by Andi Zeisler
With Erotic Capital, Hakim brought not only a coinage with an intellectual pedigree—the phrase built on sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s identification of multiple forms of capital—but also a use-it-or-lose-it attitude regarding negotiations of sex and power in daily life. Though her book emphasized that erotic capital is not exclusively effective for women, Hakim put special emphasis on the need for them (as well as anyone “with less access to economic and social capital, including young people, ethic minorities, and working-class groups”) to deploy it. The acknowledgment that white men, for the most part, still disproportionately hold the reins of power translated into the book being shilled as a high-minded, if politically incorrect, how-to for women, a twenty-first century version of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Office.
The argument for prioritizing erotic capital is that most of us are naturally more confident when we look good, so why not look good first, harness that confidence, and then move on to doing the thing you want to do that changes the world/gets you a promotion/increases your opportunities for success. In some parts of the world, this plan has become part of a larger economic strategy. Brazil, until recently the world’s leader in cosmetic surgeries performed (South Korea now surpasses it), is home to dozens of public hospitals that offer free or discounted cosmetic procedures to low-income citizens, with the belief that conforming to the country’s famously stringent beauty standards gives underprivileged people a leg up in the job market (preferably one with no spider veins). And while procedures like facelifts, nose jobs, and butt implants are performed regardless of gender, women are the ones featured in most media coverage of the subsidized surgeries, giving the impression that the management and leverage of erotic capital is primarily a woman’s concern.
Most women don’t need a corporate-funded study to inform them that erotic capital is an uneasy and often thankless negotiation. The Procter & Gamble study profiled in “Up the Career Ladder” noted that while makeup in general may positively affect how a woman’s colleagues and superiors assess her worth, too much makeup, or “high-contrasting” colors—a vampy, dark lip, say—risked making a woman come across as “untrustworthy.” Women’s-magazine guides on dressing appropriately for the workplace have long warned that button-up shirts or pencil skirts that look perfectly chic on A-cup breasts and mini backsides risk looking “tarty” when worn by bustier, bootier women. The message, ultimately, is that erotic capital is incredibly useful, assuming your existing body already lands in the sweet spot between attractive but not intimidating, sexual but not oversexed, feminine but not Jessica Rabbit.
Like many people who have attempted the almost impossible feat of finding that sweet spot, I was absorbed back in 2010 by the story of a New York City–based former Citibank employee named Debrahlee Lorenzana who brought suit against her employer’s parent company, Citigroup, claiming that she’d been fired for being too sexy for her job. Lorenzana’s lawsuit asserted that her bosses complained that her body was just too distracting for her male colleagues. They forbade her to wear, among other things, turtleneck shirts, pencil skirts, fitted suits, and three-inch heels. When Lorenzana pointed out that her attire was no different from that of other female Citibank employees, she was told that “their body shapes were different than mine, and I drew too much attention.”1 In the end, Lorenzana was awarded no damages, and since she went on to become serially litigious—between 2011 and 2013, she sued a cab company and a medical lab—media coverage has more or less voided the substance of the Citigroup suit. But the question of whether there’s a beauty penalty as well as a premium has been answered resoundingly in recent years.
In 2013, a Florida high-school teacher was asked to resign from her job after photos from her side gig as a model (for which she used a different name) were sent to the school’s principal; in 2014, a recruit at the Port Authority Police Academy was singled out as a “Barbie Doll” and “American Girl Doll” by her instructors, repeatedly harassed, and ultimately fired after she refused to resign.2 Before he was ousted as CEO of American Apparel, the list of harassment allegations and rumors accrued by now-legendary garment-industry douchebag Dov Charney included the claim that he had fired employees he deemed insufficiently fuckable.3 And the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that it’s fair for a woman to be fired from her job if her appearance is distracting enough to threaten the marriage of her superior—a decision spurred by the case of a dentist who fired his hygienist because even in head-to-foot scrubs, she was simply too irresistible. In the court’s finding, this was totally legitimate: employers “can fire employees that they and their spouses see as threats to their marriages.” It’s not up to employers, you see, to be more professional and appropriate in such cases, it’s up to female employees not to unwittingly lead them on by doing nothing other than having the gall to show up for work with their god-given faces and bodies. (If you’re wondering where you’ve heard this narrative of women as temptress and man as hapless accessory to his desires before, just check out, oh, the past few thousand years of history, art, literature, and music.)
