Conclusion

Both couples exemplify a majority trend in American mating called“assortative mating” (Greenwood, Guner, kocharkov, and Santos 2014).Americans now depart from what has been their traditional pattern. Theynow marry people who share similar earning capacity. Changed U.S. eco-nomic and gender conditions and class relationships in personal life nodoubt shape that shift

earnings, lack of ambition, and increased emotional and sexual demandsmake John intolerable. His demands are feudal and inappropriate to theirinitial understanding of communality. John is educationally, financially,and now emotionally and sexually not a communal partner. Even thoughthey are not legally married, Jane is following a trend in which 90% of thedivorces of college-educated women are initiated by the women (Cohen2015b). Jane is beginning the process of leaving the relationship.

Many couples want financial security and adequate funds before theymarry. They look for jobs with benefits they can depend on. Secure jobshave become steadily less available to the vast majority of Americans.Changes since 1970 have robbed U.S. men in particular of their stable well-paid jobs in manufacturing, high power sales, and construction. Americahas switched to a service economy in which the fastest growth areas are infood service and lower-paid medical assistance fields (Lacey and Wright2010). These are traditionally female fields. Unlike women who have en-tered mostly male fields en masse, men are reluctant to enter pink collarjobs (Reeves and Sawhill 2015)

In another twist, the gender transformations that allow sugar arrange-ments to flourish without much moral or legal condemnation were foughtfor in the 1960s, when sexual liberation was advocated as part of thehippie and peace movements (Allyn 2001). Ironically, those movementswith their slogan, “Make love, not war” declared freedom from capitalistmoney values and constraints.6 Sugar is not as stigmatized as it wouldhave been previously. In a final twist, the very sex object status that maymark women as inferior can be commodified and bartered for freedomfrom the college debt that haunts their male peers. Gender ideology hassufficiently changed so that sugar arrangements are tolerated as one partof university culture.Sugar babies have advantages beyond freedom from debt. They canpursue careers without fearing that emotional intimacy with men will re-sult in their losing focus on professional priorities. They may fear the kindof compromises that marriage and family still entail for women.7 Sugarbabies can pursue their ambitions with neither emotional nor financialdebts. The terms of sugar arrangements are clear. The violence and inap-propriate rage that many women experience from romantic partners orspouses are seldom present in purely voluntary sugar relationships withclear boundaries and sporadic voluntary meetings.Both parties in sugar arrangements thrive, while what many consider tobe traditional sexual and emotional pairings dissolve under the weight ofcollapsing traditional families. Yet, at the same time, both parties in sugararrangements are deprived of the thrill and personal fulfillment of beingfreely chosen as lovers and partners.8 Neither babies nor daddies benefitfrom the intense interactive experience and learning one can have from atruly honest emotionally intimate and communal love relationship.

Changed economic conditions promote the lure of sugar arrangements,but so too do evolving gender dynamics. A changed gender landscapeleaves many men feeling insecure about their position in relationships.Many are unable to negotiate the emotionally communal relationshipsincreasingly demanded by educated, professional women. Sugar arrange-ments protect sugar daddies from negotiating the new gender terrain.Daddies achieve the illusion of emotional and, sometimes, sexual andintellectual intimacy with attractive young women. Their money accom-plishes what in sex work is referred to as a GFE, a girl friend experience.A sugar daddy’s money replaces his partner’s demands for reciprocal andcommunal emotional, sexual, and/or intellectual labor. Sugar daddiesalso buy out of any demands for marriage or future security. Both partiesrefrain from the frequent financial negotiations that may mar the sugardaddy’s fantasy of a purely romantic connection.4Sugar arrangements are comfortable for such men. They can appearat business-related or other social gatherings with smart, attractive, so-cially appropriate young women, who are generally able to understandtheir business dealings, converse intelligently with their colleagues, andalso impress with their youth and looks. Daddies can have dates withoutconcern for their adequacy as partners. They have paid in advance forappreciative partners. Men now face a different gender terrain in whichto navigate personal relationships. The economic dependence that forcedwomen to remain in destructive relationships has changed. In sugar ar-rangements the rules are clear and determined in advance. Daddies canmaintain financial dominance, 5 which may be a great relief to them. Theyare comfortable in that terrain.

