When I was doing Dan Ariely's Coursera course on Behavioral Economics, there were videos of guest lecturers every week. One of the speakers was Nina Mazar, and she spoke about a model called "sexual economics" - if memory serves, one of the things she touched upon (and please note that the talk was short and could not possibly cover all the nuances of her research on the topic) was how sex was used in a manner of a good/commodity. Like, how someone who beds women gets scorned because he's getting the commodity without "paying" - that is, taking care of the female in a caring, secure, loving relationship. I believe there was also a part describing where women who are in an area that has a dearth of viable mates tend to "advertise" their "availability," in some cases by wearing more revealing clothing; whereas those who were in a place where there were a lot of possible mates tended to not do so (by covering up).
Hopefully, I did not misrepresent the information too much. It's been some months and I'm sure I've forgotten a lot. The amount of negative response after that talk's video was posted was really huge. The logical discussion about the concepts presented was completely overshadowed by the emotional response of the majority. It was kind of sad for me because what was presented was a model. That it got mired in controversy effectively scuttled whatever benefit the research might have had on those taking the course.
You can still view the firestorm, by the way, the forum posts should still be up at Coursera; one need just sign up for the course to be able to view them. I have to admit that thinking about sex as a thing subject to economics kind of made sense to me. Survival of the fittest has wrought weirder things, like that of duck genitals. A male's attractiveness is also affected by how able he is to take care of his mate; and furthermore there are a lot of societies in the world who consider that women should be pure, unsullied by worldly things, and dependent. Some of these societies consider women to have some ambiguous connection to the honor of the family that they are attached to; and so perhaps in these ways meeting these societies' definition of womanhood can represent a taking up of value.
Because the family's honor is paramount, women who do not bring shame to the family are valuable; they can be married off to other families and there is financial benefit in doing so. Perhaps they'll also use her to cement alliances. These women therefore should be taken care of - they are covered up, and no doubt about their pristine natures should crop up. This means they must be confined at home or if they need to leave the house they must be accompanied by a family member. The women's families can afford to be discerning with regard to her future husband, there's probably a little endowment effect in operation here.
When we quantify what would make a good spouse in this way and worse when so many people (male and female) buy into it, horrors are committed without regret. If the society is less conservative, perhaps it's the women themselves who are free to settle on the terms of the economic exchange.
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