Text 2 Erotism

Theories of Sexual Stratification: Toward an Analytics of the Sexual
Field and a Theory of Sexual Capital*
JOHN LEVI MARTIN

University of Wisconsin, Madison
MATT GEORGE
Kyungsung University
The American tradition of action theory failed to produce a useful theory of the
possible existence of trans-individual consistencies in sexual desirability. Instead,
most sociological theorists have relied on market metaphors to account for the logic
of sexual action. Through a critical survey of sociological attempts to explain the
social organization of sexual desiring, this article demonstrates that the market
approach is inadequate, and that its inadequacies can be remedied by studying sexual
action as occurring within a specifically sexual field (in Bourdieu’s sense), with a
correlative sexual capital. Such a conception allows for historical and comparative
analysis of changes in the organization of sexual action that are impeded by the use of
a market metaphor, and also points to difficulties in Bourdieu’s own treatment of the
body qua body.
Though group sex has certain attractions, its serving as a primary symbolization,
even of wider solidarities, seems to be severely limited.
Talcott Parsons (1971)
In this work, Parsons took up theoretical arms against the prescription of the
Aquarian Age that universal love would conquer all, which he took as a worrisome
sign of de-differentiation. Even more, this vision undermined the edifice with which
his theory began, namely, his solution to the Hobbesian problem of order, which was
assumed to stem from scarcity of things desired. The vision of solidarity through
group sex Parsons criticized not only violated the religious legitimacy of dyadic love,
it was also based on a ‘‘non-zero-sum’’ vision of erotic abundance, which undermined
the very need for a normatively structured solution of the Hobbesian problem in the
first place. Yet that had been Parsons’s (1968) fundamental point: while specific
interests might in fact conflict, this does not mean they are idiosyncratic and
un-organizable, for individual passions and desires (what we now call ‘‘interests’’1)
are systematically related to overarching value commitments (Parsons [1940]
1949:211). It was this argument of Parsons—that competing material interests must
*Address correspondence to: John Levi Martin, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin,
Madison, 8128 Social Sciences Bldg., 1180 Observatory Dr., Madison WI 53706-1393. E-mail: jlmartin@
ssc.wisc.edu. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1997 meetings of the American
Sociological Association, Toronto; we thank Paul DiMaggio and Bonnie Erickson, as well as the reviewers
and editors, for comments and criticism.
1
On the development of ‘‘passion’’ to interest, see the wonderful account of Hirschman (1977).
Sociological Theory 24:2 June 2006

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108 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
be understood as embedded in a broader cultural framework of values—which lies at

the root of the American tradition of action theory and continues, for better or worse,
to orient much of American sociological theory.
However, one aspect of potentially unorganized desires was left untouched by the
Parsonian theory, namely, sexual desire. Despite his incorporation of Freudian theory
into his framework, Parsons ignored the social importance of sex, even though
heterosexual desire was considered by Enlightenment thinkers to be one of the driving
forces in the state of nature (where, as Hobbes ([1651] 1909:100) puts it, ‘‘every man
has a Right to every thing; even to one another’s body’’), and the exclusivity of mating
to lead to an ever-present potential for conflict. Any resolution of the problem of
order such as Parsons’s that ignores specifically sexual desire (and the related differ-
entiation of persons into more and less desirable) is therefore problematic from the
start. Although we do not ourselves hold to the Parsonian theory, it represents a key
point in the evolution of a specifically American tradition of action theory. The
analytic, if not always literary, clarity of Parsons’s formulation makes it a useful
way to frame a significant question: If sociological theory answers the question of how
individual desires are objectively organized, why has the American sociological trad-
ition yet to consider how specifically sexual desire is socially organized?
By ‘‘socially organized,’’ we refer not to the social construction of sexual desire (how
does desire ‘‘arise’’ in some society, what are its forms and modes of expression, who is
allowed to have it), a topic that has attracted a great deal of attention (see, e.g., the
collection of position papers in Stein (1992)), but, rather, the manner in which one
specific type of desire, the desire to pair with one and only one person as opposed to
another for heterosexual congress, displays supra-individual consistencies. (By ‘‘pair-
ing’’ we do not imply any degree of permanence nor an act of sexual intercourse.)
Thus it is not desire per se (not its aim, according to Freud’s (1938:553) usage) that is
socially significant for the question of order, but the differential valorization of
possible partners that could produce scarcity and conflict; for this reason we will
henceforward speak of the social organization of sexual desiring. Is this valuation
random, or does it follow the principles of organization and hierarchy that are found
in other spheres of social life? This question has not been seriously addressed, despite
the upsurge of interest in the body.2
One significant exception was the work of Kingsley Davis. Davis is perhaps best
remembered for his functionalist explanation of income differentials in terms of the
importance of the job performed and the scarcity of personnel (Davis and Moore
1945). But Davis had also perceived that the functionalist theory of differential
valorization logically extended to the case of sexual desiring: ‘‘Sexual affection
is . . . a distributive value. To let it go undistributed would introduce anarchy into
the group and destroy the social ‘system’’’ (K. Davis 1936:402f, 1966:329, 332ff).
Davis’s preoccupation here suggests that it does not strain credibility to argue that
a social organization of desiring is implied as a sociological problem of order
2
In seeming contradiction to this last claim, Turner (1982) has argued that Foucault’s work ‘‘has to be
located within a well-established tradition in social philosophy which recognized the problem of human
passions as the critical factor in social order,’’ and in his own work explicitly begins, as do we, with the
relevance of the body for the Hobbesian problem of order. However, in linking Foucault’s concerns to the
Hobbesian problem of order, Turner has confused the functionalist problem of governance (a problem for
sovereigns) with Hobbes’s problem of insecurity in the state of nature (a problem for desiring individuals).
Because he does not begin from conflicting and intrinsically unlimited desires, Turner’s (1984:39) notion of
the centrality of the body amounts to seeing the body as an internal environment with physiological needs;
what then results is a set of wholly universal statements, as opposed to a theoretical framework that can
begin an investigation of the social differentiation of bodies.
SEXUAL STRATIFICATION 109
(cf. Tiryakian 1981). Furthermore, while they are few, there have been a number of
explicit and noteworthy attempts in sociological theory to discuss this social organ-
ization of sexual desiring. We undertake an analytic review of these attempts, arguing
that they tend to founder on market metaphors. We return to Weber, who also
discussed (in different terms) the organization of a specifically sexual sphere of life,
and then follow the alternate elaboration of Weber’s action theory recently pursued
by Pierre Bourdieu, arguing that an analytics of the sexual field allows us to rephrase
the question asked by the authors we survey in a noncontradictory manner amenable
to empirical exploration.
This issue is clearly of relevance to general questions regarding the relation between
the sexes and prestige orders in feminist theory (e.g., Ortner and Whitehead 1981),
and more specific questions regarding to what extent sexual resources or rankings are
tied to or exchangable for resources or rankings in other spheres, such as the
economic (see Zelizer 1996).3 Further, our extension of Bourdieu is relevant for
theorists seeking to study how bodily capital is formed (Wacquant 1995) or how the
emotional aspects of social life treated as residual by Bourdieu may be related to
stratification (Illouz 1997; Reay 2004); it also suggests limitations to Bourdieu’s
treatment of the body.
Parsons’s insight in the opening quotation was that despite the potential for social
integration through unrestricted sexual contact, social life may require restricted and
organized pairing (see also Parsons [1940] 1949a: 171–75); this was understood by the
writers we will survey as implying a social consensus regarding a hierarchy of desir-
ability or attractiveness in sexual pairing. We will begin our analysis of 20th-century
sociological approaches to the social ordering of sexual desiring with Davis; this is
fitting for two reasons. The first is that, as stated, Davis most clearly understood the
relevance of sexual desire for the Hobbesian problem of order,4 and attempted to
demonstrate a normative organization of desiring. But he—like the other theorists we
will survey—never actually found such a normative basis. Instead, as we shall see, he
relied on market analogies. The second reason is that Davis was the first to focus on a
stratification of sexual attractiveness as the fundamental basis of the social organiza-
tion of sexual desiring, as opposed to simple mechanisms of heterophily (opposites
attract) (e.g., Forel [1906] 1929:84) or social homophily (see Laumann et al.
(1994:231ff) and England and Farkas (1986:34) for good discussions). This latter
approach assumes that choices are made on nonsexual grounds, and hence that a
structural analysis of pairing could dispense with the super-structural phenomenon of
desiring. Arguments from homophily also deny the possibility of one stable ranking,
since there are structured disagreements in taste. In contrast, the theories of sexual
stratification put forward by Davis and the others we survey maintain that there is a
specifically sexual ranking and that it is the subject of social consensus: hence those
matched with ‘‘lows’’ have been so matched as the result of a market-like process in
which they desired higher-ranking partners but could not attain them. We now turn to
the specifics of Davis’s theory.
3
Some feminist appraisals of the sexual revolutions of the 1920s and 1960s have divided over whether it is
liberatory for the sexual sphere to be divorced from the economic, or whether the divorce weakens women’s
positions by ‘‘increasing and legitimating male right of sexual access to women’’ (Jackson 1987:52). For a
further discussion, see George (1996).
4
‘‘Unless there is some kind of social order in the distribution of sexual favors, a war of all against all will
tend to result’’ (K. Davis 1966:350).
THEORIES OF SEXUAL STRATIFICATION
Davis and the System of Generalized Prostitution

