The central idea of Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital appears uncontroversial. Catherine Hakim, a Senior Research Fellow of Sociology at the London School of Economics, claims that beautiful people get noticed, get on and, above all, they get paid. Beauty is an asset and gives someone “Erotic Capital”, a lifetime of benefits in the private and public arenas of life which the plain and ugly are less likely to achieve. She writes:
Attractive people draw others to them, as friends, lovers, colleagues, customers, clients, fans, followers and supporters and sponsors. This works for men as well as women. Indeed, the “beauty premium” seems to be larger for men than for women in public life, most notably in the workforce, where it can add 20 per cent to earnings.
Beauty, she argues, should not be dismissed as some shallow vanity in comparison to intelligence, education and moral integrity but that it has a power of its own. This is an interesting idea and Hakim uncovers dozens of examples to support her case. But then her argument takes a different direction. The way for women to improve their standing in society is to get out the makeup, show their curves and use their sexuality. This is the true feminist response and it works because of what she labels “the universal male sexual deficit.” She writes:
Men generally want a lot more sex than they get, at all ages. So men spend much of their lives being sexually frustrated to some degree...Male sexual desire declines only slowly with age, if at all. Women’s desire often falls rapidly after the age of thirty, typically due to motherhood. The male sex deficit grows steadily over the life cycle...The laws of supply and demand determine the value of everything, in sexuality as in other areas. Male sexuality is worthless, because of excess supply at zeros cost.
Attractiveness then is a bargaining commodity, women using men’s sexual appetites for their own purposes and financial gain. Men are there to be exploited and this is to be achieved by women using their sexual appeal, rather than erasing it. Hakim wants women to act as objects of sexual desire because in this way they can control the market place of private relationships and public commerce. “The male sex deficit allows women to leverage the exchange value of women’s erotic capital to a higher level,” writes Hakim. In other words, Angelina Jolie would not be paid as much as she does if she was plain looking.
Western radical feminism, she believes, has restricted women’s potential to use their erotic capital and in doing so plays into the hands of patriarchy. In Hakim’s thinking the stripper, the lap-dancer and the prostitute are simply using their erotic capital to gain appropriate financial rewards. Women in every sphere of life should do the same in order to gain financial and personal benefits that are presently denied them.
This has happened because, in order to maintain their patriarchal dominance, men have chosen to portray beautiful women as “bimbos” and beauty as only "skin deep.” Hakim reiterates the cliched criticism of Christianity as reinforcing “the Madonna/whore dichotomy of the two Marys – the virginal mother of Christ and Mary Magdalene, the beautiful courtesan and repentant sinner. Pleasure, beauty and sensuality were presented as invitations to sin, transgression, iniquity.”
This is one of the most depressing books I have read for a long time. Life devalued to a series of financial transactions or power games. Men are little more than slaves to their genitals and passions. Women forced to recreate themselves as pornographic fantasies in order to capitalise on the base longings of men. Relationships between men and women, such as marriage, are just bargaining enterprises, where a woman can withhold sexual favours in order to get what she wants. Lipgloss is to be preferred to learning - the fake sun tan to the dignity of womanhood. The idea of love is relegated to some romantic ideal with no currency in the contemporary market place. We cannot rise above our sexual and economic impulses. Money and sex make us who we are.
The problem with this sexonomics vision of men and women is that it does not correspond with reality where the desire for authentic, self-giving and life-giving love motivates us. This reality is concerned with that which lies beyond surface appearances and is the place where the loving heart of who we are is revealed. Here, beauty and truth are related. To live this reality is, I am convinced, what truly liberates men and women.
Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital, by Catherine Hakim, Allen Lane, 2011
The all too depressing feature of the proposal featured in this book is that it was written by a women. Can you imagine the impact of this argument if its author had been a man? I believe that such a book would not have been published as it would have come across as a contemptuous put-down of women by a male who was threatened by the emancipation of women. Somehow the fact that it was written by a woman makes the content "acceptable". Back in 1991 Susan Faludi wrote "Backlash" and proposed that "the feminist ethic of economic independence has been twisted into the consumer ethic of buying power". Feminism has by now been demonised in popular culture so effectively that no woman who wants to progress economically or socially publicly identifies with it. On the contrary what we find is that intelligent, educated, go-getting women have all sussed that the quickest way to get onto the fast track is to attack the old pillars of feminism. This book appears to say to women that they should all embrace the freedom to turn themselves into sex objects. There is a huge popular scorn for "wild eyed feminists" who attempt to argue that the sexualization of female imagery in popular culture is a bad thing, both in itself and in the attitudes and behaviours it engenders. As a female working in an office I listen to male colleagues in their 20's - 40's discussing women. There appears to be no social embarrassment in commenting on the sexual potential of women either in the media or the workplace. My colleagues appear oblivious to the fact that by judging whether or not they would "do" this or that female, they are putting themselves in the position of judges and women as sexual objects constantly scrutinised primarily on their ability to satisfy a man's lust. Of course, when the object of the conversation fails to reach impossibly high standards, then the man doing the judging is able to dismiss them, in terms that are frequently as contemptuous as they are crude. The sad thing is that while women continue to argue for the status quo and against change, then we will continue to tolerate the role of the man as the judge and the woman as the sexual supplicant. I also fear that we are becoming more and more accepting of the marginalisation of everybody who does not fit the profile of the attractive, young, sexy, well paid, golden consumer that seems to be being peddled so relentlessly in today's media. I love and value old people - where do they fit into the sexual currency portrayed here? Or the mother who is struggling financially and prefers to spend money on her children rather than on the latest handbag? Altogether a sad reflection of current mores and cultural poverty and I could not agree more with Fr Martin's commentary.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your insightful comments. Perhaps it is time for women (and, indeed, men) to forge a radical feminism that challenges the pornographic ideal (that so many women are being forced into) without reverting to the Spare Rib political rhetoric of the past?
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