The Age of Sexual Capital

The Economics of "Looksmaxxing"

Over a year ago, in September, I watched the movie The Substance (2024) at the Toronto Film Festival. On its surface, it’s a grotesque horror-thriller about vanity and the pursuit of eternal youth. But beneath its body horror and dark satire lies something far more unsettling, a reflection of our collective obsession with looking young and attractive at any cost.

The film follows Elizabeth Sparkle, played by Demi Moore, a former TV star who discovers a mysterious serum that splits her into two bodies, her aging self and a younger version named Sue. As Elizabeth watches her younger self achieve the fame and attention she once had, her own body begins to deteriorate. It’s a literal manifestation of how aging women are expected to compete with younger versions of themselves in an economy where youth itself has become a form of capital.

But why has this obsession with anti-aging become more intense than ever before in history? Why is it so focused on cosmetics rather than actually prolonging life? And why does it seem to provoke such deep existential anxiety? The answer lies not in some transhistorical fear of death, but in something far more specific to our current economic system: the fear of diminishing sexual capital.

Sexual capital, a concept developed by sociologists Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz,^[1] has become more integral to an individual’s power and perceived value than ever before in history. In our hyper-visual, globally connected economy, being perceived as sexually attractive provides significant competitive advantages, not just in dating, but in job opportunities, social networking, and career advancement.

This isn’t just about the entertainment industry anymore. Research shows that perceived attractiveness correlates with higher earnings across virtually all sectors. As sociologist Catherine Hakim notes in her work on erotic capital,^[2] beauty and charm have become important assets in the modern economy. Hakim, coming from a more neo-liberal feminist perspective, celebrates this as something that women and men can potentially use for empowerment, and many already do. However, for Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz, coming from a more socialist-feminist perspective, the reality is far more insidious.

The fear of aging is not merely vanity or social pressure, but anxiety about losing one’s position in an increasingly brutal economic hierarchy where youth and beauty function as forms of capital accumulation that naturally expire as one gets older. The anti-aging industry isn’t just selling products; it’s selling the promise of maintaining your position in the sexual marketplace, which has become inextricably linked to the marketplace of jobs, opportunities, and social mobility. Each cream, injection, and procedure represents an attempt to combat the depreciation of sexual capital in an economy where youth and attractiveness function as forms of productive investment.

Much of the recent discourse surrounding looksmaxxing is driven by its most extreme manifestations, with viral clips of internet sensations like Clavicular, who have popularized some of the most over-the-top looksmaxxing practices, prompting various reactions. Some of these highly questionable practices, such as bone smashing, taking unregulated drugs to alter appearance, or injecting various substances, are reckless, unproven attempts at self-transformation. However, the broader desire to improve one’s appearance is not itself an irrational obsession. While not everything these “looksmaxers” do is rational, the impulse behind the drive to “mog” is emblematic of a broader pattern in which people are adapting to the modern economy, even when it leads to obsessive extremes that are ultimately not safe or beneficial.

This article will explore how sexual capital operates in the contemporary economy, why it’s become more central than ever to social and economic success, and how phenomena like looksmaxxing and anti-aging obsessions represent rational responses to these material conditions. By understanding the concept of sexual capital as an economic force rather than just a cultural trend, we can better grasp why the pursuit of eternal youth has become so frantically intense in our current age.

Let’s start by understanding exactly what we mean by sexual capital.

The Rise of Sexual Capital

Before we can understand sexual capital, we need to understand what capital itself is. Capital is a form of accumulated wealth, typically in the form of money, assets, or commodities, that is used to produce more wealth through the exploitation of labor in a system of production. It represents a social relation between the owners of the means of production (capitalists) and the workers who sell their labor power.

But capital isn’t just economic. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu identified other forms like cultural capital (education, taste, cultural knowledge) and social capital (networks, connections, influence). These forms of capital can be converted into economic advantages and help reproduce class hierarchies.

Sexual capital represents another distinct form of power that operates alongside these other forms of capital. But unlike economic or cultural capital, sexual capital has been systematically undertheorized, often dismissed as mere vanity or reduced to individual assets. This theoretical neglect masks how sexual capital functions as a system that structures social hierarchies and dictates who holds power.