We have seen above that Davis believed that a theory of society had to account for the
normative allocation of desirable persons. The existence of such ‘‘desirable persons’’
implied not only a differentiation of attractiveness, but also a ‘‘gradation from
extremely attractive to extremely unattractive, with an unfavorable balance of the
old, ugly, and/or deformed.’’5 But Davis’s erotic ranking was primarily a ranking of
women, not so much of men. ‘‘Out of the total female population there are relatively
few who are young and pretty; they are in great demand by virtually the entire adult
male population’’ (K. Davis 1966:370f).
The greater importance of erotic rank for women comes about because Davis took
the principle of the ranking to be, on the one hand, exogenous to the sexual system
(people are born more or less attractive), and, on the other, one resource among the
many that enter into pairing. ‘‘Sexual attractiveness becomes a value that can be
traded for economic and social advantage, and unattractiveness becomes a handicap
that can be overcome by control of nonsexual means’’ (K. Davis 1966:324). According
to Davis, since men have greater economic resources than women, the pairing system
tends to involve an exchange of female attractiveness for male money. Attractive
women can capitalize on their rank (as do most) through marriage, which gives
security against loss of beauty; others enter the labor force in an occupation where
looks help, and, finally, some become prostitutes. Women’s options thus become
minor variations on the major theme of prostitution, ‘‘for in consenting to get married
a woman exchanges her sexual favors for economic support.’’ Skeptical as to the
difficulty of the prostitute’s actual labor, or its draining effects, Davis argued that
‘‘[t]he interesting question is not why so many become prostitutes, but why so few of
them do’’ (K. Davis 1966:349, 361, 371).
In sum, Davis took for granted that the system of sexual pairing involved both
ranking and exchange, where men and women had relatively similar demand struc-
tures but very different resources. Although Davis held that the ranking of women
leads some to be relatively scarce, and therefore draw a higher price in exchange, he
did not problematize this ranking or see it as endogenous to the pairing system, as did
Willard Waller.
Waller and the Rating-Dating Complex

The first sociological account of the generation of a ranking of attractiveness of which
we are aware was Willard Waller’s (1937) remarks on the ‘‘rating and dating complex’’
at college campuses in the 1920s. Despite the association of dating with sexual
exploration, this system was not oriented toward sexual gratification first and fore-
most, but toward competition and ranking. ‘‘Within the universe which we have
described, competition for dates among both men and women is extremely keen.
Like every other process of competition, this one determines a distributive order’’
(Waller 1937:730). Some are at the top, others toward the bottom. But the principle of
this ranking is different for men and women.
5
It is worth noting that Murray Davis (1983) also begins from this premise of absolute scarcity of
‘‘lovables’’; see Hume ([1777] 1985) and Levi-Strauss ([1949] 1969:38) for a critique of this premise.
In order to have Class A rating [men] must belong to one of the better frater-
nities, be prominent in activities, have a copious supply of spending money, be
well-dressed, be ‘‘smooth’’ in manners and appearance, have a ‘‘good line,’’ dance
well, and have access to an automobile. . . . The factors which appear to be
important for girls are good clothes, a smooth line, ability to dance well, and
popularity as a date. The most important of these factors is the last, for the girl’s
prestige depends upon dating more than anything else; here as nowhere else
nothing succeeds like success.
Hence, women would manipulate their perceived scarcity in order to inflate their
rank, which would then be a self-fulfilling prophecy (1937:730).
Scarcity is the key to relative power in this system, not only on the individual level
(the scarcer woman is the more valuable) but also on the level of the sexes. When
women are scarce (e.g., during the winter term in one school described by Waller), the
coeds have ‘‘a relatively high bargaining power,’’ but when school teachers come for
the summer term, the balance of power reverses, and men get easy sexual access
(1937:732). At the same time, one’s dating scarcity is not the only factor contributing
to one’s rank—indeed, for men, it is not even the primary one. It is quite interesting
that beyond the fact that men paid for dates, and that various institutions arose (such
as the corsage6) to allow the man to publicly demonstrate the money spent on the date
(and therefore the equilibrium of her worth and his supply), the system does not
involve an exchange of economic support (which the college woman has) for sexual
access. The logic of Davis’s sexual market is unnecessary. Yet again, men’s ranks seem
to be closely aligned with ranks in other spheres, while women’s ranks are more
autonomously generated within the system. Finally, Waller clearly saw the ranking as
taking into account a number of different attributes—such that we might conceive of
a woman’s overall dating rank as being a combination of her endogenous dating rank
(her popularity, proportional to her scarcity), and her exogenous rank (e.g., clothes,
‘‘line’’).
Thus Waller, like Davis, perceived there to be a system of exchange between men
and women, and a system that implies the ranking of men and women according to
their dating attractiveness. But in contrast to Davis’s reliance on a preexisting degree
of attractiveness in everybody, Waller proposed that, to a certain degree, attractive-
ness is a result of the ranking system itself. Thus, scarcity becomes not simply a way of
increasing the price of a good that one may happen to hold, but the very good itself.
A man wishes to go out with a scarce woman because she is scarce—it is not that
attractive women are scarce, or that the attractive woman, by withholding sex (as in
Davis’s account), increases her bargain. The idea that one’s value within the ranking
system might be different from one’s visible attractiveness is amplified in the argu-
ments of Zetterberg, to which we now turn.
Zetterberg and the Erotic Ranking

Hans Zetterberg is probably now best remembered for his methodological treatise, On
Theory and Verification in Sociology (Zetterberg 1954), but he also achieved some
attention for his daring piece, ‘‘The Secret Ranking,’’ in 1966, which posits an invisible
‘‘erotic stratification.’’ This ranking is secret because it is not reducible to visible
attractiveness or to popularity, but is a latent probability each and every person
6
See Bailey (1988:65ff).
carries ‘‘that he can induce an emotional overcomeness among persons of the opposite
sex.’’ This probability is actualized—and changed—in erotic contests. ‘‘The steps up
and down [the erotic ranking] are not necessarily signalled in the form of sexual
relations between the principles . . . but as events when someone no longer is master
of his feelings’’ (Zetterberg 1966:135).7
Zetterberg suggested that erotic rank entered into rating and dating courtship à la
Waller,8 but he emphasized its independence from other forms of stratification,
including dating popularity. Despite its secret existential basis, Zetterberg believed
that the effects of the erotic ranking could be manifested in social disruption, espe-
cially when there was a disjunction between one’s erotic rank and one’s other ranks.
The tournament of erotic contests that gives rise to this rank seems quite divorced
from the stable pairings associated with marriage; however, Zetterberg believed the
erotic stratification to be relevant for such pairings. ‘‘We may take it as a worthwhile
assumption that equals in erotic rank get along best.’’ At the same time, Zetterberg,
like K. Davis (1966), claimed that persons of low erotic ranks may have offsetting
characteristics that lead to stable unions. This led Zetterberg (1966:136, 138, 139) to
ask ‘‘in what settings this ranking becomes dominant,’’ a key question he never
answered.
Collins and the Historical Positioning of Sexual Exchange

The writers we have analyzed share the belief that men and women are ranked in
terms of their attractiveness for sexual pairing, and that these rankings are connected
with, but not wholly reducible to, rankings in other spheres. We have also seen a
leaning toward market metaphors to explain this allocation of partners; in one case
(Davis) this was because there is a substantive connection to economic activity
(women’s need for material support), while in another it was because of a formal
correspondence to economic activity due to the centrality of scarcity (Waller). We
close this section with the work of Randall Collins, since he, more rigorously—and
with more historical scope—than others, completed this line of theorizing in the 1970s
by explicitly claiming a market-like mechanism that included both the substantive
tradeoff of male money and female sexual access, and the formal characteristics of
supply and demand.9 We also think that his analysis took the market metaphor to its
rigorous conclusion, and thereby disclosed its inherent limitations, limits that reap-
pear in later attempts (examined below) to use market metaphors to analyze the social
organization of sexual desiring.
Collins’s (1971:7)10 primary interest was the historical development of what he
called sexual stratification, namely, the relation between the sexes (as opposed to
our use of the term to denote a stratification of sexual desirability), and its ‘‘basic
feature,’’ ‘‘the institution of sexual property,’’ chiefly male sexual property in women.
7
Zetterberg is usually given priority here; however, J. Richard Udry (1966) in the same year put forward a
similar analysis of dating as a complicated game in which the victor ‘‘is the one who makes the other lose
self-control without losing it him- (or her-) self.’’
8
There cruelly mis-cited as Wallace Walter.
9
We are in the somewhat awkward position of focusing critical attention on the earlier work of a theorist
whose approach has since evolved. Indeed, recent work on this topic by Collins (2004) in many respects
parallels the Bourdieuian perspective we will propose. We consider it an open question as to when the two
perspectives are empirically distinguishable and, if so, which is superior. We restrict our attention to his
early work because it exemplified a consistent market approach, our focus here.
10
This article was included with modifications in Collins (1975); we use the original version, though making
a few references to the later emendations.
The story Collins told was a historical one of the development of a free market in this
property, culminating in the ‘‘personal sexual market’’ of the modern era.
There are, of course, rankings of men and women in terms of attractiveness in this
market, as discussed by Davis. But this ranking, for women at least, preceded the
emergence of this market, although at the dawn of modernity, sexual rank was well
synchronized with social rank. But with the emergence of market society, the middle
classes, the smaller household, and the state’s restriction on the use of violence against
women, women become ‘‘at least potentially free to negotiate their sexual relation-
ships.’’ This is done through the marriage market, in which the man trades ‘‘economic
and status resources for possession of a woman’’ whose ‘‘main resource’’ is her
sexuality. With the emergence of this market, women try to manipulate their scarcity:
‘‘The most favorable female strategy, in a situation in which men control the economic
world, is to maximize her bargaining power by appearing both as attractive and as
inaccessible as possible,’’ and to promote monogamy and stigmatize the promiscuous.
But with the entry of women into the paid labor force, they became more ‘‘free to
strike their bargains without economic compulsion’’ (1971:13f, 16).
Collins recognized that this was only a partial change, but that ‘‘it is now at least
possible for a number of different things to be bargained: income resources as well as
sexual attractiveness, social status, personal compatibility, deference, and emotional
support. . . . Where women bring economic resources of their own, they may concen-
trate on bargaining for sexual attractiveness on the part of men,’’ which leads to the
rise of the ideal of male sexual attractiveness. ‘‘A pure market based on rankings in
terms of sexuality, in the sense discussed by Zetterberg, thus becomes more prominent
for both men and women, but as only one of the many sexual markets in existence’’
(1971:17, 19).
Thus Collins integrated the timeless idea that women’s sexual scarcity is the key to
what power they have with a general and theoretically consistent approach to social
action as a combination of conflict and exchange. He discussed both the system of
exchange of male support for female sex à la Davis and the more autonomous sexual
ranking à la Zetterberg as being different, though overlapping, historical types. We
might therefore assume that such a market perspective is the most general and
reasonable one for the subject in question. But surely it seems somewhat odd to
begin by looking for a social organization of sexual desiring akin to the organization
of values of sociological theory, and end up with the apparently anomic world of the
market—in other words, the very historical circumstance of atomized action that
prompted the question! In fact, this tension was perceived by some of the authors.
We go on to demonstrate the weaknesses of the market approach.
FROM THE SEXUAL MARKET TO THE SEXUAL FIELD
What is a Sexual Market?

