Girls as Elite Distinction: Appropriation and Ownership of Bodily Capital
Abstract
The capital concept has proliferated in studies of culture and stratification, usually
depicting individual assets as personal advantages within given fields. Because this
approach sidesteps issues of ownership, it obscures how unequal value can be generated
through the appropriation of someone else’s capital. Based on fieldwork in the VIP party
circuit from New York to Cannes, as well as 84 interviews with party organizers and
guests, I document the uses of women’s bodily capital by men who appropriate women as
a symbolic resource to generate profit, status, and social ties in an exclusive circuit of
businessmen. I argue that women are unable to capitalize on their bodily capital as
effectively through participation in the VIP scene because symbolic boundaries penalize
women for strategic intimacy. By shifting the analysis of capital from individual
advantages to systemic extra-individual advantages, this article brings appropriation into
the study of culture and class. Further, this article genders the elite by documenting the
cultural contradictions of femininity and power in elite men’s social spaces.
Keywords
Ownership, Bodily capital, VIP, Girls, Elites
Words: 14,200 (too long!)
Dear Reader: Thank you for reading this and I’m sorry it’s so long. I really need help
on where I can cut to and where the argument needs support. The paper is R&R’d at
Poetics, and I’m happy to share reviewer reports and/or the original paper, just email me.
There are a few things I need to do to satisfy the reviewers still but not sure how to go
about them: 1) clarify if these are really “elites,” and if so, what type? 2) be consistent
about the VIP as a field, or circuit, or a scene; right now I try to do it all. As you read, let
me know if you buy my argument that this is an elite world and that it is a field.
2
Introduction
Since the expansion of human capital to account for the cultural foundations of
class inequality (Bourdieu 1986), new concepts of cultural capital have proliferated.
Some are in response to changes in the world, like changing class structure and hence,
emergent cultural capitals (Prieur and Savage 2013), while others are efforts to
understand specific fields, like sexual capital (Martin and George 2006), and the role of
the body in carrying capitals, from aesthetic (Anderson et al. 2010), bodily (Wacquant
1995), and physical capital (Shilling 1993). Marx’s old concern with capital
accumulation centered on owners and the unequal extraction of value, yet in sociology’s
“accumulation of capitals,” there is a relative absence of attention to appropriation and
ownership (Neveu 2013). To whom does the value of all of these capitals go?
This article revisits the problem of ownership in the case of women’s “embodied
cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1984). Building on feminist revisions of capital and its
conversions (McCall 1992; Skeggs 2004), I examine the uses of women’s bodily capital
and the differential value it generates for men and for women. If, as Randall Collins has
posited (1992), women are to status as men are to class, what are the signifiers and types
of value that women afford, and why does their value accrue disproportionately to men?
I present ethnographic data on the circulation of women with highly valued bodily
capital, called “girls,” in the global circuit of VIP parties catering to the new global elite.
A modern social and representational category, “the girl” signifies the contested status of
young women who lie outside childhood and outside social codes and conventions of
adulthood relating to gender, marriage, sexuality, and motherhood (Weinbaum et al.
2008). I show how men and women unequally profit from women’s embodied symbolic
3
value, or girl capital for short, which men use to generate status and social connections in
an exclusive circuit of businessmen. I document this process by following women
throughout the VIP party circuit and its organizers, called party promoters, a class of
largely male brokers hired to bring women to VIP destinations. I observe women at
parties in New York, the Hamptons, Miami, and the French Riviera over 18 months.
Additionally, this article draws from interviews with 20 girls, 44 promoters, and
20 clients (men who spend money in VIP parties). Drawing from men’s interviews, I
map the moral distinctions—especially sexual morality (Parrenas 2011)—that men use to
evaluate girls and approach interactions with them in the VIP club. I argue that women
are unable to capitalize on their bodily capital through participation in the VIP scene
precisely because their use of bodily capital aligns them with devalued social identities.
By shifting the analysis from capital as an individual resource to the cultural
meanings that make capital unequally convertible, this article brings systems of
ownership and appropriation into the study of culture and class. In addition, this paper
“genders” the elite and documents the cultural contradictions of femininity and power in
elite men’s social spaces.