Sociologists Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz identify four distinct categories of sexual capital, each reflecting different historical and social tendencies:

1. Sexual capital by default: Kaplan and Illouz describe this as referring to attributes like chastity and virtue, particularly for women. These were the norms of capitalist sexuality prior to the sexual revolution, which kept the price of sex high. However, their framing requires clarification: describing chastity as sexual capital is only accurate for societies where dating had already become marketized, such as America from the 1910s to the 1950s. In pre-capitalist or traditional societies, partner selection functioned more like a planned economy than a market economy, with mating determined by arranged marriages (whether chosen by families or requiring family approval) rather than individual choice in an open marketplace. A sexual market, properly speaking, does not emerge until non-familial, unregulated avenues for men and women to meet become available, such as colleges or workplaces. In traditional societies, chastity was not a form of sexual capital but a normative expectation, the bare minimum. It was only in the transitional era of marketized yet regulated dating (roughly the 1920s to 1950s) that chastity became a genuine form of capital: women were freely choosing partners, meaning they had the freedom to break the rules, and as Foucault showed in his history of sexuality,^[3] people did engage in premarital sex even during supposedly repressive eras. Yet it was still more valuable, particularly for women, to be chaste, which determined their relative value in the dating market. After the sexual revolution, this form of capital largely disappeared as sexual capital became associated primarily with attractiveness rather than restraint. Kaplan and Illouz are correct that sexual capital has transformed, but it is misleading to characterize chastity as a form of “sexual capital” itself. If anything, it is a pre-capitalist social norm that conflicts with capitalist logic. However, many people and communities operating within capitalist economies today still operate within pre-capitalist forms of meeting arrangements, such as religious communities that practice arranged marriage, and vestiges of the pre-capitalist meeting order remain.

2. Sexual capital as surplus value of the body: This refers to the direct monetization of sexuality through sex work, pornography, and related industries.

3. Embodied sexual capital: This encompasses attractiveness, charm, and sexual competence that can be used for social advantage.

4. Digital consumer sexual capital: The newest form, where sexual experiences and attractiveness enhance employability and professional success.

Some might argue that what we’re describing is simply the “halo effect”, the well-documented tendency for attractive people to be perceived more favorably. But sexual capital under today’s digital consumer society represents something far more systematic and intensive. Attractive people have always had certain privileges, but not nearly to the same extent as they do now.

What makes capitalist society different from all previous class societies is the prospect of social mobility. The dream of increasing one's power and moving up the hierarchy distinguishes it from hereditary aristocracy. This makes people more “status anxious” than ever before. One’s brand image has become more important than ever in attaining power.

Social media platforms have intensified these dynamics by creating a hyper-visible marketplace where desirability is quantified through likes, followers, and engagement metrics. This has had a profound effect on both professional advancement and the dating market itself. And yes, while the term “mating market” may sound rather icky due to the way it’s used in Red Pill manosphere communities, dating is indeed a market. Dating apps and social media like Instagram, which in many ways is a dating app of its own, have had a massive effect on dating market imbalances, particularly because they are so heavily based on appearance.

To compete in that environment, if one chooses to, one needs to maximize one’s sexual capital and actualize it via one’s digital profiles in order to compete successfully on the dating market, unless one opts for traditional means of courtship, which is increasingly rare. Social media and dating apps intensify the deregulation of the sexual economy. Things have been shifting in this direction for quite a long time now, but with dating apps, people no longer seek out companions primarily in their immediate local vicinity; they also have unlimited access to mates across their entire geographic region, city, and even country, well, at least those with high sexual capital do.

With social media, people can now compare their sexual capital with that of the most attractive people across the entire planet, which certainly has had quite a negative impact on self-esteem. Based on research, social media appears to have a more catastrophic impact on women. In contrast, dating apps tend to favor women on these sites due to the fact that there are just way more men than women on these apps, and women are often pickier, due to a variety of reasons, mostly because they are exposed to far more risks.