Both Davis (1936:395, 405) and Zetterberg (1966:140f) discussed the problem of
‘‘anomie’’ in sexual ranks, but neither realized that the anomie was in their analyses,
not the world. Both began by asserting the importance of the normative regulation of
sexual ranks, but provided analyses that included only the barest normative elements.
The only entrance of those norms Davis considered essential was the rather feeble
one that losing participants must accept defeat—that possessions must be seen as
property. ‘‘[Consider] the sudden entrance of a strange but attractive young
woman. . . . Gradually a few competitors take the lead. Social order then requires
that the others recognize the superiority of these, quit struggling, and turn their
attention elsewhere.’’ Similarly, Zetterberg (1966:141) argued that ‘‘[i]t is known that
society regulates whatever places persons in any one of its dimensions of
stratification. . . . If sexual relations produce ranks, that fact in itself will generate a
set of social norms,’’ but the only norms he brought into play were those stemming
from the fact that the ranking was to be kept secret.
This paradox of beginning with strong talk about the importance of norms and
ending up without any indicates the ambiguous nature of a sociological reliance on
anomic market metaphors to explain the social regulation of action. Although the
current work in economic sociology finds markets—real economic markets, even the
stock market—to be social institutions, not incarnated economic abstractions (Lie
1997; classic examples are White (1981), Baker (1984), and Fligstein (2001)), the
understanding of market behavior used to discuss sexuality tends to assume an
abstract and perfect market.
As Swedberg (1994) has stressed, classic economic treatments of markets have been
surprisingly undertheorized—what was meant by ‘‘market’’ was generally more
implicit than explicit. We may say that an efficient market exists when the following
conditions are met (see Stigler 1968:5–12): there are a large number of buyers and
sellers, none of whom commands a large proportion of the market, and all of whom
are free to decline any offered trade.11 Trades are made in money prices, and the costs
of making any transaction are negligible. Goods traded are divisible and comparable,
and their quality can be determined easily, or at least any information about their
quality not accessible to buyers would not alter buyers’ offered prices. Information
about the transactions made by others is public, and people rationally attempt to
maximize their own subjective utility. These assumptions lead to powerful results—
items carry prices that allow all individuals to increase their subjective utility and that
efficiently distribute supplies and direct production. Most relevant to us, the marginal
cost of a good to a buyer is the same as the marginal cost to a seller, and so we may
say that these prices bring ‘‘equality.’’
If the market approach made analytical sense, it would be rather unscientific to
reject it merely on the grounds of a disciplinary prejudice for stronger social factors.
But when we seek to uncover the social logic of sexual desiring, the market approach
fails us in two important ways. The first has to do with the oft-mentioned point that a
market approach dissolves into tautology when there are unobservable utility func-
tions (not to mention unobservable supply schedules, as in this case), as any outcome
can be explained by crafting appropriate utilities (see, e.g., Etzioni 1988). More
importantly, to ask why there is consensus regarding a principle of stratification in
sexual desirability is to ask a question about the basis of one of these utilities, that is,
the utility of one body as opposed to another. To make all utilities exogenous to the
analysis is then—as noted by Collins (1993:204) and Kanazawa (2001:1133)—to fail
to answer the question. Instead of having a useful framework in which to ask an
empirical question, we have a one-size-fits-all story that tells us nothing in particular.
The second failure is more particular to the case of a ‘‘sexual’’ market, in which no
objects are exchanged that carry prices. This drowns whatever tautological virtues the
market approach might have when utilities are unobservable in a sea of confusion, as
analysts cannot separate the price of an object, its utility for a purchaser, its intrinsic
value, and the object itself. As England and Farkas (1986:53) point out in their
11
This last point is generally forgotten by rational choice theorists, such as Coleman (1990), who consider
any fight an exchange and any meleé a market.
discussion of marriage markets, economists assume that ‘‘interpersonal utility com-

parisons are meaningless.’’ Yet because there are no prices, the market approach used
by sociologists here not only assumes that such comparisons can be made meaningful,
but that these utilities can be assumed to be exactly the same. Because of this, even an
approach that admits that the market metaphor is immune to disproof, but sees it as
theoretically generative, collapses—instead of generating theory, this approach breeds
paradox. We examine not only Davis’s and Collins’s use of market logic, but also the
arguments of Posner (1992) and the analyses of Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, and
Michaels (1994), the most important empirical investigation in the sociology of
sexuality to date.12
To conduct this critique with the greatest clarity and rigor, given that arguments as
stark as ours regarding the empty nature of the market model require clear support, it
is necessary to introduce some simple notation consistent with the market model
(though such notation is not consistent with our own approach). Define the overall
utility of some potential partner j for any person i as:
X X
ij ¼ i xj þ ik zjk ; where xj ¼ x*j þ wjl :
k l
The first component of this utility, xj, is the ‘‘attractiveness’’ of the potential partner,
however defined, while the various zjk are all those factors affecting the utility of the
partner that are not perceived as ‘‘attractiveness’’ per se. For example, in Davis’s
model, one such z might be wealth. The weights ai and bi indicate that various factors
are weighed differently by different persons; if we wanted to fully replicate Davis’s
analysis, these would be functions of the marginal utility of person j’s contribution of
some factor to person i’s existing stock. The social organization here is found in the
fact that the factors only have j subscripts, not i’s—there is no disagreement among
persons as to how others ‘‘rate’’ on various attributes. None of the authors we
reviewed introduced such disagreement.
If we are to give the market model fullest flexibility, the ‘‘attractiveness’’ component
x must be potentially decomposable into two portions: one x* that has to do with
some specific bodily attractiveness, and others w that are not directly bodily yet are
immediately perceived in the form of greater attractiveness.13 To illustrate: if women
follow Davis’s logic or Parsons’s ([1942] 1949c:225) ‘‘female glamour pattern’’ and
prefer ‘‘rich and powerful men’’ because they are willing to give up some attractiveness
in a potential partner to gain riches and power, then ‘‘riches’’ and ‘‘power’’ enter into
this model as zs. If, however, women perceive rich and powerful men as attractive,
then riches and power enter this model as ws. The distinction between these two types
of elements is clearly central for any sociological investigation of the organization of
desiring.
The market approach we analyze not only defines the utility of one person for
another as above, it also makes the substantive claim that as a market, the sexual
12
The Laumann et al. volume, being the result of collaboration between researchers of different back-
grounds, has overlapping and at times frankly competing explanatory strategies; here, we focus only on the
market approach. But we wish to note that two of the authors, in recent theoretical work (Laumann and
Gagnon 1995, esp. at p. 204), have called for a study of the social structuring of sexual pairing in terms
compatible with our approach below. Further, we must acknowledge that our general approach has been
greatly influenced by the earlier work of Laumann on networks and Gagnon on scripting. Once again, we
subject this work to critical attention precisely because we believe that it is exemplary, and hence any
analytic problems can be traced back to the use of market metaphors.
13
Because of this immediacy, we refrain from assigning weights to the different components.
market leads to exchanges of equal utilities. As emphasized below, in the absence of

measures of resources (z) and preference structures (b), this claim is untestable. But we
may at least use the assumption that equal utilities are exchanged to get conditional
information about the joint effect of person i’s preference and person j’s attributes
(though we may not be able to disaggregate them)—conditional, that is, on our
assumption being correct. But we shall demonstrate that rather than leading to
reasonable, if conditional, analyses, this approach necessarily degenerates; finally,
we demonstrate that it is not simply that there is no reason for the core postulates
and conclusions of this approach to be necessarily true; they are actually unreason-
able, unproductive, and false.
From Rational Action to Rationalizing Action

