Sexualities

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'Erotic capital' and the power of desirability: Why 'honey money' is a bad
collective strategy for remedying gender inequality
Adam Isaiah Green
Sexualities 2013 16: 137
DOI: 10.1177/1363460712471109
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Article

Erotic capital and the

power of desirability:
Why honey money is a
bad collective strategy
for remedying gender
inequality

Sexualities
16(1/2) 137158
! The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1363460712471109
sex.sagepub.com

Adam Isaiah Green

University of Toronto, Canada

Abstract
In this article I conduct a close reading of Catherine Hakims theory concerning the
relationship of sexual desirability to power and gender inequality. I suggest that Hakims
thesis requires renewed attention not only because of the international reach of her
work, but because it reflects a general cultural sentiment concerning womens sexuality
and power. I argue that her primary concepterotic capitalis overstretched, internally
inconsistent, and asociological, glossing over the structures of race, class and age that
mediate womens access to the resource. Moreover, I show the two ways that Hakim
might remedy her theory, but conclude that both are indefensible. In turn, the policy
implications Hakim derives from her theory of erotic capital, along with the more
general cultural notion that equates sexual desirability with power, are put in high
relief. I conclude by noting the existence of a productive stream of sociological
theorythe sexual fields framework (Green, 2008)that develops a concept of
erotic/sexual capital which predates Hakims work and offers a more sociologically
grounded analysis of power and desirability.
Keywords
Erotic capital, gender inequality, looksism, sexual capital, sexual fields, sexuality

Recently, with the publication of Catherine Hakims (2010, 2011) theory of erotic
capital, controversy has erupted in the press and the blogosphere on both sides of
the Atlantic regarding how and to what extent female attractiveness and sex appeal
Corresponding author:
Adam Isaiah Green, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Avenue, Room 374, Toronto, M5S 2J4, Canada.
Email: adamisaiah.green@utoronto.ca

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relate to gender inequality. According to Hakim, erotic capital is a personal asset

comprising interpersonal skills, beauty and sexual attractiveness, the totality of
which confers power upon those who possess it, especially women. This power,
however, has been inhibited (2010: 1) by moral ideologies (2010), including
patriarchal and feminist discourses that stigmatize its use by women, be it in the
bedroom, the boardroom, or the brothel (2011). Not only is erotic capital an
unappreciated resource for which women have advantage over men, it is a resource,
Hakim argues, with the same value for women as education and work experience
(2010: 512, 2011). Thus, Hakims manifesto (2011: 200) urges women to develop
erotic capital as a powerful tool to ameliorate gender inequality.
Our thesis is that erotic capital is rising in social and economic importance today,
gives women an advantage, and is a key factor in womens changing status in society
and the economy . . . Overall, at the aggregate level, the value of erotic capital is
thus roughly equal to the value of womens human capital in the 21st century.
(Hakim, 2010: 512)

While responses to Hakims thesis have been mixed (Boesveld, 2011; Donahue,
2011; Odone, 2011), feminist-identied writers both in the press and on the
blogosphere have generally condemned the work (MadamJ Mo, 2011;
Williams, 2011), perhaps not the least because Hakim lumps together feminist
theory and patriarchal authority as co-conspirators in the disempowerment of
women. These sentiments may lead some gender and sexuality scholars to reject
outright any serious consideration of Hakims manifesto for women (2011:
200) because to do so seems to lend her thesis more credibility than it warrants.
However, I contend that Hakims argument requires careful consideration not
only because her claims have received near global coverage, from the Guardian to
the Wall Street Journal to The Australian, but more, because the general issue of
the relationship of sexuality to gender inequality is as relevant today as when
radical feminists took up the issue three decades ago (Munford, 2007; Waters,
2007). Indeed, a wide range of feminist writers, such as Gill (2006, 2007), Jereys
(2005), Levy (2005), Wolf (1991) and Greer (1999), are alarmed by the extent to
which contemporary popular culture and media, more powerful than any form
of indoctrination that has ever existed (Greer, 1999: 410), reduce women to
sexual value. At the same time, however, their observations sit uneasily alongside
a robust poststructural and postfeminist literature and praxis that regards the
sexual domain as a complex sphere of liminality within which women may speak
back to power (Butler, 1993; Chancer, 1998; Duggan and Hunter, 2006; McNay,
1992; Quindlen, 1996). From this vantage point, Hakims thesis is not incompatible with contemporary gender and sexuality scholarship but may be construed as
a bridge between the second-wave feminist emphasis on collective action and the
poststructural valorization of personal power through sexuality (Baumgardner
and Richards, 2000). In this way, a thesis that links erotic capital to
womens advancement is neither outdated nor irrelevant for contemporary

