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: “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 romance into an auction. “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.”
The idea of a bidding-based app went too far even for its founder, Ryan Beswick, who started it as a spinoff of his main company, Couple. “We had this wacky idea on the whiteboard: What if you had to bid?” Beswick said. Describing the result as a “transgressive app experience,” he added, “We actually decided not to pursue it long-term.”
While Bidsy was short-lived, the idea of attaching a figure to potential mates has bubbled into the mainstream after years in obscure regions of the internet. Writers and commenters in those niches refer to it as “sexual market value.”
This transactional view of romance may seem like a relic of the dowry age, but it has gained modern traction. The concept informed Neil Strauss’s The Game, a 2005 bestseller about male pickup artists, and received new life in 2012 when "manosphere" influencer Rollo Tomassi posted a graph on his blog, The Rational Male, tracking the supposed appeal of men and women over time. According to Tomassi, men hit their peak value in their late 30s, while 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 noted that the term “sexual market value” was once limited to misogynist web forums.
Influencers are now capitalising on the insecurities of young men. In a video last year, Casey Zander, who has nearly 650,000 YouTube subscribers, described the "high-value" man to his audience. “He cares zero what people think of him,” Zander says. “His lack of emotional care for love toward her also signals high sexual market value.”
This reduction of romance to data points reflects an increasingly quantified world where apps track everything from cardiovascular health to social status. In trying to determine their worth, some men assign themselves numbers based on jawlines, income, and "leverage."
Austin Dunham, a 30-year-old influencer, sells a sexual market value calculator that asks men to rate themselves from 1 to 10. His survey asks: “Where do you see yourself on the social ladder?” Dunham likens men to stocks that can fluctuate in price. “All it really means is your dating power,” he said.
In 2024, Dunham rated his followers’ values live on camera. After an 18-year-old participant rated himself “about a 4,” Dunham asked him to take off his shirt so he could judge his physique and assign him a definitive number.
The New York Times