January 13, 2022 15Love for Sale
Anahid Nersessian
The End of Love:
A Sociology of Negative Relations
by Eva Illouz.
Polity, 315 pp., $19.95 (paper)It was a September afternoon in 1796,
and Mary Wollstonecraft had one
thing on her mind. “What say you,”
she wrote to her lover William God-
win, “may I come to your house, about
eight—to philosophize?” This use of
code was typical. If she wanted him
she would ask to borrow books or ink;
he liked to say he needed soothing,
like a sick child. In his journal God-
win used dots and dashes to log what
he and Wollstonecraft had done, when
they had done it, and where. After their
third date he wrote, “chez moi, toute.”
Were Godwin and Wollstonecraft
having casual sex? Sure. Neither was
interested in marriage, which Woll-
stonecraft thought turned husbands
and wives into tyrants and despots.
Godwin went even further, blasting
monogamy as “an affair of property”
and “the most odious of all monopo-
lies.” If Wollstonecraft hadn’t become
pregnant they might eventually have
parted ways, since she and Godwin
believed that human beings should be
able to enter and exit intimacies as they
liked. By the mid- nineteenth century,
this would be called free love.
Free love suggests excess, an abun-
dance of partners as opposed to the
austerity of one person per person. For
its partisans, however, opting out of al-
liances was as important as opting into
them. Victoria Woodhull, the suffragist
who ran for president in 1872, proudly
claimed a “right to love whom I may,
to love as long or as short a period as I
can [and] to change that love every day
if I please.” In the press Woodhull was
known as Mrs. Satan, having crossed
the ultimate line—not just seeking
pleasure but moving on afterward.
In The End of Love, Eva Illouz of-
fers a history of “unloving”: the rise
of a culture in which sexual bonds are
dissolved “on purely subjective emo-
tional and hedonic grounds.” You or I
might call this dating. For Illouz, how-
ever, unloving is neither so ordinary as
to pass without comment nor the sort
of utopian practice Godwin or Wood-
hull hoped it might be. Instead, tem-
porary intimacy—loving for as long or
short a period as one likes—radically
transforms both sex and the self. As a
product of “the capitalist market and
consumer culture,” it reduces human
beings and especially women to goods
for sale, with no expectation of reci-
procity from their partners or even of
breakfast in the morning.A sociologist by training, Illouz, a
professor at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem and the School for Ad-
vanced Studies in the Social Sciences
in Paris, has spent her career arguing
that being white, wealthy, and hetero-
sexual, despite the advantages, is an
absolute bummer. Her books focus on
the erotic lives of urban professionals
in Europe and Israel and have names
like Consuming the Romantic Utopia:
Love and the Cultural Contradictions
of Capitalism and Cold Intimacies:The Making of Emotional Capitalism.
Despite the titles, any resemblance to
Marxist thought is mostly coincidental.
Instead, the draw of this work lies in
its seductive combination of left- wing
sentiment—in sum, capitalism is bad—
and good old- fashioned sex panic.
The story The End of Love tells
is simple and familiar. Illouz begins
with a brisk history of sexual intimacy
from antiquity to the present era, paus-
ing to distinguish the secular West—
where “love progressively detached
itself from... religious cosmology” to
become a nondenominational “life-
style”—from India and China, whose
cultures (she says) viewed romance as
inseparable from “religious values.” In
ancient Greece, male citizens beefed
up their social and political prestige
by penetrating younger boys and get-
ting their wives pregnant; for them,
sex was about power, not feelings. “It
was Christianity,” writes Illouz, “that
slowly made sexuality into a heterosex-
ual and relational bond,” even as sex
itself remained governed by patriarchy
and its economic interests. It did so by
encouraging the ideal of courtly love,
which celebrated passionate but uncon-
summated attachments between men
and women. Not surprisingly, l’amour
courtois owes much to Christian tropes
of virtuous suffering and ennobling
anguish: “Your lovely eyes,” wrote the
twelfth- century troubadour Raimbaut
d’Aurenga to his lady, “are a switch /
That whips my heart into joy / I dare not
desire anything base.”
In the eighteenth century, things
changed. The rise of a middle class in
Britain and Europe was accompanied
by cultural shifts that encouraged peo-
ple (at least, people of means) to see
themselves as free and autonomous.
The state, as John Locke and Jean-
Jacques Rousseau argued, would need
the consent of its subjects to govern,
and private life too became something
to negotiate—like a contract—on fair,
reasonably equitable, and mutually sat-isfying terms. In theory if not always in
practice, women were now seen as hav-
ing the right to choose and refuse their
partners. They were no longer their fa-
thers’ or husbands’ property; they were
their own.