The Deregulation of the Sexual Economy

We are told that the shackles of repression have been thrown off, that individuals are free to express and explore their desires without the constraints of religious morality, patriarchal tradition, or state-imposed norms. But as Kaplan and Illouz argue, this is a fantasy, a convenient narrative that conceals a deeper reality: what appears as liberation is simply the restructuring of control. Instead of the church or the state regulating sexuality, sexuality has become disciplined by the market, dictating what is desirable, who is valued, and who is left behind.

The sexual revolution of the Sixties created not socialism and liberation, but the acceleration of capitalism into the most intimate spheres of social reproduction. The very notion of a “sexual marketplace” that dating gurus and psychologists (such as Dr. Orion Taraban) often talk about (as if it were a transhistorical component of human societies) was, in reality, a relatively recent development. It’s not a surprise that the liberalization of social life helped unleash the age of sexual capital and subjected the so-called “sexual market” to free-market dynamics and new hierarchies increasingly shaped by sexual capital. Michel Houellebecq described the outcome of capitalism’s expansion into the sexual market incisively: “We live today in a two-dimensional system: erotic attractiveness and money. All the rest, the happiness and the misery of people, is derived from this... The consequence of the sexual quest is not pleasure but, rather, the narcissistic reward, the prestige awarded by the desired partner for one’s erotic superiority.”^[4]

If the body was once disciplined by religious morality and/or traditional norms, it is now disciplined by market logic, an economy where, as Kaplan and Illouz put it, “self-worth is increasingly measured not by inner virtue, but by one’s ability to extract desire from others.” This represents a system where sexual subjectivity is increasingly produced through biomolecular and technical processes, from cosmetic procedures to pharmaceutical interventions.

The Professional Sphere and Sexual Capital

The obsession with aging and enhancing sexual capital is intensified by the visually-based mediums through which people compete for both career success and mating success, which have become increasingly intertwined. This isn’t simply because employers are “lulled” by attractive people. Rather, capitalist employers are more likely to give opportunities to younger, more beautiful people as they represent a more profitable long-term investment. Beauty diminishes through age almost as fast as the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in capitalist firms, which they are compelled to always combat by seeking new sources of profit maximization.

Just as white-collar workers, especially those in professional-managerial class jobs, must cultivate their employability, people must now cultivate their desirability, treating their own bodies as a kind of investment portfolio. The beauty, fashion, fitness, and plastic surgery industries all depend on the promise that sexual capital can be accumulated, that desirability can be earned through consumption. But sexual capital is not just about appearance; it is about performance. It is about confidence, seduction skills, and the ability to project desirability in both intimate and professional settings.

Digital consumer sexual capital is especially powerful in elite professional circles, where sexual confidence is often linked to economic success. Silicon Valley executives attend exclusive sex parties as part of their networking culture, while middle-class professionals use their sexual experiences to reinforce their social and workplace confidence. This is why digital consumer sexual capital differs from earlier forms: it functions less as a direct exchange and more as a reinforcement of class mobility. Those who master it accumulate more status, while those who fail to do so are left behind.

The relationship between sexual capital and class mobility has been fundamentally transformed by platform capitalism and the digital mediation of social life. While sexual attractiveness has always conferred certain advantages, digital platforms have created new infrastructures through which sexual capital can be accumulated, measured, and converted into economic and professional advantages.

This is not simply about the quantification of attractiveness through likes and followers. Rather, it represents the integration of sexual capital into the very fabric of professional life. LinkedIn profiles, Zoom meetings, and personal brands all require the careful cultivation and presentation of attractiveness as a form of professional competence. Sexual capital, in my view, has become inseparable from the broader phenomenon that Hans-Georg Moeller calls “profilicity” (the mode of identity formation in which people become who they are by managing how they appear to a generalized public—building and maintaining a profile that can be observed, evaluated, and validated).

We are no longer just competing with people in our immediate social circles or local communities. Kind of like how free trade agreements have liberalized capital mobility, these digital platforms also globalize the competition for attention and desirability. Through social media, we are thrust into a global marketplace where everyone is competing with the most attractive people in a city, country, or, in some cases, across continents.

