Talk:Sexual capital

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 19 August 2019 and 29 November 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Dfee2. Peer reviewers: Reliablesourceconnoisseur, Milest303.

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Connection to sexual attractiveness article

An interesting concept. If the article is deleted, I hope the information can be placed in the discussion on sexual attractiveness. — 76.90.36.59 (talk · contribs), 03:35, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Deletion?

Resolved

 – Article was not deleted, and rationales for deletion were covered at the deletion discussion.

Why in a million years would you want to delete this article? Just because it's a new concept?

Looks an awful lot like censorship to me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.113.188.66 (talk) 04:29, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Did you actually bother to read the discussion?-Wafulz (talk) 03:09, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Female erotic actor?

Where is the female example, we don't want to be sexist now, do we? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Irongrip (talk • contribs) 16:53, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

That's funny; usually "sexism" is reserved for female subordination or sexual objectification. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.232.87.109 (talk) 05:53, 28 October 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.77.58.178 (talk) 06:11, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Elements nonsense

Resolved

 – Issue was corrected.

Does the article really say "The six distinct elements of Erotic capital" ? I count seven! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.220.70.97 (talk) 22:16, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Someone fixed that. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 07:38, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Rewrite

Unresolved

 – Severe problems identified but unresolved.

I think this article is a bit weak - it really reifies an analytical tool (erotic capital) and casts it as a thing-in-itself.

It would be good if an expert in this area could have a look at it - it is currently intellectually very slipshod. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.253.41.121 (talk) 09:12, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Erotic capital is an objective, if relational resource in a field. The article locates erotic capital in the context of specific fields. I see no problem with it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.232.87.109 (talk) 00:01, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

The article references FOUR journal publications for the term. Three of these publications use the term "erotic capital"; one of these publications uses the term "sexual capital". Hence, this is NOT a case of "original research." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.77.58.178 (talk) 06:13, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

It's still crap. 99.232.87.109 and 75.77.58.178 may see no problem with it, but it's already only barely survived WP:AFD, does not properly cite sources, is written as if a 13-year-old cobbled it together for a school class, and is worded in ways that not only disagree with its own sources, but seem to have been made up in parts, with personal opinion, and not drawing from reliable sources at all. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 07:17, 16 April 2010 (UTC)q

It's nice that it now cites (generally, not specifically) one more source and is no longer is juvenile wording, and some of its most obvious personal-opinion blather has been removed, but the problem still remains that a large number of claims are made in the article, none of them exactly cited to specific sources at specific pages. Especially problematic is the claim that "sexual capital" or "erotic capital" has X number of specific, identified aspects. Even if one source can be found that says this, it isn't at all clear that this is a majority view in the field, or even that sexual/erotic capital as defined by that source is what is meant by either term as used in other sources. I am thus restoring the WP:NOR cleanup tag on this article. This would-be article, which despite recent minor cleanup still reads like someone's blog post, barely qualifies as a stub, is not sourced properly, and no amount of complaint in my direction is going to magically make it a proper encyclopedia article. It's nothing personal. The article just needs to be improved. My examination of the sources cited so far suggests that this is a potentially valid article on a notable topic, even if barely given the newness of the term and of the concept and its lack of widespread coverage so far. We can have an article about this. But what we have right now is not the article we need. PS: The article is also grossly overcategorized. It should probably have something like two categories on it, not a dozen. Most of them are redundant (i.e., if an article is in category Y, and Y is a subcategory (or sub-sub-sub-category, whatever) of category Z, then we do not also put the article into category Z). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 07:38, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

No consensus to move. Vegaswikian (talk) 23:56, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Sexual capital → Erotic capital — Relist. Vegaswikian (talk) 23:33, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Procedural nomination: Someone objected to my move of this article from erotic capital to sexual capital. At the talk page discussion is the objection message and my response to it, from my talk page, refactored as !votes. [NB: I've filed this Requested Move discussion on behalf of the objector because the objector does not sign posts, and several other edits by the objector indicate that this person is a new user and not likely to know about WP:RM procedures. I oppose the move, but I want the objector to have their fair say.] — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 07:13, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

If this was in fact a procedural nomination, then surely the correct action would be to move the page back and propose your original move? As things currently stand, the burden of opinion would appear to be reversed, in that it would require a clear consensus to revert the move, rather than requiring consensus to keep the article at its current title. 81.111.114.131 (talk) 02:05, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