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sexuality studies but, rather, represents a critical point of arrival for renewed
analysis.
In this article, I reect on Hakims concept of erotic capital and the call to
arms that she issues to women to ameliorate gender inequality. My intentions
are neither to oer a denitive normative statement about the rightful place of
erotic capital in the tool chest of resources that individuals have available to
them, nor to reinvent the wheel by running the concept of erotic capital
through the now 30-year old discursive machinery of the sex wars in western
feminist thought. Rather, I wish to work from within Hakims theory to consider its analytic merit and, in turn, the claim that erotic capital may be
cultivated as a collective strategy for improving womens position in the society. I suggest that the central problem with Hakims analysis is that she
appropriates Bourdieus concept of capital but ignores the broader framework
in which he embedded iteld theory. Consequently, her analysis is not only
conceptually awed, it is asociological and incapable of remedy. By contrast,
there is a growing body of work on sexual attractiveness that predates her own
and grounds the power of desirability in the context of the sexual eld. This
latter stream of work draws directly from a Bourdieusian eld theoretic to
develop the concept of erotic/sexual capital (Farrer, 2010; Green, 2008a,
2011, forthcoming; Martin and George, 2006; Weinberg and Williams, 2010),
and is better equipped to speak to the possibilities and limitations of sexual
desirability as a form of empowerment.
To contextualize the subject of this article, I rst situate Hakims theory within
some of the most relevant literature in gender and sexuality studies and consider
how her thesis may be read simultaneously as a departure from and extension
of this broad body of work. In the second section of the article, I conduct a
close reading of Hakims theoretical treatment of erotic capital and show that
by collapsing personality characteristics, interpersonal skills, style and sexual
attractiveness into a single resource, her conceptualization of erotic capital
is overstretched with the eect of producing insights that are both trivial
and contradictory. In fact, Hakim presents erotic capital as a comprehensive
concept but, by sleight of hand, must narrow and reduce the concept to beauty
and sex appeal to make her argument work. In turn, I suggest the claim
that women can use erotic capital as a collective source of empowerment is
asociological and therefore untenable, as it ignores the structures of race, class,
age and context that inform attributions of desirabilitythat is, the elds
in which erotic capital is embedded. In the third section I demonstrate
the two ways Hakim might try to recuperate her concept of erotic capital,
but show why neither is analytically defensible. Finally, a discussion section summarizes the analytic argument of this article and draws attention to the sexual
elds approach (Green, 2008a, 2008b, 2011, forthcoming; Martin and George,
2006; Weinberg and Williams, 2010), which better problematizes the power of
beauty and sex appeal in the specic social worlds in which these may have
inuence.

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Sex, gender and power in the literature: An orienting sketch

It was Simone de Beauvoir (2009 [1949]) who, in the mid-20th century, suggested
that the heterosexual bond isolated women from each other, preventing them from
formulating a common account of womens history. Decades later, feminist
writing from the late 1960s forward picked up on, deepened and refuted this
idea in a variety of competing accounts, the totality of which came to be known
and periodized as the sex wars (Barton, 2002; Chancer, 1998; Duggan and
Hunter, 2006; Paglia, 1990; Rubin, 1984). Underpinning these accounts was the
critical question of the relationship of womens sexuality to gender inequality.
While positions in these debates were not xed, but dierentially congured
across theorists by the issues of pornography, sex tracking, sex work and sadomasochistic practices, among others, two competing bodies of discourse characterize this literature (Rubin, 1984; Whelehan, 2000). In the rst instance, radical
feminists conceived of sexual relations between men and women as the crux of
gender inequality. In the strongest instantiation of this discourse, womens sexuality was seen as an artifact of male desire, such that consensual marital coitus and
rape were analytically collapsible (MacKinnon, 1987). Here, heterosexuality itself
was more than the desire of one sex for the other; it was an entire complex of
ideologies, institutions and social arrangements that tied womens bodies, sexuality, and domestic labor to men (Dworkin, 1974; Pateman, 1988; Rich, 1980; Rubin,
1975; Walby, 1990).
By contrast, in another stream of important worksometimes referred to as sex
radical feminism (or pro-sex feminism)the repression of womens sexuality
was conceived as a cornerstone of patriarchy (Rubin, 1984). Standing in support
of all forms of consensual sex between adults and against the censorship of pornography, this latter contingent of feminists, like their radical feminist counterparts,
wished to disentangle sexual relations from the patriarchy, but believed that this
was possible only by rejecting eorts by the state and the culture, including feminist
theory itself, from censoring, stigmatizing or prohibiting sexual relations and representations (Hollibaugh and Moraga, 1981; McElroy, 1995; Paglia, 1990; Queen,
1996; Rubin, 1984; Willis, 1992).
Owing a debt to this latter literature, poststructural and postcolonial work,
often referred to as third-wave feminism, emerged in the wake of the sex
wars to revisit the relationship of gender, sexuality, race and power (Andersen,
2008; Butler, 1993; Munford, 2007; Queen, 1996; Wilkins, 2004). While this work is
characterized by the postmodern rejection of a unied, grand narrative, third-wave
feminists on the whole have adopted a pro-sex stance that includes an emphasis on
womens agency within the domains of sexual life and cultural representation.
Much of this work hinges on Butlers (1993) conception of performativity in a
variation of West and Zimmermans (1987) notion of doing gender (Green,
2007). Hence, some third-wave feminist and queer theoretical writers and activists
nd emancipatory possibility in a politics of gender parody eected through gestures, representations and performance (Green, 2002; Stein and Plummer, 1996;