Returning to our central issue of the social organization of sexual desiring, we may
begin with the most fundamental question, namely, the nature of attractiveness itself.
Is it a singular bodily attractiveness (which might be asocially organized), or is it
composed of additional components? The simplest response of the market theorists is
to refuse to analyze the social components of attractiveness. There are two subver-
sions of this, both employed by Posner (1992). In one version, one may simply declare
that all utilities are defined in relation to exogenous preference structures, about
which we know nothing. In matters of taste, there is not only no dispute—there is
no analysis. In this case, the ‘‘economic’’ analysis then becomes only a dreary exercise
in translation: one simply calls every apparent inclination someone seems to have a
‘‘benefit’’ and any apparent disinclination a ‘‘cost,’’ and, given any decision, proclaims
(to no one’s surprise) that the benefits outweigh the costs. In the other version, one
may come up with nonsociological explanations for this bodily utility. Here, Posner
(1992:93) uses sociobiology to explain (suspiciously time-bound) standards of attrac-
tiveness (such as that women with larger breasts have been found to eke out a slightly
larger amount of milk when lactating).
When either of these tactics are employed, the market metaphor, whatever possible
attractions it might have, tells us nothing about the social organization of sexual
desiring. But market analyses usually do not renounce such explanatory potential—
instead, they use the assumption of an exchange of equal utilities to comprehend the
logic of the choice process as a whole. That is, if we assume that uij ¼ uji, and we also
know that there are some cases in which x*i > x*j , we can hunt for some other factor,
say wj, that balances the exchange. Let us follow the analysts as they pursue this from
the reasonable to the tautological.
Imagine we have found a case of apparently unequal exchange of bodily attractive-
ness. We may propose that other characteristics not reducible to bodily attractiveness
enter into the pairing decision, and hence that this exchange is in fact equal. Laumann
et al. (1994:11) take the notion of human capital, normally used to account for wage
differentials, and propose that ‘‘there are also types of human capital that facilitate the
pursuit of sexual objectives.’’ Further, one may posit as do Posner (1992:118) and
Laumann et al. (1994:11; also see England and Farkas 1986:44) that in a compan-
ionate relationship, some of these sexual human capital skills are partner specific, and
hence give an additional utility to preserving the relationship that can compensate for
the lack of the utility of newness that comes with a different sexual partner. Here, it
seems as if the market approach has produced an interesting contribution, namely, the
existence of a possible w component of attractiveness not reducible to some totally
exogenous bodily attractiveness. This contribution, it must be admitted, is
substantively empty, since this utility is totally invisible, and one is free to postulate an
equally plausible, and equally invisible, utility pulling in the opposite direction. In
other words, the addition of a utility to partner specificity can explain why there is less
changing of partners than might otherwise be expected—if this is observed. But, of
course, were people to change partners more often than might be expected, this can be
explained with equal ease—the utility coming from novelty outweighs that coming
from asset specificity. The same theoretical apparatus can be invoked to account for
totally opposite findings.
A reasonable response would be that one should not fault theory for missing
observations; it is in principle possible to measure the acquisition of partner-specific
skills, in which case this becomes a testable claim. But—and here is the key point—
given the market assumption, any such data only force us to repeat the cycle of
inventing new utilities to balance the equation. That is, we may compute new pre-
dicted utilities that take into account this new factor we have measured, but still find
some difference e’ between them. Indeed, such an e’ is certainly expected if, like
Collins, one posits an infinite number of other possible factors that go into the general
utility. We see Laumann et al. (1994:11) inexorably drawn along in this direction: they
continue their analysis by reasonably suggesting that ‘‘[a]nother type of human capital
used to secure sexual activity is the skills necessary for maintaining an existing
relationship. These might include . . . the ability to accommodate his or her personality
and interests, to get along with his or her family and friends and so forth.’’
There are two things to note here, in addition to the fundamental point that this is
indeed a logically sound extension of the market approach. The first is that we are
clearly moving away from the identification of factors that are components of ‘‘attrac-
tiveness’’ per se (ws in the model above), and moving toward ones that are theoreti-
cally opposing, namely, factors that can compensate for a lack of attractiveness (zs).
Yet there is nothing in the market model that can distinguish between the utility
gained by that portion of one’s partner’s human capital that is realized in the form of
one’s increased sexual pleasure, and that which is realized in the form of easier
relations with one’s parents. Accordingly, while this may have relevance for issues
of choice (Laumann et al.’s primary concern), this seems unlikely to be a fruitful way
to understand desiring.
The second thing to note is that not only does such an approach seem to miss the
‘‘desiring’’ aspect of the organization of desiring, it also misses the organization.
Laumann et al. clearly consider this sexual human capital as something that should
be stable in terms of its differential distribution—accordingly, they attempt to discuss
those who ‘‘possess more of the traits most valued.’’ Yet their definition of such
resources resists any such definition. The analogous situation in economics to
Laumann et al.’s ‘‘human capital’’ for dates (which includes the ability to get along
with one’s partner’s family) would be to attempt to construct a theory in which
human capital included being the same height as one’s boss. It would be impossible
then to speak of people who had ‘‘more’’ human capital than others. In other words,
we logically must abandon the constraints on those weights (b) that would allow us to
use the assumption of equal exchange to identify factors (z) contributing to increased
utility.
Thus the market approach’s strength—its ability to consistently find creative terms
to justify its assumption of equal exchange—is its weakness. But imagine that the
market analyst is eventually faced with evidence of stubborn differences in utilities
that will not go away. What can be done? In a brilliant move, the analyst can
postulate that the very disutility of the less attractive partner is a utility. Collins
(1975:253) writes: ‘‘A highly secure and (erotically or economically) attractive person
can profit from a ‘mismatch’ to a less attractive person, by demanding greater
subservience from him or her as the price of staying.’’ But if one’s disutility is one’s
very utility (the more attractive chooses the less attractive in order to get the sub-
servience), then it seems that any pairing is matched in terms of price by fiat.
The only response to the charge of tautology is to admit that there could be
situations in which the more attractive partner refuses to exact any surplus subser-
vience from the less attractive. But it is hard to imagine that a market theorist would
need to accept this as a falsification of the postulate of equal exchange; one simply
brings in the well-known egoistic utility of altruism, and hence the pleasure taken in
refraining from obtaining subservience, and the equation is again balanced. Indeed, it
is not hard to imagine the most rarified utility of all being the second-order pleasure
taken in not taking pleasure in refraining from exacting subservience. The point is not
that such utilities are impossible, it is that this line of theorizing is necessarily flawed if
any disproof is handled by the creation of a utility that only serves to cancel the
disproof. It is as if the error term in an equation were instantly made into a theoretical
term, leading a model to fit perfectly. We go from a model of rational action to a model
rationalizing action; we can come up with a seemingly good excuse for any observation.14
The Utility of Disutility or the Disutility of Utility?

Not only does the market metaphor distract us from the search for the social logic of
partnering by offering a story for all problems, but it postulates an equality of
exchange that is unjustified according to economic logic. Even where objects carry
prices, for any buyer and seller, there are frequently a range of possible terms of trade
that will clear the market, in that each produces an increase in the marginal utility of
the participants (see Coleman 1990:670–74). Where objects do not carry prices (which
is, as said by Laumann et al. (1994:111f), the case for sexual markets), assuming equal
utilities necessarily leads to paradox.
For example, Collins (1975:253) proposed that ‘‘[u]nattractive persons of both
sexes . . . may be motivated toward a lasting formal contract out of their weak market
positions: they would have trouble getting anyone better.’’ But if the sexual market
gave each person a price based on the combination of their sexual value and their
other attributes, and people then matched price for price, why would the unattractive
people marry their early partners? Indeed, for every mismatched low person marrying
a high person, there must be a high person marrying a low. What is the motivation for
the mismatched highs to lock in this bargain? If it is the subservience claimed above,
why would the lows want to lock in such a (no longer fortuitous) deal?
We do not mean to comb through Collins’s writings and pick nits; rather, we
believe that the idea is substantively quite reasonable but formally bizarre given the
orthodox market approach.15 The market metaphor requires that one’s ‘‘value-in-
14
We note that there is a formal homology between these market analyses of sexual desiring and those
coming from so-called evolutionary psychology, which lead to the same paradox of postulating a utility of
disutility (see Batten 1992:48; Zahavi 1975).
15
For one example, Holland and Eisenhart (1990:95; cf. Holland and Skinner 1987:102) found evidence
among college women that differences in attractiveness between dating partners could be compensated for
by better/worse treatment, as Collins says. For another, Burgess and Locke ([1945] 1950:386) cite infor-
mants who make it clear that going steady is a retreat from competition on the part of those with lower
ratings, and Elder (1969:526) found ‘‘going steady’’ negatively associated with later upward mobility for
women. This supports what Collins has suggested above, even though it leads to paradox in the market
metaphor. Furthermore, it is a pattern that is probably specific to a particular constellation of the sexual
field—in other contexts, the opposite pattern has been observed (Holmes and Hatch 1938).
oneself’’ is the same as one’s ‘‘value-for-another’’—as noted above, a real market

