by
Eva Illouz
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Fourth, are there cultural norms and techniques to hold one’s desires and wants in suspicion? For example, Christian culture contains a built-in suspicion of one’s own (sexual and other) wants and desires, whereas a culture of consumer self-realization, on the contrary, encourages the view of desire as the legitimate grounds for choice. Culturally designed suspicions (or lack of them) are likely to shape the course and outcome of decisions.
The vision of love outlined here emanates directly from what nineteenth-century men and women called “character.” In contradistinction to a long Western tradition that presents love as an emotion that overtakes one’s capacity to judge and that idealizes the object of love to the point of blindness, love is here solidly anchored in Knightley’s capacity for discernment. This is why Emma’s faults are no less emphasized than her virtues. The only person who loves Emma is also the only one to see her faults. To love someone is to look at them with wide-opened and knowing eyes. And, contrary to what we would expect today, such capacity for discernment (and awareness of another’s fl aws) does not entail any ambivalent feeling toward Emma. On the contrary, Knightley’s own excellence of character makes him forgive her faults, discern (what will later prove to be) her own “excellence of mind,”10 and strive to improve her character with fervor and even passion. Understanding Emma’s faults is not incompatible with being thoroughly committed to her because both emanate from the same moral source. Knightley’s love itself is supremely moral not only because he makes the object of his love accountable to a moral code, but also because to love Emma is intertwined with the moral project of shaping her mind. When he looks at her anxiously, it is not lust that burns in him, but rather his desire to see her do the right thing. In this particular conception of love, it is not the unique originality of the person that we love, but rather the person’s capacity to stand for those values we – and others –
[...] Thus, another noticeable difference with modern sensibility is that this woman does not think it proper to communicate her inner authentic feelings. On the contrary, to be adequate is to be able to hide these feelings and to disguise them under an appearance of cheerfulness. Being able to play her role convincingly consists in helping her husband play his own role, and it is from this that she derives a sense of fulfillment and adequacy. Furthermore, it is likely that this woman is not even trying to understand and express her true feelings. She is more concerned by the fact that in expressing her negative feelings, she might make her husband feel inadequate in his capacity to make her happy. In other words, she views it as her responsibility to maintain his own sense of adequacy, defined as his capacity to make her happy. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, we may notice how she states in a neutral way that he cannot understand her. In fact, she invokes this as a way to explain and excuse the fact that he cannot be made a part of her private distress. This is in stark contrast with the way in which modern men but especially women expect to reveal their intimate self and to intertwine it with that of their partner. Pre-modern conjugal relations presuppose intricately connected selves, but in this interconnectedness the self is neither naked nor authentic. The two selves displayed here are, by modern standards, emotionally distant (they do not let each other peek at the content of their thoughts and emotions); yet, they are inextricably intertwined and interdependent. In contrast, modern selves expect each other to be emotionally naked and intimate, but independent. In a modern marriage, it is two highly individuated and differentiated selves that come together;53 it is the fine-tuned compatibility of two constituted selves that makes up a successful marriage, not the display of roles. The fine-tuning of the emotional makeup of two persons becomes the basis for intimacy.
Let me make a bold suggestion: the transformation undergone by romantic choices is akin to the process that Karl Polanyi has described for economic relationships and that he dubbed the “great transformation.”57 The “great transformation” of economic relations refers to the process by which the capitalist market dis-embedded economic action from society and from moral/normative frameworks, organized economy in self-regulated markets, and came to subsume society under economy. What we call the “triumph” of romantic love in relations between the sexes consisted first and foremost in the dis-embedding of individual romantic choices from the moral and social fabric of the group and in the emergence of a self-regulated market of encounters. Modern criteria to evaluate a love object have become disentangled from publicly shared moral frameworks. This disentanglement occurred because of a transformation of the content of the criteria for selecting a mate – which have become both physical/sexual and emotional/psychological – and because of a transformation of the very process of mate selection – which has become both more subjective and more individualized.
The “great transformation” of love is characterized by a number of factors: (1) the normative deregulation of the mode of evaluation of prospective partners – that is, its disentanglement from group and communal frameworks and the role of mass media in defining criteria of attractiveness and worth; (2) an increasing tendency to view one’s sexual and romantic partner simultaneously in psychological and sexual terms (with the former being ultimately subsumed under the latter); (3) and, finally, the emergence of sexual fields, the fact that sexuality as such plays an increasingly important role in the competition between actors on the marriage market.
oh hell yeah
Undoubtedly, along with the feminist and bohemian claims to sexual freedom, consumer culture has been the most significant cultural force that has contributed to the sexualization of women, and later of men. Writing about the 1920s, John d’Emilio and Estelle Freedman argue that “American capitalism no longer required an insistent ethic of work and asceticism in order to accumulate the capital to build an industrial infrastructure. Instead, corporate leaders needed consumers. [. . .] An ethic that encouraged the purchase of consumer products also fostered an acceptance of pleasure, self-gratification, and personal satisfaction, a perspective easily translated to the province of sex.”61 Consumer culture put desire at the center of subjectivity, and sexuality became a sort of generalized metaphor of desire.