Race and Sexual Capital

The distribution of sexual capital isn’t random; it follows and reinforces existing social hierarchies. While neoliberal feminists like Catherine Hakim see sexual capital as potentially empowering, they ignore how it remains deeply embedded in systems of racial and economic inequality. Dating app data consistently shows patterns of racial preferences in perceived attractiveness, with Black users, especially Black women, facing the most substantial disadvantages. Research indicates that users are 2.3 to 3.3 times less likely to swipe right on Black profiles compared to White ones, while White users tend to receive the most favorable treatment.^[5] The growing importance of sexual capital doesn’t just reinforce conventional beauty standards; it also heightens some of the most arbitrary hereditary hierarchies.

Class and the Genetic Aristocracy

The ability to accumulate and maintain sexual capital is heavily influenced by economic class. Wealth allows one to improve one’s appearance more easily through access to expensive skincare routines, cosmetic procedures, personal trainers, and high-end fashion. But this wealth-based advantage is separate from a deeper structural inequality: the genetic aristocracy that exists at the level of attractiveness and stature itself.

Like it or not, the marketized system of dating is inherently more Darwinian and unequal than a traditional system where people are encouraged to date with the aim of marrying, promoting modesty among both sexes. Despite its own problems, this traditional arrangement is more egalitarian than a purely liberalized, deregulated market environment. In a market without restrictive social norms & taboos that indirectly limit the accumulation, valorization, expenditure, and self-exploitation of sexual capital, the more economically and genetically fortunate disproportionately benefit at the expense of the rest. Not only is it less egalitarian, but one can also argue that the free market of love and sex is also less “meritocratic” (if one places importance on free will and non-inherited traits) because of the genetic aristocracy built into natural variations of attractiveness (bone structure, facial symmetry, stature, skin, hair, muscularity, athleticism, fat genetics, etc).

Not to mention the non-visual heritable traits, such as verbal IQ and differences in cognition like Autism (the actual kind, not autistic as in merely socially inept), which some studies have linked to INCELs. It’s easy to tell these people to “just work on your personality,” but that’s actually just as hard, if not even harder, to change than one’s physical appearance. In the age of sexual capital, the latter is what is more important anyway, because most people need a minimum level of sexual capital in order for people to appreciate their personality or talents. But it’s probably best to encourage people to focus more on their personalities or their crafts/talents, so they don’t become like those miserable looksmaxxers. After all, Plato believed in noble lies for a reason. But in the age of sexual capital, those noble lies, even if they had a rational kernel of truth, are becoming less believable to many people.

Phenomena like looksmaxxing, embodied in movies like “The Substance” or recent viral internet sensations like Clavicular, represent exaggerated attempts to overcome the limits of the genetic aristocracy through investment and surgical/biomedical self-transformation. Yet overcoming the limitations of genetic inequality often leads to constant unhappiness and anxiety. This drive does not emerge from nowhere. It stems from the reality of sexuality operating within an increasingly competitive and image-based market system.

Pharmacopornographic Capitalism

What The Substance brilliantly captures isn’t just the horror of aging; it’s the economic terror of depreciating sexual capital, particularly for women, and how nobody really wins in this system, except for the capitalists who profit from the human capital they invest in. It shows how even the “winners” at the top of the sexual capital hierarchy eventually become the biggest losers. The more you rely solely on sexual capital for success and validation, the harder the fall in self-esteem as one experiences the inevitability of aging. This is why all the female celebrities (and increasingly even the men too) desperately try to keep looking young with new surgeries, botox, injections, dietary drugs, and questionable medical procedures. Once a person becomes accustomed to a certain level of attention, power, and positive treatment simply because they are attractive, the harder it is for them to live as a less exceptional person as their looks depreciate. It’s a feeling that an ordinary person who never had much sexual capital to begin with could never understand.

