergamy,” another favorite term of the manosphere — recalls Victorian class dynamics. What is “Wuthering Heights” but the tale of Healthcliff improving his sexual market value so that he may be worthy of Catherine?

The widespread use of the term “sexual market value” can be linked to the ubiquity of dating apps and their focus on immediate physical attraction, said Andrea Smith, an assistant professor of communication at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. “The apps separate the human being from the image on the screen,” Dr. Smith said. “When you have that separation, you feel like the person that’s on the screen is a commodity.”

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Josh Brito, a tech entrepreneur in Washington, D.C., recently signed up for Bring Me Bae, a matchmaking “bounty” platform. Clients choose how much they are willing to pay for a match. The reward is displayed below their profile picture. It looks a bit like a wanted poster.

Mr. Brito, 33, said he had used Hinge and Tinder, but the travel demands of his consulting job made long-term relationships difficult. There was another challenge, too. “Being a short guy makes it tough,” he said. “I was more annoyed by it in high school. But now, it’s like, You’re 33, get over it.” He discovered Bring Me Bae through its founder, Blaine Anderson, a dating coach whom Mr. Brito had worked with.

Ms. Anderson said that traditional matchmaking was labor-intensive for the matchmakers and expensive for clients. The idea behind her business was to bring a crowdfunding dynamic to a timeworn practice. “I started thinking about ways to make everyone your matchmaker and incentivize them,” she said.

Potential matches for clients are vetted by the Bring Me Bae team before any introduction is made. The reward money is put up by the clients and held in a separate account before it is disbursed to the person who made the successful match.

The minimum bounty price is $10,000. Mr. Brito decided on $25,000, though he debated whether offering that much might send the wrong signal. “I worried it was an ick, like this guy has to pay that much for a date,” he said. But he also felt it was sending a signal about how seriously he was taking the process. “If I’m not doing everything I can, then I can’t complain about not getting the result I want,” he said.

The considerable bounty hasn’t yielded any matches yet, but Mr. Brito is optimistic it will pay off in ways that defy measurement.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/style/these-men-want-to-know-their-sexual-market-value.html

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