In a well- known analysis of political
theory during the Enlightenment, the
Canadian philosopher C. B. Macpher-
son called this way of conceiving the
self “possessive individualism.” It has
its pros and cons. Like all forms of
private ownership, it encourages us to
view the needs or desires of others as
potential threats to our personal free-
dom. However, it also affirms that no
one has the right to own anyone else.
This is a good thing, although it’s nec-
essary to remember that the extension
of this claim to bourgeois women in
Britain and on the Continent did noth-
ing to stop the enslavement of African
and indigenous people in the Americas
and elsewhere.
For what it’s worth, the notion of
possessive individualism is behind
some of the greatest bangers of literary
history. Think of Jane Eyre refusing to
marry Mr. Rochester once she learns
that he is, alas, already married. “I am
no bird,” she says, “and no net ensnares
me; I am a free human being with an
independent will, which I now exert to
leave you.” Indeed, and as Illouz rightly
points out, the modern novel evolves
hand in glove with what she calls “emo-
tional modernity,” a way of being with
others—in love, in marriage, in bed—
that depends on the shared belief that
our bodies and souls are ours to share
or withhold as we please.It’s a small step, Illouz warns, between
thinking of ourselves as our own and
thinking of ourselves as commodities,
to be signed away on the dotted line.
Contemporary sexual culture turns out
to be the worst of all worlds. We are
still treating society as a marketplace,
where our assets—height, build, favor-ite bands, secret kinks—are put up for
sale, but we’ve also traded the protec-
tions of the old “contractual logic” for
the “generalized, chronic and struc-
tural uncertainty [that] now presides
over the formation of sexual or roman-
tic relations.” Intimacy, whether casual
or conjugal, no longer comes with the
guarantee that each party can count
on something from the other. There is
scant expectation of honesty, fidelity,
or a future beyond what happened last
night.
Dating apps are partly to blame, but
“unloving,” as Illouz sees it, is a perva-
sive feature of social life both on- and
offline. Defined as any erotic relation-
ship “driven by uncertainty” instead
of being “structured and organized
around clear norms”—such as mar-
riage, or, to use Illouz’s example, the
punishment of a woman’s adultery by
stoning—unloving encompasses every-
thing from making out with a stranger
to getting a divorce. It includes “the
one- night stand, the zipless fuck, the
hookup, the fling, the fuck buddy,
the friends with benefits, casual sex,
casual dating, cybersex,” lingerie ads,
and Sex and the City. It makes common
cause with the decriminalization of sex
work. It lines the pockets of the sex- toy
industry. It is mostly done by hetero-
sexuals, although gay men, if they’re
promiscuous, can unlove too. Not so les-
bians, whom Illouz idealizes as having
less permissive attitudes toward sex and
not caring if their partners get old or fat.
Above all, unloving is character-
ized as sexual activity that is “devoid
of emotions” and features “no or little
involvement of the self.” Here we might
pause to consider the wise words of
the literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedg-
wick: “People are different,” from one
another and also from you. It is true
that some of us are not emotionally
and psychologically engaged by casual
sex; it is also true that some of us are.
It is true that some of us experience the
fuck- buddy system as confusing, pain-
ful, and maybe degrading; it is also true
that some of us sleep with our friends
because we trust as well as desire them.
What turns you on may turn my stom-
ach. What makes you feel safe might
make me feel stifled.
Such broad- mindedness escapes Il-
louz, who is committed to the familiar
proposition that women are dupes and
men are pigs. Given her source mate-
rial, she could hardly have drawn a dif-
ferent conclusion. Her evidence comes
from interviews with chronically disap-
pointed wives, girlfriends, and single
ladies along with male subjects who
range from predatory to clueless. She
also extracts testimony from the Inter-
net’s id: Reddit, Facebook, Tinder, and
the personal website of Twilight author
Stephenie Meyer.
Here is a world starkly divided be-
tween male and female, straight and
gay, sex and love, dignity and humili-
ation. None of Illouz’s informants are
identified as people of color, who ap-
pear only as items on an anonymous
man’s list of prospects: “The JAM AI-
CAN WOMAN who was getting her
PhD in literature,” “A VIETNAMESE
LADY who was in dental school,” and
so on. There are no queer people, noCorri-Lynn Tetz: Cave, 2018Corri-Lynn TetzNersessian 15 16 .indd 15 12 / 16 / 21 4 : 51 PM