The Substance is a brilliantly exaggerated portrayal of the obscenity of what Kaplan and Illouz call “Pharmacopornographic Capitalism” (yes, I know, theorists love to invent new terms for capitalism). The grotesque transformations that follow aren’t merely body horror for entertainment’s sake; they represent the violent logic of a market system that treats bodies as investments requiring continual optimization. A common narrative you hear from people trying to explain the rise of the anti-aging industry is that the obsession with looking young reflects an existential “fear of death.” This is a very insufficient explanation for the rise of the anti-aging industry, and it ignores the far more important (and uncomfortable) reality: higher sexual capital gives you a great competitive advantage in modern capitalist social hierarchies. Having higher sexual capital = more human capital. Not only does the halo effect make people treat you better, but having more sexual capital simply opens more opportunities in all avenues of life.

Kaplan and Illouz note that while the sex industry has historically been a direct site of sexual capital accumulation, today, sexual capital extends far beyond explicit sex work. Social media influencers, lifestyle coaches, and even corporate professionals increasingly rely on attractiveness and sexual appeal to enhance their career trajectories. The growing emphasis on personal branding has turned everyone into a marketer of their own desirability.

The serum in The Substance serves as a perfect metaphor for this process, promising liberation through transformation while actually intensifying forms of control and self-exploitation. Just as Elizabeth’s younger self emerges as an apparently “natural” embodiment of youth and beauty, this apparent naturality masks the violent technological processes required for its production.

The Economic Rationality of Looksmaxxing

This brings us back to phenomena like “looksmaxxing” and the obsession with anti-aging. These aren’t simply products of social media influence or cultural pressure, they represent rational responses to material conditions where sexual capital has become increasingly central to economic survival and social mobility. Many normies like to act as if looksmaxxing is some weird, unprecedented trend that only terminally online autistic men engage in. However, this perception exists only because it seems rather odd and antisocial for men to openly discuss superficial realities of this sort, which most people only internalize subconsciously or keep to themselves while pretending they are above it. Of course, women tend to be very open about these matters amongst themselves, but it appears as a strange trend when men talk about it.

Looksmaxxing represents the male adoption of things that were already normalized and even expected for women. For women, makeup has always been part of their effort to enhance appearance, and fashion has always been more heavily emphasized. Now, plastic surgery and body modifications are spreading into male spheres. Men who want to prove their masculinity especially have a hard time admitting to doing anything that could be seen as effeminate or gay, so to justify beauty practices traditionally seen as feminine, they need to talk about it with a hefty dose of testosterone. What people call looksmaxxing is essentially the hotwheelification of what was traditionally called “grooming” for men, except with a much stronger, more desperate emphasis, as (most) men no longer have more relative power than women do, and thus have to prove their desirability by competing on terrain that used to be considered more crucial for women.

The Depreciation of Value and Inflation of Sexual Capital

Beauty & seduction traditionally allowed women to enhance their relative power in a context in which most women had less power than men by default. Yet as this power imbalance began to equalize, the obsession with enhancing appearance via makeup and fashion actually increased, as women began competing with men and other women over jobs in the workforce. In addition, as men no longer needed to marry in order to get access to sex and intimacy, and as pregnancy no longer came with the implicit promise of marriage (due to abortion rights, oral contraceptives, etc), the power of sex by default was reduced, as it simply became less expensive to access. Furthermore, the expectation of marriage and having children at younger ages encourages people to vet for character traits of long-term importance beyond physical appearance (such as mental stability, competence, personality compatibility, and trust).

With the loosening of traditional norms and expectations, human mating is increasingly driven by desire rather than needs. Consequently, all of these variables combined meant that a woman’s desirability became even more dependent on her looks, as men could now get access to sex with women more easily without consequence and without having to commit to them long term. However, everyone knows that not all women are as “easy” as others. The most conventionally attractive ones tend to be naturally “harder” to sleep with due to the number of men who will “chase” after her. And it’s not just about being able to sleep with these highly sought-after women either. For men, being seen with these women and being desired by them is its own status metric by which men seek validation among other men, and it has the “pre-selection” effect in attracting even more women. In other words, men see them as trophies and accomplishments to collect. While everyone today wants to believe they are “the prize,” the truth is that not all women are considered attractive enough to be valorized in this way, which comes with its own set of obvious objectifying problems. Attractive women can demand more from men, whether it be commitment, money, attention, and can get away with more negative behaviors that would otherwise turn off a man. This heightened importance of attractiveness gives rise to more intense competition among women for men they desire and to higher beauty standards they would constantly compare themselves to. Thus, while beauty and seduction were always a part of human societies, the obsession with beauty enhancement was once a novelty that only people within the elite classes had the luxury to partake in. Whereas post-sexual liberation, female beauty has become a competition to which all women are subject, as attractiveness has triumphed as the most powerful metric of a woman’s desirability above all long-term character traits, let alone variables like social trust between families, which are more important in traditional societies.

