the end of love: a sociology of negative relations

a tragic study on the process of ‘unloving’ – how consume capitalism has seeped into social relationships, sex, and love.

“If this work is traversed by an implicit norm, it is that love (in all its forms) remains the most meaningful way to form social relationships.” (Illouz, 2019, p. 21) (pdf)

“Men and women, but mostly women, turn to their psyche in order to manage the symbolic violence and wounds contained in such emotional inequalities: “Why is he distant?” “Am I acting too needy?” “What should I do to catch him?” “What mistakes did I do to let him go?” All these questions, asked for women and by women, point to the fact that heterosexual women feel culturally largely responsible for the emotional success and management of relationships. In contrast, homosexuality does not translate gender into difference and difference into inequality, nor is it based on the gender division between biological and economic labor that has characterized the heterosexual family.” (Illouz, 2019, p. 25) (pdf)

i think this is maybe i prefer to love people who aren’t very gender-conscious

the goal is internal freedom, and to be unbothered by received ideas of gender

queer/gender/race studies is interesting because it traces the central question of liberation. because the very act of sexual queerness has historically opposed social rules, the people who found the courage in themselves to conduct these acts had already taken a first step to self-liberation

but this also explains, sociologically, why some queer people are so annoying, or how anyone who’s any flavor of gay could possibly vote for trump.

my answer is that these studies have been too preoccupied with oppression. in many western countries the sexual liberation of the late 20th century have left us progressive laws regarding sexuality. and these people, who were born into privilege and never needed to ‘come out’

‘coming out’ is not just a choice of personal freedom against an oppressive environment. because before coming out to other people, one needs to come out to themselves. they never took the first step of personal liberation.

“To have a modern or late-modern self is to exercise choice and to increase the subjective experience of choice.” (Illouz, 2019, p. 27) (pdf)

you once said that you wanted to have as many choices as possible

to borrow this terminology, i think that, if we were to enter into a relationship, it would not be a hetereosexual one in the context of this sociological study.

“Sexual encounters organized as a market are experienced both as choice and uncertainty. By letting individuals negotiate themselves the conditions of their encounter with only very few regulations or prohibitions, this market-form creates a widespread and pervasive cognitive and emotional uncertainty (chapter 3). The concept of the “market” is not here simply an economic metaphor, but is the social form taken by sexual encounters that are driven by Internet technology and consumer culture. When people meet on an open market, they meet each other directly with no or little human mediators; they do it through technologies that aim at increasing the efficiency of the search for a mate; they do it using scripts of exchange, time efficiency, hedonic calculus, and a comparative mindset, all characteristic of advanced capitalist exchange.” (Illouz, 2019, p. 28) (pdf)

(i think calypso would also really love this book)

this market thinking is one of the reasons why i said i’m ‘fundamentally different’ from some of my other close friends. [[ rationalists ]] tend to be big fans of economic thinking.

“Predictability is a fundamental dimension of social interactions, to be found, for example, in rituals. When interactions are ritualized, they generate certainty about the actors’ definition of a relationship, of their position in such relationship, and of the rules to conduct such relation.” (Illouz, 2019, p. 51) (pdf)

hugely interesting way to view rituals

there’s an idea that courtship used to be a social ritual which enabled the following forms of certainty

types of certainty

• normative: coming from outside norms (eg protection of woman’s virginity remained an ironclad norm until well into the twentieth century)
• existential: perceived alignment between one’s subjective and objective experience
• evaluative: whether you could gather reliable information about others or with what standards to evaluate them
• procedural: the rules with which one carries forward an intention and interaction. different from rules, norms dicate a procedural or sequential order for how to move things forward

so there’s an uninteresting story of how increasing sexual freedom erased the old certainties and makes modernity laiden with uncertainty. free sexuality, in fact, has become a proxy for freedom

how consumer culture became the unconscious driving force behind sexuality in the latter half of the 20th century