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Rupp and Taylor, 2003).1 Along these lines, in what some refer to as postfeminism (Aronson, 2003; Giort, 2011; Hall, 2003), a generation of young
women have adopted a highly pro-sex position that conjoins a traditionally feminine presentation (e.g., makeup, lip gloss, revealing clothes) and a proactive,
unapologetic sexuality, with empowerment (Evans et al., 2010; Munford, 2007;
Taska and Negra, 2007; Waters, 2007). This sex-positive praxis provides a
strong counter to the radical feminist thesis by anchoring womens agency in the
erotic domain and nding in sexuality and gendered performance pathways to
liberation. For instance, Baumgardner and Richards (2000) refer to girlie feminism to capture a recent contingent of young feminist women who nd solidarity
through traditional feminine activities and girlie presentations.
Nevertheless, the extent to which these practices actually challenge sexism is
unclear (Baumgardner and Richards, 2000; Munford, 2007; Wilkins, 2004) and
contested (Gill, 2006; Greer, 1999; Jereys, 2005; Whelehan, 2000). Some, for
instance, argue that these kinds of presentational and sexual practices mark less
a route to gender equality than a potentially . . . dangerous slippage between feminist agency and patriarchal recuperation (Munford, 2007: 274). Even as contemporary young women may embrace the ideals of gender egalitarianism and see their
own proactive sexuality as its benchmark, they may still leave intact interpersonal
inequalities between men and women (Wilkins, 2004), to say nothing of the larger
structures of inequality around race, class and ethnicity that operate in and through
gender and sexual life (Collins, 2004; Fahs, 2011; Lovejoy, 2001; Wingood et al.,
2002). Still others bring a Foucauldian perspective to bear on the postfeminist
notion that equates womens empowerment with a highly stylized, hyper-feminine,
sexual presentation (Larner, 2000; McRobbie, 2007; Roberts, 2007; Tasker and
Negra, 2007). These feminist critics suggest that the discourse of postfeminist
sexualitypart of what McRobbie (2007: 719) calls the new sexual contractmistakenly represents the highly sexual and sexualized phallic girl
(2007: 732) as the product of gender equality, thereby re-establishing patriarchal
law and masculine hegemony (2007: 723).
Research within sociology and psychology draws attention to other problematic
dimensions of the relationship of power to gender and sexuality, including the
observation that womens sexual desirability to men accrues unequally across
women, and is embedded in structures of race and class, to say nothing of age
(Collins, 2004; England and McClintock, 2009; Fahs, 2011; Farrer, 2010; Lovejoy,
2001). Thus women internalize racialized, ageist, male standards of physical beauty
and sexual appeal (Collins, 2004; Lovejoy, 2001; Wingood et al., 2002; Wolf, 1991),
and may use these as a yardstick to their own worth (Fahs, 2011), with a variety of
negative consequences for those who believe they fail to measure up. These may
include diminished self-esteem (van den Berg et al., 2010), sexual permissiveness
(Ackers et al., 2009) and an increased propensity for high-risk sexual activity
(Eisenberg et al., 2005; Gillen et al., 2006) among others. Moreover, given the
already pronounced importance of female attractiveness in our society, women
are more prone than men to cycles of unhealthy dieting, eating disorders,

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and surgical procedures to remedy their perceived inadequacies (Davis, 2003;

Heyes and Jones, 2009; Roberts, 2007). This hardly feels like empowerment.
Against the backdrop of this literature, Hakims (2010, 2011) work, and the
broader cultural sentiment that equates womens power with sexual desirability,
can be read as both an extension of and departure from it. Hence, in the following,
I turn to a careful explication of Hakims (2010, 2011) argument, focusing on her
treatment of the two central concepts of this work: erotic capital and the male
sex decit, and then relate this treatment back to the larger question regarding the
viability of erotic capital as a collective tool to ameliorate gender inequality.

Hakims erotic capital and the male sex deficit

Hakims (2010, 2011) thesis is built upon two central concepts: erotic capital and
the male sex decit. Combined, these concepts form the theoretical foundation
upon which her manifesto (Hakim, 2011: 200) to women is issued.
According to Hakim, erotic capital is the fourth personal asset (Hakim, 2010:
500), which, together with social, cultural and economic capital, completes
Bourdieus (1984, 1997) formulation of the resources that organize systems of
stratication. Erotic capital includes at least six elements (Hakim, 2011):
beauty (2011: 11); sex appeal, by which she means the sexual allure of the
body (2011: 11); social skills, including grace and charm (2011: 12); liveliness (2011: 12); social presentation, by which she means style of dress and
related accessories (2011: 12); and nally, sexual skill (2011: 13). Combining characteristics that are both given by nature (such as beauty and body type), and
nurture (such as charm, grace and liveliness), Hakim (2011) argues (nevertheless)
that erotic capital is achievable meritoriously, if only women will properly invest in
it. Here, Hakim suggests that women can turn to a plethora of self-help guides,
beauty and make-over experts, plastic surgeries, and tness trainers, to improve
erotic capital, even when nature is less than kind (2011: 20). In turn, Hakim (2011)
excoriates Bourdieu for glossing over the existence of erotic capital, attributing his
error to the fact that erotic capital is not strictly tied to economic and social
hierarchies but, rather, to eort and personal initiative (Hakim, 2011: 18).2
Hakim argues that erotic capital is of equal importance for women as education,
work training and social contactsin other words, human capital and social capital, respectivelyin all social arenas (2011: 2). To support this assertion, Hakim
cites social scientic work on the socioeconomic eects of characteristics such
as height (2011: 182183), ones body-mass index (2011: 110) and beauty (2011:
94102). This literature suggests that individuals who are taller, more height-toweight proportionate and more facially beautiful, are rewarded by a pay premium
in the market, most particularly in the private sector (2011: 181). Moreover, those
with erotic capital, compared to those without, experience the world as friendlier
and warmer from the earliest years of childhood forward (2011: 96), have better
interpersonal relationships, are perceived to be smarter and more honest (2011: 97),
and are less likely to get caught in criminal activity or receive a guilty verdict at trial

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(2011: 97). While erotic capital has always had some impact on social status, it is
particularly important in modern societies on account of rising rates of divorce and
the succession of monogamous relationships that characterize contemporary sexual
life histories (2011: 27, 28). In these times, we moderns cannot aord to allow our
erotic capital to erode (2011).
It is important to point out that Hakims call to women to invest in erotic capital
gains its practical, ethical, and emancipatory valance because, according to her, it is
a resource not determined by class structure and for which the locus of control
resides, in large measure, within the self. That is, even if any given woman is born
without beauty or sex appeal, it is possible to acquire erotic capital nonetheless by
developing those elements that rest within personal control, such as ones weight,
style of dress, good manners, charm and liveliness (2011: 103). Even learning to
dance can help (Hakim, 2011: 93). This feature of erotic capital democratizes the
resource and allows Hakim to suggest that all women have access to it, if only they
are self-disciplined enough. It also frames erotic capital in less sexist terms, for
surely women (and not just straight men) would agree that good interpersonal skills
are favorable attributes.
The bad news here is that it is denitely better to be born beautiful or
handsome. The good news is that everyone else can get similar results eventually,
if they are prepared to invest time and eort . . . If you are not beautiful or
handsome, then get a good body or learn to dance or develop social skills
(Hakim, 2011: 93).
Furthermore, Hakim argues that erotic capital can be cultivated by women of
lower socioeconomic status to level the playing eld relative to women of higher
socioeconomic status:
Young women with few qualications can invest in their erotic capital in the hopes of
becoming the wife of a star athlete or becoming successful themselves as a popular
singer or fashion model, or pinup model. Such investment can be seen as a rational
strategy because there are few risks and the potential rewards are large, even if the
chances of success are slim. (2011: 74)