When the lines between acceptable and unacceptable deployment of erotic capital are drawn and redrawn at will by others—employers, peers, state judicial bodies—the “choice” Etcoff spoke of in the New York Times seems pretty hollow. Furthermore, erotic capital is indelibly racialized, making proclamations about its power inevitably subject to white-centric standards. Consider the incident at a 2007 Glamour magazine event held at a law firm and called “The Dos and Don’t of Corporate Fashion,” where one of the magazine’s editors instructed the assembled female lawyers that Afros, dreadlocks, and other “political” hairstyles were “inappropriate” and a definite “don’t.” Seven years later, the U.S. Military, as part of an overhaul of grooming regulations, prohibited styles significant to African-American hair, including dreadlocks, two-strand and flat twists, and Afros. The new-do rules, issued to “maintain uniformity within a military population,” according to their wording, also made reference to “matted and unkempt” styles which seemed to further point a finger toward black service members. (The unwelcome publicity about the changes prompted an official response by the Congressional Black Caucus and an eventual rollback of the provisions.) These examples speak to the entrenched belief that words like “appropriate,” “professional,” and “uniform” refer only to white baselines of attractiveness; this can’t help but suggest that people of color who don’t strive for that standard squander the erotic capital they might otherwise use for professional and social advancement.
Adding to the problem of erotic capital is that its trappings—clothes, makeup, even shoes—are often the first things to come under review in cases of sexual harassment and rape, as anyone who’s ever read a media account of those incidents knows. It’s only very recently that “Well, what was she wearing?” has ceased to be the first question posed (though it’s often the second or third). The woman who in 1991 accused William Kennedy Smith of rape had both her story and her credibility questioned in part because of the undergarments she wore on the night in question—a pearl-studded lace bra and underpants from Victoria’s Secret. Though the bra was admitted into evidence ostensibly to counter the plaintiff’s claim that she was tackled and raped by Kennedy, it was treated in the media as proof that its wearer was a wanton opportunist, with photos of similar garments splashed across the covers of supermarket tabloids as the televised trial played out.
Even those women who are arguably the most successful in trading on their erotic capital—those whose careers depend on it—ultimately have less choice than the likes of Etcoff and Hakim would have us believe. In late 2014, when a massive hack of Sony Entertainment revealed email exchanges between the film company’s top executives, one of the more notable revelations was the discrepancy in salaries between men and women working on equal footing. Jennifer Lawrence was revealed to have been paid less than both her male costars in the ensemble movie American Hustle. Charlize Theron, after finding out via the lea
ked correspondence that she made significantly less than her Snow White and the Huntsman costar Chris Hemsworth (who doesn’t, by the way, have an Oscar to his name), demanded a pay increase.
