Economic Aspects of "Love"

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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 09, 2011 8:11 am

http://survivalring.org/lodge2/?page_id=68

Quests for Dollars

Plastic medicine men proliferate on Internet, abuse ceremonies

By Brenda Norrell
Navajo Times

September 5, 2002


Tucson, Ariz.
— On the Internet, there are OtterMoon Stars and Coyote Butterflies. A cyber-shaman promises a “software-based psionic device” to deliver whatever you want from the universe.

Wananeeche sells “White Eagle Medicine Wheel Cards” for 40 English pounds. It comes with an autographed book.

David Silver Bear claims he grew up with Navajo elders and gives “medicine wheel massages” in Sedona, Ariz.

There is rainbow and wolf medicine. “Dances with Power Animals, “Tortise Shell New Age Nexus” and “Turtle Island Worm Band” are among the Web sites.

The abuse sounds an alarm in Indian country.

In Texas, Jeffrey “White Horse” Hubbell claims to be a Lakota sun dancer, chief and medicine man. Hubbell and his wife, Mary Thunder, are directors of the Thunder Horse Ranch near Austin. Hubbell has conducted sweatlodges and vision quests for 10 years.

The price for one of Hubbell’s vision quests slated for Westminster, Maryland, in July was $325-$375.

Offering vision quests, sweat lodges, pipe ceremonies and contact with aliens, Thunder’s group, Blue Star, is officially listed as a cult in the Watchman Fellowship’s 2001 Index of Cults and Religions.

While marketing of native ceremonies proliferates on the Internet, so does its exposure. A list of vendors of Lakota sweat lodge cards, customized medicine bags, rainbow lodges and “quests” are listed on the Web site, “Guarding Indian Cultural Spiritual Beliefs.”

On the list of offenders are Bear tribes, Ghost children and Cyber teepees. Wolf lodges are exposed, along with plastic medicine men and women: White Eagle, Medicine Eagle, Summer Rain, Swift Deer, Evening Crow and Grey Wolf.

The site reveals those who use ceremonies for personal profit or glory and those who infuse Indian spiritual ways into New Age or shamanic practices.

Innocent will suffer

Victoria Redstarr, Nez Perce from Colville, Wash., said it is troubling because innocent people will suffer from the abuse of ceremonies.

Redstarr said all people must live their own truths.

“I think many of these shamans believe that if they take our ways, they will be saving themselves. Untrue. They need to go back to what they truly are, to save themselves. They have to live in their real way, not ours.

“They need to stop stealing what they cannot truly have.”

Redstarr said the precious and sacred nature of ceremonies calls for vigilance in their protection and, perhaps, not telling everyone everything one knows.

“For the longest time, my people, Nez Perce, have been very protective of what we know,” said Redstarr, tribal member from the Chief Joseph Band of Nez Perce in Colville.

“We know there is danger for anyone tainting that sacred trust with money. This is the course Jeffrey White Horse Hubbell and others of his ilk are taking; that dangerous path that will hurt them and their children.”

Connecticut imposter

The Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Mon., took action after receiving complaints about a Connecticut imposter, Cherylanne Rainbow Star (real name Cherylanne Linares.)

Claiming to be Blackfoot, “Rainbow Star” is director of White Buffalo Society in Milford, Conn. Her catalog offers children toy pipes with legends, game rules for medicine lodges, plastic bear claws and eagle claws for making play jewelry.

In schools, she places paper feathers on the heads of children and then instructs teachers to be “chief” while sorting the children into clans.

Blackfeet Nation attorney Joe McKay said, “We want people to know Cherylanne Rainbow Star is not a member of nor sanctioned by or approved by the Tribal Council or Tribal Business Council of the Blackfeet Nation. Her stuff is not culturally consistent or appropriate for our people or tribe.

“She is misrepresenting native people and our people and in our view is fraudulently benefiting from her misrepresentation(s),” McKay said on June 28.

Two people died in Northern California in a sweat lodge with inadequate ventilation this summer. Kirsten Dana Babcock, 34, of Redding, and David Thomas Hawker, 36, non-Indian of Union City, died inside a sweat lodge covered with plastic sheeting during a “vision quest” in the El Dorado County Forest in Northern California in June.

Warning issued

Two decades ago, traditional Indian leaders gathered at Two Moons Camp on Rosebud Creek in Lame Deer, Mon. on the Northern Cheyenne Nation, Oct. 5, 1980. Many of those leaders have since passed to the Spirit World. They issued a warning of what would come to pass if plastic shamans did not halt the desecration of ceremonies.

Stating that Native American spiritual traditions are not for sale, the elders said the components of the religion must be kept in balance by highly-trained leaders who are the legitimate representatives of their tribes.

“We, the elders and our representatives sitting in Council, give warning to these non-Indian followers that it is our understanding that this is not a proper process and the authority to carry these sacred objects is given by the people, and the purpose and procedure is specific to time and the needs of the people.

“The medicine people are chosen by the medicine, and long instruction and discipline is necessary before ceremonies and healing can be done. These procedures are always in the Native tongue; there are no exceptions and profit is not the motivation.

“There are many Nations with many and varied procedures specifically for the welfare of their people. These processes and ceremonies are of the most Sacred Nature. The Council finds the open display of these ceremonies contrary to these Sacred instructions.”

Misuse for profit

The elders said individuals claiming to be spiritual leaders should be asked: What nation, clan and society they represent, who instructed them and what is their home address.

Although they said there are many things to share with the Four Corners of humanity concerning a shared destiny, they said their concern was with those who misuse the ceremonies for profit.

“Therefore, be warned that these individuals are moving about preying upon the spiritual needs and ignorance of our non-Indian brothers and sisters. The value of these instructions and ceremonies is questionable, maybe meaningless, and hurtful to the individual carrying false messages.”

Gathered at Rosebud Creek in the fall of 1980 were Austin Two Moons, Northern Cheyenne Nation; Larry Anderson, Navajo Nation; Thomas Banyacya, Hopi Independent Nation; Frank Cardinal, Sr., Chateh, Alberta, Canada; Phillip Deer, Muskogee (Creek) Nation; Walter Denny, Chippewa-Cree Nation; Chief Fools Crow, Lakota Nation; Peter O’Chiese, Entrance, Alberta, Canada; Izador Thorn, Washington; Tadadaho, Haudenassaunee; Tom Yellowtail, Wyola, Mont.

Redstarr said ceremonies were given to American Indian people for a divine purpose.

“We were separated down by war – the white man and the Indian. The Indian was given special practices to help them deal with these wars and the following pains and sorrows – so that we might survive and thrive through the Creator. These ways are meant to help us to the end.”

Urging prayers for those abusing the ceremonies, she said the destruction caused by the abuse became evident in recent tragedies.

“All that money being made will turn black and evil before their eyes soon. Soon they won’t be able to outrun and undo what they have started.

“The Creator knows what is here and what is right and real. These ’shamans’ may be pretending with others, but they can’t pretend in front of the Creator
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 09, 2011 8:17 am

Maria Mies, from Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale: Women In the International Division of Labour:

An emphasis on these colonial divisions is also necessary from another point of view. Many feminists in the United States and Europe have, together with critical scientists and ecologists, begun to criticize the dualistic and destructive paradigm of Western science and technology. Drawing their inspiration from C. G. Jung’s psychology, humanistic psychology, non-dualistic ‘Eastern’ spirituality, particularly Taoism and other oriental philosophies, they propose a new holistic paradigm, the New Age paradigm (Fergusson, 1980; Capra, 1982; Bateson, 1972). This emphasis on the fact that in our world everything is connected with everything and influences everything is definitely an approach which goes along with much of the feminist rebellion and vision of a future society. However, if this desire ‘to become whole’ again, and build bridges across all the cleavages and segmentations White Man has created is not to be frustrated again, it is necessary that the New Age feminists, the eco-feminists and others open their eyes and minds to the real colonies whose exploitation also guarantees them the luxury of indulging in ‘Eastern spirituality’ and ‘therapy.’ In other words, if the holistic paradigm is nothing but an affair of a new spiritualism or consciousness, if it does not identify and fight against the global system of capitalist accumulation and exploitation, it will end up by becoming a pioneering movement of the legitimization of the next round of the destructive production of capitalism. This round will not focus on the production and marketing of such crude material commodities as cars and refrigerators, but on non-material commodities like religion, therapies, friendship, spirituality . . .


http://kloncke.com/2011/02/18/buddhism- ... fetishism/
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby Hammer of Los » Thu Jun 09, 2011 9:23 am

Great little quote there AD, from a smart woman, that Maria Mies;

However, if this desire ‘to become whole’ again, and build bridges across all the cleavages and segmentations White Man has created is not to be frustrated again, it is necessary that the New Age feminists, the eco-feminists and others open their eyes and minds to the real colonies whose exploitation also guarantees them the luxury of indulging in ‘Eastern spirituality’ and ‘therapy.’ In other words, if the holistic paradigm is nothing but an affair of a new spiritualism or consciousness, if it does not identify and fight against the global system of capitalist accumulation and exploitation, it will end up by becoming a pioneering movement of the legitimization of the next round of the destructive production of capitalism.


So nice to see you still posting. I have always enjoyed your contributions. Except for that, er 911 cult business. Moving on..

Cheers, AD.

:thumbsup
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 09, 2011 10:14 pm

http://nymag.com/print/?/nymetro/news/b ... res/10894/


The Capitalist Spirit

In the post-9/11 healing boom, a new battery of mystics like Sondra Shaye are raking it in.

By Jeff Sharlet Published May 21, 2005


Image


I first met Bhakti Sondra Shaye, née Shaivitz, B.A., M.A., J.D., guide, teacher, and adept member of the Great White Universal Brotherhood and Sisterhood of Light, ritual master in the High Council of Gor, universal Kabbalist, Reiki master, and metaphysician, at the New Life Expo at the Hotel New Yorker this past October. The gathering bills itself as “America’s Largest Mind, Body, Spirit Expo,” four floors of alternative spiritual options. Vendors bark discount rates; “consumers” haggle over the tools of their salvation. In New York, the hidden economy of New Age mysticism—elsewhere marked by disingenuous disdain for commerce—is laid bare with pride.

A session titled “Spiritual Capitalism: What the FDNY Taught Wall Street About Money” promised to reveal a good deal of New York’s version of New Age on-the-make, but the teachers failed to show. So I spent a few hours inspecting spirit sticks, dodging feng shui–ers, and having various intangible parts of my aura balanced, stacked, and aligned. Bhakti Sondra Shaye was the least-assuming person in the room. Three middle-aged women who’d fit right in at a Betty Crocker bake-off—purveyors of “SoulTalk”TM—pointed her out. “She’s the one you want to talk to,” one of the women said, when I queried them about who was most attuned to New York and money. As she pointed out Sondra, she gave the anti-agers, crystal forkers, and aromatic transformers just the slightest eye roll. Sondra sat in a corner, wearing a purple tunic, and she wasn’t hawking anything. If you asked, she’d give you, for free, a picture of her teacher, a ruggedly handsome Irishman named Derek O’Neill, who in turn would name the famed Indian guru Sai Baba as his master. But since I told her I was investigating spirituality in New York—she liked that word, investigating—she did me one better. She drew a “Prema Agni” on my back, and nearly made me fall down.

The Prema Agni is a cross with two legs, one of them serrated, a heart above the arms, and a triangle below. It was supposed to open my heart, “for love to flow IN and OUT.”

Sondra thinks New York is a New Age spiritual center—maybe the spiritual center—because it’s unabashed in fusing the worlds of spirituality and money. It’s a city built on the kind of beliefs embraced by stingy blue bloods on the Upper East Side, grouchy old Jews in Brooklyn, and, of course, the spiritually evolved: You get what you pay for. There’s no free lunch. Brain work should be well compensated.

If that sounds like a conservative line, it is: New Age has shed the anti-capitalist trappings of its sixties revival to align itself with the dogmas of the new, globalizing market, embracing the ancient teachings of Adam Smith, the economic patron saint of the Enlightenment, if not enlightenment.

