Sex, Currency, and Radical Gifting: Rethinking Value Through Mutual Exchange
Money, money, money.
What if there was another way?
Have you ever hear the expression man he or she just got nailed.. maybe it came from this true story. In 1767 a British sailing vessel in the Tahitian Islands were trading with the natives. Pineapples pots and pans this kind of stuff until they figured out what the natives really wanted. Nails Tahitian women really wanted nails. It was very usable. They didn't have iron and they could use nails for all kinds of things.
Soon the sailor started trading sex for nails with the Tahitian women. Trouble Brew when they started running out of nails. In order to keep having sex with the Tahiti women sailors started taking nails out of the ship.
The captain became furious. Banned his crew from trading nails for sex because the ship was falling apart and they were afraid they wouldn't make it back to England.
Now this is edging closer to the idea that maybe sex isn't necessarily work but maybe it's money itself. In a barter system sex is the universal thing that everybody wants. It's a universal currency.
In a world where nearly everything has a price, money has come to dominate the ways we understand value, relationships, and even morality. The age-old adage “money is the root of all evil” might sound like hyperbole, but its resonance reflects how deeply monetary systems influence modern life—for better or worse. Money can buy medicine and mansions, but it also buys power, obedience, silence, and at times, suffering. It allows people to bypass social obligations and community responsibility, replacing cooperation with convenience.
But what if we thought differently about value? What if we looked to more primitive or experimental economic systems—like bartering—to understand how we might rewire our society around pro-social behavior rather than capital accumulation? And what if, instead of money, something innately human became the currency of exchange?
The Barter System and Its Limits
Professor David Graeber, anthropologist and author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, discusses the history of money and credit. The economics profession tends to teach that money arose from barter. However, anthropologists have been searching for 200 years and have found absolutely no evidence for this. Instead, it seems that early human societies had reciprocal gift exchange, whereby one person would gift something to their neighbor, and that person would be tacitly indebted for something of similar quality. Barter has only been observed between groups that didn't frequently come into contact, and sometimes between outright enemies, or among people who are already used to money but for some reason have no access to it.
Now, imagine a barter economy based not on objects, but on behavior. Not on accumulation, but reciprocity. What if sex—consensual, meaningful, and freely given—was the reward for pro-social action? What if, instead of currency rewarding competition and greed, we had a system that rewarded empathy, generosity, and connection?
Sex as Currency?
Before you bristle at the idea, it’s important to clarify: this isn’t a suggestion of transactional sex in the commercial or exploitative sense, but rather a thought experiment. We already live in a culture where sex is often traded, implicitly or explicitly, for power, validation, resources, or status. It’s already functioning in many cases as a form of currency. What this thought experiment proposes is not commodifying sex further, but decoupling it from the capitalist system altogether, and reimagining it as a natural and ethical form of exchange embedded in communal values.
In this system, sexual intimacy wouldn’t be bought or coerced, but offered as a gift within a framework of mutual appreciation and shared values. A society like this would require radical rethinking of consent, equity, and agency, and would need a cultural ethic that sees sex not as something to be taken or purchased, but something earned through social reciprocity and trust.
Burning Man
To see a glimpse of how this might work, look at Burning Man, the temporary city erected annually in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert that hosts 80,000 people each year. Burning Man is called Burning Man because people are getting together to show their frustration and their collective joy. It's a collective symbolic action burning of the patriarchal system, I.e, "the man," a 50 ft tall sculpture made of wood that is burned at the end of the festival in the shape of a man.
An overhead view of the Burning Man festival
At Burning Man, the value of money is diminished. You can’t buy food or souvenirs. Everything is gifted, bartered, or shared in a communal spirit. Need a meal? Someone will offer it. Want a massage or a handcrafted necklace? You’ll likely receive it with no strings attached. The city is built on the principle of radical self-expression and radical inclusion—but just as importantly, radical gifting. It’s not a utopia, but it is a living experiment in what happens when you remove money and re-center value around connection and contribution.
Burning Man
Burning Man was using the barter system so they said up until 10 years ago they got rid of it and started calling it The radical gifting system mostly because people would serve up drinks and then they'd be like okay flashes your boobs or turn around in a circle and it got to be a little silly. Burning man they don't necessarily trade sex for say a bologna sandwich. Although you could. It's more like radical gifting.
Within this framework, prosocial behaviors—like cooking for strangers, cleaning up after events, helping someone build a structure—are rewarded with trust, affection, and sometimes intimacy. Not because there's a direct trade, but because social value naturally begets social connection.
A look at the many burns happening around the World!
Sources:
Debt: The First 5,000 Years | David Graeber | Talks at Google https://youtu.be/CZIINXhGDcs?si=q-RjkK3mV474B6LH
Where Did Money REALLY Come From? https://youtu.be/REbrKOjsG2A?si=0cS1O2P8bOx1YG3y
Tahitian women traded sex for nails: The Story of HMS Dolphin | Animated History : https://youtu.be/DhqVmwJwu9k?si=ZFtl4RgqsV80u7hM
The Burning Man Regional Network https://regionals.burningman.org/
Burning Man ethnography: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339919
Bartering: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4225147
Intimacy and Coersion: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Intimacy_or_Integrity/TOQ6onCqYu4C?hl=en&gbpv=0
Burning Man through the eyes of an army man: https://www.coffeeordie.com/article/burning-man-army-sniper