by Sara Pascoe
Samantha from Sex and the City has articulated her opinion like maths, which is always persuasive and clever-sounding. Let’s unpack her equation. Sam says, ‘Money is power,’ and I’d agree with that. On both a macro- and micro-cosmic level, those with money seem powerful. Rich corporations can exert influence on politicians, rich people can pay others to work for them. The richest countries loan money to the poorest and use their indebtedness to deprive them of resources while taking advantage of their citizens for cheap labour. The poorer you are, the fewer choices you have. You may be dependent on a government, a harvest, a person. It’s no coincidence that many abusive relationships involve the withholding or control of cards and cash. There is no escape without money. You cannot travel, hide or survive without it. If you think about your own life, your options and freedoms will depend on what you can afford.
‘Sex is power,’ Samantha asserts next. This sounds a lot like bullshit at first. You don’t find women in thongs running the country, no one’s ever got her tits out in a meeting to get more respect. Actual sex, the literal act of sex, is an interchangeable exchange of status. Rolling around, taking turns at vulnerability and domination. Even within the most vanilla sex there is back and forth – the stronger person might enjoy having their arms held above their head, the weaker person could sit astride and enjoy feeling dominant. Consensual sex is playful and trusting, permitted dominance and pretend submission, tumbling over and under. That sex is a sharing of power.
When I was a teenager I read in magazines that female sexuality was powerful. It’s the kind of thing my mum would say too, she’d tell me that our sexuality gave us power because we could use it to manipulate men – to get what we want. It was not something that seemed true to me. I never watched a cat winding his way round a trousered leg meowing to be fed and thought, ‘Look how powerful that kitty is.’ Can-opener is power. Opposable thumbs is power. Pussy is owned.
There are many people who’d disagree with me on that.
* 3nder for people who only do one at a time.
† There was NO NEWS in 2015. It was before all those celebrities died to avoid Brexit.
‡ No excuse for this, there’s loads of news now.
§ Sometimes while I’m writing I remember that I’ll have to say all this out loud in the audio book. I’ll have to do my terrible Samantha from Sex and the City impression, and I can’t wait. I don’t know if I’ll read that last sentence in the audio book. Or that one. Or indeed this one. Won’t it be weird to talk about the audio book inside the audio book? It’s quite weird to be talking about it here, in the book. Or in the audio book if I’ve recorded all this and you’re listening to me deciding whether you should call the men who took Blanche DuBois away.¶
¶ While we’re on this topic, it’s worth remembering that Blanche DuBois relied on the kindness of strangers because she had no money of her own.
Erotic Capital
My friend Carla is a stripper. She earns a lot of money. When she talks about stripping being empowering, I listen. It makes her feel physically powerful, because she feels attractive. Her body is strong, and the desire she elicits makes her feel she has power over the men who desire her. She mesmerises. Having another human watch your movements like your body answers every question is a wonderful feeling. Carla is able to make men drunk on wanting her. When she talks, I think I agree that being desired is a form of power – if we didn’t live in a capitalist society. In hunter–gatherer times, attractiveness, fertility, beauty were a currency of their own. Like money, you could exchange them for protection or food.
I only found out about ‘erotic capital’ recently. I was interviewing Kalinda, who works as a dominatrix escort (her description). She said, ‘Women who don’t take advantage of their erotic capital are doing themselves a disservice,’ and I bit my pencil and asked what the hell she was talking about. Kalinda told me she’d written her university dissertation on this topic and would send it to me. We must be so grateful to people who do not treat us like we’re stupid; it is the ultimate generosity and the only way we’ll learn. I now know that erotic capital is a value that we all possess, calculated on our sexual attractiveness and exchangeable for other forms of capital – money or services or goods. As in all economies, some of us are richer than others. It’s not fair.
Kalinda made a fascinating point in her dissertation about the gender pay gap being easily bridged by how much more money men are willing to spend on sexy women than women are willing to spend on sexy men. My friend Carla sells her erotic capital in a strip club and makes more than her equally gorgeous sister who works for an insurance company – the latter being an example, for Kalinda, of someone refusing to capitalise on their sexual attractiveness and thus ‘doing themselves a disservice’.
*Brain exploding emoji*
In capitalism, we’re all machine-people selling our time and services. Our value is dependent on skills. Being sexually desirable is a skill, or a service, that most women refuse to sell. Or refuse to admit they are selling even if that is what they’re being paid for.
I asked Kalinda how she felt about men paying for dinner. She told me a meal is a wage paid in exchange for her time spent at the table. Things are so clear in her universe, and I’m jealous of that clarity. She has priced everything and is not abashed. ‘What if the man hasn’t enjoyed himself?’ I asked. ‘He did,’ she replied, winking, and I couldn’t think of any more questions.
Afterwards I worried about obligation, expectation. I asked my mailing list some questions on this topic and I got really upset by an email from a girl who’d gone out with a group of friends. A man had bought them some champagne, then another bottle. At the end of the night her friends said one of them would have to go home with him. They all had boyfriends, so it was decided she had to do it. It made me feel sick. Did the man know she felt she was ‘paying’ for their drinks? Did he care?