Part and parcel of this shift is a consumer-driven model of belief. There are hundreds of spiritual traditions bandied at the New Life Expo, but the rhetoric of deliverance here is strikingly uniform. This new New Age takes as its mediator, its high priest or priestess, the hero of the story, you: the recipient of Esalen strokes and Prema Agnis and aromatic transformations. New York, spiritual capital of the world, has become the fulfillment of Martin Luther’s dream of divine access—“the priesthood of all believers”—to say nothing of the prognosis made by Max Weber in his 1904 classic, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It may be a Jewish-Catholic-Latino-Pentecostal town, but New York, now, is the ultimate small-p protestant city, and everyone who buys a stick of incense, or takes a yoga class, or listens to Tibetan monks chanting is experiencing the cosmopolitan godhead just as Luther and Weber would have wanted: unfiltered, billable by the hour.

And yet the recent explosion in New Age spiritual practice is the result of more than commerce. In New York, at least, its catalyst was September 11, 2001. “Spirituality” was big in the days right after the attack. At first, church attendance soared, 60, 70, 90 percent, depending on which pastor, which rabbi, which culture warrior you asked. But within a few weeks, it returned to normal. The new traditionalism did not endure, not in New York.

Sondra makes more money now as a healer than she did in the early nineties as a young litigator for Davis Polk & Wardwell.

Practices such as Sondra’s—religious experiences one could engage at a time of one’s own choosing—have. The rhetoric of “spiritual war,” popular among conservative Evangelicals, found a parallel among New Age adherents, as New Yorkers spoke of “wounds,” and “scars,” and allies in their “personal battles.” And then there was the sensual appeal of it all. The scents and the poses and two dozen ways to get your back rubbed, chopped, and prodded. Down at ground zero, firemen lined up for massages. Across the city, cheap Chinese tui na became more common than shoe shines, its vague “spirituality” implied by the masseurs’ inability to speak much English.

It was, Sondra recalls, after the 9/11 attacks that she met her personal teacher, Derek O’Neill, at the 2001 New Life Expo. A friend of hers invited her to tag along. Sondra, already working as a successful healer, wasn’t looking for new business. She thought then—and, truth be told, thinks now—that much of what’s on offer at the expo is snake oil at best, “dark energy” at worst. But she didn’t want her friend to sit at her booth alone, so off she went.

After the Al Qaeda attacks, America’s Largest Mind, Body, Spirit Expo was experiencing serious doubts. Detoxification was big that year; alchemy, with its focus on instant wealth, not so much. Sondra went with low expectations and was disappointed.

Then, Derek. A helmet of prematurely silver hair, ocean-blue eyes, a jaw like an anvil, a bemused half-smile.

He and his wife, Linda, came up to Sondra at her table. They’d been looking for Sai Baba. Although Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba, a jolly, ever-smiling Indian man with a giant Afro and a penchant for conjuring jewels, claims at least 10 million devotees, Sondra recalls that she alone brought his picture to the expo.

Sondra also remembers that Derek smelled smoky, because, she’d later learn, he’d been down at ground zero, healing people. But that’s not what slayed her. She talked to him for what felt like only ten minutes, ordinary chat; but when she looked up, in mid-conversation, she realized two hours had passed. Her friend was staring at her, and Derek was gone.

At that moment, she says, she was opened to yet another new healing, of which she is the primary channeler. “Way more powerful” than her old routine, she says. “Way.” Her friends, her Jewish mother who didn’t really believe in any of this mishegoss, could all feel it sparking off her.

Maybe I could, too. The first time Sondra drew the Prema Agni on me—before I knew her well enough to respect her, if not necessarily share her beliefs—I felt a surge of vertigo, a spiral of twitches running down my spine. Weeks later, Sondra told me that when Derek draws the Prema Agni, people shudder, weep, and fall down—not unlike Christians who are “slain in the spirit,” an experience known to strike even nonbelievers.

Derek is no mystic. Ex–Irish Army, ex-Catholic, working-class in spirit if no longer in income (he can earn $45,000 with a single workshop, although he gives much of it away), he lives in Dublin like an ordinary guy, with an ordinary family. On the phone, he makes jokes, asks me about my background, talks about pop music. But he is “so fucking evolved,” Sondra says—she and Derek both love the word fucking, because “it grounds you”—that while he teaches a workshop, “his consciousness can be off having a Guinness somewhere.” One of her ambitions is to join Derek—a married man with whom she is deeply, chastely, in love—for a pint on the astral plane. But she’s not that powerful.

Actually, though (Sondra also likes that word, its marriage of skepticism and belief), actually, she will be soon. Things are happening in other dimensions. Channels are opening. It’s no coincidence, her friends tell me, that I’m writing about Sondra. The power is growing. Someday soon, she’ll join the metaphysical Derek. Sai Baba, too, and Jesus, Krishna, Merlin, all the ascended masters, like a great big dinner party. Sondra doesn’t normally drink, but when that happens, she’ll raise a glass. It’s going to be fucking amazing.

Before I could interview Sondra further, I needed to be healed. “It will clear you,” Sondra told me. Later, both she and Derek would declare that God, not New York Magazine, had sent me to be their gospel writer, but at the beginning, Sondra was wary. “I don’t want to come off sounding crazy,” she said. So she decided to let me experience the energy for myself. And I did, after a fashion.

Sondra began my healing with an “Emotional Cord Cutting.” This entailed my standing very still while she swiped a foot-long blade up and down, very fast, inches from my body. She paid special attention to my crotch, which is only natural—it’s there, she pointed out, that we form many of our most unhealthy attachments, emotional and otherwise. Sondra invented this healing herself. It costs $95.

Once my emotional cords had been cut, I lay for two hours on a cold table in a cement-floor studio above the Park Slope Tea Lounge, which Sondra rents from a yoga center by the hour. She worked me over with a battery of energy services—the rising star, divine energy healing, etheric surgery—“ancient healing modalities” revealed to her or other teachers she admires. But as far as I could tell, she wasn’t even there. Occasionally, I heard the rustle of her silk jacket, a special garment she wears to perform healings. Once, a finger traced a hard line from my right shoulder to my collarbone, but Sondra later said she hadn’t touched me anywhere but my knees and abdomen. I shivered through most of the session. Sondra later said it’d been so hot in the room she’d been sweating.


Money is the means by which the New Age proves itself a religious movement that has a place in the economy of belief.


The next day, I got the flu. I was down like a sedated hippo for a week. Sondra called. She said it was a healing crisis. I was lucky, she said; a lot of people experience such crises emotionally, but it’s quicker and easier to get the negative energy out through the body. Price tag for the whole affair: $395. Sondra comped me.

I mention these sums not to cast doubt on the authenticity of the services rendered. You don’t have to be a moral relativist to recognize that “true” and “false” are empty categories when you’re trying to understand other people’s mysteries. The light flashing off the blade, the bead of orange at the tip of a stick of incense slashing along with the knife, the sweetness of its smoke, the look of concentration that makes Sondra’s giant brown eyes flutter and draws her pretty face into a scary look of loose-jawed concentration—it all made for sensual accoutrements to what could, for some, be a persuasive metaphor. Viewed from another perspective, Sandra’s healing services are no sillier nor more profound than the idea that by dunking yourself in water, you experience death and resurrection, or that by beating yourself on the chest every Yom Kippur, you really take responsibility for a whole community’s sins.

If Sondra’s Cord Cutting lacks the historical pedigree of better-known rituals, it is no less “real.” In fact, it may be Sondra’s steep rates that are proof of her spirit guides’ full arrival in the pantheon of American gods; money is the means by which Sondra and other New Age healers show themselves to be a religious movement that’s within the economy of belief. “Some people have this misconception that spiritual work is real only if it’s free of charge,” Sondra told me early on in what she’d come to call “our work” together. “Great. Cardinal Law will help you for free.” She doesn’t have to add the tacit disclaimer: With him, there are all sorts of long-term hidden costs.

It’s no heresy to say that most religions come with a price tag. The grammatical truth of the world’s scriptures as usually read is not, as atheists sometimes insist, imperative, a command, but rather conditional: the cosmic “If.” If you obey these rules, rewards will follow. It’s all about the deal. Money always changes hands. From client to Sondra, from churchgoer to collection plate, from a corporation back to its institutional investors.

And practitioners such as Sondra found their client base expanded by the ranks of the marginally “spiritual”—real-estate agents who wanted properties “healed” of the “bad energy” lingering from those who fled the city, working-class stiffs who decided that in “a time of war” it’s okay to be emotional about one’s “inner pain,” former fundamentalists who believe they can’t live without some kind of spiritual practice, not anymore.

Such people stand at a convergence of trends: the mainstreaming of therapeutic language, the collapse of conventional Christianity’s good manners and carefully drawn private-public boundaries, and the economic validation of spiritual entrepreneurs such as Sondra, who makes more money now than she did in the early nineties as a young litigator for Davis Polk & Wardwell, a powerful corporate law firm. How much is that? Two or three clients a day, from $150 to $300 an hour, plus the occasional workshop that’ll bring in thousands of dollars for a day’s work. Do the math. Ask her accountant. Enough that she buys what she wants (not much) and gives as much as she wants—enough to empty her bank account twice in the past few years—to an orphanage in India.

She sees nothing contradictory in her material comfort. The division between the sacred and the profane, God and money, she thinks, is one of the “wounds” that alternative spiritualities were meant to heal. New York itself, she says, is one big, pulsating, alternative spirituality, a DNA spiral of sacred and profane, spirit and dollars.

“Real estate,” she told me when we first met. “Perfect example.” One of Sondra’s clients is a former telecom exec named James Hatt. Hatt moved to New York from London in 1999, and fell in love: with an American woman, the city, its opportunities. He bought properties, he sold them, he prospered. But then he’d picked up a million-dollar co-op in which someone had gone insane. Once he listed it for sale, the apartment sat on the market for seven months. Finally, says Hatt, a fellow real-estate agent said, “Look, there’s this woman you should try. A lot of agents use her. Nobody talks about it.” “This woman” sounded like an arsonist. But what Sondra offered, says Hatt, was a “cleansing,” a service she and other healers quietly supply for most, if not all, of the city’s major brokerages. There’s no directory for this kind of work, but Jennifer L. Dorfmann, a broker for Corcoran, told me that when she sent out a query to colleagues asking for recommendations, she received half a dozen names in a manner of minutes. Sondra provided me with a list of brokers she works with at other firms, but their employers forbid them from talking about what some clients might consider hocus-pocus, even if the cleansing fee—usually around $250—comes out of the broker’s pocket.

“An hour and a half,” recalls Hatt. “She chants a mixture of incantations and prayers, from a variety of faiths and persuasions. Her whole technique is very silent, quiet, unto herself. Nothing for the audience, you know?”

Hatt sold the apartment two days later, and when he hired Sondra to cleanse a loft in Soho where the previous occupant had died, after it had sat unsold for four months, it also moved in a matter of days. Hatt started seeing Sondra for personal healings, long sessions that began with Sondra’s setting up an altar to a variety of divine figures and going on to channel their energy into and around Hatt’s spirit-body.

In the material world, Sondra is surpassingly gentle, an elfish assemblage of diminutive bones and smooth skin and giant eyes. These days, she believes she’s a fairie. She says that a close friend, a high-powered real-estate broker herself and a conservative woman in most respects, is “of angelic descent,” with an invisible dragon living in her apartment.

In the early eighties, when she was an English student at Rutgers, Sondra was “goth before there was goth,” moping to the Smiths and the Violent Femmes. Later, when she was getting an M.A. in fiction at New York University, she had a sideline in modeling. When she graduated from Brooklyn Law near the top of her class in 1992, she molted into tailored suits and conservative hair. Bored by corporate law practice into a state of depression, she left Davis Polk to work as a part-time attorney while studying acting at the Stella Adler school.

Now her favorite color is pink; it’s cultural—“I’m a girl-girl,” she says—as well as spiritual, what she calls a color of power. In cold weather she wears a pink puffy coat over a pink sweatshirt emblazoned with a brooklyn logo, with a pink hat and pink gloves and Nikes with pink swooshes, and blue jeans that are a little too big for her. She often stands too close to people, but nobody seems to mind. Her presence is asexual, not so much celibate as ethereal.