Furthermore, the competition over sexual capital was further facilitated by the transition to a consumer economy, and new developments in technology made it possible to streamline the possibilities for beautification for the average woman. Put simply, as the ability to have sex without long term commitment made it so that men had less reason to marry, and as the average woman had less to offer a man for marriage, attractiveness became even more decisive in a woman’s ability to secure a long-term mate. In today’s world, we are witnessing the same thing happen to men as the primary thing the average man had to offer a woman (being able to provide and protect) has significantly declined.

In a post-patriarchal age in which many no longer “need” a man, women select based on who they find desirable. And during a rough economy in which men objectively have less to offer, desirability is further determined by factors such as sexual and social capital, as well as exceptional personality qualities (like being funny or charismatic). If desire is the primary basis of relationships, then the great recession of sex and relationships is a predictable consequence of a mating economy in which most men (and arguably most people in general) simply aren’t “desirable.”

Of course, many people in the long run do end up with partners whom they may not have initially found “desirable,” but the fact that people colloquially tend to speak of this process as “settling down” only proves the point. Finding the love of your life is for those who are fortunate enough to end up with the people they desire, whereas settling down describes those who adjust their standards to the realities of what they can get as their optionality decreases as they age.

Thus, if it’s easier to improve your looks than it is to change your personality, especially as internet echo chambers and digital escapism facilitate the breakdown of socialization, then looksmaxing is a logical consequence that shouldn’t be too difficult to make sense of. What matters is not so much the particular details or degrees of extremity in which some people take looksmaxxing, but rather the incentives that drive the obsession with self-optimization in general, which I have covered in an old video essay on Byung Chul Han’s The Burnout Society. The reason why looksmaxxing discourse has popped into the zeitgeist isn’t simply due to the particular obscenities of internet personalities like Clavicular alone. Rather, he merely embodies a cartoonified spectacle version of a broader phenomenon in response to real socio-economic shifts that have become increasingly hard to ignore.

Why Things Are Different Now

Being more handsome and taller was always an advantage, but now it is more decisive. This is not just because of social media, but because most men, on average, simply have less to offer. In modern liberal capitalist societies, in which most vestiges of patriarchy no longer exist, most men can no longer rely on being able to “provide” to attract a long-term partner. Before women entered the workforce en masse, women didn’t necessarily marry men who could provide merely because they were economically desperate and/or coerced into marrying men they did not want. If that were the case, women today would no longer pursue men who have more money and status than they do. Yet they still do. The truth is quite simply that a man being able to provide genuinely makes him more attractive to women.

Even today, in which hypogamous relationships (women dating men with less money and status) are growing but still are not the norm, it is still the case that men who cannot provide are simply not as attractive to women compared to the ones who can, unless they can be attractive by other means (sexual capital, high status/clout). Especially in the context of long-term mating, a man who can provide is simply more attractive (“husband material”) because it signals his independence and his capability of relieving a woman from the double burden of having to be both the mother of a family and a full-time worker for an employer. In a more gender-equal world in which women now outnumber men in university and even outcompete men in white-collar work,^[6] men are now having to rely increasingly on high sexual capital or high status to seem desirable to women.

