The commerce of dating + "crimes of passion"

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lou posted:

>Skin trade
>
>Welcome to the new world of dating, where everyone's out to get the best
>deal they can.
>
>- - - - - - - - - - - -
>By James Surowiecki, salon.com
>
>Sept. 22, 2000 | The September issue of Talk magazine featured a painfully
>true-to-life portrait of the dating travails of Kristin Whiting, a
>32-year-old single woman in New York who is, to turn Jane Austen on her
>head, in want of a husband. The most remarkable moment in the piece comes
>when Whiting explains that she refused to go out on a second date with a
>personable, attractive man because on their first date he suggested they
>split the check. "I want to be taken out for dinner," Whiting says. "Not
>for the economics, but for the principle."
>
>What's remarkable about this is not that Whiting dumped the guy. That's
>dismaying, but not really surprising (except for the fact that Whiting is
>so upfront about it) to anyone familiar with the New York dating scene. No,
>what's remarkable about the story is that Whiting has elevated her
>insistence on being paid for into a principle. Because what, after all,
>could the principle really be?
>
>Of course, there is no principle -- at least no defensible one -- behind
>Whiting's behavior. She's just borrowed an old custom, mixed it with a
>desire to live an easier life than the one she'd have to live if she paid
>for everything herself and come up with a slapdash ethos. And in this,
>Whiting might have walked right off the pages of Candace Bushnell's new
>novel, "4 Blondes," in which sex and commerce are inextricably linked. For
>Bushnell, relationships are essentially forms of trade, beauty and sex
>going in one direction, and wealth and the illusion of power going in the
>other. And no one seems to do anything in the war zone of "romance" -- the
>word itself seems like a bad joke in the novel -- without contemplating
>exactly what they're going to get out of it.
>
>(complete article at:
>http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/09/22/dating/index.html)
>
>===

What has been happening under capitalism after the "Sexual
Revolution" in the 60s is that many men still do not treat women as
equal _subjects_ & often regard women as sexual _objects_ and _yet_,
now that there is a _de jure_ equality of genders, most men insist on
splitting the check without prorating (even though women, on average,
earn much less than men) and getting sex for free (without neither
wages or fees as in the case of prostitution nor life-time employment
as in the case of marriage).  I suppose some young women may respond
to these male demands by renegotiating the bargaining terms of
political economy of gender through "post-feminist" conservatism
(e.g., insist on getting paid, as in the case of Ms. Whiting; take a
vow of chastity until marriage -- popular among conservative
Christians; etc.).

However, what James describes is not a "new world of dating."  It
reminds us of an older world but reproduces it with a twist.

*****   These new popular amusements created not only a heterosocial
environment charged with youthful sexual energy, but also a
commercial relationship between male and female that mirrored the
larger social context.  Although admission to some, such as the dance
hall and the movie house, was often minimal, a system of "treating"
developed that allowed young women to partake of a wider range of
evening pleasures.  In part, this reflected the less than subsistence
wages that many working women received.  As a Chicago waitress
explained, "If I didn't have a man, I couldn't get along on my
wages."  But it also revealed a gender-differentiated system of
roles.  A young man proved his worth, and impressed the object of his
affection, by being able to treat a young woman to refreshments, a
night on the town, a day of rides at the amusement park, an excursion
on a lake steamer, or presents.  If he could not afford to do so, he
might find himself without companionship.  "MAN GETTING $18 A WEEK
DARES NOT FALL IN LOVE," said a Chicago headline in 1919, commenting
on the perils of treating.  Women faced their own set of pressures.
They hoarded their resources to pay for the clothes, jewelry, fancy
ribbons, and cosmetics which made them attractive.  "A girl who does
not dress well is stuck in a corner," one New York working girl
observed.  Embedded within the system of treating were expectations
of sexual exchange -- what would a young woman give, sexually, in
return for the favors of a man.   (John D'Emilio & Estelle B.
Freedman, _Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America_, NY:
Perennial, 1988, p.197)   *****

This is a question of the _gendered distribution of social power_
(not unique to capitalism, as Henry pointed out).  Men will resemble
"buyers" & women "sellers" (even if exchanges are not explicitly
commercial transactions as in the case of prostitution) as long as
men have more social power than women and hence more goodies (mainly
money in the case of capitalism) distributed to them.  Socialism
without the abolition of gender oppression will still provide a
material ground -- though different from capitalism -- for the system
of exchange productive of sex, gender, & sexuality as we have known
them.  And such a system of exchange will resemble prostitution even
though prostitution _per se_ gets abolished by fiats (as in the case
of actually & formerly existing socialist countries).

Marriages based upon love are no better & introduce a different peril
for many women -- the kind that sets off the narrative in Imamura
Shohei's _Eel_:

At 7:57 PM -0400 9/14/00, Louis Proyect wrote:
>In "The Eel" we are introduced to Takuro Yamashita (Koji Yakusho), a
>"salary man" who reads an anonymous letter on the train home informing him
>that his wife has been committing adultery, particularly when he goes on
>overnight fishing trips. Her lover drives a white sedan. After returning
>early from one such fishing trip, he finds her having sex with her lover
>and stabs both to death. He rides his bike to the local police station and
>confesses.

Imamura's film never deals with the causes of Yamashita's murder of
his adulterous wife: jealousy based upon monogamy & sexism that
compels a man to murder his beloved if the woman doesn't return love
(here, love functions as a claim of exclusive ownership & a right of
life and death over another being).  With the same beginning (wife's
adultery & husband's distress), however, Roman Polanski's _Chinatown_
eventually unravels the entangled relationship between capitalism,
sexism, & exploitation of nature while exposing the problems of the
petit-bourgeois male, who oscillates between the desire to expose the
crime of female sexuality that transgresses gender roles & the wish
to protect "innocent" femininity (both are portrayed as vain) without
changing the whole ensembles of social relations.

Yoshie