Still, she assumes an easy, unforced intimacy with her clients. One weekend I join her on a cat-healing house call; once the feline patient, Bowie, is restored to health, Sondra turns to face the cat’s owner, Rose, as she lies on her couch. She frames a triangle over Rose’s face with her hands. Rose’s face collapses into her couch cushions. Sondra’s, meanwhile, has undergone an even more curious transformation. For an hour, her chin disappears. Lines normally invisible stretch like deltas from her eyes, and her smooth forehead is as furrowed as rough seas. She raises her triangle hands, the veins pop in her neck, and when she has them fully extended above her head, she blows—foof!

And that’s it. She stands, knees cracking, shakes herself out, and takes a seat on the floor beside me. She bites her lower lip.

“So, you can take your time coming back.”

Rose wiggles her toes. We sit in silence.

Rose opens her eyes. She’s crying.

“He’s with you,” Sondra says. Derek? Sai Baba? Jesus?

“I saw him,” Rose whispers, finally moving to rub her nose.

“I know.”

“It’s so hard. To say good-bye. I flew back. To Australia. And, and, I didn’t get there in time.”

Rose pulls herself up. Sondra moves to a seat beside her, wraps an arm around Rose’s shoulders.

“My brother,” Rose says. She shudders with tears.

Rose’s brother had been sick; she’d flown home to be with him; he’d died before she could get there.

“When I saw him, I didn’t want to come out of it,” Rose says.

“I didn’t want to come back. Here.”

She looks up at Sondra. “Did . . . did James”—Rose’s friend, Sondra’s client—“did he tell you about my brother?”

Sondra shakes her head. She doesn’t lie. “I didn’t know,” she says.

Jim Farah, a Corcoran real-estate agent, sits with perfect calm as Sondra squirts holy water—tap, blessed by her, dispensed from a pink plastic spritzer—on the carpet, ceiling, and walls of a Kips Bay apartment he’s been trying to sell. It’s a one-bedroom in a doorman building, with an open terrace overlooking a dazzling, gold-domed church and the East River, and it’s priced very reasonably—$680,000—but it’s not moving. Farah, a sober, dignified man with neat gray hair, a black jacket, and a gray sweater, “baptized Episcopalian,” a former retail executive with no supernatural experiences, called Sondra. Now she’s standing in the living room, her eyes fluttering and her shoulders twitching as she calls in a full congregation of minor and major gods.

“Jim,” I whisper. “Does this—is any of this kind of, I don’t know, hard to swallow?”

Farah shakes his head and offers the best defense of New Age I’ve encountered. “Absolutely not,” he says. “To some extent, it’s a language of its own.” The terms, he says, may be peculiar, but the ideas at hand—that spaces reflect their inhabitants (“bad sex energy,” Sondra had diagnosed this property), that faith goes by many names, that all rituals, “true” or “false,” cohere around metaphors of our own creation—are perfectly ordinary.

Sondra slumps, hangs like a puppet on strings, straightens, and leaves the apartment. She needs to get some distance, so she can draw a magic circle around the newly cleansed space. Neither seller nor buyer will consciously budge an inch on the basis of this invisible shield. Farah, like most brokers, won’t even mention the procedure. I look at him, hands folded in his lap, waiting for Sondra to return. It’s then that I understand: He has purchased this spell, the details of which do not concern him, for his own peace of mind.

Around them, Sondra and Derek have a magic circle that seems to serve, at the least, the psychological needs of their students. And beneath it all, they have the perfect small-business model—especially since they continue attracting students and training a corps of healers, who then go on to win new adherents and train more healers.

It’s Amway without the hooks, a pyramid scheme without a catch. According to the social critics John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene (themselves sort of New Age sociologists), American corporations spend $4 billion a year on New Age consultants. IBM provides employee seminars in the I Ching. On a smaller scale, the Soho branch of Corcoran invited Sondra to address a group of 80 brokers. And in the everyday, we all fill our lives with uncountable, tiny totems, gestures toward the unseen. Not just candles and incense and Buddha key chains, but also commodities as ordinary as juice. Ever had one that claimed “anti-oxidant” properties, a scientific impossibility? Welcome to the New Age.

Both the right and the left despise this phenomenon, for the same reasons many in both camps hate New York. The right thinks New Age is, literally, demonic, or at least shallow. The left thinks New Age is consumer capitalism at its most dishonest, and—yes—shallow. And they’re right, all of them. The Christian crusaders and the intellectual scolds and even the New Agers themselves. Not because truth is relative, but because faith, by definition, always is. If it had an empirical basis, it wouldn’t be faith; it’d be the humdrum, material world for which people turn to faith for meaning.

September 11, 2001, a date around which Sondra’s own spiritual biography revolves, is a case in point. After weeks of conversation, Sondra exploded the chronology of her own story. “You know,” she said, “I was checking my records, and I realized it wasn’t 2001 that I met Derek. It was a year later.” She mentioned this in passing, as if it changed nothing.

How could she mine September 11 for personal drama? The answer, of course, is even more obvious than the question. To make a story of loss is to alter the reality of the dead to suit the needs of the living. Yet, take another look at your crucifix, listen to the stories of the patriarchs, open your Koran at random—that’s what faith does. That’s what we do. Rightly or wrongly, we search for a whole whenever we find a hole in our lives.

One of the rules attending the drawing of the Prema Agni is that the recipient must give at least $7 to a good cause. One day, I told Sondra I’d given my $7 and then some to tsunami relief. Sondra agreed that counted. But the tsunami didn’t really register for her as it did for most of the world.

“If you want to know the truth, my guides told me it was gonna happen about a year ago. That’s why I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, the tsunami! The tsunami!’ ” And she won’t be shocked by the next disaster. “It’s already written in the karmic book, the Book of Life,” she said.

The “karmic book, the Book of Life”—in a phrase, Sondra assimilates Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism. But these awful fated events “can be erased,” Sondra said, if we’d all just learn “compassion.”

There’s that grammar of faith: “if,” the offer, the deal. Theologians dismiss such negotiations with the divine as elementary, nothing more than a phase in the spiritual development of the soul. But money knows otherwise. That “if” is the prerequisite for the awesomeness of faith in a globalized world, the sovereignty not of a god but of the consumer. An entrepreneurial New Age faith like Sondra’s can serenely pigeonhole terror attacks and global disasters, regardless of why—or evidently when—they actually occur, because their meaning can be recast instantly, according to the spiritual need of the moment. It’s simple, really: Home Depot sells the idea of home, Circuit City sells a wired world, the new New Age sells “spiritual health”—while the right of the sovereign consumer to acquire it purchase by purchase is praised as the law of nature: an orthodoxy of a thousand choices, an infinitely marketable economy of belief.
"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 10, 2011 9:11 am

CONFESSIONS OF A FEMINIST STRIPPER

I'VE BEEN FASCINATED BY STRIPPERS EVER SINCE KIDS STARTED CALLING ME A SLUT IN HIGH SCHOOL. AFTER READING THEIR LIT AND WATCHING THEM GYRATE FOR 10 YEARS, I STARTED A GRAD PROGRAM IN WOMEN'S STUDIES, WENT TO A SEX WORKER'S CONFERENCE, AND DECIDED TO TAKE THE PLUNGE FOR MYSELF. FIVE YEARS LATER, I HAVE AN M.A., AND AM ABOUT TO QUIT DANCING. BUT FOR NOW, I WRITE.
3/26/11

The Girlfriend Experience


So in the last entry, I detailed a few “types” of customers and outlined (my perceptions of) their motivations. But I left out a big one, in my haste to publish that post: the girlfriend-seeker. This post isn’t just about that type of customer though, it’s about the myriad of services we sell, namely: the girlfriend experience (GFE).

Girlfriend seekers are the most pitiable class of customer I’ve encountered. I’ve seen variations on this theme, so many times: old rich white dude is lonely. Maybe he got divorced, maybe his latest (usually stripper) girlfriend finally got sick of dealing with his shit, and the money and resources and shelter from having to work was finally not enough. Maybe she just got bored of having to fuck some old dude, and wanted something that actually turned her on. Whatever. So newly-single old rich white dude, what does he do? He comes into the club, looking for the next one.

Seriously, I’ve seen this so many times.

There used to be a regular named Jim, who bared a striking resemblance to a frog (no really. It was WEIRD). He was a sweet old bastard, way too gullible, and lemme tell ya, the phrase “looking for love in all the wrong places” never rang so true for me as it did during the hours I spent with him upstairs. Maybe the second time we sat together (he paid hourly and was respectful, this was long before the economy tanked when hourly was still fairly standard), he goes, “You’re going to make me fall in love with you, aren’t you?” I mean really. How do you respond to that. I don’t even remember what I said. But in his gullibility, I could tell that he REALLY wanted to believe it.

Jim was looking for a girlfriend, straight up. He told stories about the women he’d “taken care of” in the past; this was most definitely a pattern for him. He told me he was lonely. He told me he would take care of me. Now, normally when guys say shit about how they’d like to date me, I generally steal myself and play along, just so I can empty their wallets and get the fuck out of there with them still thinking they have a chance. (Lately that’s not the case; I don’t give anyone the impression this is anything but ephemeral entertainment. I’m getting blunt in my old age). But eventually I had to stop sitting with Jim, because the charade just became too much, and it reached the same old tipping point of “whatever they’re paying me isn’t enough to deal with their bullshit.”

He disappeared for a while, but I’ve seen him a few times in the club in the last couple of years, accompanied by—you guessed it—one of our dancers, who doesn’t work anymore, whom I guess is now his girlfriend. I hope she’s happy, I really do.

Then there’s David, the guy Kendall and I sat with on Sunday. David was my regular wayyyyy back in the day, like after I first started, for about a year, until he disappeared. I figured he got remarried and moved permanently to his house on St. John. He’s got a shitload of money. David’s cool in that I can actually be honest about my relationship status(es) with him. He recently resurfaced; it’d been so long that I actually thought his name was Michael. But whatever, I’m crappy at remembering names. So anyways, here he is out of the blue, a few weeks ago. I sat and ate with him and we caught up, mostly about our love lives and what’s transpired in recent years. He’s recently single, and whaddaya know, back in the fucking strip club. Just bought his ex a house in LA so she’d get out of his hair. Hope that’s worth it...

What is it with these old rich white dudes constantly getting into commodified relationships? Do they lack self confidence, and figure they might as well purchase their companionship in a roundabout kinda way? Is it a power thing, so that they can get rid of whomever rather easily, if she turns out to be batshit crazy? Do commodified relationships automatically attract the batshit crazy? Because it seems to me, and it’s not just the fact that they resurface every couple of years when their latest fling goes tits up, that the commodification just fucks everything up. I mean yeah, there are plenty of perfectly healthy relationships in which one partner takes care of the other financially, this is obviously not uncommon in our culture, and lends itself rather well to breeding. But this is something different. It’s commodified from the get-go. How could they honestly think it could last? How are they not walking around constantly questioning the authenticity of their relationship? Are they even aware of that uncertainty, and if so, does it bother them?

Old white rich dudes aside, there are some guys who just have no clue that hello, this is our job. I’ve been over that here before. You get to the part where they pay you, and all of a sudden they’re clueless. Like, what? You want money for what just happened? But I thought you really liked me! Then there are the guys that want to see you out of the club (and not for cash, either. I’m happy to have dinner with someone for $500, but rare is the person who gets that, sticks to that, and can afford that). They think that, just because you provided a service, which also happens to include fake affection, this means that you want to go out on a date. So fucking annoying. WAKE UP. You're at a STRIP CLUB. We do not ACTUALLY like you.

And yeah, I give my phone number out. Some girls have business cards, others have work phones (those are also tax deductible btw). Here’s the deal: If there’s a chance I’ll get repeat business out of it, it’s almost always worth it. I make it clear that my primary mode of communication is text messages, that I haven’t listened to my voicemail in three years so don’t bother calling and/or leaving one, and that they should text me when they’re coming in next, instead of leaving it up to chance whether I might be working that night or not (especially if they’re travelers. Oh, how I love the travelers). The point is: if they want to sit with me again, I’d rather be there than not. I’d say this strategy works out about 5% of the time, but holy god, the money I’ve made over the years because of it. And yeah, I still get 3AM-attempted-booty-call-drunk-dials from time to time, from the locals. Stupid locals. To be clear, I don’t think this is like, the revelation of the century or anything, but there are some people who take it the wrong way, and are all, “Whoa! That stripper gave me her phone number! She must really like me!” And then they’re texting me with boring shit, day in and day out. I mean, some checking-up is fine, some random volleys here and there are acceptable, sure, this is a business relationship and certain ties need to be maintained. But really? How clueless ARE you?