THE CAPITAL CONCEPT
Embodied Capital as Personal Advantage
Since Bourdieu analyzed cultural dispositions as convertible resources, types of
cultural capitals have multiplied to show how people navigate through various fields,
from the neoliberal city (Centner 2008 on spatial capital) to underground parties
(Thornton 1995 on subcultural capital).1 By establishing the conversion value and
4
outcomes of people’s various capitals, sociologists have explicated the cultural
mechanisms of class reproduction (e.g. DiMaggio 1982; Rivera 2012).
However, these refinements tend to understand the value of cultural capital as a
personal resource, because such analyses are concerned with how people or groups of
people advance through fields to acquire, for example, neighborhood access (Centner
2008) or social esteem (Thornton 1995). This tendency to focus on individual-level
rewards characterizes the conceptual offspring of Bourdieu’s “embodied cultural capital,”
those corporeal cues of class written onto the body (Bourdieu 1984, p. 91). Bourdieu
noted that looks are not entirely dependent on class trajectories,1 and to account for the
resource of physical appearance, sociologists have developed an array of concepts: bodily
capital (Wacquant 1995), physical capital (Shilling 1993), and aesthetic capital
(Anderson et al. 2010).
Together, these works show how embodied capitals are convertible for individual
rewards, like earnings, status, and romantic outcomes (for a review see Hammermesh
2011). For example, Green shows how “sexual capital,” the recognition of being
desirable in a given field, orders status in nightlife (2011; see also Hamilton 2007). The
conversion rates of bodily capital are gendered, and a school of British feminist scholars
argues that femininity itself is a form of cultural capital with wide currency not accessible
to men, for instance, in some segments of the labor market like care work (Huppatz 2009;
Lovell 2000; Skeggs 1997).
1
Bourdieu is contradictory on this point. Sometimes, class and one’s trajectory through social space
determine looks; other times, looks are random accidents of birth (see Martin and George 2006 for a
critique). He does note that beauty is valuable to those who possess it, particularly women, especially for
occupational profit in the labor market (1984).
5
These analyses implicitly frame the primary value of someone’s embodied capital
residing with the capital holder herself. An extreme version of this argument is Hakim
concept of “erotic capital,” which she argues is women’s collective asset because a
biological mandate makes women’s sex appeal more valuable than men’s (2010; for a
critique see Green 2013). By keeping the focus on capital as a personal asset with
individual consequences, sociologists implicitly shares with neoclassical economists an
assumption that self-investment leads to better market outcomes, paradigmatic of human
capital theory (Becker 1994).2 This is explicit in Hakim’s framing of erotic capital,
which posits beauty as a currency; she who possesses it gets to “spend” it. Such an
approach exemplifies a neoliberal philosophy of the personal imperative for selfinvestment and a disregard to systemic power relations that unequally distribute erotic
capital across populations. Moving beyond the personal advantage perspective, we might
ask: who, beyond any particular individual, benefits from the value of people’s embodied
capital, and why?
Gender and the Unequal Value of Embodied Capital
Scholars working at the intersection of gender and Bourdieusian theory have
begun to chart how gender structures the field of power such that women and men have
differential capacities to profit from the value of their own capital (McCall 1992; Skeggs;
Lovell 2000; McNay 2000). As “sign-bearing capital,” Skeggs argues, women are a
2
Human capital theory frames capital as an individual investment that is exchangeable on the free market
for scarce rewards; by framing wage-earners as miniature capitalists, this approach overlooks how systems
of power enable some people to extract unequal amounts of use-value from others (e.g. Karabel and Halsey
1977 p. 307 – 312).
6
gender and class resource that men appropriate (2004 p. 22), a kind of “repository” of
capital (McNay 2000, p. 142) that can generate social capital and status for men (Chancer
1998; Lovell 2000).
Much literature shows how women’s bodies signify men’s class distinction, as
Sombart noted among the capitalist classes of the 18th century (1967 [1922]) see also
Veblen 2009 [1899]). Contemporary ethnographies document such processes of
distinction in interactional service settings like retail, where workers, particularly women,
do “recognition work” to construct high status (Hanser 2008, p. 106; Sherman 2007).