Arguably, erotic capital is as useful to men as it is to women, but for the addition of
one, critical, universal, new social fact (2011: 32)the male sex decit. Here
Hakim (2011) argues that men have much stronger sex-drives than women, not the
least because they are more susceptible to visual stimuli (2011: 191). This dierence is conrmed by her survey of cross-cultural research which shows that, on
average, women experience a sharp decrease in sexual desire past the age of 35,
whereas men do not. Left in a perpetual state of sexual longing, men are sexstarved over the course of their lives, even when they are married, and even
in France:
The received wisdom on men always wanting more sex than their wives emerges not as
a stereotype or prejudice but as fact. The gap in sexual desire between men and women

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is observed in every country and culture where sex surveys have been carried out, even
in France, and it shows up in all age groups over thirty. (Hakim, 2011: 50)

This permanent sex famine (Hakim, 2011: 48), in turn, provides women with a
very special advantage over menher trump card (Hakim, 2011: 202):
[M]en generally want a lot more sex than they get at all ages. Women express much
lower levels of sexual desire, as well as less sexual activity, so men spend most of their
lives being sexually frustrated, to varying degrees . . . This imbalance automatically
raises the level of womens erotic capital and can give women an advantage in
social relationships with menif they realize it. (2011: 32, 39)

Taking a step back and looking critically at the male sex decit, one could argue
that Hakim glosses over the ways in which these statistics may represent as much
artifacts of the gendered constructions of sexuality, as actual dierences in sexual
desire between the sexes. This is somewhat surprising given that, according to
Hakims own admission, women in the Anglo-Saxon world are trapped in the
Madonna/whore, good girl/bad girl dichotomy (2011: 65), and are therefore
likely to underreport their sexual desires. Moreover, Hakim fails to note that the
western cultural construction of masculinity is anchored to the notion that males
are naturally more sexual than females and are constantly on the prowl in search of
the next sexual conquest (Kimmel, 1995, 1996). In short, what Hakim regards as a
new social fact (2011: 32), may be a normative construction rather than a biological distinction in sex drive.
Still, most sociologists would agree that social constructions are themselves
powerful and consequential in shaping human taste and desire (Berger and
Luckmann, 1966). In this sense, the idea of the male sex decit may itself produce
the very phenomenon the concept is purported to measure. Put dierently, it may
be less important to know if men are naturally more interested in sex than women,
than to recognize that the dominant notion of sexed dierences in libido may result
in gender distinctions nevertheless (even if not by the mechanisms that Hakim
supposes). Ultimately, because we cannot denitively weigh in on how or if a sex
dierence in libido exists, I put this issue aside and, giving Hakim the benet of the
doubt, proceed to examine her argument as if the male sex decit is a social fact.

A close reading of Hakim: The critical sleight of hand

Unlike prior sociological work that develops the concept of erotic (or sexual) capital,
(Green, 2008a; Martin and George, 2006), Hakims construction of erotic capital is
much broader, capturing not only beauty and sex appeal, but also, non-sexual elements related to style and interpersonal social skills (i.e., charm, grace, liveliness). To
wit, it is the comprehensiveness of her denition provided by the addition of these
non-sexual elements that, according to Hakim (2011), constitutes the novelty, power
and practical appeal of her concept (129, 130131, 236 fn 58, 252 fn 129). And it is

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precisely here that the central analytic problem with Hakims argument arises.
Collapsing sexual attractiveness, personality characteristics, social skills and style
into a single resource, Hakim overstretches the concept of erotic capital and undermines its analytic utility. As I will show, this conceptual aw is revealed in the fact
that Hakim presents erotic capital as a comprehensive concept but, via sleight of
hand, reduces it to beauty and sex appeal to make her argument work. Indeed, it is
no wonder that Hakim uses the concept erotic capital, for it is precisely in the
realm of sexuality where she locates womens advantage.
This analytic sleight of hand is executed throughout the book as nearly every
piece of evidence she marshals in support of her argument revolves around sexual
desire. Thus, she contends that whereas womens responsiveness to men is inuenced by social and economic clues (2011: 119), men are narrowly focused on
beauty and sex appealobjective elements of attractiveness that produce high
degrees of consensus regarding who is and who is not attractive:
[M]ens judgments of womens sexual attractiveness are focused narrowly on womens
bodies, faces and sex appeal. They can ignore more extraneous details on income and
status, and usually do. This is the main reason why men display high consistency in
their ratings of female attractiveness. (2011: 119)

Along these lines, every table and gure in her book presents data distributions of a
physical and sexual nature between men and women, including: sex dierences in
unrequited desire (Hakim, 2011: 40); sex dierences in celibacy by age (2011: 42,
43); sex dierences in masturbation (2011: 44); the distribution of attractiveness in
the USA, Canada (2011: 23) and the UK (2011: 24); and the beauty premium in the
USA (2011: 170). In fact, the only table that purports to measure the eects of
social attractiveness (2011: 169), is actually a table showing the impact of physical characteristics on pay, including height and weight dierentials.
Thus, for example, Hakim cites a study by Hammermesh and Biddle (1994)
showing that physical attractiveness, not intelligence, class or condence, produces
a beauty premium for women.3 Similarly, Hakims analysis of class variations in
erotic capital reduces to the genetic consolidation of physical characteristics
through selective generational partner choices:
Higher-status people choose spouses with the highest erotic capital, increasing the
likelihood of their children having above-average endowments of erotic capital as
well as status and wealth. In the very long run, class dierentials in erotic capital
may develop, and beauty and sex appeal may lter up the class system over generations. (Hakim, 2011: 21)