Like I said in the previous entry, I cannot wait for the moment when I delete all the customer numbers from my phone. I have them saved in the same spot in my contact list; every single one of them has an “L/” before their name (L stands for Lodge), and some sort of descriptor after their name, because I suck at names and generally require mnemonic devices in order to keep my shit straight. Sometimes those don’t even work, and when someone I don’t remember does come back in, I tell him to text me when he’s sitting at the library bar. That way I can usually pick out the face, and save face in the process.

Seriously, I fantasize every day about the moment when I delete all of these numbers, save maybe like, five. There are five people, out of one hundred and seventy two (no really, I just counted. Trust me, I’m JUST as shocked as you are right now, probably more so), that I care about maybe having a drink with the next time they’re in Austin. Five people whose company I would keep even if they weren’t paying me.

Notable mnemonic descriptors include: “Andrew the pervy Canadian” (people’s kinks fucking fascinate the hell out of me) “Bob the nosy New Yorker” (OMG what a dick, but oh, so much money…), “Brad with the weird nose,” (for the record: I don’t remember the nose, but I guess it was weird, LOL), “Brian the SMU douchebag” (nuff said. Def remember him), “Cliff the desperate married guy,” (fuck, that could be ANYONE!), “Ed the submissive” (subby customers are really good outlets for aggression), “Hurricane Steve” (insurance adjustor, crazy stories about Katrina), “James in the chair” (god I miss him. My paraplegic customer. So irreverent, he was. He enjoyed pretending he had cerebral palsy whenever a waiter would ignore him due to that presumption, and missed the days before movie theaters got handicapped seating, because he had to park his chair in the aisle and then got to laugh when people tripped over it and down the stairs. And you know how blind people get insane senses of smell and hearing? Well, his neck was so sensitive, I could barely touch it without him stopping me. He’d had orgasms from neck stimulation. But I digress), “Jim the hot air dude” (Jim from a previous blog, “I got caught being a real person,” the one who kept asking me about my evil ex like months after we’d broken up. He flies hot air balloons), “John the cheapo who thinks art is good” (god, he was so cheap. Why did I save a cheapo number? Who knows) “Reagan octopus tie” (that guy is RAD and I hope he comes in again), “Ron with all the mile points” (can you tell what I was after?), “Scott the spanker” (that was a fun night!), “Tony the ?” (hmm. Don’t remember him. SHOCKING), “Chris with stripes” (he always wore shirts that have what I call “intelligent stripes.” He’s one of the five. And I think he lives in Austin now. I want to be his friend. He’s SUCH a nerd), and “Rob the racer” (has Ferraris, races Porsches, pity I never took a ride in a fucking Enzo, that’s a helluva box to check; fuck, I’d do that for FREE).

Phew, names. So many names. So many forgotten moments of feigned intimacy. So many remembered moments of actual intimacy, so many fears and hopes and dreams spilled out over drinks and flesh. Enough. I’ve had enough.

All that being said, we do the GFE all the time, and it’s great. People need companionship, the same way that babies in Chinese orphanages will die if you don’t touch them. I’ve said it before, but I’m okay with what we sell, even though my time to sell it is done. We provide what certain types of customers lack in their personal lives, we provide love, support, acceptance, acknowledgment, intrigue, adoration. R. Danielle Egan calls this role the “whorish wife.” Her work featured prominently in my thesis. The whorish wife provides all the emotional support of the wife, but the physical (in our case, feigned) availability of the whore. Such a great term.

Some of my coworkers bring a different meaning to the GFE. Many of my friends in there (read: the handful (<10) women I’ll keep in my life post-stripping) pick up dates in the club. Not like, people they fuck for money, but actual guys they date. To this day, I don’t understand it. I’ve tried once. But the guys that come into the club, the locals, the young attractive ones? Not the people I want to date. Generally the men in my life, especially the ones I’m intimate with, don’t enjoy strip clubs (unless they go to party, that’s a different story and motive altogether), and I like to think it’s because they can get pussy on their own. So the ones who come into the club, who are in the right age/attractiveness bracket, those guys just aren’t my speed. They’re boring. But whatever, not judging my girls, just making the point that yeah, sometimes we DO actually like you!

So yeah, GFE. Big can o’ worms, that one. Thanks for reading, ya’ll.


3/25/11

what men want

I’ve said it before, and I will continue to stand behind this statement, no matter how jaded or far removed I become from the biz: everyone comes to the club for different reasons. But there are certain patterns I’ve noticed, and conclusions I can draw therein. Here are a few of them. This list is not complete. It gets ramble-y, but these are some of the most important observations I’ve ever made about what stripping does to relationships and psyches, so fucking pay attention.

Exhibit A: The ideal customer.

The ideal customer knows he’s paying for an entertainment/companionship service, and doesn’t deny this to himself or to others. Last night I was bored and kept following Mazlowe around to her tables, because she picks good ones. We were busy eating and cackling with one of her regulars (this was about the time when we decided that during my last week of work, I should change my name to Pavlov and only dance to “Ring my bell” and “Who let the dogs out”), when he said something really interesting. “How do you explain to your coworkers that you come to the titty bar to hang out with amazingly intelligent beautiful women? Nobody would believe you.” And it’s true, most people don’t get it. But there are exceptional customers out there who get it. They get that we’re at work, they get that they have to pay us for our company, and there’s never a problem with that arrangement. These men must have a combination of some pretty specific qualities: intelligence, empathy, generosity, and loneliness. If they’re local, they have to be dissatisfied with their personal life. If they’re travelling, they have to be bored because they’re on a business trip in Dallas and there’s not anything interesting to do here.

I usually prefer the travelers, because they don’t have any mistaken notions about “what it all means.” Every time I find a local regular, the relationship eventually ends because they realize that they’re not actually dating me. We have awesome times together, but eventually he’ll wake up and be like, “Okay, this feels like a relationship, but I have to pay her to hang out with me. She doesn’t want to be my girlfriend.” That will be that, I’ll take an income hit, and move on. Right now my local regular could become the exception to that rule, because he’s in a romance-less marriage and they’re basically roommates and staying together because it’s cheaper than a divorce. So he’s probably “safe” in that regard. But who knows.

Now, let me be clear. I truly like and appreciate every regular I’ve ever had. I don’t care who you are, customer or not, but you don’t get to be my friend, much less see me once a week or more, if you’re not interesting as hell. Would my regulars be people I could sit down and talk with in an airport bar for six hours while we’re both stranded in, say, Milwaukee? Absolutely. Will I keep in contact with some of them after I’m done? Sure. They’re good buddies, and they have good stories, and I feel that at least a portion of our relationship(s) is/are genuine, despite the commodification. But I won’t keep all of them around. I fantasize about the moment when I get to delete the literally hundreds of phone numbers I have stored. Airport conversation or no, would I be this nice to them if they weren’t paying me? Probably not. I’ve become quite skilled at channeling my affection. But I’m tired. I’m tired of pretending to like people more than I do.

The constant channeling into different outlets can get exhausting. The Aussie and I both prefer to make all our money from one or two sources per evening. As she put it, we tire easily of the “I’m this, I’m that, I’m this, I’m that” game.

Yes, we are selling parts of ourselves. The Aussie said, “This is exploitation on my terms. You think you’re not being exploited in a cubicle? This is on my terms.” It’s true, we’re all whores for our jobs, but we strippers have a little bit more control over where that exploitation comes from, i.e. we can walk away from an abusive situation if we deem it so. The Aussie’s mom said, “We all sell ourselves, in marriage, in life.” And her daughter, my dear friend, extrapolates: “I’m just doing it the way I want to do it. And that’s why I’ve stayed so long. I don’t want a real job until I can do it the way I want.”

Selling ourselves changes the way we interact with “real” people too. I tend to be really social when I go out, relishing in the fact that I’m engaging in real interactions with pure motives. The Aussie expresses something different: “You lose the filter when you’re not getting paid. I don’t want to talk to people when I go out, I want to take ecstasy and dance and lose my shit. I don’t even know how much I’ve given up by [stripping]. I’m not getting laid.”

And it’s true. This job makes it impossible to have a real relationship. You work at night. You’re constantly selling so much of yourself, it changes the way you love. The Aussie says, “I’m so used to manipulating people that I find myself dating people who are beneath me because they’re easy to manipulate.” She’s recognized this, and is trying to break that habit. “I’m excited by people, which is why I’m a good stripper, but my instantaneous connection is sexual, which is why I’ve never had a relationship that grew. Eliza is in her first post-stripping relationship and is having a hard time adjusting to the real. It’s romance, he’s not a customer, she likes him for him, not his money. She’s basically been dating customers and is having a hard time switching back.” Now, my personal experience hasn’t been like this. I’ve had relationships, I don’t manipulate my lovers, I don’t see my patterns with customers spilling over into my intimate life, but most of them were long distance, so I could still control my time (read: work nights and schedule week/ends where I see my bf and fuck off from work). Now that I’m single, and living in a place where I won’t find a mate, and all I could really do is go out on a date here, a date there, and I don’t. I don’t see the point. I don’t want dates, I want love. I’m tired of this. You can’t put a price tag on love. When I’m done here in a few, whatever I lose in income, I will earn back tenfold in authenticity.

Some customers think you can buy love, though. Not all customers are ideal. There are some who are completely deluded, and some who are aware they’re being deluded.

Exhibit B: The Skeptic.

In “Never trust a man with a boat,” I describe how some customers can turn on you once they realize that you’re not dancing naked for them, or laughing at their jokes, or generally being adoring, because you genuinely feel like it. Well, a few weeks ago, I had a really interesting exchange with a guy after I’d done a few dances:

Him: “Wow, you’re really good. I totally think you’re going to go home with me, but you’re not.”

Me: “Um, thanks?”

Him: “No seriously, I feel like I should be giving you my number right now, but that’s pointless, because you don’t actually like me.”

Me: “I do like you. But not in the way you’re thinking. May I be completely honest?” (stealing myself a little here, ahhh fuckit)

Him: “Sure.”

Me: “You’re too short. I need guys who are at least three or four inches taller than me.”

Him: “But I’m five ten.”

Omg. He’s so not five ten.

Me: “No way.”

I take off my shoes (which is considered prostitution in this state btw, still need to figure out the arcane source of that particular blue book law), we stand toe to toe, quite literally. He’s not five ten. Whatever.

The point is: he cut through the crap. He called me out on my game. And he seemed quite put off about it.

Whatever, he deserves it. He clearly didn’t know what he was getting into when he started talking to me.
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 10, 2011 5:15 pm

http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/nhC ... 407.085133

The Commodification of Intimacy: Marriage, Sex, and Reproductive Labor
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 38: 49-64 (Volume publication date October 2009)
Nicole Constable
Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260; email: constabl@pitt.edu


ABSTRACT

Over the past three decades, scholars have paid greater attention to the intensification and complex interconnectivity of local and global processes. Anthropological studies of cross-border marriages, migrant domestic workers, and sex workers have burgeoned, demonstrating growing scholarly interest in how social relations have become evermore geographically dispersed, impersonal, mediated by and implicated in broader political-economic or capitalist processes. At the same time, intimate and personal relations—especially those linked to households and domestic units, the primary units associated with reproductive labor—have become more explicitly commodified, linked to commodities and to commodified global processes (i.e., bought or sold; packaged and advertised; fetishized, commercialized, or objectified; consumed; assigned values and prices) and linked in many cases to transnational mobility and migration, presenting new ethnographic challenges and opportunities. This review highlights contemporary anthropological and ethnographic studies of the transnational commodification of intimacy and intimate relations, related debates, themes, and ethnographic challenges.