An even more depressing example comes via the fashion models who in the past decade-plus have spoken up about the sexual coercion they’ve experienced working with star fashion photographer Terry Richardson. Richardson’s patented creepy-uncle approach to young female models—involving on-set requests for hand–and blow jobs, often in front of roomfuls of people—was for years an open secret in the industry. Starting in 2004, however, multiple current and former models began coming forward (some anonymously, some not) in online spaces including Jezebel, The Gloss, and BuzzFeed to denounce Richardson’s predatory m.o. Their tales underscored how the alleged power of female beauty and sexuality can be easily overpowered in a career where young models’ ability to earn a living may well rest in the hands of a man who once said, “It’s not who you know, it’s who you blow.” An extensive 2014 profile in New York magazine revealed what seemed to be Richardson’s willful ignorance of the power imbalance between a celebrity photographer and unknown models who knew that walking out of a shoot could end their careers before they started. A photography agent quoted in the piece was blunt: “Kate Moss wasn’t asked to grab a hard dick. Miley Cyrus wasn’t asked to grab a hard dick. H&M models weren’t asked to grab a hard dick. But these other girls, the nineteen-year-old girl from Whereverville, [she] should be the one to say, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea’? These girls are told by agents how important he is, and then they show up and it’s a bait-and-switch. This guy and his friends are literally like, ‘Grab my boner.’ Is this girl going to say no? And go back to the village? That’s not a real choice. It’s a false choice.”4
In other words, if there’s a difference between the women who make the “choice” to leverage erotic capital in their careers—fittingly, the one place where erotic capital favors women over men is in the commercial sex industry—and the millions of those who are coerced or forced to in order to simply survive, it’s pretty minimal.
Navel (and Nasal) Gazing
“I did it for me,” reads the plaque held by the woman in a Botox ad. There’s a sense that she’s presenting the plaque to us, the audience, and it’s kind of unnerving. The makers of the ad are conversant in the basic language of both body acceptance and choice feminism, and this ad is an attempt to make an end-run around any existing skepticism about cosmetic surgery, by appealing to free, market-savvy choice and its result, empowerment. This woman who paid a tidy sum of money for a smooth forehead and nonexistent nasolabial folds is not a dupe of the patriarchy, dammit! She’s not doing it for a man; she’s not doing it for a woman; she’s doing it for herself, and those are the magic words. Variations on “I did it for me” appear and reappear in ads for Botox and breast implants; they’re present when Vogue suggests—you know, just puts it out there—that you could shorten your toes in order to better fit them into Jimmy Choos; they exist whenever morning talk-radio hosts give away free breast implants to the woman with the best small-boobs sob story. “I did it for me,” “I did it to feel better about myself,” and, “I’m not doing it for anyone else” are defensive reflexes that acknowledge an imagined feminist disapproval and impatiently brush it away.
It’s been twenty-five years since Naomi Wolf wrote, in her bestselling book The Beauty Myth, that “The ideology of beauty is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has the power to control those women whom second-wave feminism would have otherwise made relatively uncontrollable.” For all the gains that various women’s movements have made possible, rigidly prescribed, predominantly white beauty standards are one site where time has not revolutionized our thinking. Concurrently, it’s also where the expansion of consumer choice has made it possible to bow to such standards in countless new ways.
Choice has become the primary way to talk about looks, a phenomenon that journalist Alex Kuczynski called “an activism of aesthetics” in her 2006 book Beauty Junkies. In the book, the cosmetic surgery industry in particular is portrayed as a kind of Thunderdome where the waiting lists for a new injectable climb into the double digits, impeccably spray-tanned celebrity doctors jostle for prime soundbite space in women’s magazines, and speakers at surgeons’ conventions end their speeches with a call to “Push plastic surgery.” With a rise in options—more doctors, more competing pharmaceutical brands, the rise of cosmetic-surgery tourism that promises cheap procedures in tropical locations—the landscape of sculpted noses and liposuctioned abs has been defined by choice. The “activism,” too, is one of individual choice—it refers to being proactive about one’s own appearance, vigilant enough to be able to head off wrinkles, droops, and sags at the pass. Framed within our neoliberal discourse, an activism of aesthetics doesn’t dismantle the beauty standards that telegraph worth and status, but advocates for everyone’s right to purchase whatever interventions are necessary to achieve those standards. The individual world shrinks to the size of a doctor’s office; other people exist only as points of physical comparison.