I was really angry on her behalf, but having been young myself, I understood that they felt there had been an unspoken deal they couldn’t renege on. They had taken too much from him not to offer something in return, a sacrifice.
Obligation is an under-discussed emotion. It can be a strong current tugging our behaviour away from what we want to do and towards what is expected of us, our duty, what we owe to whom. I learned a little lesson about men and money when I was fourteen. I went out with girls I had met through drama club. We looked older (sixteen?), were confident and liked dancing. In Romford there were three nightclubs that DID NOT CARE how old you were. I’d smile to the bouncers and they’d move out of my way. Please note this was a closed-mouth smile which cunningly concealed my braces.
Alright, Ocean’s Eleven.
I went out a lot from fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. I didn’t have very much money because I was a child, not a hedge fund manager, but I quickly learned that men in pubs and clubs would get us drunk. They would come over and ask me or one of my friends, ‘Can I get you a drink?’ And we’d say yes because alcohol is the only way to switch off your hateful inner monologue and exist in the moment. ‘Yes please, white wine.’ But there was always more to this exchange. No one ever bought us a drink and went away. What they offered was a drink, but what they were buying was a chunk of our time, politeness, flirtation – a chance, an in? But something. I took these interactions on a case-by-case basis but most went like this:
Man offered alcoholic beverage. Sara said yes as she had no money to buy her own. Sara followed man to the bar, made small chat while he ordered, while they waited if it was busy. ‘What’s your name? Who are you here with? Do ya live round here? Oh yeah, which road?’
These men seemed old at the time but were probably about twenty-three, which I now consider an embryonic stage of humanity. No one is even born until twenty-seven, and no one should be held responsible for their actions until thirty-nine, nor have children before the age of fifty-two. There is too much to learn.
Sara would try to be entertaining and make a joke, have a laugh at th
e bar. When the drink arrives, clink the glasses, ‘Cheers – thank you,’ while making eye contact. Then take a sip, say, ‘Have a great night,’ turn and walk away. Sometimes I might add an ‘I should get back to my friends’. Sometimes the man followed and I’d have to talk to them awkwardly about Top Gear or Gladiators for fifteen minutes. Sometimes they’d shout at me when I tried to leave: ‘What the fuck?! I just bought you a drink.’ The walking away was rude, it was not the deal. You weren’t supposed to say yes to a drink unless you were interested in the guy, that was the rules, but without money I couldn’t afford that system. ‘I bought you a drink, bitch, where d’you think you’re going?’ Sometimes I didn’t go through the pretence of gratitude and was called a cunt or a slag. I thought these men were stupid, but they had something I wanted: cash, a credit card, access to the numbing effect of alcohol.
If you’re a man who’s bought an ungrateful woman a drink, if you’ve ever felt belittled or tricked when you were simply trying to be friendly or meet someone new, you’ll perceive this situation from the opposite perspective. We have things to learn from each other. When I was a young woman receiving attention in bars I never ever considered what it was like to be a straight man. I wanted to screech and play and be free with my friends. Every man who approached was a cloud blocking the sun. I did not know that my youth was enticing because I’d never not been young yet. It never occurred to me that it might take bravery to speak to a stranger, to risk rejection. That the offer of a drink was a socially acceptable way of saying, ‘May I enter your life? Might we have fun together?’
Today I’m thinking about how wrong I was to assume that money meant nothing to the men, because they handled it so easily. But it felt unfair to me then, because I had nothing, and life felt like a lottery that other people had already won.
I have money now, and I have never since said yes to a stranger offering me a drink. I have never ever wanted to meet a man who has approached me. I am sorry for men because our culture tells them to introduce themselves to women who in the vast, vast majority don’t want to meet them.
Some of them do.
Okay, I am really biased, I think women are incredibly polite because you’re bigger than us and we are taught to be polite. We’ve already seen that in our ancestral past, unknown men were potentially dangerous. For the men outside our tribe we were prey. A woman approached in a bar feels hunted. In the main, we do not want to talk to you. New man, stranger. You might be lovely, but we don’t care.
I have money now, I never have to speak to anyone I don’t want to, and I love it. What money has bought me is freedom, and I never forget it.
Grid Girls vs Presidents Club
I’d never heard of Grid Girls or the Presidents Club until they were cancelled.
I know now that Grid Girls were attractive women employed as models at Formula 1 events. Once the car whizzes past there isn’t much for the crowd to look at, so Lycraclad ladies were provided. I went on the Grid Girls website and the women were advertised like this:
Add a touch of glamour to your companies open day, show, exhibition, trade show, private party and race meeting with Grid Girls UK.
There is an email address to write to for a quote and I’m so tempted to see how much it would cost to hire a dozen for my book launch. They’re usually quite staid, polite affairs, everyone drinking wine from those tiny 125 ml glasses and pretending they’ve read your book when they haven’t. I’ll ‘add a touch of glamour’ with some hot women. Maybe I’ll get them to pose reading the book and that will encourage other, non-gorgeous people to read it? Yes. Grid Girls will find their new vocation is sexing up literature. There’ll be a Grid Girl on the front of the London Review of Books and sales will skyrocket. I’ll design some spandex with Proust quotes on it, get the girls in them and some thick-rimmed glasses, standing behind library counters – suddenly we’ll all be bookworms. Let’s get these unemployed women back to work and improve the nation’s literacy all at once.
