Deb!
The idea that sex and beauty should be traded just like any other commodity is gaining capital. Rachel Hills reports on a controversial new trend.
Whoever said that money can’t buy love never logged on to whatsyourprice.com. The US-based dating site, launched in April, promises to introduce the rich and “generous” (usually men) to the “beautiful, gorgeous and sexy” (usually women). The hook? Instead of paying a monthly fee to the administrators of the website, users give their cash directly to those they want to date, “bidding” tens, hundreds and even thousands of dollars for the chance to spend a few hours face to face with the hottie of their dreams.
Distasteful? Perhaps. Mercenary? Certainly. But if sites like whatsyourprice.com seem seedy, they’re just the extreme end of a bigger trend: the merging of love, sex and commerce. And leading the charge is British sociologist Catherine Hakim, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies, a neoconservative UK think tank, and chief cheerleader for what she has dubbed “erotic capital”.
On some level, most of us intuit that sex appeal matters. We’ve seen the stats that place the annual value of the global beauty industry at about $340 billion, lusted after the preternaturally pretty faces that wallpaper advertising, television and celebrity gossip magazines, and felt the frisson of possibility that comes with meeting someone attractive and charming.
It feels as if we’re hit with a new study on the subject every few days, informing us that: we can determine who is hot and who’s not in a fraction of a second; that we believe beautiful people to be smarter, kinder and better leaders than the plain or unattractive; that one in three women would shave a year off their life in exchange for a “perfect” body.
But with her controversial book Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital, Hakim takes this urge to quantify our urges one leap of logic further. Hakim’s “erotic capital” is part continental philosophy, part human-resources jargon. The term is a play on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of “cultural capital”, which describes how class and status are not just a matter of the balance of our bank accounts or who our parents are, but manifest in the schools we attend, the newspapers we read and even the music we listen to.
Hakim’s interests are more transactional. Erotic capital, as she describes it, isn’t just a signifier of wealth and power - it is a “personal asset” that can be traded for those things, no different from a university degree, a good professional reputation or a strong network of friends or acquaintances.
According to Honey Money, good-looking junior employees who sleep with their bosses to get ahead are neither exploited nor exploitative: they’re just engaging in a simple exchange of pleasing aesthetics for social introductions and mentoring. Husband-funded ladies who lunch are no less powerful than women who bring in 60 per cent of their household’s income … so long as they maintain their erotic allure.
If beauty and sex appeal are goods that people want and are willing to pay for, argues Hakim, why not charge for them? For those who share her world view, casting a “bid” for a date with an attractive stranger isn’t mercenary - it’s just honest.
Hakim isn’t the only academic writing about that place where sex and economics meet. In a recent New York Times article, University of Texas economist Daniel S. Hamermesh (author of Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful) calculated that the difference in lifetime earnings between a markedly unattractive worker and a relatively attractive one came to $US240,000. Two months earlier, University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus used the term “sexual economics” to explain why young Americans were marrying later than their predecessors, putting a pointy-headed spin to the idiom “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”
Hakim and her colleagues would have us think they’re intellectual renegades, rebels with the guts to reveal the ugly truth about how sex and attraction “really” work. In Honey Money, Hakim describes erotic capital as having a “maverick, subversive, wild-card character … a talent so completely ignored until now that there has never been a label for it”.But, while the terminology may be new, the principles underlying “erotic capital” and “sexual economics” are decidedly old-fashioned. Men are only after sex, women just want what’s in your wallet, beautiful people have it better than the rest of us … If it all sounds depressingly familiar, it’s because it is.
What is new is the rhetoric used to justify these tropes. Until recently, most sex-related pop psychology relied on biology, or its approximates: our behaviour is written in our genetic code, our impulses an echo of what worked for our caveman ancestors. Now, “evolution” has been moved to the marketplace, and “fitness” is measured the only way economists know how - in monetary value.
In a recent article for Salon.com, staff writer Tracy Clark-Flory wondered if this trend towards “blunt financial-cum-romantic advice” was a fallout of the global recession. Perhaps people couldn’t afford the same standard of living they could pre-crash and were seeking new avenues to maintain their old lifestyles. “Pragmatism is highly appealing in these harsh economic times,” she mused.
But how appealing is it? “Erotic capital” is a snappy concept, but it caters less to our superficial impulses than to our pessimism. Who grows up dreaming of a lover they had to lure into bed with money? Or of “exploiting” the people who are attracted to us for professional or material gain, as Hakim recommends? Sexual economics give eroticism a price, but its value is very low indeed.Related: Some questions I have about erotic capital and beauty positivity
I’m a huge believer of chia seeds, currently have them most mornings for breakfast!
Um, Emily….why are there poppy seeds in your water?
Those aren’t poppy seeds, silly. Those are chia seeds!
Today our chef, mixed up a batch of chia water and knowing I am always game for stuff like this, she encouraged me to drink a mug of this superfood. Super awesome food, is more like it!
These seeds are highly nutritious, providing calcium and proteins and since they absorb and hold 10x their weight in water, they are extremely filling which makes them a great aid in appetite control (in addition to their dozens of other health benefits)!
