Before I try to talk about economies of sexual selection and of power and of fame (following up on my earlier discussion of economies of status), I really should try to nail down what I mean by an “economy.”
An economist friend of mine once chided me for using the term “capitalism.” There is no such thing as capitalism, he insisted; there are only “markets.” Obviously, the markets for higher education, healthcare, and food work in very different ways. For one thing, they have entirely different distribution methods; for another, each relies on a very different set of subsidies. Who pays—and for what—differs radically in the three cases.
My title “disparate economies” points in this direction. I am talking about “an economy” of status, not about “the” economy (an aggregate of the effects of multiple disparate economies/markets). There is no reason to believe knowing the intricacies of financial markets will yield much in the way of insights that can be carried over in the effort to understand an economy of status.
Still, how do I want to characterize “an economy” in general terms? Here goes. “An economy” is a set of actions (or, better, interactions) organized around the effort to secure possession of or access to a defined good. There must be multiple actors for an economy to exist. These actors must share a minimal agreement that the good(s) in question are desirable. (They can vary in the intensity of their desire for those goods, where those variations in intensity may give certain actors an advantage over others.) The pursued good(s) must be relatively scarce. That is, there will be a competition to secure the good(s)—a competition motivated by the sense that either a) some people will be derived of that good altogether or b) the good will be unequally distributed. Where a good is available to all in exactly equal quantities, there is not an economy, just an administrative issue of distribution. (This logic dictates Marx’s famous—if mostly mistaken—idea that that state will wither away, to be replaced by the “administration of things.”)
This Marxist notion points to the important fact that an economy much be structured; it must have fairly clear delineations of what counts as possession, and what are legitimate means for securing possession, and in the case of alienable goods, what counts as accepted procedures for the transfer of goods from one person to another. This structure needs to be enforced. Thus no economy without power. There must be a location from which the rules are enforced and from which “recognition” of legitimate possession/achievement emanates. Formal economies are structured legally—with the whole ensemble of contracts, torts, civil court cases etc.
[This does not mean an economy must be zero sum, only that the good in question must be hierarchically arranged. Think of the housing market. Various markers–size, location, amenities, prestige–mark some houses as more desirable than others. But that doesn’t mean someone must go without any housing at all. It’s not musical chairs where the loser is left with nothing. Granite countertops become de rigueur in even the most modest houses as consolation for the knowledge that, by dint of various intractable exigencies, one has had to settle for something less than one’s dream house.]
Informal economies are trickier since they lack these legal underpinnings. An economy of status is wonderfully circular. Those who have the right to confer status on others have never been elected into some formal or official role. Their power comes solely from their being deemed social arbiters by other players in the game. (This is a somewhat less true where there is an official aristocracy. In that case, the state does play some role in designating power to certain players in the game.) Hence there will be jockeying for positions as social arbiters even as there is also jockeying for being granted status (“recognition’) by those arbiters. Two competitions are going on at the same time—and the whole thing is much less stable than an ordering that is secured by laws. Fashion is fickle; those on top today may be deemed “out” (old-fashioned and passé) tomorrow. The markers of status fluctuate as does membership in the elites that get to determine who has status and who does not.
In sum, there is a common good that participants in an economy are pursuing; there are recognized and accepted protocols/markers of possession and exchange; and some power has the ability to sanction competitors who don’t obey the rules (written or unwritten). The structure, to be clear, is not immune to change—and that means structures can be ambiguous, neither clearly discerned or free of “grey areas” where the norms of proper behavior are unclear. The endless jockeying for advantage always includes some players who are trying to bend or change the rules of the game in their favor. The hoary historical argument is that French society’s deep resistance to changing the social orders of the ancien régime to accommodate non-aristocratic wealth was one cause of the French Revolution, while the English avoided that kind of violent social upheaval by providing a ladder toward political power and social status to its middle classes.
OK. It appears (taking Jane Austen’s novels as our evidence) that the sexual selection market in her England, at least among the top 10 percent (in terms of wealth) was highly formal. Women eligible for marriage were declared “out” and were paraded in front of prospective spouses in public assemblies, private balls, and other social events. A man wishing to marry could survey the available women—and make his choice. Sexual selection outside of this formal system was frowned upon—declassé and scandalous. From James Boswell’s and Pepys’s diaries (from the 18th and 17th centuries respectively) to Frank Harris’ My Secret Life at the end of the 19th century, we can deduce that sex outside of marriage in England was mostly enabled by class divisions. Upper class men could impose themselves on lower class women, with a variety of seduction techniques at their disposal (ranging from direct payment to various blandishments that played upon the woman’s desire to rise in social class.) It is important to note that men who were hanging on to the lower rungs of the top 10% could not expect to marry until well into their thirties (when they would have—ideally—finally secured the economic security to afford a wife and all that a “respectable” home was meant to possess). An outlet for sexual desire prior to that happy date was needed—and mostly winked at, if one were reasonably discreet and did not prey on women of “respectable” social standing. As Pride and Prejudice shows in the case of Wickham and Lydia, marriage is expected if dalliance with a respectable woman is discovered. George Eliot’s Adam Bede offers the opposite case: the lower class woman is abandoned by her squire seducer.
