Sexual capital
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Love for sale --Love for Sale (1930) by Cole Porter "The reason good women like me flock to my pictures is that there is a little bit of vampire instinct in every woman."--Theda Bara "Elizabeth Taylor […] wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the world-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses women's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm."--Camille Paglia on Elizabeth Taylor in Penthouse, 1992, collected in Sex, Art, and American Culture |
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Erotic capital is power possessed by an individual as a result of their sexual attractiveness to others. It is one among other species of capital, including social capital, symbolic capital, and cultural capital.
The concept has been developed by sociologist Dr. Adam Isaiah Green (University of Toronto), who builds on Pierre Bourdieu's (1980) concept of capital. Green defines erotic capital as the quality and quantity of attributes that an individual possesses which elicit an erotic response in another. Some of these attributes may be immutable, such as an individual's race or height, while others may be acquired through fitness training, plastic surgery, or a makeover, among other techniques.
Erotic capital is interconvertible with other forms of capital, as when actors parlay erotic capital into financial capital or social capital.
There is no single hegemonic form of erotic capital. On the contrary, currencies of erotic capital are quite variable, acquiring a hegemonic status in relation to the erotic preferences of highly specialized audiences that distinguish one sexual field from another (see Green 2005, 2008; Martin and George 2006).
See also
- Ascribed status
- Beauty
- Eroticism
- Femme fatale
- Interpersonal attraction
- Physical attractiveness
- Pornographic actor
- Power (philosophy)
- Seduction
- Sex symbol
- Sex industry
- Social status
- Social influence
- Status symbol
- Transactional sex
- Trophy wife
- War of the sexes