INTRODUCTION

The proliferation of consumption practices and domains in late capitalism, including the commodification even of fetuses and the means of reproduction, creates doubts as to what—if anything—exists outside of commodity exchange.

Russ 2005, p. 142

In employment market terms, European demand is strong for migrant women in three areas: cleaning, cooking and housekeeping inside private houses; caring for sick, disabled, elderly and young people inside private houses; and providing sex in a wide variety of locales.

Augustín 2007a, p. 53

To label a payment as a gift (tip, bribe, charity, expression of esteem) rather than an entitlement (pension, allowance, rightful share of gains) or compensation (wages, salary, bonus, commission) is to make claims about the relationship between payer and payee.

Zelizer 2000, p. 826


Over the past three decades, anthropologists have paid attention to the intensification and complex interconnectivity of local and global processes (Appadurai 1996, Basch et al. 1994, Gupta & Ferguson 1992). They have criticized and analyzed the myriad ways in which social relations have become evermore geographically dispersed, impersonal, mediated by and implicated in broader political-economic or capitalist processes. Scholars have examined the ways in which aspects of intimate and personal relations—especially those that are linked to households and domestic units, the primary units associated with reproductive labor—are increasingly and evermore explicitly commodified, seemingly linked to commodities and to commodified global processes, or under assault by “market biographies” or lives that are shaped by market demands that characterize modernity (Beck & Beck-Gernscheim 1995, Shumway 2003, Zelizer 2005).

In Marxist terms, commodification refers to the process of assigning market value to goods or services that previously existed outside of the market (Marx 1978). This review focuses on how anthropologists have recently contributed to analyses of the real or imagined commodification of intimate relations, particularly those involving marriage, sex, and reproductive labor. By commodification, I refer to the ways in which intimacy or intimate relations can be treated, understood, or thought of as if they have entered the market: are bought or sold; packaged and advertised; fetishized, commercialized, or objectified; consumed or assigned values and prices; and linked in many cases to transnational mobility and migration, echoing a global capitalist flow of goods.

The term intimate relations refers here to social relationships that are—or give the impression of being—physically and/or emotionally close, personal, sexually intimate, private, caring, or loving. Such relationships are not necessarily associated with or limited to the domestic sphere, but discourses about intimacy are often intertwined with ideas about gender and domesticity, gifts as opposed to markets. In many cases, intimate relations are related to reproductive labor or care work in the broadest sense including, most notably, child care, nursing, and hospice care (Hochschild 1983, Russ 2005) and also to entertainment such as stripping, erotic dancing, hostessing, and other types of sex work. This review draws selectively and not exhaustively from a vast and rapidly growing literature on transnational intimacies, including intimate labor and intimate relations, although much of the literature is not self-identified as such or unified around this theme. Topically, primary examples are taken from three broad types of intimate relations: cross-border marriages, migrant domestic workers and care workers, and migrant sex workers, as they relate directly or indirectly to commodification. These three broad categories represent of course only a small range of possible intimate relations that are related to reproductive labor, but these are three areas in which a significant literature has developed in recent years. This review focuses on the ways in which ethnographic scholarship contextualizes, problematizes, and theorizes the commodification and consumption of intimate reproductive labor, especially within an increasingly global or transnational context since the 1980s and concludes with a discussion of possible future directions.1

GENDERED MIGRATION

Gender is a central topic and primary subject of criticism in the literature on transnational marriage migration, sex work, and care work. Since the 1970s, studies of migration were criticized for focusing almost exclusively on male migrants (without attention to gender) or for treating female migrants as though they were simply appendages of migrant men (Brettell & deBerjeois 1992; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Morokvasic 1983, 1984; Piper 2006). Since then, many influential studies have focused on the feminization of migrant labor (Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2003, Parreñas 2001, Sassen 2000). More recently, the scholarly focus on migrant women (instead of gender) as well as the heteronormative focus of most migrant studies have also been subject to criticism, pointing in new directions for future research (Babb 2006, Donato et al. 2006, Mahler & Pessar 2006, Manalansan 2006).

In her influential essay entitled “Love and Gold,” Hochschild argues that the care and love provided by third world women is a resource that is not unlike “the nineteenth-century extraction of gold, ivory, and rubber from the Third World” (2003a, p. 26; 2003b). In the contemporary version of imperialist extraction, she argues, love and care are “the new gold” because emotional labor is extracted from poorer regions of the world to benefit richer ones at a low cost (2003a). The edited volume Global Woman focuses primarily on such feminized labor and is aptly subtitled “Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy” (Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2003). The articles in Global Woman illustrate how globalization has resulted in increased opportunities for intimacy across and despite vast geographic distances.

Numerous studies and analyses of global relationships and processes point to wide variations in gendered patterns of mobility that involve men as well as women. Men from poorer regions of the so-called Global South migrate for work—as in the case of construction workers and seamen from the Philippines and Indonesia—to the oil-rich countries of the Middle East. Immigrant male doctors provide intimate care, and men are also involved in sexual and reproductive labor. But such men, with few notable exceptions (e.g., Espiritu 2002; Margold 1995; Padilla 2007a,b), are rarely approached as a gendered topic of study. The issue of intimacy is far more often applied to the physical and emotional labor of women (Augustín 2007a,b; Donato et al. 2006; Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2003).

Scholars have attempted to shift the analytical focus away from “women” per se toward gendered analyses more broadly. Building on cultural geographer Massey's notion of “power geometry” (Massey 1994), in which some people are in charge of mobility (their own and that of others), Pessar & Mahler (2001) call for attention to “gendered geographies of power” in which one's social location relative to power influences opportunities for geographic mobility. Massey, Pessar & Mahler, and others query the variety of factors that determine who moves and who controls or influences the movements of others. Following Appadurai's notion of global ethnoscapes (1996), scholars have examined a variety of “marriage-scapes” (e.g., Abelmann & Kim 2005; Chao 2005; Constable 2005a,b; Freeman 2005; Oxfeld 2005; Schein 2005; Suzuki 2005; Thai 2005) and “sex-scapes” (Brennan 2004, 2007).

Ethnographic research thus describes varied patterns of gendered marital mobility and gendered sex and care work in a global context, illustrating new gendered geographies of power in which certain women have opportunities for mobility that are unavailable to men, and certain classes of men and women have the ability to determine their own mobility and that of others. Despite the burgeoning number of studies of caregivers, domestic workers, and cross-border marriages, studies of migrant sex workers, particularly of male sex workers, male care givers, and same sex-intimacy, have been slower to appear (Augustín 2007a; Cheng 2005, 2007, 2010; Constable 2000; Manalansan 2003; Padilla 2007a,b; Sim 2007, 2009).

Gendered geographies of mobility point to different class ends of the migratory spectrum. On one end are elite “astronaut families” (in which the family members are divided across regions; for example, the male breadwinner may go work in one country and the wife accompanies the children to another country to facilitate their education) and immigrant professionals (Ong 1999; Piper & Roces 2003; Shen 2005, 2008; Shih 1999; Yeoh et al. 2005), many of whom have the privilege to choose to remain at home or whose “home” becomes multiple and flexible. On the other end of the spectrum are growing numbers of documented and undocumented women and men from poorer countries who provide benefits for the more privileged residents of wealthier regions (Ong 2006) as maids (Anderson 2000, Adams & Dickey 2000, Lan 2006, Parreñas 2001, Sim & Wee 2009), sex workers (Augustín 2007a,b; Cheng 2007, 2010; Parreñas 2008), wives (Constable 2003, 2005a; Oxfeld 2005; Roces 2003; Thai 2005, 2008), or adoptees (Cohen 2007, Dorow 2006, Volkman 2005), all of whom contribute to what Parreñas has called a “chain of love.”

Studies of contemporary global migratory processes point to the importance of socioeconomic class transformations and related conflicts for workers and employers or clients. The “middle-class” educated identity of Filipina maids, for example, may be threatening to Taiwan or Hong Kong employers when the home is also an intimate workplace (Constable 2007b, Lan 2006) or can increase their perceived value relative to other nationalities of workers (de Regt 2008, Lan 2006). Conflicts exist between the class and educational identity of migrant Vietnamese or Chinese wives and their U.S. working-class husbands, and in the gendered desires of men who seek “traditional wives” abroad and women who seek “modern husbands” (Constable 2003, 2005b; Thai 2005, 2008). In a fascinating study of Brazilian erotic dancers in New York City, Maia (2007) illustrates the class/gender complexities of the situation as educated middle-class Brazilian women opt to work as dancers in nightclubs (as opposed to working as maids) where they provide intimate labor for working-class—or less-educated middle-class—U.S. men. In such cases, class identity is an important mediating factor in constructing and resisting commodified migrant subjectivities.

Ethnographies of migrant workers have examined a single ethnic group/nationality of workers in one location, for example, Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong (Constable 1997) or Mexican and Central American maids in Los Angeles (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001). More recent studies have adopted more ambitious multisited research methodologies including multiple destinations, sending and receiving countries, and migrant workers as well as family members who are left behind (Cheng 2007, 2010; Frantz 2008; Gamburd 2000; Parreñas 2001, 2005a,b; Sim & Wee 2009). As Liebelt (2008) argues, migrant maids and caregivers often do not simply move back and forth from home to a single migrant destination and back again, but rather on and on from one destination to another that is higher on the global hierarchy of employment possibilities, thus requiring mobile research methodologies.

Clearly not all geographic mobility involves travel or migration of women or men from poorer countries to wealthier ones for work. A rich area of research examines movements of residents of richer countries, as in the case of tourists (Brennan 2004; Padilla 2007a,b; Wilson 2004) and astronaut families described above (Ong 1999, 2006; Piper & Roces 2003; Yeoh et al. 2005). Men and women tourists from wealthy countries of Asia-Pacific, Western Europe, North America, and elsewhere travel to regions of Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and elsewhere for sex and in search of spouses. Whereas women also partake in sex tourism, and local men provide sexual intimacy to men and women, men from wealthy regions of the globe are widely depicted as the main beneficiaries and the consumers of such global intimacies (Brennan 2004; Cheng 2010; Frohlick 2007; Kelsky 2001; Padilla 2007a,b). Such studies increasingly consider new mobility patterns of elites and nonelites, the “costs and benefits” both to those who move and those who remain at home (Gamburd 2000, Parreñas 2005a), and, as discussed below, the role of new technologies in patterns, and the notions of love and authenticity that such relationships entail.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF CONSUMPTION

Arranged marriages and marriages based on correspondence are not new, nor is the employment of migrant maids or sex workers. New technologies offer unique methodological and theoretical challenges to ethnographers of transnational intimacies while also transforming the landscape of intimacy. The Internet plays a striking role in the proliferation of businesses that promote international marital introduction services (or offer mail-order brides). It shapes new procedures for recruiting, interviewing, and employing foreign maids across great geographic distances, and it proffers new opportunities to advertise and locate sexual services. Internet technology plays a central role in the commodification of intimacy and in shaping new movements and geographic and electronic landscapes of intimacy for individuals who are otherwise geographically dispersed (Brennan 2004; Constable 2003, 2007a). New technologies offer migrant workers new means to create and maintain a sense of intimacy with family members far away, as in the case of “long distance mothering” (Parreñas 2005a,b; Yeoh et al. 2005), to facilitate intimate communications between sex workers and boyfriends/clients (Brennan 2004, Cohen 1986), and to provide opportunities for prospective spouses to develop online intimacy before they meet face to face (Constable 2007a).

Since the early 1990s when so-called mail order bride catalogs began to be published and accessible online, the number of introduction agencies geared toward English speakers has rapidly proliferated (Constable 2005b). Recent studies of cross-border marriages, courtships, dating, and sexual partnerships of various sorts have pointed to new patterns of commodification and to rapid growth of profit-oriented and electronically mediated forms of matchmaking or marital introduction that facilitate wider global patterns of cross-border relationships (Johnson 2007, Johnson-Hanks 2007). Some marriage brokers promote international marriage partners as though they were commodities or offer services to facilitate the process of meeting and selecting partners from a wider globally defined “marriage market” (Constable 2003, 2005a; Freeman 2005, 2006; Piper & Roces 2003; Simons 2001; Thai 2008; Wang & Chang 2002).