It’s not your worst idea.
Why did the Grid Girls lose their jobs? Were they rude? Did they forget to smile? Did they age or put on weight and thus fall foul of our society’s restrictive beauty ideals? No. They continued to do what they had always done – be beautiful near cars. Their dumping is explained by Sean Bratches, the Managing Director of Commercial Operations at Formula 1, who wears a suit not made of Lycra:
‘While the practice of employing grid girls has been a staple of Formula 1 Grands Prix for decades, we feel this custom does not resonate with our brand values and clearly is at odds with modern-day societal norms. We don’t believe the practice is appropriate or relevant to Formula 1 and its fans, old and new, across the world.’
Mr Bratches says that Grid Girls are ‘at odds with modernday societal norms’. We know the Grid Girls haven’t changed so it’s norms that have. They’ve evolved over the last few decades and all the decades before that. People swish along like a river, generation after generation running past, comprised of many beliefs and behaviours but generally going in a similar direction. Then there are occasional phases of enlightenment where the river becomes conscious and goes ‘WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING WORSHIPPING THE SUN/BURNING PEOPLE AT THE STAKE/KEEPING PEOPLE AS SLAVES?’
In a relatively short period of time, the objectification of women has gone from unnoticed to unfashionable to unconscionable. But within this we have many contradictions – like Grid Girls. Women who have chosen to pay their mortgage by being looked at are suddenly being told that how they feed themselves and their kids isn’t appropriate any more. It is ‘at odds’. It is not believed ‘appropriate’. Nothing has physically changed about female bodies and the instinctual reasons we like to look at them, but it’s now interpreted as damaging, disrespectful, demeaning.
Leaving a pin in that for a second – let’s gatecrash the Presidents Club. We can’t attend in the proper way because only men get invited and I’m a woman, a bossy one who won’t let you go without me.
The invitation to the 2018 Presidents Club dinner had a woman on it, Marilyn Monroe. She is symbolic of sumptuous sexuality even decades after her death. Whenever I see a photo of her I like to remember that she had endometriosis, a condition where cells that should be lining your womb migrate around your body and stick to other organs, causing extreme pain. Marilyn couldn’t work when she was on her period because of the agony.
Saying things like that is why we don’t want you at our fun parties.
AHA, in fact there were women at the Presidents Club party, 130 ‘specially hired hostesses’. Women weren’t invited to the Presidents Club, they were provided.
The rough details of the event were provided by some Financial Times journalists who worked there undercover in 2018 and then published an exposé. The 360 guests were ‘figures from British business, politics and finance and the entertainment industry’. There was dinner, a show and a raffle, all held in the ballroom at the Dorchester Hotel. I’ve hosted events there myself, by the way – award ceremonies for PR companies or women’s magazines. Comics refer to these types of gigs as ‘corporates’ and they’re very well paid and soul-destroying. The hostesses ‘specially hired’ for the Presidents Club were paid £150 plus £25 towards a new soul taxi home. They were hired through an agency called Artista, whose website offers ‘The Professional Face of Your Event’. To ensure those professional faces are also attractive, potential staff post photographs that can be vetted by clients. The prerequisite for the Presidents Club was that hostesses be ‘tall, thin and pretty’, which is bullshit, but also fairly typical of this sort of thing and unlikely to get anyone in the papers.
You might be wondering, what is a hostess? On this occasion, the hostesses’ job was to bring drinks to tables, which sounds like waitressing, but there’s a difference, which I can explain to you because I’ve done both. With hostessing you have to pretend to enjoy it. You have to smile and laugh at shit jokes and people who speak in clichés. You have to act like it gives you intens
e personal joy to bring people bottles that cost more than your wages. With bartending and waitressing you just plonk things in front of people and try not to meet their eye. Hostessing needs a bit of personality. They are paying you not simply to move liquid from one place to another without spilling it, but to be sociable, nice, chatty.
I worked for promotional and temp agencies all through my twenties. I’ve served on boats, I’ve sat on tables at black-tie events and encouraged millionaires to spend more at auctions, I’ve perched on casino stools and encouraged gamblers to keep drinking and playing. On paper, the women employed at the Presidents Club were no different. The job description was getting drinks and being amiable. The thin, pretty women working ad hoc for an agency were students, models, out-of-work actors, skint artists. So far, so quotidian.
The women engaged to work at the Presidents Club were told* that their uniform would be provided on the night: a short black dress with a corset belt. They were instructed to wear high-heeled, sexy black shoes and black underwear and … THEY WERE TOLD WHAT COLOUR KNICKERS TO WEAR. Did your work tell you which pants to put on this morning? What a weird feeling that must be, to be a grown adult and get an email from a stranger about your underwear. And why would it matter what colour their underwear was? Because the skirt was so short their knickers would sometimes be visible.
