‘Erotic capital’ and the power of desirability: Why ‘honey money’ is a bad collective strategy for remedying gender inequality
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".