Made out of people

Temporality of Romance

Zerubavel is a sociologist interested in how we socially operate in time. In The Seven-Day Cycle, he quotes Staffan Linder:

Those who complain that girls these days are 'easy' fail to understand that in a hectic age girls must accelerate to save time, both for themselves and for their male friends. It would be inconcievable, for reasons of time, that a modern young lady should require her presumptive lover ... to appear for one hundred evenings and wait outside her door, to be admitted in the hundred-and-first.

The rise of the "quickie" as a modern institution must also be understood within this context.

Of course, we need to contrast this with this paper on the economics of orgasm, heroically found by Tyler Cowen:

This paper models love-making as a signaling game. In the act of love-making, man and woman send each other possibly deceptive signals about their true state of ecstasy. Each has a prior belief about the other's state of ecstasy. These prior beliefs are associated with the other’s sexual response capacity...