Even in marriage wherein one might expect interpersonal capital to exert its most
concerted eect, Hakim has nothing to say about grace, charm and social skills
(i.e., those other elements of erotic capital), but rather, restricts her analysis to
physical attractiveness. It is these latter aesthetic and sexual attributes that provide

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the critical leverage women need in relation to their husbands. Thus, Hakim compares two womenRania and Charlottethe rst (Rania) who has more
erotic capital than her husband, and the second (Charlotte) who does not.
Whereas Rania invested in her erotic capital and was always regarded by her husband as a catch (2011: 133), Charlotte was not so wise. Failing to invest in her
physical appearance to gain an erotic capital advantage over her husband,
Charlotte enjoys much less power than Rania in her marriage.
Rania is twelve years younger and far more attractive than her ugly husband. He clearly
regards her as a great beauty and a catch. She is in fact only moderately above average
in looks, but she invests time and eort maximizing what she has. She has stayed slim
despite several pregnancies. Her thick brown hair is skillfully highlighted and is worn
long, leading to umpteen variations in style . . . In contrast, Charlotte was very equally
matched in everything, including appearance . . . As she is no great beauty and not
markedly better-looking than her husband, Charlotte has no hidden extra asset to
balance Pauls hidden career advantage, and she is in practice more of a subordinate
wife than Rania is, with much less power in the relationship. (2011: 13334)

In the same vein, Hakim cannot help but work against her own comprehensive
denition as she explicitly ties the very substance of womens erotic capital to male
sexual desire. In this formulation, youth, beauty and sex appeal trump all else.
It is impossible to separate womens erotic capital, which provokes mens desire,
intentionally or otherwise, from male desire itself. Men do not generally lust after
eighty-year old wrinkled grandmothers, no matter how sprightly or spirited they are.
They lust for young and attractive women who are still interested in sexual games with
men. (2011: 82)

This narrow focus on physical attractiveness and sexual desirability is further

revealed in her discussion of how one may cultivate erotic capital. Here, Hakim
is concerned not with improving ones personality and social skills, but with what
she terms, body modication and beauty practices (2011: 28):
Today, in auent modern societies, extremely high levels of erotic power can be
achieved in countless ways, through diets, gyms, personal trainers, tanning beds and
sprays, cosmetics, perfumes, wigs, weaves, and hair extensions, cosmetic dentistry,
cosmetic surgery, hair dyes and hair dressing, corsets, jewelry, fashion advice, and a
cornucopia of clothes and accessories to enhance appearance. Body modication and
beauty practices have a long history, and all cultures encourage people to conform to
accepted standards of beauty . . . As Helena Rubenstein, one of the founders of modern
cosmetics famously said, There are no ugly women, only lazy ones. (2011: 28)

Ultimately, despite the conceptual attention Hakim gives to personality and interpersonal skills, her deployment of erotic capital boils down to a personal,

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asociological and heteronormative version of sexual capital. Thus it is the unmitigated fact of beauty and sex appeal that constitutes the decisive element of erotic
capital and, in turn, the ill-fortune of the well-dressed but plain looking woman:
Spending money on cosmetic dentistry, plastic surgery, a gym membership or personal
trainer can help to develop erotic power. But money has its limits: a wretchedly poor
girl or boy can be so astonishingly beautiful and sexually attractive that their simple
clothes and manners cease to have any importance, while an expensively adorned but
plain woman or man may still fail to attract admirers. (Hakim, 2011: 20)

In this section I have argued that despite purporting to advance a formulation of

erotic capital that includes both sexual and non-sexual elements, Hakims actual
analysis of the power of erotic capital in womens lives boils down to sex appeal,
and represents little more than a compilation of research and anecdotal vignettes
concerning how heterosexual mens unrequited lustthe male sex decitcan
be used by sexy women to their advantage.4 Moreover, Hakim is clearly not mindful of the fact that some women do not wish to produce a sexually desirable
appearance for heterosexual men, no less marry them. Nevertheless, putting
aside Hakims sleight of hand and the heteronormativity of her manifesto, leaves
open the possibility that her comprehensive formulation may still have analytic
value, just not one realized by Hakim herself. In the next section I show why
Hakims erotic capital is not only poorly demonstrated in her work, it is conceptually overstretched, producing trivial insights and contradictory propositions. I
then attempt to show the two ways that Hakim might recuperate her concept, but
demonstrate that neither produces a proper remedy.

Hakims erotic capital

The problems of triviality and contradiction
Because Hakim (2010, 2011) develops such a broad, catch-all concept of erotic
capital, her theory produces insights that are trivial on the one hand and contradictory on the other. In the rst instance, if we use Hakims full denition of erotic
capital (contrary to her actual application of that concept in her analysis), her
argument goes something like this: people who have any kind of personal
appealbe it a beautiful face, a sexy body, a pleasing personality, good style, or
strong interpersonal skillsare treated better than those who do not. Men assign
greater value than women to erotic capital. Hence, as a policy implication, women
should use this gendered distinction to their advantage, and work to become more
physically and socially attractive in order to gain the admiration of men and, in
turn, socioeconomic mobility.
This conceptualization of erotic capital is so general that it yields very little by
way of analytic value. At best, her claim is trivial: individuals who are personally
appealing are viewed more positively than individuals who are not, and therefore

