The Inelasticity Shift A Market-Level Theory of Sexual Access After Liberalization

This paper develops a market-based theory of contemporary intimacy that treats sexual access and relational commitment as distinct goods governed by different elasticities, costs and signaling mechanisms. It argues that sexual liberalization and digital matching platforms produced a structural supply shock that transformed sexual access from a high elasticity good into an inelastic one, while relational commitment became hyperelastic under heightened volatility. The analysis introduces three core parameters. The elasticity of relational access (ERA) captures how changes in overall investment affect sexual access outcomes. Linguistic signal efficiency (LSE) measures the marginal impact of linguistic investment on access and is shown to collapse under conditions of liquidity and noise. The volatility adjusted linguistic cost (VALC) formalizes how high market volatility inflates the cost of producing credible commitments. Drawing on communication theory, signaling theory and formal work on syntactic autonomy, the paper frames language as a signaling market that has shifted from scarcity to oversupply, degrading the informational value of discourse. Sexual access becomes insensitive to marginal changes in investment, while commitment becomes highly sensitive to small increases in perceived risk. The result is a dual elastic market in which low tier, template language governs access, and high competence linguistic forms operate as filters for long term partner selection. This framework offers a structural, non-moral account of post liberalization relationship markets and provides testable parameters for future empirical research.

DOI

• Primary archive: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17632696
• Secondary archive: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30639773
• SSRN: Pending assignment (ETA: Q4 2025)