To use Chia seeds, soak them in water for about two hours and they will form an almost tapioca like consistency. You can then drink them straight in the water or add to any recipe (unlike flax seeds, chia seeds are essentially tasteless…so you can sprinkle them on top of salads, in a fruit cup and you will hardly notice they are there.)
You can read more about the benefits of chia here, but for what it’s worth…I am sold!
Gorgeous!
I got tied up at work last night…a pretty neat last-minute project that needed my attention. I was excited to help, but there was no way I was going to make it home in time to relieve our nanny.
A pleading ping to my husband
<simon is typing>
“No problem. I’ve got it babe.”
teamwork.
I finished…
Let's dance.
The Beach Boys: Do you want to dance?
Whitney Houston: I want to dance with somebody.
David Bowie: Let's dance.
The Contours: Do you love me now that I can dance?
5 things i’m thankful for today…its almost summer edition!
1. Its the last day of winter. Goodbye, Good Riddance!
2. My new conditioner is working on my blonde bleached-theshit-out-of-my-hair ends.
3. I’ve paid for my ticket to Paris to see my sis
4. I can go to bed early tonight, so I can rise early for 6am spin class
5. I get paid today (er that was too easy)
Oh no! They seemed like such a good couple. Poor Julia - but she’ll be fine, she always is. (Just like the rest of us!)
that is simultaneously completely and totally depressed, convinced I made a terrible, horrible, awful, gut-wrenching mistake, angry at men specifically, the world in general, and convinced I will never date or fall in love again.
It is not, in a word, pretty.
I know, intellectually, how to wrest…
So weird - only Saturday night I was corrected by a friend when I said thats what I do, big crocodile tears, (during weddings - esp the royal wedding etc) and she let me know I was fake crying! I had no idea thats what it meant!
In my last post, I mentioned shedding crocodile tears after watching a particularly touching Chrome Ad
Shortly after publishing, a reader left a comment saying “I’m sure you meant otherwise, but crocodile tears are fake.”
Confused by her comment, I Googled “Crocodile Tears” only to find…
Some of my family is from San Diego/Coronado (the American side obviously, the rest hail from Sydney and Canberra of course) and I’ve seen this house! I miss SoCal so much!
Every morning Lilly & I go for a walk on the path near the beach here in Coronado, and we pass this extraordinary garden … I’ve never seen anything quite like it!!!
A gal can’t be without an eyebrow pencil one shade lighter then her natural brow colour, and a pewter/gray eyeshadow with a hint of warmth to bring out her bluey-green (or brown) eyes. Two must have products! (I just dropped $100 on my lunch break! F*ck!)
so much cute in one room!
Looking rather stately with @sweatshorts
Before Law Prom last saturday, my roommates and I all took pictures shaking hands with each other. That way, as each of us becomes famous/important, we can put them up in our respective offices and say things like
“Why yes, that is me and the newly-appointed Postmaster General in a kitchen. Ah, 2011 was a great year.”
![I knew there was a true, real reason Laney is awesome!
Anyways, I seemed to have been born knowing all the lyrics to every song by the Beatles (Even ‘I am the Walrus’!) I quizzed my dad about this and he admitted playing his records to mum’s tummy when she was pregnant with me. Aha!
heylaney:
I grew up listening to The Beatles - on car rides, during Sunday afternoons with the family, alone in bed at night with headphones and a Discman, on my iPod while walking to and from work.
They were one of the first bands I introduced the baby to, as soon as the books told me that the baby could hear and respond to music.
During the more anxious moments of my pregnancy, I listened to Let It Be (over and over and over) to calm me down.
Recently, my dad got tickets for the entire family to see Rain, a well-respected Beatles tribute band, currently playing on Broadway.
The baby had been quiet for most of the morning. However, from the first chord of the show until the last, he was tap dancing in my belly to the music of The Beatles.
A tiny fan already. I couldn’t be more proud.
(By the way—for posterity’s sake—I’m 32 weeks today and just got back from the doctor, where I got to see my little man. He’s no longer breech (!!!) and weighs in around 4 1/2 pounds. Only 8 more weeks to go…)
[via noraleah]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lix1ij77Hl1qcb6y0o1_500.jpg)
I knew there was a true, real reason Laney is awesome!
Anyways, I seemed to have been born knowing all the lyrics to every song by the Beatles (Even ‘I am the Walrus’!) I quizzed my dad about this and he admitted playing his records to mum’s tummy when she was pregnant with me. Aha!
I grew up listening to The Beatles - on car rides, during Sunday afternoons with the family, alone in bed at night with headphones and a Discman, on my iPod while walking to and from work.
They were one of the first bands I introduced the baby to, as soon as the books told me that the baby could hear and respond to music.
During the more anxious moments of my pregnancy, I listened to Let It Be (over and over and over) to calm me down.
Recently, my dad got tickets for the entire family to see Rain, a well-respected Beatles tribute band, currently playing on Broadway.
The baby had been quiet for most of the morning. However, from the first chord of the show until the last, he was tap dancing in my belly to the music of The Beatles.
A tiny fan already. I couldn’t be more proud.
(By the way—for posterity’s sake—I’m 32 weeks today and just got back from the doctor, where I got to see my little man. He’s no longer breech (!!!) and weighs in around 4 1/2 pounds. Only 8 more weeks to go…)
[via noraleah]