toward sexuality. One form of sex work I discuss is the phenomenon ofsugar daddies and sugar babies. The other is changing sexual dynamicsin two modern love relationships. Let’s begin with the form of sex workcalled “sugar arrangements, sugar, or sugar baby dating,” which illus-trates the independent class process. I will use a variation of David Mon-trose’s precise definition of sugar arrangements (Montrose 2010, 9).In sugar arrangements, women (sugar babies) garner financial and ormaterial benefits from sugar daddies in exchange for providing emo-tional, often sexual, and other services on which they both agree. It’s apay to play arrangement negotiated between young women and wealthy,usually older men. Sugar arrangements are not only about sex. In fact,40% of all high end sex-worker transactions do not involve sex (Ventakesh2010). The terms are negotiated early in the relationship. After the initialnegotiation, money is rarely mentioned. A credit card is given, tuition orrental bills are paid, etc., with no reminders of the cash nexus that bindsthe sugar partners. Sugar involves an exclusive relationship on the partof the sugar baby. That relationship usually includes intensive emotionallabor. Sugar babies are overwhelmingly female.Although similar arrangements have existed seemingly forever, theyare now prevalent, advertised, and part of an active sub-culture at col-leges and graduate schools. While sugar arrangements can and do existoutside of an educational context, I am focusing on the women who entersugar arrangements to escape education debt. At least 44% of sugar babiesare paying for school. One popular website is called “Sugar Baby Uni-versity” (https://www.seekigarrangement.com/sugar-baby-university).It features an attractive young woman wearing scholarly eyeglasses. Herprominent video on the site, entitled “Say Goodbye to College Debt,”attests to her success in escaping educational indebtedness via a sugardaddy arrangement. U.S. college debt now outstrips credit card debt ormortgage debt (Touryalai 2014). It now takes, on average 21 years to payoff college debt (Bidwell 2016). Sugar steps in as an ever more prevalentform of sex work

A New Marxist analysis of sex work

Sex work and emotional labor can be performed in a way that is similarto feudal labor. Like a feudal serf, the feudal wife or prostitute is tied to herhusband or her pimp by laws of “fidelity and love,” or as the medieval serfand Lord promised, love and “fealty,” which allow him to exploit her sex-ual and emotional surplus labor. The feudal sex worker is intimidated intoserving a pimp or voluntarily devotes him/herself to a feudal husband ora pimp as an act of “love.” Like the feudal serf, the sex worker and emo-tional worker in the feudal arrangement cannot easily change employers.The feudal lord (as pimp or exploiting husband) is supposed to protectthe serf. However, that feudal lord or husband has the power to protector to victimize. In the U.S., all 50 states only criminalized spousal rapein 2005. Before that a wife’s sexual labor was legally the sexual propertyof her husband for him to use at will (McMahon-Howard, Clay-Warner,and Renzulli 2009). A wife’s domestic and emotional labor was likewise

MATERIAL ANd SocIAL EXISTENcE INTERTWINEd

But while reading Marx,we also have to step back from our complete immersion in capitalism and all that we takefor granted about how our society is organized. Instead, we begin to critique it, probingbeneath surface appearances to discern the multiple ways in which capitalism matters indaily life. It makes us probe, for example, why hotel housekeepers receive low wages fortheir hard labor (see Introduction) whereas multimillionaire salaried cEos receive multi-million dollar bonuses even in times of recession and high unemployment and even if insome cases there is a decline in the value of their company’s stock

MARX’S THEORY OF HISTORY

cAPITALISM AS STRUcTUREd INEQUALITY

EXPANSION OF CAPITALISM

Postmodern Concerns

Impact of Interventions

Psychosocial Factors Related to AIDS

Sexual Practices

Sexual Identity

As Giami and Dowsett (1996) point out, at least twomain approaches to sexual behavior research continue to be used—one focusing on risk behaviors, and reflecting epidemiological con-cerns, the other focusing on the structure and the social and behav-ioral organization of sexual activity, reflecting the confluence of alter-native social theories in sexuality research

exuality was crucial tosuccessful AIDS prevention

To see sexuality from a social/cultural perspective, and as predom-inantly socially constructed, has two contradictory consequences. Onthe one hand, this characterization weakens tolerance-promoting po-sitions such as those describing sexual deviance as resulting from er-rors of nature and, therefore, deserving of sympathy. On the otherhand, it lays the ground for social movements engaged in culturalactivism to challenge hegemonic forms of sexuality.