Processes of online and electronic communication have influenced the purchase of sexual services because individual sex workers increasingly advertise online and communicate with prospective clients via the internet and without the need for middlemen or intermediaries (Agustin 2007a,b; Bernstein 2007a). As Bernstein's sensitive and fine-grained analysis shows, electronic communication leads to new opportunities and possibilities for intimate encounters and individual businesses and have literally redefined the spaces of sexual labor. As opposed to depending on older assumptions about red light districts and street walkers, patrons and clients can now advertise and locate one another invisibly and privately through the Internet.

The Internet has also had a major impact on the marketing and consumption of migrant domestic workers (Constable 2007b, Julag-Ay 1997, Lan 2006, Tyner 2009). Internet technology is one tool of domestic worker employment agencies (replacing videotapes and CDs with live Internet interviews). As is the case with online escort and dating services and marriage introduction services, the success of the business is based on creating and anticipating the desires of consumers or clients. The more “high quality” products or services they offer, the better the chance of selling the agency's services. A number of scholars have examined the role of domestic worker recruitment and employment agencies in marketing and selling products, distinguishing among different nationalities of workers, objectifying workers by offering specials, sales, markdowns, free replacements, and guarantees—in short, using the language of commodity markets to refer to workers—but less has been done in terms of analyzing its importance in creating new markets and transforming the spaces of labor. Unlike Bernstein's study of the spaces of sex work and the historical impact of technological change on both the meaning and consumption of sexual services, parallel analyses have yet to be produced in relation to domestic labor and the terrain of marriage.

An intellectual bridge is also needed to connect the technology of marriage, domestic work, and sex work to transformations and redefinitions of the meaning of family, drawing from the many insights of studies of technologically assisted parenting and the reproduction of children. Adoption and new reproductive technologies have provided a rich arena for anthropologists to revisit older theories of kinship and definitions of family (Edwards et al. 1993; Franklin & McKinnon 2000, 2002; Franklin & Ragoné 1998; Schneider 1968). Commodified processes of reproductive labor have led to important studies of diverse family forms that challenge prevailing patterns of heteronormativity (Lewin 1993, Weston 1991). New critiques of biologically deterministic theories of kinship have offered insights about commodified global and transnational processes (Bowie 2005, Cohen 2007, Dorow 2006, Howell 2003, McKinnon 2005, Orobitg & Salazar 2005, Padilla et al. 2007, Volkman 2005). Anthropologists have examined the sociocultural and political-economic implications of new procreative or reproductive services and mechanisms such as surrogate parenthood, egg or sperm donation, and local and international adoption that aim at facilitating the creation of families (Bharadwaj 2003; Franklin 1995; Ginsburg & Rapp 1995; Inhorn & Birenbaum-Carmeli 2008; Modell 1994; Nahman 2006; Ragoné 1994, 1996; Sharp 2001; Strathern 1985, 1992a,b). Work remains to be done to link the insights relating to the reproductive technologies with technologically mediated and transnational intimacies.

LOVE, PERFORMANCE, AND AUTHENTICITY

The commodification of social relations in the era of industrial capitalism stands in supposed contrast to Marx's nostalgic ideal of the “social character” of familial labor in precapitalist peasant families (Marx 1978, p. 326). Yet despite common idealization of precapitalist social relations, social relationships that are represented and defined by gifts, bride wealth, dowry, and payments are not unambiguous, free of conflict, or unmarked by inequality or instrumentalism (Bloch & Parry 1989, Comaroff 1979, Mauss 1967). Commodification is likewise rarely simply given, unambiguous, or complete, as illustrated by Zelizer's analysis of monetary exchanges, intimate social relations, and legal disputes in the West (2000, 2005). The social science perspective that places moral boundaries between market and domestic spheres has been labeled the “hostile worlds view” (Zelizer 2000). The conflation of intimate social relations with monetary value is criticized by those who imagine a more altruistic or authentic precapitalist past or who view the domestic sphere as a proper shelter from the harsh and impersonal world of market capitalism. Yet the question remains of how the commodification of intimate relations is understood and experienced by those involved in such relationships and processes. A key concern is–as the title of Brennan's (2004) study of sex workers in the Dominican Republic aptly puts it—What's Love Got to do With It?

The historical meaning and construction of love, its performance and authenticity, are rich and promising areas of inquiry, as the following diverse examples illustrate. Whereas Brennan (2004, 2007) approaches Dominican women's relationships with foreign men, some of which result in marriage, as “performances” in which sex workers feign love to mask the economic exchange and the benefits they receive, other scholars define them in terms of “bounded authenticity” (Bernstein 2007a,b) or in terms of historical constructions of romantic intimacy (Giddens 1992, Hirsch 2007, Padilla et al. 2007).

Numerous studies examine cultural constructions of love and romance in a variety of geographic settings (Jankowiak 1995), considering how they are commodified in terms of material expectations, gift exchanges, and mass-mediated images of modern romance (Ahearn 2001, Hirsch 2004, Hirsch & Wardlow 2006, Illouz 1997, Jankowiak 1995, Padilla et al. 2007, Rebhun 1999). Commodification may be hidden, disguised, mystified, denied, or reinterpreted as a gift or experienced as liberating and modern (Russ 2005). In the context of Europe and the United States, Bernstein argues that “traditional ‘procreative’” and “modern ‘companionate’” models of sexuality are increasingly being supplanted by a “recreational sexual ethic” that differs from marital or ongoing relationships and is defined by “physical sensation and from emotionally bounded erotic exchanges” (2007b, p. 6). She argues that the “girlfriend experience” increasingly offered by sex workers and often located via the Internet is an example of “bounded authenticity” in which not only eroticism but also an “authentic relationship” (albeit within a bounded frame) is for sale in the marketplace (Bernstein 2007b, p.7). Allison's research among Japanese salary men who frequent hostess clubs and engage prostitutes focuses on how hostesses serve to make men “feel like men” and that men gain satisfaction from “care” they receive and the lack of ongoing responsibility that accompanies payment for sexual and intimate attention in hostess clubs and on sex tours abroad, in contrast with their domestic lives and relationships with their wives (Allison 1994).

These examples suggest that commodification of intimacy is not an analytical end in itself, but instead offers a valuable starting point for analyses of gendered social relations, cultural meanings, social inequalities, and capitalist transformations (Appadurai 1986). In a provocative volume on modernity, companionate marriage, and romantic courtship, Hirsch & Wardlow illustrate the promise of such comparative ethnographic analyses (Hirsch & Wardlow 2006). In her study of the Huli of Papua New Guinea, Wardlow notes that Seventh-Day Adventist missionaries criticized the Huli (as other Christian missionaries did of other groups) for the exchange of bride wealth, which they argued “commoditizes women and weakens the proper bonds of marriage” (Wardlow 2006, p. 66). Yet the decline of bride wealth among the Huli and in other societies has not meant that within “the context of capitalism, the home becomes ideologically demarcated as the safe haven of emotional intimacy, a place where one recovers from the alienation of the marketplace” (Wardlow 2006, p. 74). Instead, the meanings and importance of commodities are transformed in relation to particular local understandings of modernity as related to subjectivity and intimate relationships (Ahearn 2001, Chao 2005, Rebhun 1999).

Faier's work on professions of love among Filipina entertainers who marry Japanese men is groundbreaking. Instead of questioning the authenticity of women's professions of love for their husbands, or treating them as feigned performances, Faier asks how such declarations are “made meaningful through global processes” (2007, p. 148). Faier argues that Filipinas' professions of love serve to counteract the stigma of their work and to define their transnational subjectivities. Love is also associated with the care (including gifts and monetary remittances for their families) and understanding offered to women by their husbands. Following Rebhun's view of Christian love in opposition to financial gain, Faier stresses women's constructions of new gendered and sexualized subjectivities in relation to modernity, Christianity, and Philippine notions of utang ng loob (a debt of gratitude) that encompass the meaning of love (Faier 2007, p. 156) in relation to the notion of shame, which results from a failure to respect and repay one to whom it is owed. As discussed below, Faier's analytical approach to love also has important implications for the debate about migrant women as agents or victims of trafficking.

As scholarship on transnational intimacies illustrates, relationships assumed to be based primarily on paid work for money are often understood to involve complex forms of intimacy, love, or emotion, and those assumed to be based on love are linked in new and evolving ways to commercial practices and material desires.

BEYOND TRAFFICKED VICTIMS

A central theme in critical popular media and certain activist and feminist depictions of women who migrate from poorer countries to wealthier ones as maids, brides, or sex workers is that they are powerless “victims of trafficking.”2 So-called mail-order brides are depicted as though they are literally bought and sold and connected to human trafficking, although little actual evidence exists to support this position (Constable 2005c, Vance 2005).

Building on Foucault's idea that power is everywhere, much anthropological attention has been paid in recent decades to revealing instances of resistance and agency among the relatively powerless (Martin 1987, Ortner 2006, Parker 2005). In opposition to popular media images of helpless victims, ethnographic research has provided numerous examples of migrant women's activism, their subtle or explicit protests, and their resistance and agency within the context of structural factors that limit the opportunities and often disempower foreign brides, migrant domestic workers, and sex workers (Brennan 2004; Constable 1997, 2009; Kempadoo 2005; Kempadoo & Doezema 1998; Parker 2005; Parreñas 2008).

Unlike popular media depictions of trafficked women as commodities devoid of agency, anthropologists point to subtle and complex forms of power and agency within the household, in public spaces, and in the wider global context. Studies of care workers reposition older arguments about emotional labor as a gift or commodity in terms of, for example, the “commodity candidacy” of care, the relationality of partners in exchange, or the phenomenology of gift and commodity in relation to the self (Appadurai 1986, Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2003, Kopytoff 1986, Russ 2005, Valeri 1994).

Scholarship on gendered migration points to striking contrasts between the gendered migration of (mostly girl) babies who are adopted from China and elsewhere by European and North American middle-class, mostly white and heterosexual, parents and the migration of foreign brides and workers who face a markedly different migration process. Whereas forming a family through adoption is viewed as the right and privilege of middle-class families, and transnational adoptees are assumed to grow up to be privileged citizens, other types of immigrants face vastly different circumstances. Whereas adoptees, like migrant brides and workers, are sometimes characterized as trafficked or as part of a commodified process, adoptees are more likely to be depicted as the fortunate beneficiaries of such a process (Anagnost 2000, Cohen 2007, Constable 2003, Dorow 2006, Volkman 2005). In her study of U.S. adoptions of Chinese children, Dorow considers how discourse and processes of commodification are counterbalanced and opposed to parental understandings of children as gifts who will also receive the gift of good life and opportunity (Dorow 2006).

Anthropologists, sociologists, and feminist scholars have examined migratory patterns that build on or contrast with older forms of arranged marriage and matchmaking, have reconsidered older patterns of gift exchange and marriage payments, and have criticized Levi-Straussian structural assumptions about the “traffic in women” (Bloch & Parry 1989, Comaroff 1979, MacCormack & Strathern 1980, Rubin 1975). More recent scholarly research on sex work, sex tourism, prostitution, and comfort women points to the fluidity between paid sexual labor and marital relations and to interconnections between paid forms of intimacy and those that are assumed to be “free” (Bernstein 2007a,b; Brennan 2004; Cabezas 2004; Cheng 2007; Cohen 1982, 1986; Liechty 2005; Padilla 2007a,b; Piper & Roces 2003; Zelizer 2000).

The agent-victim binary has proven to be a dead end of sorts. Whereas certain feminist scholars and activists argue that all sex workers are victims, other scholars and feminists can respond with endless examples of agency and choice. Instead, scholars such as Augustín (2007a,b), Bernstein (2007a,b), Vance (2005), and others take on a critical analysis of the notion of trafficking, considering its historical specificity and the parallels between late-twentieth-century anxiety about trafficking and nineteenth-century hysteria about white slavery. Several scholars have drawn attention to both sex workers and their middle-class “social helpers” or nongovernmental workers and volunteers who often aim to help or rescue sex workers in misguided ways (Augustín 2007a, Bloch 2003, Cheng 2005). Anthropologists have also addressed methodological challenges associated with research on trafficking and have criticized rhetorical conflations of trafficking with prostitution (Brennan 2005, 2008; Vance 2005).

