What is Sexual Capital?

Dana Kaplan, Eva Illouz

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781509552337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book does to sex what other sociologists did to culture: it shows that sex, no longer defined by religion, now plays a role in the economy and can yield tangible benefits in the realms of money, status, and occupation. How do people accumulate sexual capital, and what are the returns for investing money, time, knowledge, and energy in establishing and enhancing our sexual selves?

Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz disentangle the current cultural politics of heterosexual life, arguing that sex – that messy amalgam of sexual affects and experiences – has increasingly assumed an economic character. Some may opt for plastic surgery to beautify their face or body, while others may consume popular sex advice or attend seduction classes. Beyond particular practices such as these, the authors trace an emerging form of "neoliberal" sexual capital, which is the ability to glean self-appreciation from sexual encounters and to use this self-value to foster employability, as exemplified by Silicon Valley sex parties.

This highly original book will appeal to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and cultural studies and to anyone interested in the nature of sex and how it is changing today.

1
Introduction Sex and Sociological Metaphors

Two sociologists have recently called on their profession to be more modest, more ambitious and more joyful in its endeavor to explain the social world.¹ While sociology cannot make the world a better place, they go on to claim, it can certainly offer fresh ways of understanding it through its theories, concepts, and metaphors. In this study we scrutinize one sociological metaphor that has been gaining considerable traction: that of sexual capital, which is increasingly being used—and not only by sociologists, gender scholars, and sex researchers. In everyday talk sexual capital has become a common metaphor for addressing the actual social and individual consequences of “our world made sexy” and how people “make do.”²

Ordinary people will cringe at the use of capital for a domain like sexuality: after all, isn’t sexuality a realm of pleasure, self-abandon, improvisation, play? Why should we connect it to the economic–sociological metaphor of capital? It is because sexuality is always “in society” and is regulated by changing societal forces. The three monotheistic religions have relentlessly regulated sexuality, making it central to the ideology of purity, to the family, and to political power. The way sexuality appears in ideals of the self is always social. If in the traditional world sexuality was shaped by religion, in late modernity it has become chiefly intertwined with the economy.

The metaphor of sexual capital assumes that sex is a resource for future gains in a way that goes well beyond sexual activity per se. Unlike concepts whose meanings, at least in theory, are widely shared and accepted, metaphors are more open and less precise. They have a certain vehicular quality, and it is their conceptual imprecision that sometimes makes them useful to the sociologist’s imagination.³ But, although the sexual capital metaphor has become quite popular, on the whole it remains undertheorized.

In common sociological usage, sexual capital refers to the returns people may receive from investing money, time, knowledge, and affective energy in constructing and enhancing their sexual self, the aspect of their identity that concerns sexuality. Some may opt for plastic surgery in a bid to beautify their face or body, while others may consume popular sex advice or join ‘seduction communities’ in order to train their sexual subjectivity to become more confident. These different investments may generate a better position from which to compete on sexual access to the bodies of others. This sexual competition can be oriented toward pleasure maximization or toward the mere feeling of being desired by others.

In this study we will describe the historical conditions under which four different forms of sexual capital have appeared, thrived, and sometimes waned. We will further suggest that under neoliberalism these forms of sexual capital change, and their transformation is responsible for phenomena as diverse as Silicone Valley sex parties as expressions of high-tech ideals of creative, fun, and collaborative work, genital plastic surgery among upper-middle-class patients, and even some sex workers’ beliefs that through their services they are able to garner self-esteem and develop emotional resilience and other employable skills.⁴ Through the lens of capital, we offer a detailed analysis of the effects of neoliberal capitalism on sex and sexuality. Neoliberal sexual capital, as we dub it, designates the ability to glean self-appreciation from sexual encounters and to use this self-value so as to foster employability.