In spite of background ideologies that present scientific knowledgeas universal, the understandings generated by scientific inquiry are infact local. This localism is complex and multidimensional, and possiblemetaphors for "local" go far beyond the literally geographic. Hence,the configurations of proximity or mutual exclusion adopted inter-nationally by networks of scientific institutions, both within and acrossdisciplines, provide only partial illustration of the contextuality of sci-entific understanding. We live in a world heading towards globaliza-tion, but in which globalization by no means eliminates the historyand effects of colonialism but instead contributes to its postmodernforms. In such a context, the practice of science, and the structureswhich support it, reflect and even partially define postcolonialism.The internal logic of what Kuhn ( 1962) described as scientific para-digms, and identity formation/affirmation processes in the scientificinstitutions of postcolonial countries, interact with broader postcolo-nial relations to define science in peripheral countries as a set ofpractices largely subservient to the interests of more powerful nationsand their institutions. Not surprisingly, the use of local scientificknowledge (and perhaps of any scientific knowledge) by policy makersin peripheral countries is relatively rare

Now more than ever, research on sexuality constitutes a broad andcontested field. The emergence of HIV and AIDS, with the consoli-dation of agendas linked to promotion of sexual health and repro-ductive rights, has given this research area increasing prominenceamong academics and funding agencies. Not only has there been agrowing demand within the academic community for scientific workin this arena, but, more important, this demand has triggered a trans-formation of institutional, disciplinary, and political boundaries sur-rounding the production of knowledge of the sexual, and has involvedan increasingly complex array of social actors. Traditional holders ofscientific authority on sexuality, such as psychologists and biomedicalspecialists, have been joined by epidemiologists and researcherswithin the sociological and anthropological traditions. Among non-academics, activists for women's rights and women's health, alterna-tive sexualities, environmental justice, abortion rights, and AIDS pre-vention have interacted with lawyers and professional politicians,health-care providers, religious leaders, artists, and the press in a pro-liferation of new lands of knowledge that compete over the definitionof socio-sexual reality, and over the power conveyed by such an op-eration. It is inevitable there should be tensions, and several questionsmust be asked to understand and disentangle them. This chapter dis-cusses issues of epistemology and methodology in relation to sexualityresearch, as well as questions of hermeneutics and agency. It drawsupon ideas developed in the context of recent research on sexualbehavior and sexual identity in Peru.

Erasure is best achieved by disappearance from discourse. In contrast,to reference an idea – as we did here by resurrecting the 1930s idea that earlobe typeis dichotomous – is to remake. Moreover, to cite is to support (even as critique); topublish is to objectify, to fasten or stabilize, through a broader communication.

So, forexample, if the Earlobe Theory of Attraction became a matter of social consensus, thenwe would not question whether the theory exists, but instead evaluate the premisesupon which it was made (that human ears fall into dichotomous types and that thesetypes are the basis of attraction and ultimately relationship stability).

The question is not whether some-thing is real or artificial, but how that realness or artificiality is suggested, asserted,and proven through the use of (material and immaterial) tools. Thus, the question isnot whether sexuality is a lifestyle choice, innate, or performative, but rather howthese truth claims are produced and reproduced, and what consequences flow fromthose claims.

However, this ismistaken. Constructionism is concerned with how everything – from concepts toobjects – is real, not because things refer to some natural condition outside of humanproduction, but because of that human production.

“Sex” is often presented in essential-ist terms as absolute, biologically based categories of “male” and “female,” while “gen-der” refers to cultural constructions of “masculinity” and “femininity.” Gender is moreeasily understood in terms of gradations and combinations of gender that are madeclear in light of gender-variant practices like genderqueer or gender fluid identities.

For some, this raises the question:Are there categories that just exist – that are natural? Are all categories just creationsof the human mind? Whether we regard categories as natural or as human creations,it seems as if there is a difference between what we think and what is real – betweenthe ideal and the material

What is important as we think about categories, beliefs, ideas, etc. as sociallyconstructed is thinking about how and how well they were constructed, as well as theconsequences of those constructions.

