FE AT URES
hen she was in Grade 7 at Branksome, Marina Adshade and her friends shared a book during Quiet Reading Time. It was hardly Little Women. They put a newspaper dustjacket around it to conceal the title and tittered over the revelations of The Happy Hooker: My Own Story, by Xaviera Hollander. People of a certain age will remember Xaviera, a Dutch former madam in New York City who became a best-selling author and columnist on the topic of sex. And as the title indicates, she was not the slightest bit ashamed of her raunchy lifestyle and former profession. Now you might think, with that opening, that this is a story about a Branksome grad who became a popular academic expert on sex by going on to university, studying scientifically in the field, and probably hooking up a lot. Nope.
W
First of all, Marina didn’t go to university immediately after Branksome. She very soon met her future husband and was off the market. And when she finally did enter university nearly a decade later, she ended up studying economics, the dismal science. In fact, the main things Marina has in common with Xaviera are 1) a flair for book titles, and 2) well, she really does believe in the joy of sex. So let’s jump ahead to 2008, when Marina was an economics professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax. For some seven years, she had been a specialist in economic history, macroeconomics and the economics of gender and income inequality, and had been dutifully attending dry international meetings. Now her department was looking for a way to attract more students, and Marina suggested a course in something they could apply in their own lives— the economics of sex and love. Relationships and intimacy are just as subject to economic fundamentals, such as the law of supply and de-
mand, as are other aspects of society, she notes. Marina’s course looked at prostitution—“one of the biggest labour markets in the world”— infidelity, the history of marriage, monogamy vs. polygamy, teen pregnancy, and much more. “Unsurprisingly, it was a huge hit,” she says. “We had students sitting on the floor.” And for her, career-wise, “it got the ball rolling.” The course attracted international media attention, and soon she was writing commentaries and columns for outlets that eventually included The Globe and Mail, Psychology Today, the Wall Street Journal and Time.com, as well as talks for TEDx and Ideacity. Then, in 2013, she wrote a book called Dollars and Sex: How Economics Influences Sex and Love. And her edgy ideas started making waves. One of her key points, for instance, is that even today, society still sees women as being far less interested in sex than men. Yet there is no biological evidence for this, she says, academic (continued on page 36)
DOLLARS AND $EX How economist Marina ADSHADE’86 became a renowned expert on sex, love and—yes—sex robots BY BERTON WOODWARD / PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARTIN DEE
34
The READ Winter 2018 –19