Faier's work (2007) discussed above offers a valuable alternative to the victim-agent binary. She focuses on the transnational gendered and sexual subjectivities of migrant women and successfully steers an analytical course away from the question of “true love versus material motivations,” thus offering an important advance over the dead-end question of depicting women migrants as either passive victims who lack the ability to make choices or active agents who have full control of their circumstances. Faier's analysis illustrates unequal global power relations within the context of women's self-definitions. Loving their husbands resonates with their sense of self as moral and modern women and wives. The lure of the Japanese entertainment industry for poor and unemployed Filipinas, the opportunities that such employment offers for intimate socialization with Japanese men, and the shortage of Japanese brides in rural regions of Japan illustrate ways in which capitalist processes promote new opportunities for intimacy and marriage that are influenced by, but not entirely defined by, the entertainment or sex work industry.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Recent studies of the changing local and global patterns, processes, and relations of intimacy build on and borrow from older critiques of overly binary models of public and private, intimate and impersonal, material and emotional, love and money, local and global, nature and culture (Franklin 2003; Franklin & McKinnon 2000, 2002; Levine 2003; McKinnon & Silverman 2005; Zelizer 2000). Some such studies refine older Marxist notions of commodification and reproductive labor or point to the ongoing importance of Maussian insights about gift exchange and the intimacy of social relationships. Collectively they draw on symbolic and interpretive analyses, critical global and feminist perspectives, and new anthropological insights that are linked to wider multisited and transnational ethnographic research that looks beyond local-global dichotomies, yet draws insight from older assumptions about kinship and social relations within increasingly global, mobile, and technologically mediated contexts.

Current anthropological studies demonstrate that in some contexts commodification of social relations are welcomed and interpreted as modern progress, as in the cases of child care and elderly care, which were once the responsibility of family members but can now be delegated to paid service providers. Yet even in such cases, commodification, or “the purchase of intimacy” (Zelizer 2000, 2005), is not the end point of the analysis nor is it devoid of countervailing personalized processes, assumptions, and anxieties. Instead, commodification and the accompanying notions of impersonal pragmatic market relations are often denied, mystified, mediated, transformed, or disguised. As the scope of commodification expands more deeply into various realms of intimacy, it involves a range of countervailing discourses and actions involving reciprocity and gift giving, claims to altruism, assertions of love, and claims to bounded authenticity.

This review has outlined some of the key contributions of the literature on cross-border marriages, domestic work, and sex work that addresses the commodification of intimacy. Methodologically, there is a marked shift toward multisited research away from narrow “area studies” approaches, toward border-crossing topics that require mobility as well as online and “deterritorialized” research (Gupta & Ferguson 1992). Promising new research has shifted from single nationalities and single locations, moving beyond binary constructions of sending and receiving locations to multiple hierarchies of sites and subjectivities.

Another key issue has been and continues to be gender and sexuality. Studies of transnational intimacies echo the shift in anthropology and migration studies more broadly, from the earliest topics of men as unexamined gendered subjects, to women, to gender more broadly. Still lacking are studies of men as intimate gendered subjects, as providers of care work and intimacy, and not just as consumers of sexual services. A fruitful direction for future research is also to question and move beyond the frames and assumptions of heteronormativity that are inherent in much of the research on transnational intimacies. As Babb (2006) proposes, “queering” love and globalization requires reexamining assumptions about domesticity, marriage, and gender that are deeply held by research subjects and researchers. Berlant's call for cataloging “intimacy's norms, forms and crimes,” asking “how public institutions use issues of intimate life to normalize particular forms of knowledge and practice and to create compliant subjects” (1998, p. 188) is well worth considering.

The value of future research therefore lies not in bemoaning the downfall of the sanctity of the domestic sphere or the demise of authentic relations outside the realm of capital, but instead, in continuing to attend to the multiple, complex, transnational, and also transgressive and transformative ways in which emotional ties and relationships are understood, formulated, or prohibited within and beyond local and global spaces. Studies such as those of Bernstein (2007a,b) and Faier (2007) point to the importance of fine-grained historically and culturally specific studies of intimacy in relation to new technologies and opportunities for mobility. Such studies continue to ask how authenticity is understood and experienced, offering opportunities as well as constraints. Globalization does not simply result in greater commodification of intimate sexual, marital, and reproductive relationships; it also offers opportunities for defining new sorts of relationships and for redefining spaces, meanings, and expressions of intimacy that can transform and transgress conventional gendered spaces and norms.

Future research would benefit by further examining the pairing of commodification and intimacy, casting them as the main topic rather than separating out topical foci on marriage, household work, sex work, nursing, adoption, etc. We must ask not only what differentiates erotic dance and hospice care, but also what such multiple and varied examples can tell us about the meaning of intimacy for all involved. The focus on transnational mobility of both elites and nonelites within neoliberal globalization and the ongoing tension between more complex microlevel patterns of power and agency and broader macro patterns of global inequality are also key. Research on the structural factors and the experiences and meanings of migrant work and marriage have made important inroads, allowing us to avoid the pitfalls of overly binary notions of victim and agent, public and private, or the trap of defining all women migrants or sex workers as trafficked victims. Yet there are risks and benefits associated with the notion of commodification. This notion both offers a way to illuminate power relations inherent in a variety of intimate relations but also can overdetermine the political-economic frame, thus masking the multiplicity of power and the potentially liberating and transformative aspects of intimate subjectivities.
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 14, 2011 8:11 am

http://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/0 ... st-school/

“Against school: How public education cripples our kids, and why”

John Taylor Gatto

Harper’s [Sept. 2003]



I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers’ lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else’s. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn’t know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover t~at all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insightsimply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

But we don’t do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the “problem” of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no “problem” with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would “leave no child behind”? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren’t looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education’s mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling’s true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. … Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim … is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States… and that is its aim everywhere else.

Because of Mencken’s reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch’s 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann’s “Seventh Annual Report” to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington’s aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to render the populace “manageable.”

It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant’s 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a “revolution” engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis’s 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which “one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary.”

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose – the actual purpose – of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits – and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

Tre you have it. Now you know. We don’t need Karl Marx’s conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that “efficiency” is the paramount virtue, rather than love, lib, erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn’t actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn’t have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era – marketing.

Now, you needn’t have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley – who was dean of Stanford’s School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant’s friend and correspondent at Harvard – had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: “Our schools are … factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned …. And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”

It’s perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we’re upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don’t bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to “be careful what you say,” even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology – all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 15, 2011 5:59 pm

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I Am Amway

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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 16, 2011 3:46 pm

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"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 16, 2011 5:09 pm




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"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 17, 2011 7:19 am

http://www.zcommunications.org/the-pick ... -adam-khan

The Pick Up Artist

Reinforcing male chauvinist clichés

February 2011

By Adam Khan


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In Jo Sol's film Fake Orgasm, the protagonist Lazlo Pearlman, a performance artist and self-styled "gender anarchist," tackles questions of gender, sexuality, and identity in a radical manner. Echoing the views of many feminist intellectuals, Pearlman highlights the oppressive nature of the assumption that gender and notions of masculinity and femininity are natural. For Pearlman, proof of the unfixed nature of gender can be seen in continuous attempts by patriarchal society to constantly reinforce and re-establish what it means to be a "man" or "woman." This subversive perspective agrees with the feminist theories of Judith Butler when she highlights that far from being a biological set-in-stone phenomena, gender is, on the contrary, a performative act, an ideology that requires human individuals to act out.

If this is so, then subversion and resistance will always be possible. However, in our modern or indeed post-modern 21st century Western democratic society where women have supposedly achieved their "liberation," patriarchy successfully adapts to the current situation. If capitalism can "constantly revolutionize the means of production" in Karl Marx's words, then patriarchy can clearly adapt culturally. Male and female behavior contribute to this depressing reality, creating what Ariel Levy calls a "raunch culture" where post-feminist women glorify their own objectification and exploitation through a consumer caricature of female sexuality. The reduction of female desire to G-strings, implants, porn, Playboy, and lap-dancing, all now becoming mainstream, has very little to do with the kind of sexual freedom that feminists have addressed. Within this context, something even more sinister is occurring among the crowds of horny and sex-obsessed men: the rise of the pick up artist (PUA) and the so-called seduction community.

A PUA can be defined as a man who is skilled in attracting and seducing women. Entering the term PUA into Google will result in many websites from individual PUAs with various techniques and different styles on how to meet and seduce women. For example:

· Richard La Ruina, aka Gambler, teaches a non-verbal stealth seduction approach ideal for the nightclub

· Adam Lyons approaches attraction with his "entourage game," which is based on the psychological assumption that women are attracted to men who keep themselves in the company of other attractive women

· Mehow teaches his bizarre "microloop theory" and a "10 second sexual attraction" system, often recording his victories on video

· Julian Foxx boasts the "Supernatural System," adopting a style that seeks to mimic those men considered to be "naturals" in pick up

· Vin DiCarlo unveiled his "Pandora's Box," a course that helps men "understand" women on a deep psychological level and even ridiculously categorizes women into eight types, supposedly allowing men the edge to develop individual pick up strategies

· Kezia Noble, a female PUA, also offers her services by teaching men seduction and a unique insight into the "female mind"

· Derek Lamont promotes an Internet attraction course where pick up can be transferred from the clubs and bars to Facebook and MySpace



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The origins of the seduction community can be traced to the self-improvement and life coaching industry, personified by gurus such as Richard Bandler. The fascination with Bandler's teachings, neuro linguistic programming (NLP), and [Ericksonian] hypnosis, have become traits of the self-improvement industry and PUAs. This is epitomized by Ross Jeffries, one of the founding fathers of the PUA community, and his so-called "Speed Seduction" system, which offers a manipulative approach to teaching hypnosis techniques for seduction. The other big daddy of the seduction community is Mystery, author of the Mystery Method, a kind of bible for the PUA in the way it has established much of the language, terminology, and alpha male ideology. For Mystery and many other PUAs, the process of seducing and attracting women is referred to as "the game." An important aspect of the game is for the male PUA to demonstrate that he is a high-value alpha male. The PUA desire to train their male students in becoming alpha is a perspective that is pseudo-scientific and ultimately biologically determinist. Rigid biological notions of masculinity and femininity accentuating difference are therefore reinforced in the PUA world. Many gurus identify specific traits which demonstrate "alphaness," implying a dominant man who will immediately attract women. Mystery explains in his book that the ultimate purpose of life is replication due to natural selection and thus humans are little more than biological machines.

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It is clear from the subtitle of Mystery's book, How To Get Beautiful Women Into Bed, that the mission of the PUA community is not to simply provide a dating service, especially when all the students, clients, and customers are men. The goal is to have sex with as many women as possible with no strings attached. That is why many PUAs claim to offer rejection proof strategies on approaching women in clubs at night or the streets in the day. The PUA gurus map out an entire strategy, from the opener to a conversation riddled with psychological power games, hypnosis, cold reading, and kinesthetic touches which supposedly build comfort and attraction. The conclusion to the strategy always ends with sexual escalation and either an "N close" (number close), "K close" (kiss close), or "F close" (use your imagination). In this bizarre situation, women become passive objects to be dominated and who are assumed to be biologically and psychologically wired in a specific way.

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This perverse PUA domination fantasy is confirmed not only through some of the obscene sexist language used by PUAs, but also in the way PUAs such as Gary Brodsky teach a viciously sexist bad-boy approach where men are advised to blatantly objectify their female "targets." His "any woman, anywhere, anytime" philosophy has taken PUA biological determinism to extremist heights through his online sale of ISA Formula 5, a pheromone enhancer which supposedly hits a woman's sexual receptors through their sense of smell. This disturbing yet laughable nonsense is also clear in many of the seminars of Ross Jeffries, who often uses boxing metaphors to describe the seduction process. The romancing of women is therefore reduced to a power game or struggle where men must defeat the desired female object. The main requirements for the PUA in the post-feminist woman are Victorian values of submission and obedience.

