Fifty years after Esther Vilar warned that men were enslaved by sex-as-reward, her thesis feels eerily prophetic in 2025.
Today’s so-called “independent woman” has new tools of leverage—dating apps that double as marketplaces, sugar arrangements cloaked as empowerment, and a growing underground economy of rent-for-sex transactions.
From false rape claims over unpaid encounters to rising shelter-for-sex scandals in Canada, the transactional undercurrent of modern intimacy has reached a breaking point.
What Vilar once called “the barter of bodies” has become the backbone of digital dating culture, leaving men and women trapped in a high-stakes game where independence, survival, and exploitation blur beyond recognition.
A new wave of headlines—from Canada’s growing “sex-for-rent” crisis to a Singapore teen’s false rape claim against a man who refused to pay her, and undercover stings exposing shelter-for-sex ads—echo the economic framework Esther Vilar laid bare in The Manipulated Man.
Vilar argued that men’s primal need for sex has long been weaponized as barter, with women leveraging their bodies as currency in a system of exploitation that rivals any cartel or oligarchy.
Fast forward to 2025, and the digital age has only sharpened those dynamics: online dating “safety maps” now resemble risk assessments for navigating financial fraud, as transactional relationships bleed into every corner of intimacy—from sugar arrangements to exploitative housing deals. What Vilar described as “sex as a reward” has become a global marketplace where desire, desperation, and dependency fuel a shadow economy of manipulation—and men, despite modern warnings, still pay the highest price.
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