I suspect that men who view buying a woman drinks or paying for the date as a "form of... paying for sex" are the ones not getting laid.
So do you think it doesn't work? Do you think that men who pay for their date's expenses don't have a greater chance of getting laid than those who pay for only themselves? I mean, I have so little experience with mainstream dating that I couldn't say. For me, the hotter question is "If your girlfriend is a prostitute, and she wants both a date at a restaurant and a certain amount of cash, are the restaurant money and the cash simply fungible, such that the amount I spent on her is simply the one plus the other? And how, if at all, does the price of my own meal figure into this accounting? Oh well, at least I know for sure that the restaurant money isn't going to drugs."
So what's the advice here? If I pay for the meal, and get laid, is it an illegitimate "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" inference to think that paying for the meal caused me to get laid? (Remember, sometimes a "post hoc" inference is highly legitimate.) If I don't pay for the meal, and don't get laid, should I infer that paying for the meal might have helped, and try it on the second date? If I pay for the meal, and don't get laid, then I should certainly not treat the woman as the kind of person who just defected on a Prisoner's Dilemma. Rather, I should just realize that while someone may have told me that there's an implicit social contract, the woman doesn't agree with this contract--and never agreed to it. But on the next date, should I only agree to pay my own half? or pay for both, knowing that whatever the advantages of this policy, it's not getting me laid with this woman? Or would it be a good idea to say explicitly "I will pay for both of us if you explicitly agree to sex, and otherwise pay only for myself"? Because, see, I understand the issue well enough that only a prostitute (and perhaps not all of them) would respond to this by agreeing to sex. Even if they like having their meals paid for, and probably even if they like having their meals paid for and also wanted sex enough that, before this indecent offer, they were willing to have sex. So this refutes the idea that it is a social contract.
So if my goal is to have sex, and I would prefer to spend less money rather than more, then I should prefer the outcome where I don't pay for her meal and do get laid. If paying for the meal doesn't affect your chances, then not paying for the meal is a dominant strategy with a strictly higher expected payoff. When people like you make the argument you're making, they never say women really do have sex approximately as often (or less) men who pay as with those who don't, and I'm not sure whether they mean to imply that this is the case. Or maybe they imply that they personally would make the decision with indifference to whether the man paid, but who knows about women in general? Now, if it is the case that paying for the meal increases your chances--without being a necessary or sufficient condition--then it is inaccurate to tell men that it doesn't. Especially if the truth of the matter is that it's a necessary but not sufficient condition, if a man has zero chance of getting laid if he doesn't pay, but a 50% chance if he does, and he has no cause for outrage on the other 50% when he doesn't get laid.
See, I don't mind a social contract in which the sex decision is made independently of anything the man may have paid for...although, if that system gives me an extremely low chance of getting laid, and another system (prostitution) gives me a higher chance, then maybe I would prefer to explicitly negotiate the alternative system. And on a date, I have to make the decision about whether to pay, so I'd like to know if I should be factoring in the expectation of sex when making the decision.
One of the problems of mismatched expectations is this: Suppose that the truth of the matter is that a woman's preferences go like this: Paid-for meal + sex > no paid-for meal or sex > no paid-for meal, but sex. And once the man has refrained from paying, the best she can do is to refrain from having sex. Even though both the man and the woman viewed (paid-for meal + sex) as the optimum. But the man, who didn't like the outcome (paid-for meal, but no sex), let this worry keep him from paying for the meal. And the reason is that someone told him that paying for the meal wouldn't help him get to an outcome that he does like. The woman wasn't honest enough to admit her true preferences and correct him.
Again, if your honest assessment is that a man who doesn't pay for his date's meal has approximately the same chance as one who does, then by all means say this clearly, and I'll decide if I think you know what you're talking about. And if you mean only that a system where women are expected to put out for a paying man is undesirable, then let's stick to prescriptive claims: that women shouldn't have sex more for a man who paid than for one who didn't, that they should clarify that this is their personal policy when the subject comes up, and...what are the prescriptions for men whose goals are to support the best possible social contract and also to get laid? Obviously, they shouldn't be outraged at the woman if they pay for the meal and don't get laid, but do they have to be happy about it? Should they try to figure out if paying increases their chances, and pay for meals if they think it does increase their chances? Or do you advocate some "moral high ground" where paying for the meals basically taints the woman's decision, and the man should always forbear even if, given the behavior of women in a currently existing society, he would have a better chance of getting laid if he did pay?
So yes, I am one of the men not getting laid by non-prostitutes. And as I said, I don't think that there is an implicit (much less an explicit) social contract where paying for meals is one side of the bargain, and having sex is the other. On the other hand, I am a little unclear on exactly what this view should be replaced with. When men engage in the extremely common practice of paying for their dates' meals, do they mostly believe that there is such a social contract? Do most women believe this? (And if both parties believe that such a social contract is real, then we would have to say that it is real, descriptively, even if it shouldn't be.) On the other hand, if men are paying for their dates' meals for some other reason, then what is that reason? And why isn't it just as common for a dinner between two same-sex friends to have one party consistently paying for the other person's expenses as well as his/her own? And is this reason, unaccompanied by the hope of increasing your chances for sex, a good enough reason to justify the higher expense?