When studying sexuality through a constructionist lens, we are led to many import-ant and fascinating questions. What concepts, objects and means of communication,and allies, are marshaled to support one conception of sexuality over another

Theseimportant gender innovators (like the In-Betweens in the earlobe scenario above)pushed gender – and, by association, sexuality – discourse in new directions by argu-ing that the binary categories woman and man were not well constructed, or wereharmful constructions that need to be challenged.

All use existing ideas (knowledge, concepts, objects, plans, computers,pens, paper, instruments of observation), means of communication (internet, journals),allies (peers, networks) and even energies (sugars, calories) that humans need to dothe construction work.

Sexual discourse, for example,expands its construction through the actions of reporters in the news media, bloggers,novelists, those posting their thoughts through social media, or people simply talkingto friends about the sexual categories

In the realm of sexuality, religious scholars formed founda-tional ideas about western sexuality (for example that sex should only occur betweenmarried persons) and religious knowledge was regarded as the ultimate Truth.

The idea that even concepts and ideas are constructions, rather than notions thatexist regardless of human activity – ethereal (beyond human hands and minds) anduniversal (true for all at all times)

social construction, ongoing practices of the building of aconcept (earlobe binary), a theory (binary theory of attraction), through collectiveactions of groups (like the scientists or the Free Lobe activists), organizations (likethe funding agencies of the earlobe research) and institutions (such as the media).

Scientists – after systematic study of human ears – eventuallyconclude that earlobe types are not binary, but exist on a continuum.

Some formcounter-narratives about the superiority of Free Lobes as creative, free-spirited individ-uals who offer alternative lifestyles to those of boring, confining Attached Lobe people.

Moviesand television begin to portray free earlobe people as villains, promiscuous lovers andas losers, while celebrities with attached lobes usually save the day

In other words, earlobe choice as a rela-tionship factor was not legible to them.

The study, published as “Free vs Adherent Earlobes as Predictor of RelationshipLongevity,” found that couples where both members possess adherent earlobes have

Imagine

Since the family is the site where biology,society and psychology converge mostevidently, Freud's rooting of sexuality in adeterminate way in the family makesperfect sense. Sexual desire may indeed bedeeply structured by infantile experience,internal conflicts not fully resolved, andrepressions of instincts in early life. Butthe drive model also has blind spots: itobscures the importance of later develop-ment and adult experience, understatesthe impact of the social milieu that shapesthose experiences, and retains a telos ofnormal sexual development, even as itexpands the meaning of the word "sexual".In the final analysis, it can be argued thatFreud rendered nature partly social, movingbeyond the biological determinism ofsexology to begin to understand howdesire is constituted intersubjectively. Butlacking a theory of social structure beyondthe family, the drive model of sexualitytended to downplay the actual links betweensocial structure and sexual behavior.

y. Sex was, of necessity, a fixedquantity, "a motor force in culture and aninnate force with which culture must con-tend" (Person 1987

. Sexual repression is thus incor-porated into the very structure of thepsyche, and is instrumental in forming themature eg

e, the sexuality of the child islabile and relatively unstructured-asFreud put it, "polymorphously perverse."In the drama of the oedipal crisis, the childstruggles with incestuous desires for themother and father, to an eventual identifi-cation with the parent of the same s

05).' It recognizesthe importance of subjectivity and meaningin the shaping of human sexual experience,and is continuous with object-relationstheory, an attempt to purge psychoanalysisof its drive orient

y. The first conception, termed the"clinical theory", focused upon "the valuesand meanings associated with sensual ex-periences in the motivational history of aperson from birth to adulthood", empha-sizing psychological factors (51). Thesecond, "metapsychological theory", sawsexuality as an "energetic force that 'seeks'dischar

). A bitter controversy rages to thisday in search of the "true" Freud, due inlarge part to his own ambivalence andambiguities in his writi

ls, have the capacity for self-reflection,and that this capacity plays a powerful rolein shaping the expression of seeminglyphysical