All this, of course, only for the top 10%. Among the lowest classes in Victorian England (at least), most couples didn’t bother to get married (the cost of a marriage license was one disincentive) to the endless hand-wringing of moralists (who also bemoaned the fact that the urban underclasses, in particular, never went to church). Sex among the underclasses was a chaotic mess; it would be tempting to call this an entirely unstructured economy. But the fact of the matter is that we just don’t have deep enough ethnographic insight into the habits and expectations of the London underclass to know how they structured sexual relationships. That drink and poverty generated lots of sexual and domestic abuse is certain, but we don’t know much more than that.
On the flip side, there was a tendency among Victorian commentators (I just don’t know much about the discourse around these subjects prior to the Victorian period) to romanticize the rural yeoman class and even the tenancy. (An exception: the wonderful scene in Middlemarch where Mr. Brooke is given an earful by one of his tenants.) The temptation to view the rural non-gentry as mostly aping the civilized behavior of their “betters” goes along with the general nostalgia for a non-urban England and general horror at what the Industrial Revolution has wrought. London is bad enough, but Liverpool and Manchester are completely and utterly unspeakable.
If we turn to the 20th century United States, it would seem that the marriage market (outside of the very rarefied world of debutantes and Philip Barry-like “high society”) has lost all the cohesion of Austen’s novels. There is no place to view what is on offer. Meeting a suitable mate is happenstance, a function of opportunities afforded by school, workplaces, neighborhoods, or civic associations like churches. And there is the additional problem of finding someone unspoken for, since dating (and other forms of pairing off) occurs early in life. Late-comers to the dating game (for lack of a better term) will have to try to separate out the available from the unavailable—a problem that Austen’s world avoids with its clear identification of which women are available. In short, there is no clear opportunity to survey a range of choices at a particular moment in time. Sexual selection is much more determined by what swims into view and is available in particular circumstances at any given moment. There is not much sense of making a choice among multiple options, since there is never an opportunity to view the “field” simultaneously. The rationality to which Austen’s women—and other characters in Victorian novels—aspire in making their marital choices seems very foreign to how romance unfolds in the 20th century. The clear-eyed view of what it would mean to be married to this person was probably not very prevalent in Austen’s world either, but it is not even aspired to by mid-20th century.
As for non-marital sex, practices prior to “the pill” were very class determined. Bohemians and various underclasses (including the racially stigmatized) had lots more extra-marital sex and had very different attitudes toward it than the respectable middle classes. The same holds for homosexual sex, which was not a big deal by the 1940s in Greenwich Village, but still mostly unknown—and an object of deep abhorrence when known—among the general population. We could also do a class typography about attitudes toward adultery and pre-marital sex in the years before 1960.
The pill brought a democratization of sex if we can call it that. Just as women’s entrance into the workplace with college degrees as a result of “women’s liberation” was one cause for the explosion of divorces. (The disappearance of social disapproval of divorce along with the collapse of legal and financial barriers to dissolving a marriage has transformed the meaning and practices of marriage dramatically since 1960.) I guess you could say that a chaotic market became even more chaotic once the sanctions for non-marital sex, the opprobrium attached to divorce, and even the strictures of “compulsory heterosexuality” were eroded. The very idea that sexual relations had the telos of marriage and children lost its hold on both practice and the imagination. Lots of options (all of which, of course, had always existed) were now more openly acknowledged—and had lost most of their stigma.
Enter the internet. And, oddly, we seem to have moved back toward Austen’s world. Of course, the market is not only offering suitable and available marriage partners. Some people use the dating apps in that pursuit, but you can also use them to avail yourself of the other options on the spectrum of sexual relations. Still, you get to survey a number of available partners at the same instant of time; you get to make a choice among this large number (exactly what I think you could not do in 1950, where not only the number of choices was circumscribed, but more crucially the moment of choice did not reveal a large range of available partners.) There is now, via the internet, quite literally a market in sexual selection.
