‘Erotic capital’ and the power of desirability: Why ‘honey money’ is a bad collective strategy for remedying gender inequality
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article I conduct a close reading of Catherine Hakim’s theory concerning the relationship of sexual desirability to power and gender inequality. I suggest that Hakim’s thesis requires renewed attention not only because of the international reach of her work, but because it reflects a general cultural sentiment concerning women’s sexuality and power. I argue that her primary concept— erotic capital—is overstretched, internally inconsistent, and asociological, glossing over the structures of race, class and age that mediate women’s 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 theory—the sexual fields framework (Green, 2008)—that develops a concept of erotic/sexual capital which predates Hakim’s work and offers a more sociologically grounded analysis of power and desirability.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it