Catherine Hakim, senior research fellow at the London School of Economics and staunch anti-feminist, is my new hero. With one book, she has done more to advance the cause of women’s liberation than months of worthy campaigning could achieve.
It’s not that Honey Money: the Power of Erotic Capital – in which Hakim argues that women should be taught to use their sex appeal to exploit men – is a bad book. It’s that it’s such a bad book, so poorly researched, so woodenly ill-written, so crassly offensive in its argument that all men are randy beasts and more women should become prostitutes, and so drearily hateful in its conclusions about human nature, that it’s a
highly effective advert for feminist revolution.
Using sex surveys 20 years out of date, Hakim explains to the unfortunate reader that “erotic capital”, like social or financial capital, has “six elements” and can be used to “bargain” and “negotiate” at work, at play and – most tragically – in relationships. The arguments are a mixture of cod psychology and ugly Daily Mail stereotypes: men always want more sex than women (“the universal male sex deficit”), and the proof of this is that gay men are all shallow, shag-crazed hedonists. Men will always be more powerful and better paid than women, so women can and should manipulate them for social, financial or professional gain using sex – sorry, “erotic capital”. Discouraging them from doing so is an evil feminist plot
to deny women the only real advantage they have in the “gender war” – their physical charms – although Hakim does not enlighten us as to where this leaves unattractive women, older women, women who can’t afford the strict beauty and grooming regimes she recommends, or those of us who forget to wash because we’ve been up all night watching Buffy, eating cheese and scratching ourselves.
Honey Money is a manifesto for female social and sexual capitulation, presented with all the wit and charm of a company stock report. The language is clinical and calculating, the mysteries of lust and seduction reduced to a bloodless balance sheet in which “laws of supply and demand determine the values of everything, in sexuality as in other areas”.
With her leaden argument that “the male sex deficit allows women to leverage the exchange value of women’s erotic capital to a higher level”, Hakim writes like a hedge-fund manager who’s been put in charge of a brothel. The staggeringly unseductive prose is almost forgivable, though, because Honey Money manages to make the most tenaciously sexist bits of cultural detritus sound as pig-headed and embarrassing as they really are. For that reason alone, everybody should read this awful, awful book.
Neurotic capital
Last week, I went on Newsnight to debate with Dr Hakim, and was all set to be angry with her. I had geared myself up to remind her that women of principle fought for generations for her right to earn a PhD in scabbing to the patriarchy. Instead, I found myself overwhelmed by the desire to give her a hug. Given the amount of store Hakim’s own research sets in “the social magic of smiles”, one might have expected at least a soupçon of social flirting, but you could have sharpened a pencil between her lips, and she refused a cup of mediocre BBC tea with the sort of ill-grace normally reserved for suspected poisoners. She snapped that she “didn’t want to talk” and sat glaring at everyone for half an hour. I could make some cheap crack here about neurotic capital, but actually I just felt sad for her.
Because it is sad. The worst thing about Honey Money and the notion that female sexuality is just another resource to be flogged off to drooling men is not that it’s demeaning to both genders. It’s that it is a horribly cynical way of understanding relationships, and one that currently rings true for too many people.
This paranoid, reptilian book, with its promotion of a brutal free market in female flesh, is a glimpse into a lonely future where profit has been permitted to force its dull, Gradgrind hand into every last cranny of human interaction.
In Honey Money there is a great deal of discussion of returns, assets and sexual bargaining. There is almost no talk of compassion, seduction
or love. That should tell you all you need to know about “erotic capital”.
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