At one level, all of this might just seem like the consequences of gender equality, of men having to now do what women once did and make a greater effort to look good to be desirable for the opposite sex. However, there is a key difference that complicates the picture. It was totally common to find good-looking men with high-to-middle incomes who were willing to marry women who made much less money than they did, if they were seen as good-looking enough. The same cannot be said of high-to-middle-income women with education, however. At least on average. Well-documented assortative mating patterns suggest that women, on average, still prefer men who earn more than they do and are far less willing to date “downward” in terms of status (i.e., men with less education and income than they have).^[7]

The problem is compounded by the broader economic context. Real wages for most workers have stagnated since approximately 1980, even as the cost of living has continued to rise.^[8] As economic stagnation persists and wealth inequality intensifies, most men have even less to offer women in terms of traditional provider value. Of course, the economic difficulties go both ways on paper, but statistically, men on average are far more willing to date women who are less economically successful than they are, compared to the reverse. In cases where a woman does have a better income and/or education than the man she is with, the man is typically selected for his attractiveness, stature (sexual capital), fame or clout, and/or social capital.^[9]

That being said, while the looksmaxxing trend might seem like the natural evolution of men adapting to an environment where they have less relative power than women compared to before, it cannot be said that women benefit from this either. Not only do many women consequently complain about the shortage of desirable men, but in the digital age, the competition for sexual capital is more intense for both genders, with effects that are arguably even worse for women in the long term, and that is precisely the lesson of The Substance film.

Thus, the pursuit of eternal youth and maximized attractiveness isn’t driven by mere vanity or false consciousness. Rather, it reflects an accurate recognition of how sexual capital functions as a vital form of power in today’s economy. Men have been slower to catch up to these new socio-economic changes, and when they do, it gets weird. It’s easy to single out the obsessives who take it way too far; those who invest in their sexual capital are merely adapting to the new normal.

Conclusion: The Market is the People

Movements focused solely on challenging beauty standards or promoting body acceptance, while important, can’t fully address the material conditions that make sexual capital so central to social mobility. Understanding sexual capital as an economic force rather than just a cultural phenomenon helps us grasp why the anti-aging industry has become so powerful, why beauty optimization has become so intense, and hard to resist.

The frantic pursuit of youth and beauty will continue to intensify not only because people are vain, but because people are rational actors in an irrational system. This does not mean we should accept this system as inevitable. But challenging it requires more than just critiquing beauty standards or promoting self-acceptance. Progressive attempts to promote plus-sized models or fat acceptance will not change this underlying reality. Attempts to merely tell people to “be themselves” fall on deaf ears when they see clearly that certain attributes give one a significant advantage in competing within the capitalist economy.

It is essential to acknowledge the economic system itself and the ideology it shapes for the subjects who compete within it, which gives rise to this desire in the first place. The only way to address this problem is to either accept the reality of the economic system itself or, at the individual level, refuse to be consumed by the drive to compete within that system. If one chooses to compete, they will have to do whatever gives them a competitive edge. Although sexual capital is not solely reducible to looks alone, it is undeniably a major factor. If one wants to compete in the age of sexual capital, it becomes difficult to construct a coherent argument against the broader looksmaxxing logic, especially if they do not possess other forms of capital already (social, cultural, economic). That is why there are limits to critiquing looksmaxxing logic solely at the level of individual choice. However, many left-leaning “systemic” critiques of phenomena under capitalism also tend to be naive about human nature and how it capitalizes on its worst aspects.

I have a bit of an issue with the way some leftists talk about “the market” as if it were an amorphous non-human force manipulating humans to desire things they wouldn’t otherwise desire when left to their own devices. The market is merely an arena of human transactions driven by supply and demand (wants and needs). Milton Friedman in Freedom to Choose wasn’t entirely wrong when he said that the free market is fundamentally driven by people. But the freedom to follow impulse and desire represents freedom only of a primitive sort. Genuine freedom requires will. It’s about developing the discipline to overcome the immediacy of desire, to say no to the trap of short-term expediency, in favour of long-term self-overcoming. Immanuel Kant defined freedom not merely as doing whatever one wants, but as autonomy: the ability to be governed by limits that you impose on yourself through reason. However, most of us quite simply do not possess the will or the reason capable of this self-discipline. That is what collective social norms, rituals, and traditions are for. They help us collectively prevent problems that humans forget they are prone to.

