Some Reddit users pointed out that there is a big difference between being valued for sex and being valued only for sex.
Why do you think it's sexism? Why not? It's the subjective opinions of the women.Also, I'm pretty sure you can't measure " women's desire to avoid short-term sexual relationships" when you only interview married couples.
Ugh, no access to article, so I'll just comment a little the abstract and the title. This study doesn't seem very generalizable. The samples for both studies examined are very, very small and will have tons of limitations (geographically especially). I'm also super hesitant to find merit with studies based on evolution: I like to believe we are more than our base instincts. As well, how might this apply to homosexual relationships? I feel this can be expanded to "people don't like to be valued for one part of themselves." Who wants to just be a living sex toy? On a similar vein, I wouldn't want to be in a relationship with someone who only likes me for my baking skills. I want you to like all of me, not just parts of me that benefit you.
Along the lines of what others have said... since they were using frequency of sex to approximate the male partner's sexual valuation of the woman rather than measuring that directly somehow, what this really tells us is that if a marriage is otherwise committed, sex and satisfaction seem to accompany one another, and if it's otherwise rocky (in that that one party at least is not so committed) sex and dissatisfaction seem to accompany one another - for the women involved in the (rather small) studies, anyway. Their ideas about why that might be are just ideas, it seems like, since they don't mention asking the women why they were more/less dissatisfied under their circumstances. I can think of enough alternative explanations that unless they monitored more confounding variables/took more direct measurements than they say they did, I'm not going to take the headline too literally. It seems overreaching. And yeah, someone you're married to (and presumably have a history with) who isn't committed to you is a whole different animal than a "short term relationship", or can be, so the two situations should not be conflated in the conclusions proposed, though they appear to have been. Note: This is based on a reading of the abstract only, I haven't found a non-paywalled version of the full text.