Sexologists believed that they could explainthe properties of the complex of sexualitby reference to an inner truth or essencand they set out to discover this truth inbiology, to devise a "science of sex" whicwould reveal a single, basic, uniformpattern ordained by nature itself (Week1985). The "modernization of sex", itstransformation into a field for rationalrather than moral inquiry was evidencedby the work of such researchers as Krafft-Ebbing, who conducted a series of detailedcase studies, categorizing the vast array ofsexual variations, from acquired sexualinversion to zoophilia. His elaborate tax-onomy of natural sexual "variations" wasconceived against the notion that thesewere immoral "deviations". Sexuality in-hered in anatomy and physiology, not invalues and emotions (Robinson 1976). Thesexual drive, the sexologists believed, wasa biological, unchanging force, given atbirth

of earlier experiences andsocial learning. In its broadest terms, therewas a theoretical shift from "nature" to"nurture", from a drive model to what ishere called an "identity" model of sex,from seeing sex in terms of family andgender systems, to seeing the sexual asincreasingly significant in its own r

e principal sociological challenge to thepositivist conception of sex implicit in thismodel came from symbolic interactionists,who sought to overturn drive theory byarguing that sex is socially constructed,and has no existence apart from its culturalconten

tic. Humansare driven by their biological constitutionto seek sexual release and nourishment,but their "biological constitution does nottell [them] where they should seek sexualrelease and what they should

tity. Butin the end his libido theory veered towardnature, postulating a fixed sexual drivewhich is for the most part independent ofsocial structu

ulation thisposition views sex as an overpowering,instinctual drive, a "basic biological man-date" which must be firmly controlled bythe cultural and social

odified (Freedman and D'Emilio1988). The heterosexual couple is stillviewed as the building block of social lifeand social policy, yet the forces holding ittogether have never been more tenuous.And conservative groupings in the UnitedStates have successfully capitalized on thisgrowing anxiety by attempting to legislatetheir own definition of "proper" sexualityfor all

“the ego is not master in itsown home” (Freud 1917) as people are driven byunconscious instincts

he seeks to demonstrate that the devi-ations and infantile sexuality can and will finallylead to what is now called normal sexuality inadulthood without denying their polymorph-perverse precursors

In the first edition(1905), this chapter mainly described the baby’sinfantile arousal patterns (i.e., suckling at hismother’s breast), thus demonstrating the vitalpower of the sexual instinct and combiningempirical phenomena with theoretical conceptu-alization. It is obvious that this differs from whathis contemporary sex researchers described asinfantile sexuality. As no adult remembers theseinfantile arousal patterns, Freud demonstratesthat they are lost in the unconscious, yet remain aforce that may, if the infantile desires wereextremely frustrated, later result in neuroticsymptoms

The first of the three essays, The SexualDeviations, starts by defining the sexual instinct(in German Sexualtrieb “sexual drive,” usuallytranslated as “instinct” or “sexual instinct”), thesexual object, and the aim of sexuality. Freud’sconcept of Trieb (drive, instinct) was and remainsa bone of contention, and yet it is the basis of histheory, a thing and not a thing, an interfacebetween the material world and the psychicworld, a vital power with a sexual core. What isabsolutely new in Freud’s concept and whatmakes the difference to all the contemporarywritings on sexual deviations, is that he links“deviant” sexuality and so-called normal sexual-ity, seeing both as deriving from the same source.Even neuroses are, in his view, sexual deviations,the “negative of perversions,” as he formulates it,the absence and repression of the “polymorph-perverse disposition” of every man

the first toexemplify the association between the repressionof sexual desire and its resurrection in the form ofneurotic symptoms

Although he laterabandoned his view that every neurosis wascaused by sexual trauma or sexual seduction inearly childhood (letter to Wilhelm Fließ,September 21, 1897), Freud held to the belief thatsexuality was the core of neurosis, even if only inthe form of sexual fantasies and desires.

Freud initially favored the notion that patientswillfully repressed unpleasant or traumatic mem-ories and that they could be obliged to admitthem to the therapist to unleash the suffocatingaffect associated with these events and thusexperience catharsis. Their main difference,however, was that Freud increasingly favored thenotion that every neurosis had at its core sexualconflict or trauma.

From