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do better in interactional settings. This claim appears closer to a truism than an

insight. Worse yet, by lumping together so many elements in the concept of erotic
capital and suggesting that men seek out erotic capital more than women, Hakim is
left with some perplexing propositions. Using her formulation, we must conclude
that: (1) because women value erotic capital less than men, they are less interested
than men in the sex appeal of their partners, but also less interested than men in the
personality and social skills of their partners (i.e., those other non-sexual aspects of
erotic capital); and, conversely, (2) because men value erotic capital more than
women, they value not just a womans appearance and sex appeal but, equally,
her personality and social skillsin other words, the full model of Hakims erotic
capital.
Neither of these propositions has empirical support. While research generally
conrms that women put less emphasis than men on sexual attractiveness and
beauty in a partner (Buss et al., 2001; Cicerello and Sheehan, 1995; Davis, 1990;
Li et al., 2002), the notion that women care less than men about the personality
attributes and interpersonal skills of their partners ies in the face of conventional
wisdom and a consistent body of literature that suggests otherwise. In fact, research
into gendered patterns of partner selection criteria shows that, on the whole,
women care as much or more than men about the personality and social skills of
their partners, including, most importantly, a pleasant disposition, emotional stability, maturity, warmth and humor (Buss et al., 2001; Bressler et al., 2006; Dawson
and McIntosh, 2006; Wilbur and Campbell, 2011). Indeed the claim that men value
erotic capital more than women is simply not true if one takes seriously Hakims
comprehensive version of that concept. Rather, typically, men put more value on
sexual and appearance-related characteristics in their partners, while women put
more value on non-sexual characteristics related to personality and social skills.
But jumbled together in Hakims conceptual framework, these patterned dierences are washed out and indiscernible, leaving the analyst with the contradictory
conclusions that men are more interested in erotic capital than women, and women
are more interested in erotic capital than men. In sum, Hakims erotic capital is
rendered meaningless, either producing a descriptor so general that it approaches
triviality, or a concept that generates competing propositions, each that are partially at odds with the empirical literature. Moreover, as I show next, no matter
how Hakim might try to repair her concept of erotic capital, it cannot be remedied
using her framework.

Recuperating Hakim?: Interpersonal capital or personal sexual capital

In order to rectify Hakims overstretched concept of erotic capital, one may
streamline its elements in two ways, conceiving of erotic capital as a kind of interpersonal capital, on the one hand, or sexual capital, on the other. In the rst
case, interpersonal capital, the analyst would restrict the concept to personality
characteristics, interpersonal social skills and presentational style of a non-sexual
nature. However here, as before, the concept is something of a truism

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(i.e., charming, lively and well-dressed people are better received than those who
are not), and adds next to nothing with respect to a sociological analysis of power
and social structure.
In the second case, sexual capital, the analyst would restrict the concept to
sexual elements, including beauty, youth, t bodies and seductive aect or style.
Here, Hakim could maintain that sex appeal matters more to men than women,
and since men have more structural power than women and are driven by sexual
desire for longer periods of their lives, so women benet more from being sexy. But
while the male sex decit may be factually correct (though, as I suggested earlier,
this claim cannot be denitively adjudicated with the data she presents), this version of Hakims concept suers because, at its core, it is asociological, glossing over
entirely the structures of age, race, class and context that mediate womens desirability. In fact, sexual attractiveness is not democratically distributed across
women, can be nancially prohibitive to cultivate (no less maintain) if one is not
born economically advantaged and beautiful and, in the case of heterosexual
women, is nearly always tied to a youthful appearance and is therefore ephemeral.5
In theoretical terms, Hakim renders her concept asociological by dening erotic
capital as a portable personal asset (Hakim, 2011: 19), expressly divorcing it
from Bourdieus (1984, 1996) framework, which holds that all forms of capital are
dependent on the specic elds in which they have currency. This is not to suggest
that Hakim ignores the fact of variations in what a given population nds appealing but, rather, that she completely glosses over how the structures of race, class,
age, and contextthe structures of a eldsystematically organize what constitutes desirability, that is, the political economy of erotic/sexual capital.6
Alternatively, in Bourdieus formulation, the capital concepts are developed as
part of eld theory (Martin, 2003), and are construed to be at once the property
of individuals and the property of the elds that individuals inhabit (Bourdieu,
1984). This is the crux of Bourdieus analysis of social distinction and the eld of
cultural production for which he is best known (Bourdieu, 1984, 1997). In this
work, Bourdieu rejects the Kantian notion of a universal aesthetics, arguing that
the particular appreciations that constitute cultural capital are emergent and contested within a given eld. Here, the qualities of cultural capital that confer distinction are premised on arbitrary (but not random) criteria within a given eld
(Stampnitzky, 2006; Swartz, 1997). By contrast, even as Hakim qualies that
norms of attractiveness can vary across time and space, she works directly against
the grain of this insight by conceiving her fourth personal asset as the sole
property of individuals that can be measured in positivistic terms and cut loose
from its eld-specic contexts. Accordingly, Hakim condently speaks of surpluses
and decits of erotic capital, and in terms of a restricted economy whereby
womens surplus and mens tenacious demand underpin the possibilities of
womens advancement (George, 2011, pers. comm.). Stripped of social context,
Hakims treatment of erotic capital eectively removes it from the cultural arbitrary (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 31), erasing the fundamental sociological
underpinning of Bourdieus analysis and the eld of power from which a capital

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obtains signicance. Gone entirely is analysis of how capitals are constituted and
recongured in a given eld, how players may contest the boundaries of the eld,
and the processes by which the historical transformation of elds (and capital)
takes place. Ironically, for all the power Hakim invests in erotic capital, she is
profoundly unaware of the ways in which power and its assemblage in class and
status hierarchiessuch as those accruing by age, race, sexual orientation and
ethnicitygrounds capital in social structure and shapes the very contours of
what constitutes a resource.
As a consequence of this critical conceptual misstep, a streamlined version of
Hakims erotic capital restricted to sexual elements is sociologically insucient to
account for the patterned vicissitudes of power and desirability. Indeed, without
the escape hatch oered by the full denition of erotic capitalthat is, the inclusion of interpersonal and presentational skills, for which women have a semblance
of control7Hakims recommendation to women (and men, more broadly) is
revealed for what it is: a largely non-democratic resource of the few, often of the
privileged and, in all cases, one that cannot be sustained. In short, honey money
is most denitely not a smart collective strategy to ameliorate gender inequality.

