Catherine Hakim’s latest book, “Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital” argues that women should use their sex appeal to get ahead in life. The book continues to generate press in the UK, USA and in Australian, such as in The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald.  The latter alludes to the fact that Hakim’s work distorts French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital. Hakim’s theory replicates taken-for-granted ideas about sex and gender. Sociology is useful only when it takes apart everyday ideas to help people better understand the social origins, and cultural consequences, of behaviour; in this case, sexuality, desire, and what is considered ‘attractive’.

Bourdieu argued that economic and life outcomes depend upon intangible social processes, such as cultural knowledge (for example, the type of school someone attends) and social networks (the people we know who might help us to get ahead in life). Sexual capital and erotic capital are concepts that have been used to study the social, symbolic, economic and physical resources that affect the way in which sexual desire is constructed in different societies, and the social hierarchies that affect the sexual power and sexual enjoyment of different groups. This is not the way Hakim applies this concept.

The Limitation of Erotic Capital

Hakim first wrote about erotic capital in European Sociological Review, calling it the ‘fourth personal asset’ that individuals can use to improve their social standing, after economic, cultural and social capital. In Hakim’s theorisation, erotic capital refers to the ways in which women manipulate their physical appearance and sex appeal to advance their social and economic status. Hakim argues that ‘Women generally have more erotic capital than men because they work harder at it‘. More recently, she argued in The Evening Standard:

Today, the financial returns of attractiveness equal the returns of qualifications. Many young women now think beauty is just as important as education.

Hakim presents her book as a cultural guide to empower ‘women’. This ignores the fact that not all women are attracted to men (see Adrienne Rich’s work on heterosexism), and that women’s beauty is shaped by race, dominant-minority social relations, history, and socio-economics.

Sociology of Sexual Capital

Sociological research has shown that social, cultural, racial, class and other social hierarchies affect the sexual agency of different sub-groups. This is known as sexual capital. Generally speaking, in America, middle class white men have more resources and opportunities to be sexually adventurous than other groups, such as working-class Black women. In Australia, race, gender, and class impact sexuality. For example, white, middle-class, educated women report having more sexual partners and more orgasms than working-class, less educated men of migrant backgrounds. Raewyn Connell and her colleagues‘ classic research from the 1980s finds that gay and bisexual men who live in rural or in working class areas have less resources to easily find romantic and sexual partners. Consequently, these men tend to take more sexual risks by having unprotected sex. (Gary Dowsett elaborates further in Practicing Desire.) The sexuality of people with disabilities is often infantilised, made out to be deviant or rendered invisible in popular culture, meaning that the erotic capital of disabled people is denigrated by mainstream society.

Transgender people do not fit into the gender dichotomy that many societies maintain. This can often complicate public expressions of transgender desire, which in turn affects social recognition. Asexual people do not experience sexual desire. Given that categories of sexual identification are often rigid, it can be difficult for asexual people to build supportive social networks. Others refuse to categorise their sexual desire and affection within set identities, such as pansexual or polyamorous people. Sometimes people develop an ‘anti-identity’ queer subjectivity which negates the need to identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or by any other specific sexual orientation. (For another interesting take, check out this Good Men Project post on being ‘mostly straight, most of the time‘.) These examples highlight the potential of erotic capital as a useful sociological concept; the social construction of sexual attractiveness, people’s sexual experiences and the recognition of diverse sexualities varies among different groups according to their social and economic standing.

Hakim uses ‘erotic capital’ in a colloquial understanding: (cis)women can use sex strategically, maximising their potential to attract the best male provider. They marry up to improve their social standing. This Pretty Woman mentality is not sociologically useful, as it bypasses race, class, sexuality, and other social relations.