• Support. SM: the article that was erotic capital should probably be restored to that title. Two published academic articles and one popular press article uses the term "erotic capital"; only one published article uses the term "sexual capital" (though both terms refer to the same thing). At minimum, the article title should reflect the name of both concepts. It remains to be seen which concept becomes dominant in the field. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.77.58.178 (talk) 06:38, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose: Given that nothing in that article is properly sourced at all, I did most of the source cleanup myself, the one academic source that uses the term in its title does so as "sexual capital", the one journalistic source, that prefers "erotic capital" isn't even cited properly, and from what I've seen in other sources cited in the article, I stand by the move and related edits. The term "erotic" is rarely used in anthropological and sociological circles in technical terms (while "sexual" is, very consistently, though perhaps giving way to "gender" in some cases, over time), and I don't see any clear evidence at all that the term "erotic capital" is a preferred term among practitioners in the relevant fields (sociology, anthropology and perhaps psychology). And that's considering this issue in the context of the quite limited extent to which it is even recognized as valid. I almost AfD'd this. If you want to move it back, file a motion at WP:RM and make your case; I won't have any anything to say about it there that I haven't already said here. Actually, I'll do it for you; it's easier to just refactor this as a RM !vote than to rehash the argument manually. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 07:13, 16 April 2010 (UTC) PS: Given two terms used in the field interchangeably ("sexual capital" and "erotic capital"), WP must naturally prefer the one that is less likely to be confusing or misleading to our readers, who are a very general audience (indeed, the most general audience in the whole world, namely the whole world). That would clearly be "sexual capital". "Erotic" in Modern English almost uniformly implies titillation and a conscious, even exaggerated, exploitation of human sexuality, for one aim or another, while "sexual" implies nothing but "of or having to do with sex". Try to think of any phrase with "erotic" in it that doesn't have that connotation. Erotic art. Erotic dancing. Erotic obsession. Erotic short story. Erotica. Working in the erotic industry. Erotic whatever. Having the article at erotic capital is quite certain to confuse some readers into assuming that it has something to do with titillation and conscious play at exaggerated sexuality, when in fact the concept, as laid out in the literature, does not actually imply this at all (even if subsuming such as a subset). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 07:59, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Comment:: Both terms are currently being used in the sociological literature, fairly interchangably. A look at the extant published work in the area shows more work using the term "erotic capital" than "sexual capital", but this by itself should not determine its listing. To the extent that both variations are appearing in academic published work, neither term should be excluded from this page. Indeed, it's irrelevant whether or not a given discipline uses more often the general terms "sexual" to "erotic" -- that has nothing to do with its current conceptual development as a form of capital-i.e., leave it to the experts who publish in sociology, not a clean-up bot, to decide which term becomes dominant in the field and, in turn, which term appears on this page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.77.58.178 (talk) 23:01, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

Reply: I've already addressed this. The fact that both terms appear in (professional, non-journalistic) reliable sources is why I made sure that both terms are included in the lead of the article. I moved the article from erotic capital to sexual capital because I cannot find any evidence in the professional literature that the word "erotic" is regularly used in any term of art in sociology or anthropology, meanwhile "sexual" is regularly used in wide array of constructions ("sexual politics", "sexual relations", "sexual division of labo[u]r", "sexual power struggles", etc., etc., etc. And even if I were wrong and somehow missed a big upswell of "erotic" being used in various social science jargon terms, the fact remains that Wikipedia is written for a general, not specialist audience; "erotic" has a strong set of implications that come with it ("baggage"), and the word "sexual" by comparison generally does not. Ergo, as we agree (and we do agree, by your own statements) that both "sexual capital" and "erotic capital" are terms represented in the scientific literature, then WP pretty much automatically has to prefer the former, because it is less confusing and misleading to readers, and (again by your own statements) there isn't any clear evidence that the field literature prefers "erotic capital" over "sexual capital". (PS: I would encourage you to add the additional sources you cited on my talk page to the article, but follow WP:CITE and start rewriting the article with inline citations). — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 23:20, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