Though we often think of beauty and body imperatives in their prefeminist form—the hobbling footbinding, the lead whitening powders, the tapeworm diet—the ostensibly consciousness-raised decades since the 1970s have brought a mind-boggling array of dictates, standards, and trends to all genders, but most forcefully to women. When capri pants were the move of the moment in the 1990s, Vogue was there to suggest quick surgical fixes for knobby knees and undefined calves. Less than ten years later, the clavicle was the body part du jour, balancing the trend of voluminous clothing with reassuring proof that, under all that material, the wearer was appropriately thin. (One clavicle-boasting woman stated to The New York Times that the clavicle was the “easiest and least controversial expression of a kind of sex appeal”—not as obviously sexy as breasts, but evidence of a physical discipline coveted among the fashion set.5) A handful of years after that, the focus moved south again, to the “thigh gap” coveted by a largely young audience, some of whom blogged about their pursuit of the gap with diet journals and process photos.
Though certain types of bodies have historically come in and out of fashion—the flapper dresses of the 1920s required a boyish, hipless figure, while the tight angora sweaters of the ’50s demanded breasts, or at least the padded semblance of them—the pace with which bodies are presented as the “right” ones to have has quickened. The beachy girls-next-door of the 1970s were elbowed out by the Amazonion supermodels of the 1980s, who gave way to the heroin-chic waifs of the ’90s, who were knocked off the editorial pages of the early 2000s by the Brazilian bombshells, who were then edged out by the doll-eyed British blondes. Meanwhile, the fashion industry selectively co-opts whatever “ethnic” attributes can be appropriated in the service of a trend. Black and Latina women with junk in the trunk who have been erased by mainstream glossies, overlooked as runway models, and ill-served by pants designed for comparatively flat rears were rightly annoyed to hear from Vogue, in 2014, that “We’re Officially in the Era of the Big Booty” thanks to stars like Iggy Azalea, Miley Cyrus, and Kim Kardashian. “There is no wrong way to have a body,” wrote author and size-positive sage Hanne Blank, but that sentiment will always be contradicted by a market, and a media, that depends on people not believing it.
Pubic Property
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, in her 1997 book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, used the diaries of young women past and present to trace the role of families, medicine, nutrition, and consumerism in increasing body-and beauty-focused anxiety in girls. One conspicuous takeaway was that girls of the 1900s, living as they did with limited consumer choices in less urbanized areas, were rarely inclined to equate their bodies or looks with their worth, but contemporary girls were positively obsessed with both. One comparison of New Years’ resolutions written a hundred years apart is jarring: An adolescent girl’s diary from the 1890s read
s, “Resolved . . . to think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversations and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.” From her 1990s counterpart: “I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can . . . I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.” The equation of “better” with “more physically attractive” is echoed everywhere, and it affects girls in particular sooner than ever. If you don’t believe it, there’s a t-shirt for tweens reading “I’m Too Pretty to Do Math” that might convince you.
Increasingly, the tenets of choice feminism, combined with an ever-lengthening menu of choices for taming, firming, filling, reducing, smoothing, softening, darkening, lightening, and otherwise prettying up various body parts, have become a justification for this obsession. You’ve got your high-tech cosmetic fillers—collagen, hyaluronic acid, Restylane—to smooth out laugh lines, crow’s feet, and other signs that women eventually age. There are serums to make eyelashes more voluminous, and, failing that, eyelash-implant and -dyeing procedures. If you’re not quite ready for full-on breast augmentation, you can opt for “vacation breasts” created by an injectable substance whose effects last two or three weeks. And, of course, there’s the surfeit of treatments to spruce up the downstairs, from “vajazzling” (the application of crystals and other adornments to the bare mons pubis) and “vajacials” all the way to labiaplasty and the pithily euphemistic “vaginal rejuvenation,” also known as tightening. Some of this stuff comes off as Hollywood hype—it was actress Jennifer Love Hewitt who first put vajazzling on the map—but the amount of places that offer the service suggest that increasing numbers of regular women are buying into the repairing and redecorating game.