Various etiquettes, unwritten rules, have not surprisingly evolved to structure this market. And the dating apps have worked to find different niches in relation to the different goals of their users. Your expectations are, to a fairly explicit extent, set by which app you are using. And then the behaviors that follow if you actually meet in the flesh a person originally met “on line” follow from those expectations.
In other words, although this is an informal economy, it is not an unstructured one. On the behavioral level, it would seem the structure comes from cultural scripts. Everyone hears about love and marriage in popular lore—songs, stories, movies, poetry—from their earliest days. There is nothing more common than the adolescent experience of wondering “is this really love?” and “am I in love?” We have the concept and the narratives that accompany it before we have the experience or the emotions—and so wonder if the experience and emotions are the right fit, are the “real thing.” When it comes to sex itself, the scripts are less overt, shrouded in mystery, although books and movies offer some suggestions. Still Bob Seger’s “working on mysteries without any clues” in the attempt to develop one’s “night moves” often fits the case. Haunted by phrases like “good in bed” and myths/hints about orgasms and ecstasy-producing bedroom practices, it is as difficult to avoid being self-conscious in bed as it is to be “natural” in the social intercourse that leads to bed—and/or to romance and love in all its possible variants. The poets and the pornographers (representing to the two extremes of a very long spectrum) are always there before us.
[A side-note: another temporal variable is when in life the individual is pursuing sexual and/or romantic relations. I read of a study that said alcohol consumption while in college had no predictive value for habits of alcohol use ten years after college. I don’t know if this is actually true, but it is suggestive. Sexual experimentation and promiscuity mean something rather different in one’s twenties as opposed to one’s forties. It does seem that there is a strong through-line heading to monogamy in contemporary culture, but that there are a significant number of non-monogamous (or serially monogamous) years prior to “settling down.” And, of course, there is a significant minority who never settle into monogamy. My point is only that the percentage of non-monogamous actors is higher among 20 year olds than among 40 year olds–and, perhaps more significantly, approval of non-monogamy (or, at least, a willingness to let it pass) is higher if those involved are 25, not 45. We expect experimentation, some form of “wilding,” among the young, but are less tolerant of it later in life. Note, however, how weak social disapproval is when it comes to sexual behavior; it only rarely influences what people do. They are generally willing to bear the cost of their neighbor’s disapproval.]
The varieties of the scripts out there and the practices they underwrite is one reason the human relations encompassed by the sphere of sex and love appears so chaotic. Everything from date rape and the use of rape drugs to the most tentative movement toward marriage has its models—and inspires some one. In Austen’s world that chaos (i.e. the uncertainties that plague every encounter that might or does lead to a sexual relationship) is richly represented. For women especially, since there is no exit from marriage and almost no power within it, making the wrong choice is disastrous. And the consequences that follow from being seduced outside the frame of marriage (especially if pregnancy follows) is the stuff of thousands of novels before the 20th century—and of plenty of novels after 1900.
My wife tells me that she heard an interview with a “dating coach” this past week on NPR. So the chaos of multiple available scripts bedevils participants in the sex/love economy. How to work out a path for oneself that provides the proper (happy) ending? Interestingly, in another return to an Austen like economy of such matters, the coach reported that discussions on money, of one’s financial position, are now common on the first date. The Austen imperative to join prudence (finding a man with the financial wherewithal to support a household) with love (true affection; she frowns upon marrying solely for money) appears to be becoming more explicit if the coach is to be believed. The previously prevailing squeamishness of talking about money could be as passé as squeamishness of talking about sex.
The individual, then, must pick one’s way through a chaos of possible scripts, of possible forms of relating to another that involve gradations of sexual involvement. A similar anarchy, it seems to me, is revealed when we ask what power(s) enforce the structures that undergird this economy. As is the case with many unwritten realms, social censure is one source of sanction. But when it comes to sex, that sanction is noticeably weaker than it was sixty years ago. Most parents in 1960 strongly objected to two people living together prior to marriage. Similar (even more intense) outrage attached to homosexual relations, or relations across racial lines, or various forms of polyamory. The force of such condemnations (where they still exist) has greatly diminished. Various arrangements and practices that would have been kept secret in the past are now fully “out of the closet.”
I think we should actually take the idea of “anarchy” seriously here. Where social sanctions/disapproval are weak and the state enforcement absent–or, at best, reluctant, intermittent, and not to be relied upon–pretty much anything goes. And that, historically, has generally been disastrous for women, whose only recourse is to depend on male benevolence (a slender reed indeed). Abuses of women by men are just about impossible to punish–except (again, historically) if the women’s family intervenes. In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Bennett’s absurd notion that Mr. Bennett will fight Wickham points to this means of recourse, even as Elizabeth bemoans the fact that her family has neither the financial nor social wherewithal to force Wickham to marry Lydia. Only Darcy has the clout to make the marriage happen–and his coming to the rescue is deus ex machina in action.