The great irony is that it is precisely religion, traditional norms, taboos, and social customs that functioned as guardrails and regulations, protecting people from the anarchy of the market. The left historically saw these institutions as part of the hegemonic order they wanted to overthrow. Yet today, it is now libertine, free-market morality that permeates the social relations of Western capitalist societies. Progressive ideologies like liberalism and Marxism have historically tended to aggressively oppose these things, viewing them as outdated traditions that are inherently oppressive or patriarchal. Despite the pretense of egalitarianism, liberal-progressive dispositions towards the social have been a vital part of the capitalist superstructure. They have effectively facilitated the age of sexual capital by rationalizing the deregulation of social life, allowing it to be further colonized by capitalist market relations. One could even say it is central to the dominant ideology of the New Spirit of Capitalism itself.

As the anonymous collective Tiqqun put it in their Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl: “Society’s final moment of socialization, Empire, is thus also the moment when each person is called upon to relate to themselves as value, that is, according to the central mediation of a series of controlled abstractions.”^[10]

Contrary to what the boomer generation of hippies and New-Left activists predicted, the decline of religion and religious traditions did not lead to “free love” and peace. Instead, it created a vacuum for the capitalist market to fill. The outcome was not a step towards communization, but rather an acceleration of the next stage of capitalist primitive accumulation in civil society. Christian morality and traditional restrictions, taboos, and guardrails have given way to free-market morality instead. The “liberal” morality that has replaced Christian and traditional moralities lacks a moral code of its own. Rather, it is a value-relativist view celebrated in the guise of the individual “freedom to choose” what they want to believe and do. But in a deregulated market society with fewer traditional norms and taboos to regulate social life, social norms and taboos become shaped by the capitalist market. This is certainly not to say that all traditional social norms, practices, and taboos are good. But neither are all forms of freedom. In the West, sexual liberation since the 60s has not made people freer; it has enslaved them to their flesh, degrading humanity into animality, only to have them pay to transform into cyborgs.

---

Bibliography/Works Cited

^[1] Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz, What is Sexual Capital? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022).

^[2] Catherine Hakim, Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

^[3] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

^[4]Michel Houellebecq, Interventions (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 41.

^[5] Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity—What Our Online Lives Tell Us About Our Offline Selves (New York: Crown, 2014).

^[6] According to the OECD, 52% of women aged 25–34 have a tertiary education compared to 39% of men across member countries. In the United States, women earned 58% of bachelor’s degrees in 2022. See OECD, “Education at a Glance 2023”; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Women in the Labor Force: A Databook” (2022); and Flashman, “The Deepening Gender Divide in Credentials, 2000–2020,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 11, no. 1 (2025): 154.

^[7] See De Hauw, Grow, and Van Bavel, “The Reversed Gender Gap in Education and Assortative Mating in Europe,” European Journal of Population 33, no. 5 (2017): 445–474; American Survey Center, “From Swiping to Sexting: The Enduring Gender Divide in American Dating and Relationships” (2023), which found 54% of college-educated women would be less likely to date someone without a college degree.

^[8] Peter Turchin documents that median real wages for American workers without college degrees have declined in absolute terms since 1976, while the relative wage (typical wages divided by GDP per capita) lost nearly 30% of its value between 1976 and 2016. See Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (New York: Penguin, 2023), 66–81. See also Economic Policy Institute, “The Productivity–Pay Gap” (2024), which shows that since 1979, productivity has grown 64.6% while hourly compensation for typical workers rose only 14.8%.

^[9] On the asymmetry of mating preferences, see Buss and Schmitt, “Sexual Strategies Theory: An Evolutionary Perspective on Human Mating,” Psychological Review 100, no. 2 (1993): 204–232. On hypogamous relationships: Pew Research Center, “Rising Share of U.S. Adults Are Living Without a Spouse or Partner” (2021), notes that in marriages where one spouse out-earns the other, husbands are the higher earner in 69% of cases. For a discussion of how women in hypogamous relationships select for male traits other than income, see Esteve, García-Román, and Permanyer, “The Gender-Gap Reversal in Education and Its Effect on Union Formation,” Population and Development Review 38, no. 2 (2012): 293–313.

^[10] Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, trans. Ariana Reines (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 18.