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Erotic capital doesn’t set us free. It yokes women’s careers to the whims of men
Before I actually read Erotic Capital, sociologist Catherine Hakim’s treatise on how women should flex their powers of sexual allure in the workplace, I wanted to like it. As Hakim presents it, erotic capital is a combination of physical assets (beauty, style) and know-how (liveliness, charisma, social skills) that can make those around you want to help you succeed.
Who can argue with that? I cheer a vivacious, charming acquaintance who thrives in her career because she strives to make her workplace convivial; I recall repeatedly going out of my way to help out a strikingly handsome colleague who always smiled at me in the hallways, even though I wasn’t particularly attracted to him. Even as a “radical feminist” — the sort of person Hakim blames for limiting women’s sexual power in the workplace — I’ve used erotic capital. When I was teaching English as a second language, I suspected that being a well-groomed, friendly, lively American woman helped me keep students’ attention.
In fact, it was because of my feminism that I wanted to like Erotic Capital: Whether from nature or nurture, women have traditionally excelled at “soft skills” like taking the emotional temperature of others, listening, adjusting one’s behavior to any given situation, and cooperating. These all happen to be skills that, until fairly recently, have been undercompensated in the workplace. In Hakim’s book I anticipated a deftly written argument that would reclaim the value of women’s work so that maybe we’d eventually start paying people in the professions that make use of those skills — say, teaching and nursing — their true value.
That’s the book I wanted to read. The book I actually read was more like this: Men supposedly have higher sex drives than women, creating a “male sex deficit,” which means men are always in a state of wanting more of what women supply. (Hakim has some convoluted theories about gay men and lesbians, but the book assumes people with actual power are heterosexual.) So women who are willing to address that deficit, by either having actual sex with men suffering from it or presenting themselves in an enchanting manner to exploit it, have erotic capital that can be traded for other forms of capital.
Erotic capital has many guises: from “trophy wives” whose skilled self-presentation becomes a part of a man’s public persona, to men or women who style themselves in such a way as to garner attention at their workplace, to women with otherwise limited means who sell their erotic capacity (whether forthrightly, as with sex workers and performers, or more covertly, as with sales jobs) to establish themselves. It’s “sell yourself” meets “sex sells.” What’s most surprising about all this is that Hakim seems to think she’s saying something new.
(Source: thenewinquiry)
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