scripts
by rantywoman
With these changes, the new sexual script has become:
Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. Girl runs through her checklist: is he a one-night stand? (If so, say yes.). Is he someone she will still want to be with in a month? (If yes, then say no tonight but arrange another date.) Is he someone who can help pay the mortgage on the condo she wants to buy but can’t afford? (Flirt some more.) Is she likely to end up picking up his dirty socks and his student debt? (No way, unless he’s really cute.)
— June Carbone and Naomi Cahn, Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family, p. 44
thebitterbabe 
The red pill concept “Marriage Markets” is plagiarized directly from the manosphere. So now we have academics writing serious books addressing men and women’s Marriage Market (Value) and by extension Sexual Market (Value).
These ideas have of course always been in play in human relationships but in the past they were hidden by cultural norms and romantic ideals.
It won’t surprise you that I think women benefited more than men from the idealistic haze around the old cultural norms. I remember the moment when I first saw Rollo’s SMV chart. It was so blindingly obvious but had never occurred to me before. Young men have this information now, they know the terrain.
So now the only place stable marriage still exists is in the upper middle class. For how long, I wonder?
By the way, the passage you have quoted from Marriage Markets continues as follows, I kid you not:
“By the time our girl has made her decision, we should be at the end of this book, and she will be asking whether he is her last chance to have children or would be better as a sperm donor than as a long-term partner.”
I never disagreed that marriage is effected by economic forces.
Although that passage ends with that sentence, the authors in general are very optimistic– if anything, too optimistic– that an educated woman who delays marriage is still very likely– more likely than most– to get married and stay married in a solid, mutually-beneficial partnership. Based on my friend, I would say that is true… but not for all.
I skimmed the extract on google books. Like you I thought what I read had an overly optimistic point of view.
The overall thesis amounts to Deregulation of the Marriage Market. A close analogy is the deregulation of the financial markets since the late 1990s which has been a bonanza for some but a disaster for most. Likewise, deregulation of the marriage market has created a relatively small number of winners – high earning upper class women who snag high earning upper class men – and many losers. The authors suggest the reason for this is that middle and lower class men are now unable to offer women any economic incentive to marry. This is not really a new idea but the authors have repackaged it in a somewhat novel way.
Did anyone find the post funny? Especially the last sentence. Hahaha!