Even post-1960, not all practices are now openly displayed. For the most part, however, the practices that are kept secret are also subject to legal, state-enforced, sanction. The “Me-too” movement is just the latest attempt by women to shore up state support in the fight against practices of which women are disproportionately the victims. Campaigns to publicize the prevalence of rape, incest, and domestic violence—and to follow up those publicity campaigns with pressure on the state to punish these abuses—have been a mainstay of second-wave feminism. Sexual harassment is another item on that list. Since women are not just almost exclusively the victims of such crimes, but that the state has rarely ever acted to protect women from them, motivates this effort to change what has up to now been the rule (more accurately, the lack of rule.) Without the state stepping in, it’s pure anarchy—and women are almost always the losers in that case. Only state intervention might possibly establish a balance of power between the sexes after thousands of years of female powerlessness.
Of course, marriage itself is the traditional site of the state’s involvement in issues of sex and love. But even as there are calls for greater state enforcement of some standards of appropriate sexual behavior, the state’s hand in marriage has been greatly weakened. Barriers to divorce have fallen and criminalization of adultery has entirely disappeared. (Such sanctions for adultery were rarely strong in either the US or England—and, predictably, tended to punish women more harshly than men in the cases where there was some enforcement.) So it seems fair to say that the marriage economy is becoming increasingly informal, outside the purview of the state, even as reformers work for greater state regulation of sexual practices deemed harmful and non-consensual.
There is another way–besides the open display of partners enabled by the internet–in which the current sexual economy mirrors that in Jane Austen’s world. The choice of partners is fairly strictly limited to one’s own social class/milieu. This fact goes hand-in-hand with the “big sort.” Americans increasingly only interact (or even live near) people who share their educational background, their financial resources, and, more generally, their tastes. Long ago, Herbert Gans spoke of “taste cultures.” What he did not foresee was actual geographical segregation according to membership in these different cultures. More consequently, he didn’t predict that political opinions and allegiances would increasingly be dictated by “tastes” (or sensibility) as contrasted to economic interest or commitment to various policies/goals. (Mark Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler’s Prius or Pickup? [Mariner Books, 2018] offers a convincing and succinct account of the cultural divides that now predict and shape how one votes and what position one takes on issues like global warming, vaccines etc.)
That the choice of sexual partners has followed the same kinds of segregation is fairly evident. True, there are some ethnic groups whose members are strongly inclined to only marry other members of the group. So that kind of bias in sexual selection is out there. But now bias as to education, profession, and politics have been added to the mix. Jane Austen would certainly be at home with these latter biases, while taking for granted the ethnic/racial bias. The causes for this narrowing of the pool of “acceptable” partners are many, but certainly the increased access by middle-class women to educational and professional attainment is one. Doctors don’t marry nurses any longer. They marry other doctors. Another is the decline of public education. As elites have abandoned public schools–from kindergarten right through to grad school–spaces for cross-class encounters have disappeared. Social segregation will, almost by default, lead to very few marriages that cross class lines (where “class” is a general term to designate the other people one associates with and not a technical term about relative wealth, power, or status). Whether the same fairly rigid segregation holds for non-marital sexual relations is less clear. As with the Victorians, there is not much social pressure attached to whom one has sex with–even as there is considerable social pressure (and expectation) that one will marry the right “kind” of person.
Despite hysterical fears to the contrary, sexual and social intercourse between the sexes is not going to end. The hysteria is usually driven by three things: a)fear of the biological advances–from the pill to various forms of artificial insemination–that disconnect sex from reproduction; b) a sense that women have increased their share of power in the dynamics of sexual exchanges, with this increased power partly due to their increased ability to be financially independent, partly due to the biological advances just noted, and partly due to the massive shifts in attitude that accompanied “women’s liberation; and c) the greatly increased fluidity of sexual/gender identification and the variety of sexual practices (as well as sexual identities) this has brought into view. The sexual economy appears more multifarious than ever. Whether this is an artifact of visibility, or actually the case is hard to know. We can say with certainty that prevailing attitudes and arrangements of the powers that structure this economy are in a state of flux. Which is why navigating these waters seems particularly difficult at this moment in time, even as one can go on-line to survey the variety of offers the market puts in front of any individual.
On to thinking about economies of fame and power in future posts.
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