• Oppose - "Sexual capital" makes much more sense as a phrase -- not everything sexual is erotic. Beyond My Ken (talk) 08:32, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
• Oppose - The article should not have been moved in the first place without first proposing the move and gaining consensus. However, it is now moved and my quick G-survey indicates that this title is more prevalent. Also, since both are somewhat rare, why have a tempest in a teapot. Leave it with the current name, IMO. Atom (talk) 14:47, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Provably-false claim of originality, and a clear conflict of interest

I want to re-post some comments from the AfD that represent major unresolved issues:

1. "Looks like a neologism without much mileage. It was invented by Adam Isaiah Green, and the article was created by Adamisaiahgreen (talk · contribs), so there may be a conflict of interest present. I couldn't find any use on Google or online journal databases. Wafulz (talk) 19:21, 27 January 2008 (UTC)"
2. "Delete based on current content. Google Books and Google Scholar indicate use of this phrase going back to the 1950s and 1960s; consequently, Adam Isaiah Green could not have invented the phrase recently, and the references to his works are probably not needed due to the conflict of interest involved. It might be possible to create a worthwhile article on this topic, though, so a rewrite which establishes this phrase as a notable concept might be worth keeping. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 20:52, 27 January 2008 (UTC)"

Both of these are out-standing issues. I would bet good money that the current anon IP address editing this article and expressing consternation over the page move from "erotic" to "sexual" capital is also A. I. Green, or a close associate thereof. At present, it appears that a phrase that can have various meanings depending upon context, like most any other phrase in our language, has been advanced as a sociology term-of-art with one particular and clear definition, by one writer in the field (despite the fact that it's not actually a real neologism, but a term already in use for decades, with probably variant meaning), who then created this somewhat self-serving article. Further, it seems that the concept (as opposed to the wording) has been detailed and called something else by others in the field. Particularly troubling is the fact that sources demonstrate usage of this term (with definitions that no source yet cited suggests are identical with Green's meaning) going back more than half a century (probably even longer if we looked for "sexual capital" as well as "erotic capital"). This might even need to be a disambiguation page with links to different meanings from different eras in different disciplines. I'm not meaning to attack Green here, and I think (from my perspective as an anthropologist by training) that the idea has merit, and as "sexual capital" without easily-confusing use of the very loaded word "erotic", is at least potentially a valid article topic. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 09:00, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

The poster SMcCandish seems to believe that if the term "erotic capital" isn't present in the TITLE of a journal article, it therefore does not count as part of published writing, and must be "original research". In fact, the term "erotic capital" is explicitly developed and applied in Green's 2008 published article in Sociological Theory, the theory journal of the American Sociological Association, which IS properly cited in the article and in the references.

MOREOVER, the term erotic capital is used and referenced to Green (2005 and 2008), in a stream of subsequent published research in highly respected academic journals, including the following:

1. Between deference and distinction: Interaction ritual through symbolic power in an …sagepub.com [PDF]

T Hallett - Social Psychology Quarterly, 2007 - spq.sagepub.com

2. Men Sexually Interested in Transwomen (MSTW): Gendered Embodiment and the …

MS Weinberg, CJ Williams - Journal of Sex Research, 2009 - informaworld.com

3. A Foreign Adventurer's Paradise? Interracial Sexuality and Alien Sexual Capital in …

J Farrer - Sexualities, 2010 - sexualities.sagepub.com

4. C Hakim - European Sociological Review, 2010 - Oxford Univ Press

5. Bare Bodies: Nudity, Gender, and the Looking Glass Body1

MS Weinberg, CJ Williams - Sociological Forum, 2010 - interscience.wiley.com

6. Internet Sex Ads for MSM and Partner Selection Criteria: The Potency of Race/ …

JP Paul, G Ayala, KH Choi - Journal of Sex Research, 2009 - informaworld.com

CONCLUSION The article clearly does not represent "original research". As well, the term "erotic capital" is clearly not a "neologism without much mileage", as demonstrated by its rapid incorporation into subsequent published work over a 24 month period since it was first published. IN FACT: the term erotic capital has been referenced to Green's work and subsequently picked up in the field of sexuality studies in a range of published work.