produces this by assigning a single price to every good, hence ensuring that we can
ignore idiosyncrasies in preference structures when examining the value of any com-
modity (see Coleman (1984) and Frey and Eichenberger (1996) on the deviations of
marriage from a perfect market). But the commitment to the same outcome in the
absence of a price-setting market leads to wild fluctuations in value as the person of
low attractiveness is construed as desirable because of the subservience that accom-
panies low attractiveness. The use of market logic where there is no market leads to a
total inability to identify the social organization of sexual desiring—instead, analysts
are forced to embrace an orthodox economic model where this desiring must
be fundamentally idiosyncratic, asocial, and inexplicable.16 Thus while Posner
(1992:111ff) admits that one motivation for sexual activity is irreducibly sociable, he
ignores this possibility in all of his analyses. To follow through on this idea would lead
us to question the idea that ‘‘desires’’ exist independently of ‘‘markets’’ that allocate
goods.
However, it is precisely such questioning of the independence of desires that we saw
in Waller’s analysis of the case where a person’s value was affected by her deliberately
contrived scarcity. It is important to realize that this is actually different from the case
in which the price paid for an object increases with its scarcity (the logic used by
Collins). Waller instead points to the case in which, at the limit, there is no ‘‘object’’
apart from the scarcity itself—there is no bodily ‘‘there’’ there, one might say. As
Burgess and Locke ([1945] 1950:384; also see Adler and Adler 1998:52) argued in their
later discussion of the rating-dating complex, each partner’s rating is affected by those
of the other partners, and so in perpetual flux (though men’s rating is more tied to
extra-dating ranks). Thus the woman’s value (in the pure form of this situation) is
more akin to that of paper money, which has value merely because of its scarcity, than
to that of a commodity (even gold) that has a preexisting demand.17 To the extent that
scarcity is manipulable, and one person’s estimation of another’s value is a function
only of the estimates of other persons, there are no efficient prices at all. This
elaboration requires that we treat the attractiveness of some person j* (xj*) as a
function of all uij*, transforming the individual utility function into a set of nonre-
cursive equations. As Orléan (1988:110) has pointed out, such a set of utilities
corresponding to a market based on ‘‘mimetic speculation’’ can be modeled as a
Markov process with an infinite number of distinct equilibria. Hence any relaxation
of the above model that allows one person’s evaluation of a prospective partner to
affect those of others—unless coupled with extremely strong assumptions about the
nature of interpersonal influence in this particular group—undermines the application
of the market model.
16
On the connection between orthodox economics and the rise of the idea of desire as fundamentally
idiosyncratic, see Birken (1988).
17
It is worth speculatively amplifying this contrast. An analysis along these lines might then suggest that in
such a system women are the currency that gives the price for men, who have an indexically formed value
from other systems (fraternity, sports). Although the idea of an ‘‘exchange of women’’ underlying the
general ‘‘political economy’’ of the sex/gender system à la Rubin (1985) is historically untenable, in such
cases as the rating-dating game, to the extent that women’s dating value is only a function of their scarcity
(and not, as is also the case, a function of their sorority, looks, dancing, etc.), then women may approximate
the free-floating significance function of money in ordering male prestige. Evidence of this in college dating
is given by Holland and Eisenhart (1990:96, 99, 105, 212; also see Irigaray 1985:170–91). It is perhaps not
without significance that Levi-Strauss’s own preemptive critique of Rubin’s approach holds that ‘‘women
are not primarily a sign of social value, but a natural stimulant’’—not simply a sign of value but the value
itself (Levi-Strauss [1949] 1969:62, 496), thus corroborating the implication of the above analysis that the
dissociation of the sexual field from sexual satisfaction allows the function of social valuation to become
primary.
In sum, whatever virtues the market approach has in constructing a ‘‘just-so story’’
for whatever is observed, these vanish in the situations where the attractiveness of any
person for another is shaped by the opinions of third parties. What, then, is left? Most
important is the assumption that if persons i and j successfully pair, then uij ¼ uji. In
other words, each person’s utility is a sufficient measure of the ‘‘price’’ of the other.
Indeed, were there a sexual market, this is what it would accomplish, for a market—as
opposed to just any conjunction of individuals pursuing their ends—is a place where
efficient prices are made. But as noted above, the sexual market produces no prices,
and if it is any kind of market, the sexual market must be a barter market (also see
Collins (1993:213f) regarding the more general case of symbolic interactions), which
unfortunately possesses none of the qualities that most endear markets to social
theorists (e.g., utility maximization).
As we have seen above, Laumann et al. recognized this difficulty due to an absence
of prices, but maintained that the pairing is sufficiently market-like to ensure the
matching of persons of equal value. ‘‘Anyone who has participated in the market for
sex partners knows that those possessing more of the traits most valued in a particular
culture have more opportunities for exchange than those possessing fewer. The
majority of these opportunities are likely to involve similarly or less attractive poten-
tial partners, from among whom each individual is expected to choose the ‘best deal’
that he or she can get. This mechanism of competition generates partnerships in which
the two partners are likely to have similar ‘values’ on the partner market’’ (1994:12),
since a partner will withdraw from a relationship where the costs outweighs the
benefits (1994:21).
However, this is to confuse a Panglossian comparison to an alternative road not
taken (you chose this person as opposed to not choosing, so the benefit must outweigh
the cost) with a wholly different issue of equal exchanges (your net gain is the same as
your partner’s net gain). Analysts seem to make the unreasonable assumption that the
cost to oneself of consenting to the pairing is the same as one’s utility for the other,
again a result of the confusion between value-in-oneself and value-for-another; it is
this assumption that leads to the belief that consent implies equality. But this is not
necessarily so. If we imagine a population divided into two subgroups A and B, with
identical preferences, and similar distributions in terms of ‘‘attractiveness’’ (x) differ-
ing only in mean ‘‘quality’’ (say the mean for group A is greater than that for B, i.e.,
E[xA] > E[xB]), then all persons might pair according to rank in their respective
subgroup (A1 matched with B1, A2 with B2, etc.), while every single A comes off
worse than the corresponding B. That is, for person i from group A and person j from
group B, (uij ¼ axj) < (uji ¼ axi) where a is some positive scaling constant; this can be true
even if the net gain for the member of group A is positive, that is, uij > 0. In short, the fact
that one has consented to an exchange does not imply that the exchange is equal.
Indeed, the most rigorous economic approach to this issue has taken the form of
what is called a two-sided matching game, where we assume that all unions are serially
monogamous, that each man has a partial order of preferences for female partners,
and that each woman has a partial order of preferences for male partners. (Here, we
rely on Roth and Sotomayor (1990).) Several important conclusions have been drawn
from such modeling, but they are not at all those derived on the basis of the market
metaphor. First, while it can be proved that such games have stable equilibria closely
analogous to a Nash equilibrium (there is no M1 matched to W1 and W2 matched to
M2 such that W1 prefers M2 to M1, and M2 prefers W1 to M2), it is not true that just
any process of social interaction will actually reach such an equilibrium—indeed, the
more plausible mechanisms do not.
Second, such equilibria are not guaranteed to exist for single-sided matching
(e.g., homosexual fields). None of the authors we reviewed would have been likely
to propose that the dynamics of heterosexual fields were integrally dependent on
the twoness of the choice process. (The extent to which homosexual pairing may
have a two-sided nature is of great importance and has been explored by Wiley and
Herschkorn (1989).) Third, the matching process does not allow us to conclude that
the utility contributed by the partners is equal; indeed, it necessarily follows that the
interests of men as a whole run counter to those of women. The matching that is best
for the men is worst for the women. And certainly, one cannot make any conclusions
as to the tradeoffs between different utilities that might enter the matching process—
all of this is folded into each individual’s ranking, which is treated as given and
nonproblematic.
Thus the simple claim of equal exchange does not follow from the axiom of rational
and free actors, nor, accepted as an postulate, does it have any theoretically produc-
tive consequences.18 What is left of the market approach, then, is only the cost-benefit
rationality of the actors. But in the absence of a true market, we can derive nothing
from this; furthermore, this is the one thing we know not to be generally the case: to
the extent that persons adopt a cost-benefit subjectivity to ensure their happiness in
sexual relationships, they are more likely to be unhappy (see Sprecher 1998). The only
recourse left is to claim the rationality of choosing not to be rational; we leave it to
others to determine what explanatory power such a formulation has.19
In sum, we must accept the fundamental poverty of the market approach in the
analyses reviewed; far from simply being tautological, it is an approach that aspires to
tautology and only reaches paradox. We emphasize that our claim is not that a
market analysis cannot treat sexual decision making; indeed, it may be empirically
testable, but only when attractiveness is exogenously given (e.g., some people are
beautiful). To the extent that trans-individual consistencies in sexual desiring are more
complex that this, and we seek to explain them, the market approach fails us
spectacularly. Further, we do not object to the particular assumptions that often go
into the market metaphor (e.g., high agreement on attractiveness, compensating
utilities, self-interested behavior). Our point is that even if these assumptions are
empirically justified, the social organization of pairing is not such as to lead to the
strong conclusions made by analysts. Finally, we do not claim that sexual decision
making cannot be rigorously modeled using approaches pioneered in economics, but
such modeling does not rehabilitate the conclusions that have been drawn from the
market metaphor.
Be that as it may, a market model of anything generates a tremendous degree of face
plausibility in 21st-century America. Accordingly, sympathetic readers often note that
modifications to the classical market model that allow for a more realistic application
to actual economic markets also produce models that do not necessarily suffer the
18
Analyses of mate choice that take seriously the process involved propose that information on the
distribution of possible partners’ quality is so costly that rational individuals do not try to maximize the
quality of their partner, but ‘‘satisfice,’’ or take the first one over a ‘‘reservation threshold.’’ See England and
Farkas (1986:39f) and Todd and Miller (1999).
19
Posner (1992:85) finally throws out this one substantive element of the rational choice approach, namely,
the assumption of rationality: ‘‘Responding appropriately to incentives, whether consciously or not, is
rational; so animals are rational as well as people.’’ Now it may be true that much of animal behavior
can be profitably studied in terms of rational action, such as foraging behavior (see, e.g., Drent 1982), but
one can be sure that Posner means to include all animal action—the lemming hurling itself off a cliff is, in a
sense, rational, and it is this sense that is a dead end for sociology. It is not necessary that respecting the
exogenous and idiosyncratic nature of preferences structures necessarily leads to abandoning a substantively
meaningful definition of rationality: for example, see von Magnus (1984:640).
deficits we have outlined here. Exactly—for these modifications entail the systematic
unraveling of the very constraints that give the market model any general explanatory
power, and simply replace ‘‘market’’ with ‘‘interpersonal interactions.’’ Since we know
already that sexual behavior falls into this category, the use of such weakened market
terminology clearly adds nothing.20 Put another way, everyone agrees that sexual
pairing is not a strict price-making market, but that it is like a market. But the
possibility of metaphor is not itself a sufficient justification for an analytic approach
devoid of explanatory power.
What happens, then, when we cast aside the market metaphor? We need not only
follow Waller in examining the principle whereby differential evaluation is assigned to
prospective partners, but also to problematize the goal of sexual action. In what
follows we go on to use field theory to discuss how such a problematization can be
made; we argue that this extends Weberian action theory in a more satisfactory
manner than the market approach. Indeed, the question of the organization of sexual
value comes directly out of Weber’s own work, but his approach relies on surprisingly
a-sociological premises that are remedied by attention to the sexual field.
Weber and the Erotic Value Sphere

