Investing Your Erotic Capital, or Not

Any good Darwinian will base his analysis of the difference between the sexes on a salient biological reality: a woman’s reproductive potential is far less than a man’s. This means that a woman can conceive far, far fewer children in her lifetime than can any man. The point is obvious and self-evident.

From this observation we should be able to draw a rational conclusion: a woman will be more likely to be more deliberative about choosing when, where and with whom to spend or invest her reproductive potential. A man, possessed with the capacity to sire legions of children, will be less discriminating about what he does with his own reproductive potential.

Madeleine Kearns relabels a woman’s reproductive potential, her “erotic capital.” It is an excellent contribution to the discussion. She takes us back two centuries ago to the time of Jane Austen, a time when women would carefully husband their erotic capital. Knowing that it had significant value, they did not gamble it away in the erotic casino.

Kearns explains:

In a Jane Austen novel, a woman is bestowed with a fixed sum of (shall we say?) erotic capital which she can either save, invest, spend, or (in desperation) sell. The prudent woman considers carefully whether to accept or decline an offer of marriage and is kind enough to advise her sisters to avoid doing something foolish like running off with a soldier, marrying a pauper, or getting pregnant out of wedlock. Those were strange and frugal times. But human nature — including sexuality — has barely changed at all.

You might say that women deployed their rational faculties when allocating their erotic capital. Fair point. Correct point.

But, Kearns seems puzzled-- who among us isn’t?-- by the fact that young women today refuse to husband their erotic capital. They much prefer gambling it away in what are called hookups. Or better, they invest it without doing the relevant research.

Today, there are those among us argue that a young woman has little [to] lose, and perhaps even something to gain, from selling everything for next to nothing — behaving like a stripper, prostitute, or porn star. 

Heaven knows where young women got the idea that they can only feel truly liberated by pretending to be males, by pretending to have a limitless supply of erotic or sexual capital? 

Kearns continues that today’s young women believe that anything goes if only they consent to it. And yet, she implies, there is consent and there is consent. You can consent to being abused and degraded, but that does not mean that you have been any less abused or degraded.

She examines the case of young women who were enticed into doing porn under false pretenses. They had signed up for photo shoots and later found out that the shoots involved disrobing and performing… I will leave it to your imagination.

How did it happen, Kearns asks correctly, that these women, having discovered that they had been lied to, chose to consent to appearing in porn videos? Why did they gullibly accept that the videos were only for a private individual?

The women from the lawsuit all said that they were initially unaware that they would be expected to participate in porn. Some said that when they tried to back out, they were threatened and told that they’d have to make their own way home. They were assured by the producers that the videos were only for a private collection in Australia and New Zealand and would not appear online. But that was a lie. The videos were posted on Porn Hub, the most visited porn site in the world, where they have since been watched billions of times and appear to be available even now (an investigation has found).

She continues:

Indeed, it is hard not to wonder what, exactly, these young women were thinking when they (ostensibly) agreed to participate in the porn videos after realizing they’d been enticed under false pretenses. After being told that the job was porn, and not modeling, why didn’t they flee immediately? Was it that they were afraid to say no? Or that they found the experience, on some level, exhilarating?

The reason, Kearns suggests, is quite simple. Young women have been told that they are free to do whatever they wish with their bodies. Your body, your choice. Why, given this new principle, should they not squander their erotic capital, even to the point of giving it away for free. And even to the point of letting the world entire know of their gamble.

Kearns concludes:

Imagine, for a moment, that we are talking about money: a young man bestowed with a great inheritance, who goes to an older relative for advice on how best to use it. Imagine that the relative has nothing to offer him but inoffensive platitudes such as “It’s your money, your choice.” Would it really be surprising if this young man then proceeded to blow his entire fortune by overspending and placing his trusting in those who wished only to exploit and extort him?

Q. E. D.