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PUAs may claim to be revolutionary in improving the confidence of men to talk to and pick up women, but in truth what is offered is merely a backward conservatism, yet another product of 1980s backlash politics. Ross Jeffries has often mentioned in his seminars that men have lost their masculinity and have become effeminate and that this undesirable feminization of men is a product of the 1960s counterculture politics, feminism, radical leftist ideas, and political correctness. Kezia Noble has also stated this same anxiety on her regularly updated website videos. "Where are the men?" she asks, citing how the lack of powerful male role models is responsible for the decline of confident, powerful, alpha males that can lead the female gender. She lists a number of examples of great male role models which include Winston Churchill, John Wayne, and Ronald Reagan known for their right wing political stances, let alone racist views.

Do They Work?

If the above information can explain why PUAs exist and how they justify their existence separate from mainstream dating services, the other question to also ask is whether PUA strategies work? Are they successful in satisfying the male ego's search to add as many notches to their belt as possible? Many PUAs may consider themselves players, claiming to have slept with hundreds of women and may indeed be "good" with the opposite sex. However what does that say about the agency of women in our society? As mentioned already, the pick-up process assumes a specific kind of behavior with regards to women. For example, PUAs will claim that women like dominant "bad boys" and find "nice guys" or needy men unattractive. This supposedly explains why some women are in relationships with men that can be defined as abusive. Gary Brodsky explains to his students that "women want to be dominated and taken."

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Kezia Noble supports this PUA perspective through her validation technique, a well-known PUA/NLP tactic using psychology. In conversation she teaches that men should demonstrate that they are high-value alpha males by showing their positive and negative approval for something the female target has done, said, behaved, acted, or worn. She justifies this through references to psychoanalysis, claiming that all women want to please men. For Noble, the origins of this psychological reality can be explained by Freud's Electra complex and a daughter's relationship with her father. The father's show of approval and disapproval for his daughter creates a situation where she seeks only approval and therefore looks for that subconsciously in her other relationships with men. Noble also trains her male students to use tasks on women, originally a hypnosis technique where, in the PUA context, men will slowly increase their control and power over a woman by giving her physical or conversational orders and challenges incrementally and stealthily. For example, a PUA may politely order a girl to get up and do a dance for him or ask her to tell him three reasons why she likes something specific as part of a conversation. This supposedly conditions a woman to be responsive and obedient to a man, building rapport and leading the interaction to sexual escalation.

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However, the fact that this kind of behavior may happen in nightclubs does not prove that women seek to please men as something ordained by nature or psychology. If PUA tactics achieve some success for men, then this merely highlights the ideological and cultural workings of patriarchy. Power is defined not simply by the social structure of domination but also the behavior of the subordinate oppressed group socialized through both implicit and explicit cultural norms. The main problem with PUA biological determinism and pseudo-psychological assumptions about the sexes are in the way they construct female sexuality as subordination and male sexuality, masculinity and male desire as something that is concerned with power over the female. PUAs merely embody this cliché. The PUA community, much like pornography, eroticizes this power relation, reducing sex to patriarchy. This is confirmed through PUA Bobby Bradshaw's 2 Girls Teach Sex DVD series, a collaboration with porn stars Tori Sinclair and Shawna Lenee, yet another journey into the fantasy of domination as attraction.

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PUAs are clearly subscribing to mainstream society's obsession with gender and the assumption of fundamental differences between men and women. Such a perspective will never see beyond difference and will always justify patriarchy and male domination. If masculinity in Western society has become a cliché unable to conceive male sexuality in any way other than through notions of power and domination, then violence against women and rape are the most extreme inevitabilities. PUAs contribute to this reality and in this sense the orientalist fantasy of a democratic liberal Western society where women are liberated becomes unconvincing. Religion-obsessed Mullahs and porn-obsessed PUAs are kindred spirits, sharing something in common. Both view women as a problem, a threat to the social order, and ultimately both share the same misogynistic desire to regulate and control female sexuality as a solution to that threat. With this in mind, the next time the likes of Mystery or Ross Jeffries appear triumphantly on a talk show or through the mass media promoting pick up, one should be very suspicious.

Z



Adam Khan
is a London-based writer, musician, and former activist on social justice issues. Previous work involved helping organize solidarity with the Zapatistas as well as anti-racist campaigns in London and involvement in the anti-capitalist movement.



From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/the-pick ... -adam-khan
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 17, 2011 12:00 pm

http://mysticbourgeoisie.blogspot.com/2 ... brand.html

LIAR LIAR 2: SELF AS BRAND

Lifting from Enchanté, my post of 29 August 2005, wherein I quoted from Philip Cushman's Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy...

In a later chapter called "Self-Liberation Through Consumerism" -- the section is titled "Heinz Kohut and the Valorization of Narcissism: The Self Takes Center Stage" -- Cushman talks about Kohut's "self psychology" and theory of narcissism, writing (p. 270) that Kohut confused appearance for essence, that is, taking culturally conditioned psychological dynamics for universal human truths. He says that Kohut

...saw the whole mid- to late twentieth-century clearing -- the appearance of emptiness, confusion, isolation, the commodification of human life -- and called it essence. By doing so he reified the given, gave it a scientific justification, and encouraged its continuation. Ultimately, this is the source of his limitation, and ours as well.

And there's this a page later...

......self structure is both built (through psychologically taking in and metabolizing the parent's qualities) and liberated (through the unfolding plan of the nuclear self). The consumer language in [Kohut's] formulation should be obvious. The two characteristic elements of twentieth-century American consumerism -- individual salvation through the consuming of commodities and the liberation of the enchanted interior -- are clearly evident.

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Relationships Are Tools
Other people are viewed as objects or tools in the quest for distinction, and the narcissistic patient expends a great deal of mental energy comparing him- or herself and judging the worth of others. If others have the potential to advance the narcissist in some way, they will be idealized and pursued. If others are perceived as ordinary or inferior, they will he dismissed, or perhaps exploited for some gain, then discarded.


Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders
Aaron Beck et al, 2nd edition, p. 250




The Brand YU Life - Chapter 6: Be Authentic
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"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."
-Malcolm X
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 18, 2011 8:54 am

http://www.commodifiedlife.com/?page_id=4


Shopfloor in the Maquiladoras

When I was being hired, after the interview, they asked me when I would have my next period…They said I couldn’t actually start work until I had my period. [I]t was still three weeks away so I had to wait. On the first day of my period, I came back. The nurse was here and she said “Let’s see it. Show me the sanitary napkin.” They accepted me that same day.

Reka S. Koerner, “Pregnancy Discrimination in Mexico: Has Mexico Complied With the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation?” Texas Journal on Civil Liberties & Civil Rights 4.2 (1999): 235, Academic Search Premier, EBSCO. 6 Sep. 2010 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=6936815&site=ehost-live>

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The maquiladora shopfloor is a space where the cheap, temporary labour meets a sexualized form of femininity through the female maquiladora workers. Row upon row of women working, constructed as dextrous and docile, exhibit the signs of a sexualized work environment that reads deeper than simply male managerial staff desiring to gaze at their female employees during the long hours.

Looking more closely, the ideas of productivity become linked to the control over women’s bodies and their sexuality. Feminist ethnographer, Leslie Salzinger, has seen this first hand and recalled:

[r]ows of them, darkened lashes lowered to computer boards, lids fluttering intermittently at hovering supervisors who monitor finger speed and manicure, concentration and hair style, in a single glance. Apparent embodiment of availability – cheap labour, willing flirtation – these young women have become the paradigmatic workers for a transnational political economy in which a highly sexualized form of femininity has become a standard ‘factor of production.

The apparent presence of sexuality on the shopfloor is inextricably to the control over the female workers’ labour and production itself. Despite making a shocking $3.40USD per day for a 9-12 hour workday, the expectations placed on female maquiladora workers to maintain their appearance on the shopfloor and accept the levels of control and surveillance that come with maquiladora work has become naturalized and distinctly associated with the shopfloor environment in Mexico’s [i]maquiladora
zones.[ii]

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For the female maquiladora workers, gaining and maintaining employment in a maquiladora is an experience of surveillance and control. With men making up the majority of the managerial staff “monitoring becomes the gaze of sexual objectification as soon as it locks on the women.”[iii] Prior to being employed at a maquiladora, the women are required to undergo medical exams, specifically pregnancy tests, and release their relationship and sexual history.[iv] Pre-employment pregnancy discrimination often occurs, meaning that women who are pregnant prior to application do not gain employment as the company would be required to pay maternity benefits in the third-trimester of the woman’s pregnancy.[v] Adding to the difficulties of gaining work in maquiladoras, pregnancy tests are routinely administered, and if a female becomes pregnant while employed, she is often harassed into resigning.[vi] This also means that birth control is readily available to the female maquiladora workers to the point of being required, while other health services are almost non-existent in the workplace.[vii]

As well as the control over women’s reproductive health, female maquiladora workers are required to adhere to certain beauty standards. This is enforced both my the male managerial staff’s comments, as well as by company-wide beauty pageants for the female workers, where the female workers are judged on their ‘attractiveness’ and are eligible for prize money that makes up more than a week’s wages.[viii] This underlying sexualized pressure has the male managerial staff telling the female workers, “Girls, utilize your sexuality.”[ix]

The implications of this highly sexualized form of femininity enables the control over women’s bodies and their labour in the maquiladora zones. Moreover, it is leads to the emergence of increased tensions between traditional Mexican views of femininity and the “New Female maquiladora Labourer.” And yet, even with the emergence of the “New Female maquiladora Labourer,” who uses birth control, has children later in life, and earns a wage, with the sexualization by her male counterparts and managers on the shopfloor the female maquiladora worker is continually stuck in a process of being put in her “traditional,” subordinate place.[x] These never-ending cycles of control take their most horrifying form in the cases of the Disappeared women, whose bodies turn up on the outskirts of maquiladora districts, having been brutally raped and mutilated to the point of being unrecognizable.


***



By analyzing the crime scene, one can deduce that the sexualized murder suggests anger at the increasing sexual independence of young women in Mexico. The mutilated breasts suggest anger at women’s use of their bodies for more than mothering and nurturing. The victims are primarily working women, suggesting resentment at women’s increasing economic independence. Abandonment of their bodies in the desert like garbage reveals that these women are considered cheap and disposable. What is not apparent at the crime scene is the class hierarchy – embedded in global capitalism and expressed through gender – that plays an integral part in these murders.



Jessica Livingston, “Murder in Juárez: Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Global Assembly Line,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 25.1 (2004): 71, JSTOR, 1 Sep. 2010 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3347254>.




http://www.commodifiedlife.com/?page_id=74
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 19, 2011 11:39 pm

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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 20, 2011 9:21 am



SELLING SPIRITUALITY


The Silent Takeover of Religion

by Jeremy Carrette and Richard King


(Routledge, 2004, paperback $22.95)

Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, authors of Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, have developed a theory that is both disturbing and sadly convincing. According to these authors, today it is spirituality, not religion that, as Karl Marx famously wrote in 1844, has become “the opium of the people,” sedating and numbing us to the state of the world and our own souls. As a matter of fact, they argue, spirituality—that which we trust to be the fountainhead of meaning, mystery, and value in life—has undergone nothing short of a “corporate takeover” and has become the latest victim of neoliberal ideology, a modified form of liberalism that values free-market capitalism above all else. “In our view,” Carrette and King write, “this reflects a wider cultural reorientation of life according to a set of values that commodifies human experience and opens up the space for the corporate takeover of all human knowledge and life.”

The confluence of economics and spirituality has produced what the authors call “New Age capitalism,” a “brand name for the meaning of life” that reinterprets religious and spiritual truths to benefit the profoundly individualistic and materialistic postmodern person. According to Carrette and King, New Age capitalism's overriding characteristic is the hawking of “personalised packages of meaning . . . rather than offering recipes for social change and identification with others.” And this popular form of spirituality, lacking any shared definitions or the context of tradition, is too easily co-opted by “the desiring machine of consumerism.” The result is that instead of providing effective paths for social transformation, spirituality is now little more than a balm that soothes us, helping us to cope with and perhaps feel a little better about the harsh realities and existential hurdles of the modern world.

http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j31/reviews.asp




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