In ‘‘Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,’’ Max Weber ([1915]
1946:323–24) put forward an idea of ‘‘spheres of value’’ in the modern world, areas in
which there is a potential purified subjective orientation that can maximize (speaking
loosely) the ‘‘value’’ of that sphere. Because the nature of the value imposes substan-
tive constraints on effective action, the purification of action orientations (a process
Weber believed was underway) leads to clear standards of the consistency of practical
conduct in each sphere. Each value sphere accordingly possesses an inner lawfulness,
or a tendency toward its distinct principles (eigengesetzlichkeit). One of these value
spheres, according to Weber, was the erotic.21 Although ‘‘sexual love’’ is the ‘‘greatest
irrational force of life,’’ it may still be the basis for consistent conduct following a
purified orientation. This has happened through the sublimation of naturalistic sexu-
ality into the ‘‘consciously cultivated’’ and purified sphere of eroticism (1946:343f).22
This purified eroticism stands in stark contrast to the emphasis on ecstatic and
orgiastic sexual experience associated with mysticism that comes into necessary con-
flict with the rationalization of knowledge and culture (Weber 1958:138, 149, 151).
But paradoxically, precisely as it is differentiated from ‘‘natural’’ sex and subjected to
its own regulations, eroticism is seen as ‘‘a gate into the most irrational and thereby
real kernel of life, as compared with the mechanisms of rationalization.’’ Weber traced
the development of the erotic sphere from courtly love to modern intellectualist
vocationalism, where eroticism remains the only possible connection to animality
and a ‘‘sensation of an inner-worldly salvation from rationalization’’ (Weber [1915]
1946:345–47).
20
It is also possible to use the same formal approach of decision-making theory to handle sexual decision
making without assuming a rational subjectivity, but the consequences are quite at odds with what is
assumed by the market theorists (see Loewenstein (1996) for a rigorous elaboration).
21
The inclusion of the erotic value sphere is far from an afterthought—Schluchter (1996:59) makes the case
that it was precisely his encounter with the ‘‘sexual-erotic ‘liberation movement’’’ that led Weber to
recognize the necessity of distinguishing between different types of values.
22
Weber gets the idea of an erotic value sphere from Rickert. Rickert (1913:313–19, 323) had used
eroticism as the chief example of a more general sphere of life values, those values that were social (as
opposed to contemplative), and oriented toward the present, having chiefly to do with social bonds,
especially personal union. Furthermore, Rickert argued that there was an aspect of sexual life that was
not merely an instinct, instinct being indifferent to values.
Weber argued, then, that modernization has led to the creation of a distinct value
sphere of eroticism, with its own goal that is necessarily distinct from ‘‘organic’’ sex
per se. It possesses its own laws of action and development, and correspondingly
appears in distinct unions (extramarital affairs). Although it is a sphere of opposition
to the rationalization of life in general, its existence is negatively defined by this very
rationalization, and while it claims to transcend other conflicting values on the
grounds of a destined conjunction of two souls, it is unavoidably a contest à la
Zetterberg of ‘‘the most intimate coercion of the soul of the less brutal partner’’
(1946:348).
Weber thus proceeded beyond the others in suggesting that the sexual system can
have goals somewhat detached from the simple satisfaction of a biological impulse,
but he nowhere explained how he had deduced that such eroticism is a necessarily
fundamental value sphere (as opposed to, say, a Wallerian sphere of popularity). As
mentioned above (note 22), Weber drew this idea of value spheres from Rickert
(1913), but Rickert’s system of values was constructed on trans-historical principles
unappealing to sociologists. Weber’s formulation of an erotic value sphere also
contained something profoundly asocial—while its pairings have a distinct institu-
tional form (the affair), the laws of the erotic value sphere are unrelated to concrete
institutions.
Contemporary Weberians tend to ignore this sexual aspect of Weber’s understand-
ing of the effects of rationalization;23 however, we see it as a significant precedent for
theorizing the formation of an autonomous sphere of specifically sexual action with
its own logic—but a precedent with a philosophical grounding untenable for a flexible
sociological theory. This leads us to the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu, which, we
hope to show, can generalize and position both the market-based approaches to
sexual stratification found in Davis et al., and the value-spheres-based approach to
the goal of sexual action of Weber. To summarize our review, the American tradition
of action theory understood ‘‘value’’ to imply both an integrative function, and a
correspondence to price; hence discussions slipped from analyzing the social construc-
tion of sexual desiring to analyzing the sexual construction of social desiring—allow-
ing theorists to uncovered their usual suspects for explaining macro order (rationality
and integration) applied to a new domain. While the American tradition built on one
portion of Weber’s work, it ignored what Roth has called Weber’s sociology of
domination. Bourdieu begins with this portion of Weber, but integrates it with the
conception of fields, preserving the distinct laws (eigengesetzlichkeit) that Weber saw
as characteristic of value spheres (Bourdieu 1990a:389, [1989] 1996:433, n. 2), but
without making transcendent philosophical assumptions.
23
It is interesting that Habermas (1987:326) excises eroticism as one of the value spheres when discussing
the above work of Weber (he also excises power as a value sphere in its own right), so as to make it
compatible with his own trinitarian formula of self/other/thing. But he then must include sexual stratifica-
tion in an entirely different form: in his explication of the sources of prestige, he divides attributes from
resources, and both are in turn divided into empirical versus rational (a division that corresponds roughly to
whether they motivate via systemic media or via communication oriented to mutual understanding). Among
the empirical attributes are strength (which allows reward or punishment), know-how (which produces
expectations of success), and physical attractiveness (which produces emotional ties) (Habermas 1987:182).
He then not only ignores erotic know-how and makes it a merely physical attribute, but because of his
refusal to consider sex a fundamental ‘‘moment,’’ he links this physical attribute to emotional ties that the
body somehow inspires. Parsons (1979:2), however, did not make this excision—instead, he proposed a triad
of erotic/economic/intellectual spheres for explaining social evolution.
Bourdieu’s Field Theory