Discussion: Toward an analysis of sexual capital and the

sexual field
Against the backdrop of a gender revolution that is both uneven and stalled
(Gerson, 2010), womens sexuality and bodies are at the focal point of an ever more
explicit eroticization, if the multi-billion dollar internet pornography business,
mainstream television programming and popular culture in North America and
Western Europe tell us anything (Gill, 2006, 2007; Greer, 1999; Wolf, 1991). In this
context, Hakim (2010, 2011) enters the domain of social theory with a concept of
erotic capital that purports to build on Bourdieus theory of practice and oer an
antidote to the Puritan Anglo-Saxon feminist tradition. While I believe that a
theory of erotic capital is crucial for the study of sex and gender, and commend
Hakim for moving in this direction, I believe that her analysis fails to deliver on
either the promise of a sociological theory of gender, sexuality and power, or the
promise of a Bourdieusian approach to erotic/sexual capital.
To be clear, what is at issue in this article is not whether any individual woman
(or man) can use beauty and sexual desirability as a means of empowerment.
Rather, it is Hakims theoretical treatment of erotic capital, and the thesis
that it can be cultivated as a collective strategy for the advancement of women,
that I wish to address. To the question posed by Hakim: Why has erotic capital
been overlooked by social scientists? (2010: 510), the answer is twofold: First,
contrary to her claim that she coined the term (2011: 1), the concept has
appeared in a variety of published works that uses eld theory to render it sociologically (Brooks, 2010; Farrer, 2010; Green, 2008a, 2011; Martin and George,
2006, Weinberg and Williams, 2010), and has therefore not been overlooked.
But second, this quibble aside, sociologists have probably steered clear of Hakims

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broad version of erotic capital because it is conceptually overstretched, including a

muddle of personality characteristics and interpersonal skills (e.g., charisma,
charm, liveliness, grace), style, facial beauty and sex appeal. As I showed earlier,
on account of its catch-all quality, Hakims theoretical apparatus produces propositions that are either so general that they approach the status of truisms or, worse
yet, contradictory and therefore analytically unintelligible. Moreover, while this
generality allows Hakim to propose that erotic capital is something all women
can cultivate and for which they have a modicum of controlfor instance, by
being lively, amicable, and well dressedher analysis actually rests on a much
narrower denition tied to sexual and aesthetic characteristics.
It follows that the policy recommendations that Hakim extrapolates from her
theory, including her argument concerning the viability of prostitution as a strategy
to ameliorate gender inequality, are also awed. Beyond the fact that Hakim
stretches the concept of erotic capital too far, she strips it of the contextual specicity of eld analysis associated with sexual eld theory (Green, 2008a, 2011;
Martin and George, 2006). In doing so, Hakim has turned erotic capital into an
asociological, essentialized (even if amenable to discipline) property of individuals
rather than the simultaneous property of individuals and the specic elds they
inhabit. That is, Hakim oers an asociological manifesto (2011: 200) to women
that obscures those structures and contexts that mediate their access to erotic
capital. In fact, contrary to Hakims claim (but central to her policy recommendations), erotic capital is not a democratized resource available to all women,
if only they tended properly to their appearance (no less, their social skills). As I
have already highlighted, research has shown that womens sexual desirability to
men accrues unequally across women, embedded in structures of race, class and age
(Collins, 2004; England and McClintock, 2009; Fahs, 2011; Farrer, 2010; Lovejoy,
2001). As a consequence, women internalize standards of beauty and physical
appeal that often exclude them (Collins, 2004; Lovejoy, 2001; Wingood et al.,
2002; Wolf, 1991), resulting in assaults to self-esteem, eating disorders, and highrisk sexual activities (Ackers et al., 2009; Eisenberg et al., 2005; van den Berg et al.,
2010).
Aging, for instance, is highly consequential for women in the one realm wherein
erotic capital might best pay omarriage. Compared to men, women face a
double-standard of aging (England and McClintock, 2009; Sontag, 1979), are
judged more harshly than men and regarded as comparatively less attractive and
sexually desirable over time.8 Research shows that starting at 35 years of age, and
increasing with each year, a womans probability of being single is greater than a
mans, and quite signicantly so (England and McClintock, 2009: 807). And men
who marry in their 30s and older consistently marry women younger than themselves, a dierential that increases as men age (2009: 808). In addition to the fact
that women are held to a higher (or, younger) standard then men with respect to
age and desirability, the bulk of their lives are spent outside the age range that
confers an erotic capital advantage, making youth a doubly dubious resource upon
which to anchor a strategy to challenge gender inequality.