Third, because there are no more formal mechanisms by which to pair people up, individuals internalize the economic dispositions that also help them make choices which must be at once economic and emotional, rational and irrational. The romantic habitus has thus the characteristic of operating at once economically and emotionally. Sometimes this habitus makes choices in which economic calculus is harmoniously reconciled with emotions, but sometimes this habitus is subject to internal tensions, as when one has to choose between a “socially appropriate” and a “sexy” person. This is why the sexual-romantic habitus has become a very complicated one, precisely because it contains a variety of dispositions.
There are some popular explanations for this state of affairs. The most conspicuous one is that men have deficient psyches and lack the basic capacity for monogamous connectedness, for psychological or evolutionary reasons. Their psychological, biological, and evolutionary makeup makes them prone to sexual multiplicity because masculinity is promiscuous and because evolution demands men spread their sperm, rather than care for their offspring.55 Such explanations cannot be used by sociologists, because of their tautological character, explaining a given state by simply postulating that necessity inscribed it in the genes or evolution. A different explanation for this state of affairs is that men are confused by their traditional role being challenged by the new power of women. Men withhold their commitment because they are afraid of women and their increasing power threatening their identities.
[...] Instead of pathologizing men’s behavior, we should ask what kind of social relations make possible and even desirable men’s “fear” of or lack of commitment and which cultural frames make such behavior meaningful, legitimate, and pleasurable. To clarify the emotional mechanisms of choice and commitment, we need to approach male reluctance to commit and women’s readiness to commit as two symmetrical phenomena, both puzzling and both in need of explanation. Sociology is primarily interested in the social conditions that make some models of the self more available than others, and the kind of dilemmas that these cultural models may be responding to strategically. What are these conditions?
The historian John Tosh claims that in Western societies, masculinity “occurs in three arenas: home, work, and all-male associations.” Authority in the household, the capacity to earn a wage in a non-servile independent way, and the capacity to form meaningful bonds in voluntary associations, taverns, and clubs that effectively excluded women are traditionally the three pillars of masculinity. Capitalism and democratic polities mark a very important change in this tripartite structure: since the twentieth century the feminist movement and its impact on the political, economic, and sexual spheres have consistently and effectively challenged and eroded male authority in the household. Also, the rise of bureaucratic organizations and salaried work has curtailed men’s independence, with most men now working under the supervision of other men and/or women, and most all-male sites for homosocial association (with the notable exception of sport) have diminished, with heterosocial leisure the norm in the majority of venues. Thus, if, as Tosh suggests, masculinity is a “social status, demonstrated in specific social contexts,”64 then clearly some constitutive elements of that status and those contexts have been seriously eroded with the advent of modernity. Independence, authority in the household, and male solidarity have all been undermined, with traditional masculinity even becoming an inverse signal of status – culturally coded working-class masculinity. It is precisely in this context that sexuality has become one of the most significant status markers of masculinity . As argued in chapter 2, sexuality confers status. Sex appeal and sexuality have become attributes of gender identity and of what within that identity takes the form of status.65
There are three possible reasons that could be proffered for sexuality being so closely associated with male status. To the extent that sexuality was associated with the socio-economic status of powerful men, it retained its association with power and status even when the connection was less strong. Serial sexuality is attractive to men of all classes because, if access to women is restricted, it functions as a sign of the man’s status – of victory over other men. Male competitiveness, validation, and status were channeled through the realm of sexuality. For men, sexuality was a mark of status in terms of the capacity to compete with other men in securing the attention of the female sex: “Women provide heterosexual men with sexual validation, and men compete with each other for this.”69 Furthermore, men transferred to sex and sexuality the control they had formerly held in the household, and sexuality became the realm within which they could express and display their authority and their autonomy. Detachment in sexuality came to signal and organize the broader trope of autonomy and control, and, thus, of masculinity. Emotional detachment could be viewed as a metaphor for masculine autonomy, which the separation between sex and marriage had encouraged. Finally, through sex, men both competed with and forged bonds with other men by casting women’s bodies as the object of male solidarity.70 In other words, sexual freedom made sexuality a site for the exercise and display of masculinity for men whose status in the three arenas of work, home, and male sociability had been eroded: it transformed sexuality into status. If sex for men was a way to display their status and to bond with other men, the demise of men’s control over the household and of their autonomy in the workplace resulted in a sexuality that was hypertrophied, in that it merged and expressed at once the three aspects of masculinity as status: authority, autonomy, and solidarity.