We consider Bourdieu’s field theory to be a useful if imperfect vocabulary to for-
mulate the fundamental question regarding the social organization of sexual desiring,
namely, the extent to which it possesses an autonomous logic of striving and of
hierarchy.24 The benefit of Bourdieu’s approach comes not in the mere description
of the question of the social organization of desiring, but in the capacity to formulate
it in a way that is largely independent of the answer. Because of the familiarity of
Bourdieu’s theoretical terminology, we merely review the most important terms for
our use, the correlative ‘‘capital’’ and ‘‘field.’’ Bourdieu’s use of the word ‘‘field’’
combines two senses; that of a field in the physical sciences with that of a military
metaphor of a field of contestation (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1990c:143). Perhaps more than
Bourdieu, we conceive of a field as being defined by a set of interlocking institutions
(cf. DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Each field generates a specific form of ‘‘capital,’’ a
composite of relational resources that determine dominance in the field, endow it with
a particular libido or interest, and sustain its relatively autonomous—and in part
historically contingent—principle of striving and optimization (Bourdieu 1990c:87).
The coordinating ‘‘mechanism’’ of the practical microcosm of the field is the habitus,
‘‘a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences,
functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions’’
(Bourdieu 1977:82f). Habitus, as the internalization of the structures of fields, allows
us to incorporate institutional sensibilities and gives us the capacity for objectively
strategic action and ‘‘traversal’’ of fields without positing generic Machiavellian sub-
jectivity nor wholly static and omnipotent social structure.
A field, in order to be a field, must possess some degree of autonomy from other
fields, yet fields tend toward alignment, most importantly through the convertibility of
one form of capital into another. Although these different capitals are conceptually
and formally independent, one may be able to trade in one form for another at a given
discount rate; Bourdieu’s later publications attempted (perhaps with only moderate
success) to specify how these rates of exchange are influenced by a kind of overall
cultural geography fashioned by activities of the state and economic sector (see
Wacquant 1993:12; Bourdieu [1989] 1996).
Despite the economic metaphor of ‘‘capital,’’ it is important to realize that a field is
not a market—indeed, Bourdieu suggests that it was only for a relatively brief period
that the economic field enjoyed such autonomy from other fields that its logic was
wholly that of an economic market (Bourdieu [1980] 1990b:133). In stark contrast to
those who tend to assume market behavior as a neutral template arising from
atomistic action, for Bourdieu any field, even the economic, has concrete institutions
in which players operate; the market may be one such institution.
Further, the ‘‘interest’’ or ‘‘libido’’ of each field is endogenous to that field, not
exogenously given (Bourdieu 1990c:88, 91, 110). This means that in contrast to the
approach of the market metaphor, here the social determination of value is not
excluded from the realm of discussion as an irreducible idiosyncrasy of wholly sub-
jective preferences. But neither are preferences assumed (as by Parsons) to be
anchored in shared values. Rather, preferences can, at least as a first approximation,
be taken to indicate some social position.
24
For example, despite the looseness of Bourdieu’s equation of capital with ‘‘that which can be the basis of
power,’’ we still prefer ‘‘capital’’ over the seemingly more neutral ‘‘resources’’ of James Coleman (1990), since
from Marx sociologists are likely to understand capital not as a thing, but as a relation, and it is such a
relation that underlies the ‘‘sexual capital’’ that is equivalent to a consensus regarding desirability.
We propose that what all the authors reviewed above have been discussing is the
sexual field, that is, the field in which the ‘‘libido’’ as discussed by Bourdieu is socially
identical to the specifically sexual libido; the riddle on which the market metaphors
foundered was determining the nature of specifically sexual capital and its degrees of
convertibility.25
Bourdieu himself does not see sexuality as being institutionalized in a particular
field; we argue that this is related to certain inconsistencies and loosenesses in his
usage. First of all, being mainly concerned with class exclusion and taste in Distinction
(which contains his most developed theory of attraction), he emphasizes homogamy
as the principle not only of marriage but also of love: ‘‘Love is also a way of loving
one’s own destiny in someone else and so feeling loved in one’s own destiny’’
(Bourdieu [1979] 1984:243). Intentionally or not, Bourdieu ironically echoes the
romantic definition of love as destiny—also discussed by Weber ([1915] 1946:348)—
but replaces the romantic’s vision of a supra-mundane order of souls and sensibilities
with predictable trajectories through social space.
When it comes to sexual attraction, as opposed to love, Bourdieu has not been
wholly consistent (also see McNay 1999:96). At some points, he suggests that class
homogamy operates: thus Bourdieu ([1989] 1996:180, 182) argues that as different
schoolings inculcate differences in bodily hexis ‘‘and even sexual habits’’ as well as
differences in habitus, there will be a tendency for like to like like (at least within the
dominant class that he is here examining). ‘‘As social positions embodied in bodily
dispositions, habitus contribute to determining whether (biological) bodies come
together or stay apart by inscribing between two bodies the attractions and repulsions
that correspond to the relationship between the positions of which they are the
embodiment.’’ But in other places, he parses sexual desirability into one element
coming from what the body signifies about the agent’s trajectory through social
space, and a second element, exogenous beauty, which is an accident of birth. Thus
Bourdieu ([1979] 1984:91) admits that ‘‘[e]ducationally equivalent individuals . . . may
differ radically as regards bodily hexis,’’ and that the latter can be used to accumulate
social capital.26 Bourdieu assumes that what is specific to sexual attractiveness (as
opposed to the valorization of class bodies) is ‘‘natural,’’ which is clearly incompatible
with a notion of sexual capital.
Bourdieu ([1979] 1984:152f) recognizes ‘‘the constitution of a socially recognized
corps of experts specializing in advice on sexuality,’’ but he does not take this to imply
25
Chancer has also proposed that ‘‘looks’’ can function ‘‘as a form of capital, as Bourdieu depicts’’
(1998:117f); while there are clear convergences between her approach and ours, there are important
differences. Most important, she defines capital in nonautonomous terms: because of her interest in the
use of women as a status signal among men (1998:114ff), sexual capital becomes something that women
possess but is used by men as a form of symbolic capital. Because she sees this system as at the heart of
sexism, Chancer then views sexual capital as a resource that disempowers those who hold it (1998:261). This
definition of sexual capital as something women are forced to have means that rather than formulate a
specifically sexual field, with its own mode of domination, Chancer posits a synchronization with other
forms of domination (e.g., race, sex, class) (1998:120). Although not using the term ‘‘sexual capital,’’
Holland and Eisenhart (1990:102f, 212, 218) make analogies to Bourdieu’s work on symbolic capital
when analyzing the logic of attractiveness.
26
‘‘One can begin to map out a universe of class bodies, which (biological accidents apart) tends to
reproduce in its specific logic the universe of the social structure. It is no accident that bodily properties
are perceived through social systems of classification which are not independent of the distribution of these
properties among the social classes. . . . Thus, bodies would have every likelihood of receiving a value strictly
corresponding to the positions of their owners in the distribution of the other fundamental properties—but
for the fact that the logic of social heredity sometimes endows those least endowed in all other respects with
the rarest bodily properties, such as beauty (sometimes ‘fatally’ attractive, because it threatens the other
hierarchies), and, conversely, sometimes denies the ‘high and mighty’ the bodily attributes of their positions,
such as height and beauty’’ (Bourdieu [1979] 1984:193).
the autonomy of the sexual field and hence a sexual capital; rather, attractiveness is
merely a form of ‘‘physical charm’’ that is, oddly, part of ‘‘cultural capital.’’ And
finally, while Bourdieu has occasionally (e.g., Bourdieu 1978:832) discussed sexual
attractiveness as a convertible resource, it has only been in the form of a general
physical capital available to the dominated classes, and it is gendered female, as
opposed to male, physical capital that leads to the sporting field (Wacquant 2003;
cf. Shilling 1993:127–47).
To some extent, these ambiguities come from his trying to discuss a form of
convertible capital that is not generated by a specific field, but they also seem related
to a more general ambiguity in Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus. Since the habitus, as
a set of classifying practices, is not conscious, Bourdieu (as any good Cartesian) tends
to assimilate it to the ‘‘body’’; further, the connotations of the Latin ‘‘habitus’’ include
‘‘bearing’’ or ‘‘deportment.’’ Thus Bourdieu tends to assume an inseparability between
the unconscious disposition that classifies bodies and the socially shaped bodily hexis
that is classified. Logic leads Bourdieu then to look for the homogamous attraction
due to the naturalizing process whereby the body classifying and the body classified
are shaped by the same social environment. But Bourdieu recognizes the insufficiency
of such an explanation, and so (not wholly unlike the market theorists we criticized)
he relies on an ‘‘accident of birth’’ to explain the rest.
These contradictions can be eliminated by considering the possibility of a specifi-
cally sexual field with a bodily capital that is not wholly indexical (i.e., that has no
value in itself, but merely points to the value of the person in some other social space),
but—to the extent that the field is autonomous—has its own genetic logic. Indeed,
other theorists have pointed to what may be seen as the creation of an autonomous
sexual field in the West during the past century.27 But the virtue of the vocabulary of
field is not its parsimony, nor the ability to retell the analyses of other theorists.
Instead, it directs us to certain empirical and historical questions that are difficult to
frame within the market perspective, and that also seem to us to be reasonable
avenues of investigation. We conclude by outlining three.
The Uses of the Field

Recasting the riddle posed by sexual stratification in the terms of field theory opens
three meaningful avenues of inquiry, all specifications of the general question whether
and in what ways a sexual field could be said to exist. The first is an attempt to gauge
the extent of the field effect, that is, to determine how—and with what intensity—sexual
27
Most importantly, Giddens (1992:27, 174) has argued that there has been an autonomization of
sexuality, which he links to the development of birth control. Although Giddens (1992:58, 144–47,
1991:93f, 205f) is more interested in the ‘‘pure relationship’’ and in intimacy than in sexual pairing, he
points to an institutional analysis stressing not only (like Altman (1983)) that developments in the hetero-
sexual field seem to have followed the homosexual field, but also the influence of expert knowledge.
Foucault, of course, has also put forward an argument as to the increasing autonomization of sexuality.
But Foucault privileges developments in medical science and demographic politics when accounting for
what might be seen as the autonomization of the sexual field, especially the increased interest in ‘‘sex itself.’’
Further, Foucault’s ([1976] 1980:48) vision of sex as one of the ‘‘multifarious power devices’’ deployed as
part of an increasing control over the body frequently verges on the conspiratorial. Increasing medical
knowledge might in some way be related to the increasing autonomization of sexual conduct, but more
prosaic factors that have been proposed for the latter since the turn of the century (birth control, weakening
of religious values, and changing childbirth patterns due to changing career imperatives (see Martin 1996))
seem sufficient to explain any autonomization, at least in roughest outlines. We note that Foucault ([1984]
1986:74) himself relies on such prosaic factors when, in the third volume, he ties the rise of what we might
call ‘‘marriage itself’’—marriage that is privatized, companionate, and general—to changing patterns of
upper-class mobility decreasing the importance of alliance in determining rank.
behavior and attitudes might be incited and coordinated by hegemonic systems of