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What is more, while beauty and youth may indeed boost womens status in the
marriage market, the benets of beauty in the workforce fall primarily to men, not
women (Hammermesh, 2011)! Remarkably, the monetary value of the beauty premium for women is, in Hakims own words, minimal (2011: 73). In fact, women do
not enjoy the same conversion of erotic to economic capital in the labor market
(Hakim, 2011: 72), are not rewarded with higher starting salaries, as are men (2011:
165), and may actually be penalized for being too attractive or, conversely,
overweight (2011: 164166). In this sense, by conferring little or no advantage in
the workforce for women, Hakims erotic capital is reduced to a resource with
relevance for only a narrow contingent of heterosexual women who wish to
marry up the class structure.
Finally, as gender and sexuality critics have shown, even while some women may
embrace their sexuality and use sex appeal as a source of power, they may still leave
intact structures of gender inequality, containing the struggle for emancipation to
the sphere of intimate life (Wilkins, 2004). Moreover, the call to women to cultivate
their erotic capital represents precisely the kind of postfeminist masquerade
(McRobbie, 2007: 722) that worry feminist critics, whereby women are enrolled
in self-work while at the same time reinstating patriarchal gender relations and
neo-liberal governance (Cruikshank, 1999; Larner, 2000;Tasker and Negra, 2007).
In sum, while Hakim is certainly right that some women may use sex appeal as a
resource to marry up the class structure, erotic capitalproperly dened as
sexual capitalis a resource available only to some women and, among the
latter, conned to a relatively small proportion of the life-span. Putting aside a
normative response to whether or not women should be encouraged to cultivate
erotic capital, a collective strategy of social advancement based in sexual appeal to
heterosexual men is dubious from the start because sexual attractiveness is not
equally distributed across women, is in all cases ephemeral and unsustainable,
benets women only minimally if at all in the employment sector, is limited to
heterosexual women who wish to marry, and does little to unsettle the larger structures of gender inequality.
As I noted earlier, in preparing her thesis, Hakim takes pains to expressly depart
from a growing body of sociological work inspired by a Bourdieusian eld theoretic that develops the concept of erotic/sexual capital (Brooks, 2010; Farrer,
2010; Green, 2008a, 2011; Martin and George, 2006; Weinberg and Williams,
2010). This literature denes that concept as a eld-specic resource bound to
social (or virtual) space whereby sexual desirability, including physical and aective
characteristics, confers status upon those who conform to the elds hegemonic
systems of judgment (Martin and George, 2006: 126). This careful denition
locates erotic capital in time, space and context, not as a universal resource, but
a resource which acquires variable signicance given the particular sites in which it
is given meaning. Moreover, rather than render the distribution of sexual desirability in essentialist terms and thereby superstructural to the analysis, a sexual
elds approach frames this distribution as a central question to be explained
(Martin and George, 2006). Put dierently, erotic capital is rendered sociologically,

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not as the objectied property (or personal asset) of the individual alone, but as a
property of both individuals and the particular sexual elds they inhabit. This
allows analysts of the sexual eld to ground research of erotic capital in domains
of social life that are amenable to empirical research and to distill how and why any
given characteristic, such as race, class or age, may position a given actor or cleavage in a status hierarchy. Brooks (2010), for example, nds that in the context of
the stripping industries of New York City and San Francisco, women of color earn
signicantly less than their white counterparts. Farrer (2010) shows how the sexual
capital of western heterosexual men in the context of the changing political economy of Shanghai, conditions their opportunities to build an intimate life with
Chinese-born women. And Green (2008a, 2008b, 2011, forthcoming) demonstrates
the ways in which urban gay enclaves congure sexual desirability by race, age and
class, with consequences for mental and sexual health. In total, this literature
develops the concept of erotic capital in sociological terms that situate it as a
resource endogenous to a given eld, with a distribution tied to the particular
settings within which actors associate, and amenable to a social and historical
analysis of how a given physical or presentational characteristic comes to have
value as a source of sexual appeal. In this sense, if we want to take seriously the
possibility that, in some contexts and for some people, erotic capital will matter in
systems of stratication, the sexual elds approach is far better equipped to speak
to the issue.

Notes
1. For instance, see the documentary FtF: Female to Femme (2006), directed by Kami
Chisholm and Elizabeth Stark. Here, lesbians adopt a hyper-feminine (femme) selfpresentation in order to call attention to the artificiality of the categories woman and
lesbian.
2. In addition, Anglo-Saxon culturepatriarchal and sex-negative at its coreis to blame
for discouraging women from cultivating their erotic capital (Hakim, 2010, 2011: 63,
202). Feminism too, disempowers women on account of its puritanical, victim-centered,
anti-sex and anti-gender bias (2011: 75).
3. It is important to note that while personality characteristics may themselves be sexy, it
is analytically useful to collapse them into one general concept only if one intends to
distill the attributes of sexual attractivenessprecisely what Hakim faults as the weakness of US work on erotic/sexual capital (2011: 129, 130131, 236 fn 58; 252 fn 129).
In fact, Hakim hinges the novelty and power of her version of erotic capital on the
combination of its sexual and non-sexual elements.
4. Tellingly, Hakim entitled the British version of her book, Honey Money: The Power of
Erotic Capital. Here, Hakim references female sex workers in Jakarta who use beauty and
sexual attractivenessthat is, the honeyto their financial advantagemeaning, the
money.
5. Hakim herself notes that sex appeal can fade rapidly by age (Hakim, 2011: 12).
6. In the literature I cite here, the terms erotic capital and sexual capital are used
interchangeably.

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7. In fact, of erotic capital, Hakim writes: Erotic capital is similar to human capital: it
requires some basic level of talent and ability, but can be trained, developed, and learnt,
so that the final quantum goes far beyond any initial talent (2010: 512).
8. In a similar vein, research has shown that minority gay men and older gay men may
experience an erotic capital deficit owing to their appearance, with significant negative
effects on their health and well-being (Green, 2011, 2008a, 2008b; Han, 2008; Murray and
Adam, 2001; Poon and Ho, 2008; Wilton, 2009). This literature underscores the necessity
of field-specific research on erotic capital whereby gender, race, age and class are differentially configured across social contexts.

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Adam Isaiah Green is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the

University of Toronto. His work on sexuality and the sexual elds framework has
been published in Sociological Theory, Theory & Society, and Social Psychology
Quarterly. Greens book, Sexual Fields: Toward a Sociology of Collective Sexual
Life is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.

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