To be sure, the idea that sexuality may increase one’s self-value is not new. After all, the character of Don Juan offers a paradigm of masculinity in which sexual conquests are undertaken for their own sake, independently of marriage and institutions, because they presumably confer a value to the self. Don Juan embodies an attribute of masculinity increasingly independent of the power of the church and defined by a capacity to generate desire in women and to satisfy the subject’s own desires. Such masculinity appears as a form of domination over women when a man like Don Juan would ruin their reputation and leave them without their only resource on the marriage market, namely their virginity. Yet, at least in Molière’s play and in Mozart’s opera, that character was punished by God himself, which thus suggests that, for serial sexuality to generate a socially recognized value to the self, it must be embedded in a social and normative order that makes it operative. In fact, in the era when Christianity was dominant, women were by default defined by a sort of sexual capital, namely by chastity. In traditional marriage markets, the woman’s (and, to a lesser extent, the man’s) reputation depended on virginity. Chastity—the lack of sexual activity—thus played the role of signaling woman’s conformity to Christian ideals, thereby increasing her value. By default, sexuality played an important role in mate selection, because in traditional societies a marriage market was based both on reputation and on the economic assets of the prospective mate. In many ways, it is this normative order, which protected women from predators, that Don Juan challenges; and in consequence his sexuality is still highly constrained by the normative order of Christian patriarchy. For a full-fledged sexual capital to emerge, sexuality needs to autonomize itself vis-à-vis religion.⁵ What has enabled the formation of a sexual capital is the loosening of the norms and taboos that regulate sexuality, along with the increasing incorporation of sexuality into the economic field. When sexuality becomes structured by economic strategies, yields economic advantages, and becomes key to the economic sphere itself, we speak of sexual capital organized in a neoliberal culture, or neoliberal sexual capital.

Our understanding of neoliberal sexual capital in particular should be distinguished from three main arguments that are usually brought up when thinking about the relationship between sex and capitalism. These are: sex as redress to gender imbalances; sexual identities as a platform for sexual citizenship; and sexual commodification or the monetization of sexuality. Let us briefly address each of the three and explain how our approach to neoliberal sexual capital may differ, improve, or complement them.

First, we write against a well-known and controversial conceptualization of sexual capital by sociologist Catherine Hakim, who has defined erotic capital as a (markedly feminine) personal asset that women can use in the labor market and in intimate relations. In her view, erotic capital combines “beauty, sex appeal, liveliness, a talent for dressing well, charm and social skills and sexual competence. It is a mixture of physical and social attractiveness”—and these, she claims, can be capitalized on to get better jobs or negotiate “better deals” in intimate relationships.⁶ Catherine Hakim’s understanding of erotic capital points to a real and powerful social reality, made more acutely relevant by the various industries that use, exploit, and expose the (woman’s) body: sexuality, as an attribute of the person, became increasingly transformed into an economic asset. However, hers remains a crude and limited way to define sexual capital, and for a number of reasons. For one thing, Hakim is oblivious to the historical and cultural processes that enabled the transformation of sexuality into capital. For example, media industries have been a major source for the codification of standards of beauty and for the conversion of beauty into capital in social fields. This process was driven by powerful economic interests. By treating sexual capital as if it were an obvious, unobtrusive attribute of “attractive” women, Hakim did not ask herself why attractiveness plays a role in various social fields that enable it to function as a capital. Second, Hakim made sexual capital an attribute of women, thereby accepting and reinforcing not only sex stereotypes but the very ways in which women are dominated, that is, through their bodies. Hakim in other words fails to understand that, if sexuality is a form of capital, this is because it uses attributes that also maintain the domination of women by men. As Catharine MacKinnon has cogently argued, sexuality is to heterosexual relationships what work is to the capitalist producer: the privileged site for the exploitation of women by men.⁷ Even more surprising, perhaps, is that Hakim’s understanding of sexual capital is premised on the hypothesis that there is a natural, biological male lust that women can use for their advancement: she seems oblivious to the fact that the use of women for sexual purposes and women’s use of their own sexuality have always been part and parcel of the most oppressive form of patriarchy, not of its subversion. What characterizes patriarchy is precisely the fact that sexuality has represented an almost exclusive avenue for unwealt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Sex and Sociological Metaphors
• 2. Sexual Freedom and Sexual Capital
• 3. What Is Sexual Capital?
• 4. Forms of Sexual Capital: The Four Categories
• 5. Conclusion
• End User License Agreement