judgment. There is no reason to assume that the degree of consensus regarding
standards of desirability is a constant across time and space: in contrast to the
universalism of the market approach, we may conclude that a field analysis is
unwarranted due to underlying disorganization in preferences. Thus we seek to
determine the boundaries of the field and their permeability, its division into subfields,
and the sanctions for those evading its dictates.
Indeed, we may be able to use empirical indications of agreement as a means of
delimiting a sexual field or decomposing it into subfields. That is, we assume that
there tends to be much higher consensus within subfields than across them. Yet we
consider these to be ‘‘subfields’’ of a larger field, as opposed to independent fields,
when any agent can generally take a single position overall. That is, either the agent
can be in only one subfield and not the other, or position in one subfield is quite
highly predicted by position in another.
The existence of such subfields may be understood as a form of horizontal as
opposed to vertical differentiation—that is, persons are distinguishable in some
relevant way without one being higher or lower in the field (see Martin 2003:34; cf.
Butler 2004:105). We may expect further horizontal differentiation even within sub-
fields. Detailed examination of what particular persons find attractive (e.g., Whittier
and Simon 2001:144) finds a duality between sense-of-self and what sorts of others are
desired. Because such senses-of-self are neither uniform nor randomly distributed, it
may be that the field analysis can shed light not only on the distribution of sexual
capital from more to less, but also on its qualitative variation. If, indeed, there is a
single social logic to both horizontal and vertical differentiation, then the relations
between subfields (e.g., stigmatization and emulation) may be explainable by the same
dynamics that structure domination and contest within these subfields. From within
the market metaphor, on the other hand, one cannot even ask such questions regard-
ing the distinctive socio-logic of a subfield and its relation to other subfields, since the
market approach assumes that people make use of a single calculating subjectivity
when taking any kind of action.
Indeed, Bourdieu’s approach has the signal advantage of being able to explain the
compatibility of objectively strategic practice with an absence of this strategic sub-
jectivity (‘‘Innocence is the privilege of those who move in their field of activity like
fish in water’’ (Bourdieu [1983] 1986:257, n. 18)). The market analysts, on the con-
trary, have rested their derivations on the assumption of strategic subjectivity (‘‘people
try to get the best they can’’), even though such subjectivity no more implies a market
than it does a war. Further, as we have seen, the market logic pushes us inexorably
either toward an exogenous bodily attractiveness, or toward an equation of attrac-
tiveness with the choice process itself. But the field approach, rather than producing a
seamless transition between those factors that ‘‘make up’’ attractiveness and those
factors that ‘‘make up for it’’—and a consequent formal puzzle—postulates a palpable
divide, the crossing of which produces the same subjective unease felt by the com-
mercial artist or any other person who betrays or compromises the immanent logic of
his or her field; the degree to which such compromises are made then becomes a
substantive question.
A second direction toward establishing the possible existence of a sexual field is the
attempt to isolate the specific constitution of the ‘‘interest-libido’’: Is it rarified
sensuality à la Weber, erotic power à la Zetterberg, or popularity pure and simple à
la Waller? Or is it, perhaps, as most recent analysts have seemed to assume, but never
made explicit, simply sexual contact with those of high sexual capital (and not sexual
release per se)? Certainly, we must be able to specify some such organizing principle
that is distinct from marriage or nonsexual leisure activities (e.g., ballroom dancing).
Further, we can ask several questions about the nature of sexual capital. First, we
attempt to specify not only what set of properties—or, perhaps better, what set of
relations—functions as sexual capital (as, e.g., in the empirical work of Holland and
Skinner (1987)), but also what field conditions allow this set of properties to function
as capital (Bourdieu [1989] 1996:264). Although researchers have repeatedly demon-
strated that there is a reasonably high agreement as to personal ‘‘attractiveness’’ (see
Feingold’s (1988) meta-analysis), little has been done to explore the logic of this
ranking, let alone its sociogenesis. But as Collins (1975:281) noted: ‘‘Attractiveness
is a social role as much as a state of appearance; learning to play it with self-
confidence results in a self-fulfilling prophecy, while the opposite process leads to
cumulative failure through awkwardness of posture, complexion, and the like.’’
Although Collins (1993) has pointed to the possible cumulative nature of success in
interaction ritual chains, and other researchers have noted that relative status position
affects how people hold their bodies (see the review in Henley 1977:82–93), we
propose that to understand the production of sexual capital, we must investigate
not only what properties are conventionally labeled as ‘‘attractive,’’ but how they
index a trajectory through the sexual field.
Second, we can attempt to determine the position of this capital on a general
dimension. Bourdieu ([1980] 1990b:57, 130; cf. 1986:243) speaks of two states of
capital, as objectified in institutions (the field) and as incorporated in the body as
habitus; he then suggests that the degree of the objectification of capital—its position
in the dialectic of the internalization of field as habitus and the externalization of
habitus as trajectory—is the most important difference between modes of domina-
tion.28 When fully exteriorized as in Waller’s endogenous dating rank, sexual capital,
we hazard, is akin to Coleman’s social capital: it is a network property of a node, as
opposed to an attribute of an isolated unit. When fully interiorized, sexual capital is
wholly a matter of the body and its ‘‘bearing’’ or ‘‘hexis.’’
There is reason not only to think that it is possible for sexual capital to vary in
degree of objectification (with implications as to the volatility and ‘‘naturalization’’ of
the sexual field), but also for this degree of objectification to differ for men and
women. Indeed, it is possible that ‘‘gender’’—that is, our cultural understandings of
sexual difference—is a kind of folk-sociological attempt to reference the differences
between the strategies of sexual capitalization of men and women, heterosexuals and
homosexuals, normal and deviant (see also McNay 1999:112). Once again, such
investigation is impossible from within the market perspective, where all desires are
unfathomable, idiosyncratic, exogenous, and yet absolutely comparable. The market
approach must posit a trans-historical attractiveness, as opposed to studying how
concrete institutions of the sexual field—for example, the barn dance as opposed to
the frat party—lead to different constitutions of sexual capital.
The third direction is to describe objectively the degree of autonomy of the sexual
field. Previously, analysts have focused on the disorganizing potential of sexual desire,
at least when this is joined with romantic love: it is that which messes up stratification
systems (Goode 1959). But if this is because the sexual field has its own logic (as
claimed by Weitman (1998:75)), and its own dictates, then the absence of one type of
organization is due to the presence of another. Are there concrete institutions that are
28
Interestingly, Laumann and Pappi (1976:188) also classified resources in terms of the degree to which
they were network or individual phenomena, as well as their degree of convertibility.
primarily oriented toward the sexual field as opposed to marriage or heterosocial

leisure (e.g., the ‘‘singles bar’’)? Do institutions outside the field (e.g., legal institutions
such as constraints on abortion) affect the distribution of sexual capital, or do they
affect choices while leaving the sexual capital of actors untouched? Is there an
institutional dispute over what constitutes valid meta-sexual authority, or is there
established and legitimated expertise?29 Does the capital of the field for men or for
women convert directly from the capital of some other field, or must it be independ-
ently generated within the sexual field? Conversely, can specifically sexual capital (if it
exists) be converted into other forms of capital? Rather than assume a homology of
attractiveness to social class, as Bourdieu frequently does, we can investigate this as an
empirical question. If the degree of autonomy has changed over time, historical
explanations for such change will be of the greatest interest.
Once more, this final investigation regarding the degree of autonomization of the
sexual field is difficult to frame within an orthodox market perspective where attrac-
tiveness is just one resource out of many contributing to a person’s ‘‘price.’’ Yet it may
very well be that changes in the degree of autonomization of the sexual field (should
one be found to exist) drive the historical changes of interest to Collins and others.
The history of courtship (e.g., Bailey 1988) suggests that there were times when the
sexual field—at least for the middle classes—became more autonomous and devel-
oped its own capital with relatively low convertibility to economic capital. But our
review suggests an additional hypothesis. Since the formation of a truly autonomous
sexual capital seems to involve the manipulation of scarcity and competition, it was
likely to be seen both by participants and later analysts in economic terms. However,
when the sexual field was closely connected to other fields, so that there was relatively
little autonomous sexual decision making, then despite the far greater weight of
economic considerations, economic metaphors were less likely to be used. We thus
suggest a slightly paradoxical outcome: to the extent that sexual pairing is substan-
tively tied to the economic field, it is naturalized and seen as noneconomic. But to the
extent that sexual orders become autonomous, and have a logic of their own that has
formal similarities to the economic field, this logic is understood in economic terms.
When we therefore take economic metaphors not as evidence of the actual organ-
ization of the sexual field, but of people’s understandings of it, we can then attempt to
give a history of the understanding of sexual value in the past century, especially in
feminist theory, which has traversed the range from Rubin’s (1985) belief that
women’s sexual value is at the heart of patriarchy to Simone de Beauvoir’s optimistic
(and Spencerian) embracing of those ‘‘sexually well-balanced couples’’ who were
changing from seeing their relations in martial terms to seeing them as exchange,
with her caution that ‘‘[w]oman has to learn that exchanges—it is a fundamental law
of political economy—are based on the value the merchandise offered has for the
buyer, and not for the seller’’ (de Beauvoir [1949] 1989:722, 728).30 Our proposal does
not answer these questions in advance; rather, it simply provides a reasonably struc-
tured framework for their exploration, one that does not assume in advance what is to
be determined, nor put constraints upon our answers that lead to paradox or empty
29
It is perhaps worth pointing out that, as noted by Kent (1983:312), the one example Weber ([1920]
1976:263, n. 22) provided of ‘‘[s]pecialists without spirit, sensualists without heart’’ was the new medicalized
sexual expert wresting evaluation of sexual propriety from the puritan divine.
30
It is interesting that this understanding of price is not that of the economists of DeBeauvoir’s days: it is
that of Hobbes ([1651] 1909:67): ‘‘The value, or WORTH of a man, is . . . his Price. . . . And as in other things,
so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the Price.’’
explanations. We may hope that attention to the sexual field will allow us to empiri-
cally investigate these questions, if not to begin a critique of sexual judgment.
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Theories of Sexual Stratification: Toward an Analytics of the Sexual

Field and a Theory of Sexual Capital*

JOHN LEVI MARTIN

Sociological Theory 24:2 June 2006

be understood as embedded in a broader cultural framework of values—which lies at

THEORIES OF SEXUAL STRATIFICATION

Davis and the System of Generalized Prostitution

Waller and the Rating-Dating Complex

Zetterberg and the Erotic Ranking

Collins and the Historical Positioning of Sexual Exchange

FROM THE SEXUAL MARKET TO THE SEXUAL FIELD

What is a Sexual Market?

discussion of marriage markets, economists assume that ‘‘interpersonal utility com-

market leads to exchanges of equal utilities. As emphasized below, in the absence of

From Rational Action to Rationalizing Action

The Utility of Disutility or the Disutility of Utility?

oneself’’ is the same as one’s ‘‘value-for-another’’—as noted above, a real market

Weber and the Erotic Value Sphere

Bourdieu’s Field Theory

The Uses of the Field

behavior and attitudes might be incited and coordinated by hegemonic systems of

primarily oriented toward the sexual field as opposed to marriage or heterosocial

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