Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital [Kindle Edition]

The basic premise of the book can be summed up in two sentences - Men don't get as much sex as they want, so women should play up to this in order to achieve their ambitions. Women should support other women in doing this and view it as a natural tool for achieving aims.

The book never really expands on that premise. It tours historical, religious and cultural reasons for the author's premise, but there's a lot of repetition with identical points being made over and over within a few pages of each other.

The author cites reams of evidence for her numerical data, but little for her wider assertions. For example, evidence that "surveys show greater diversity in sexual practices today" leads directly to the assumption "Male demands have increased to the point where women feel they are expected to perform to profession standards - including pole dancing and strip-tease". No other reasons for diversity are considered.

I'd also question the author's understanding of feminism, as the book suggests that feminist women that refuse to use their sexuality to exploit male weakness are `wrong' and feminism should be updated and corrected. That's quite a thing to claim of a 100 year old movement.

It's worth mentioning there's no hints and tips in the book, and there's certainly no guidance as to how to handle the career damage you could receive from workplace flirtation. It an academic textbook, not a how-to guide!

The book is interesting for the subject's cultural and historical background, and it's a very useful statistical reference, but it's hypothesis is as old as the hills and extrapolated further than cited evidence allows.

There's no doubt that 'Honey Money -- The Power of Erotic Capital' is a great title for what is otherwise a fairly poorly argued book. Catherine Hakim's underlying thesis is that we should extend Bourdieu's concept of Social and Cultural capital, to go with Marx's Economic capital, to also include Erotic Capital. But, aside from stating that the fourth type of capital is erotic capital, she never advances any compelling arguments about why we should want to do this.

Hakim is somewhat conscious of the flaws in her own argument: she admits that erotic capital is very hard to measure (she argues that it should be measurable, it's just no-one has ever managed to measure it), and she admits that, unlike other kinds of capital, it is non-transferable. By this point the alert reader will be asking in what sense it is like Bourdieu's other kinds of capital at all. The wide-awake reader will also be wondering how Hakim feels able to build so assertively on Bourdieu's formulation, which is most commonly cited as an alternative view of Social Capital to Putnam's, but is otherwise not strongly supported by the evidence.

Evidence is something which Hakim is particularly weak on. She is very dismissive of evidence which doesn't support her view, and overly accommodating of surveys and studies which only support her view to a certain extent. From time to time she simply makes wild assertions, such as stating that sex workers have more erotic capital than ordinary people, without any indication as to what method she used to come to this conclusion.

A lot of this book seems like it was written in CAPITAL LETTERS, and only the editor managed to calm the author down to setting it in ordinary type: Hakim's slightly overbearing style easily turns into hectoring, and in some places verges on ranting. Unfortunately, like many ranters, she gets her rhetoric and facts confused, for example suggesting that medieval Roman Catholic veneration of Mary is somehow linked to Puritanism (historically the two are polar opposites).

I've had a number of discussions with London academics about these issues, and it seems to me that Catherine Hakim is trying to give an intellectual basis to a post-feminist position which is fundamentally a romantic rather than epistemological notion. Strip away the pseudo-sociology, and the picture she presents us is the one we grew up with from Walt Disney films: beautiful people are good, and good people are beautiful, and beautiful people deserve to make the most of their beauty to get what they want.

Verdict: If you want to stay in touch with what post-feminist academics in London are talking about, this is a good book to have read, if you can survive the frustration of all those pages of special pleading, ad hominem arguments and blanket, unevidenced sweeping statements.

I think this is an interesting book, but it would have been more interesting if it addressed the concept of charisma in general, and not limit itself to the erotic capital. The author states that no-one noticed before that good-looking (and tall) people get further in life (i.e. are more successful at what they do) than others. I thought everybody knew this. Moreover, I thought it was common place.
Some of the arguments are faulty. For instance, Nick Clegg, not a good example. He did get up to 70% before the elections, but ultimately failed at elections. Also, the balance of power in relationships, based on "the erotic capital of women" and "the sex deficit of men", where a woman who doesn't earn as much as her husband, or doesn't earn at all, gets to make all the decisions about how the money is spent. I think this has little to do with good looks or using sex to gain power and more to do with personality, strength of character, charisma, good judgement, intelligence, understanding etc, all the things that the book could have addressed in the first place.