How Social Capital Affects Sexual Desire

In the press Hakim has provocatively presented her book as a push against ‘radical feminists’ who, according to Hakim, have done women a disservice by discouraging them from using their beauty. In an interview for Slate, Jessica Grose argues that Hakim may be overstating the immediate influence of radical feminists on present-day society, given that the beauty industry, including cosmetic surgery, is a multi-billion dollar business. Grose also proposes that class may be an issue for women who don’t have as much money to invest in their beauty and erotic capital. Additionally, she argues a woman does not need money to look desirable – it’s a time and effort issue. Hakim writes:

It isn’t a money thing. Having a good body, being fit, is more about time and effort. Money makes things easier, but you don’t need money for most things. Education is not about money exclusively. It’s about time and effort. If you have a lot of money, you can go to an expensive hairdresser and they’ll do everything for you. But if you don’t, then you learn to do it all yourself and most women can do that kind of thing themselves. Similarly, makeup, there’s cheap versions and cheap products, as well as expensive ones. You don’t have to have the expensive ones

Time, money and a ‘good body’… exactly the types of symbolic and material constraints that Bourdieu argued needed to be taken into consideration when we think about people’s ability to be upwardly mobile. This also sidesteps the fact that the time available for leisure activities, including luxury grooming, depends upon gender and marital status, not to mention class, income and ethnicity. Hakim does not adequately address how education and other forms of social capital (like social ties and networks) impacts on erotic capital, even though this is central to Bourdieu‘s theorisation of social capital. It should come as no surprise that money and education does matter to women’s social mobility. The Global Development Report on Gender shows that even though more women are being educated around the world, they continue to earn much less than men, up to 50-80 percent less in some countries.

Ideologically-Driven Science

It’s not just Hakim who is passing off the beauty myth as science. A new study published in PLoSONE claims that women who wear makeup are better trusted as professionals in the paid labour force. The research was carried out by a group headed by Nancy Etcoff, from the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, USA, who is also affiliated with Harvard Medical School. The story was picked up by the New York Times.

Yet as Jenna Goudreau reported in Forbes, the study was commissioned by makeup manufacturer Procter & Gamble – which, you might guess, has a vested interest in getting women to believe that wearing more makeup is good for their careers.

Subjective Experiences of Beauty Ideals

For some people, there is also a lot of pleasure in performing gendered beauty practices. For others, the enactment of femininity is fraught with ambivalence, pain or conflicted ideas. Sometimes, bodily practices associated with beauty are all these things at once. Lisa Hickey, publisher of The Good Men Project, talks about how her unhealthy obsession with beauty dominated a great deal of her time. She partly justified it in the terms Hakim and this study uses: ‘I need to look good to get ahead in work. I’ll earn more for my family‘.

Other women may feel different pressures in their negotiation of beauty ideals in other professional fields.

It is rare to see diverse notions of women of colour’s beauty in popular culture, unless it is being fetishised.

The Born This Way Blog shows yet another set of eclectic gender and sexual expressions by LGBT adults reflecting on photographs from their early childhoods. This blog addresses the personal development of sexual desire, identity and beauty through gender-non-conformity. These examples show that the negotiation of beauty, gender and sexual practices are complex. Neither inherently ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, the meaning that people place on beauty performances is situational, and their consequences are historically and culturally and dependent, as is also the case with erotic capital.

Clearly, there is a lot of social pressure on people to conform to particular sexual and beauty ideals. The studies by Hakim and Etcoff’s team present a view that is familiar to most people: if you’re ‘attractive’, you can improve your social standing. Sociologists would ask: so what? What do we learn about society that we didn’t know before? What are the social consequences of erotic capital and beauty ideals for different groups? How do we use this information to contribute to social change? Studies that fail to deconstruct the social, cultural and material constraints on the lived experiences of sexuality and beauty reproduce the existing social order. Nothing changes. The potential of social science is not fulfilled.

Fulfilling the Promise of Sociology

Peter Berger argued that part of the reason why sociology struggles to find legitimacy as a science is because we deal with topics that are familiar to most people – so why would they need our sociological interpretation? Our duty as sociologists, Berger argued, is to take apart the familiar and to offer new ways to challenge taken-for-granted social norms. In a similar vein, C. Wright Mills argued that the sociological imagination helps us see the relationship between history and biography.

Unfortunately, studies that merely replicate beauty ideals without offering a critical view of what this means for different groups falls short on the promise of sociology. Its promise is to explore the multiple sexual experiences, actors and social structures which work to maintain, negotiate and challenge what is framed as ‘normal’, ‘sexy’ and ‘beautiful’.

Read an excerpt of Hakim’s book in Ask Men.