Not to be a smartaleck, but please see the straw man article. I have made no claims about the suitability of Sociological Theory as a source (of course, it is one of the main journals in the field). I have also no longer suggested that the article is ridden with original research, because the list of criteria that was written like a junior high school student created it has been cleaned up. The issues that remain with the article have been very clearly tagged. They are overcategorization, likely conflict of interest and failure to properly cite sources, as well as the factual dispute raised by someone else, that this term predates the claimed originator by several decades. With regard to sourcing, the issue is not one of reliable sources (these journals obviously are, while the journalistic one is of questionable value and malformed anyway). It's really a matter of what we call verifiability: Dumping a bunch of ostensibly great sources at the end of an article without any indication in the article itself what claims made by that article can be traced to which reliable sources, is basically a waste of time. You appear to be an academic who surely knows how to write and properly source journal articles; I'm not sure why you think that Wikipedia articles would be written more more lax standards. They aren't. See for example William A. Spinks. I've worked my tail of sourcing that article, and I don't yet consider it quite worth the effort to have it reviewed for Good Article status, much less Featured Article. This article is a complete joke compared to that one, despite the fact that (one can argue) it could be a good one. For additional comments on the topic, see User talk:SMcCandlish#Sexual capital. And let's try to keep the discussion centralized here. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(^Õل^ō)ˀ Contribs. 23:40, 16 April 2010 (UTC)

I have no beef with the problem of OVERCAT, but what I wish to take up here is the issue of WP:DISPUTE here:

Very often ideas and concepts fall into obscurity because after their initial invention they fail to ignite the interest and imagination of others, until finally someone comes along and frames the idea/concept as something that inspires others to use it and develop new lines of inquiry. Bourdieu's concept "habitus" is a prime example of this -- it had been used for decades prior to his work but really took off in the field of sociology when he developed it. So the fact that there exist other references to the term decades ago does nothing to invalidate its current entry. Indeed, if we use the criteria that no article should be published on a concept unless every published definitional form of the term is incorporated into the article, Wikipedia would all but cease to exist. Nevertheless, by all means, should you be so inclined, perhaps you would like to add a few sentences or even a new section that outlines some legitimate, alternative uses.

To the extent that the page discusses MAJOR publications that develop the term "erotic capital" / "sexual capital" (i.e., ASA's premier theory journal) (i.e., both GREEN'S and MARTIN AND GEORGE'S articles), -- to the extent that subsequent publications explicitly reference "erotic capital" to Green (2008) and build on this work (i.e., FIVE OR SIX subsequent published articles, as a matter of fact), I see no problem in linking the term explicitly to Green in a section of the article and, as appropriate to Martin and George (2006). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.77.58.178 (talk) 00:12, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

"ECONOMIC" subsection

The reference listed beneath the "economic" subsection is wrong. In that cited article, Michael's concept of sexual capital has nothing to do with a rational investment in attractiveness; it is, instead, about acquiring safety skills, such as the ability to use condoms. This is why it is an extension of "health capital" as the title of that article indicates. Someone needs to go in and change that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.77.58.178 (talk) 11:31, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Age. And rape

This article does not address two important aspects: the loss of sexual capital with ageing in most societies (individual gerontophilia notwithstanding) for both men and women -- regardless of how the capital was invested prior to becoming old, and rape, especially of virgins, as a form of extreme aggession that not only violates human dignity, but also lessens the "value" ascribed to a sexual "capital". Can someone expound on this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.200.65.119 (talk) 11:02, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Hammermesh and Hakim

Hammermesh's research in the book "Beauty Pays" does not define attractiveness in a way that is commensurate with the broad definition of erotic capital offered by Hakim. Rather, Hammermesh's book, as the title indicates, advances a much leaner notion of attractiveness anchored to physical attractiveness, "looks" and "beauty". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.231.196.6 (talk) 04:38, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

Catherine Hakim originated the term?

The article states that Catherine Hakim was the first to use the term in the early 2000s. No citation is offered. In fact, the concept first appears in Hakim's written work only in 2010. Prior to that, others were using the concept in a variety of ways in published work. This should be removed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.232.0.182 (talk) 06:14, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Plagiarism

Hey, just letting you guys know that there's a paper out there that plagiarizes this article and doesn't cite it as a source, so if this comes up in a copyvio detector, the article is the original deal and the paper is a copy. Here is a link to said paper. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 16:03, 3 October 2019 (UTC)