Women’s bodies add value to organizations, such that employers seek out particular
types of women’s bodies because they signify distinction, for instance tall and svelte
women are valuable “feminine capital” in luxury services (Otis 2011). Analyses of sex
work likewise document the crucial role of female sexual capital in forging men’s
business networks through leisure activities (Hoang forthcoming; Osburg 2013). For
example, Allison’s ethnography of Japanese hostess clubs shows how women’s sexual
capital is exchanged among men to uphold a system of male-controlled capitalism in
Japan (1994).
The appropriation of someone else’s embodied capital need not happen via wages.
In Greek college life, fraternities gain status from women’s bodily capital, typified by
“the blonde” who circulates without pay through frat parties (Hamilton 2007). Similarly,
nightclubs amass women’s bodily capital to attract men with money (Grazian 2008;
Rivera 2010). Beyond its personal advantages, bodily capital holds value for people and
organizations able to harness it, whether by wages or other means.
7
While these literatures richly document the individual and organizational uses of
women’s bodies, they rarely explain the unequal extraction of value from embodied
cultural capital. Some feminist scholars have suggested that bodily capital is less
valuable to women than women’s bodily is to men for structural and cultural reasons.
Gayle Rubin’s “political economy of sex” traced the traffic in women as a system of
relations in which women are circulated and exchanged among men, who are the main
beneficiaries of women as social commerce (1975, p. 174). Women enable social
organization through their exchange in kinships, but men control and benefit from the
system (Levi-Strauss 1969). Structurally, women hold fewer positions of power and
weaker control of economic capital than men. Culturally, feminine beauty and sex appeal
are considered incompatible with professional competence and authority (McCall 1992).
Women who succeed in cultivating beauty are cultural aligned with a devalued feminine
realm. Additionally, women with high stores of valued bodily capital are subject to
greater distrust for strategically using their looks to gain what is seen as unfair and
unearned advantage (Haltunen 1982).
Yet polemical feminist claims that women are “valued possessions in themselves,
a source of asserting power between men” (Chancer 1998, p. 261), lack explanation,
taking men’s uses of women’s bodies as evidence of ownership, such that female bodies
are always already a property of men in a sexist society. The question of process
remains: How is capital transformed from a personal asset to one controlled by someone
else?
Taking the global elite party scene as a case to examine the gendered
convertibility and value of bodily capital, I consider the role of women in the VIP and
8
outline the symbolic meanings of women’s bodily capital below. In the VIP, capital
transforms from women’s personal asset to one of greater value for men, i.e., from a
property of women to women as property.
THE CASE: THE VIP CIRCUIT
To examine processes of ownership around a form of embodied cultural capital,
this article uses the case of women in VIP leisure events for the jet-set elite. The term
“jet-set” has origins in the 1950s in reference to global flyers, an era in which commercial
flights were prohibitively expensive for most people except the most privileged
professionals and tourists. Jet-set is colloquially used to reference highly-mobile persons
with class resources; VIP, or “very important people,” is a purchasable status that denotes
valued consumers. Sociologists define elites as those with vast class and cultural
resources (Khan 2012). Elites belong to the jet-set and the VIP, but not all elites
participate in this scene, and many of those who participate are economically insecure.
As such, this paper uses the term elite to refer to big spending patrons of clubs—people
who have demonstrable economic resources—while the scene is best described as
composed of jet-setters and VIPs.
Both VIP parties and elites are global, since the world’s wealthiest stratum is
today characterized as more international, more mobile and more geographically diverse
than its predecessors (Atkinson and Piketty 2007; Khan 2012). These parties appear in
nodes in the global circulation of the business class, which follows a transatlantic
calendar of VIP events and parties from St. Barts in January, Miami in March to St.
9
Tropez in July, and parallel to the Fashion Week calendars each September and February
(FT 2012).
In such nodes, VIPs frequent exclusive nightclubs, which offer “bottle service.”
Rather than order drinks at the bar, VIP patrons rent tables and purchase whole bottles of
alcohol, which come with ice and mixers, at prices ranging from $250 per bottle of
Absolut vodka (750 ml which retails for $25) to $5,000 for a magnum-size (1.5 liters)
bottle of Cristal champagne (which retails for $750). The average price is $1500 per
table on a Saturday night at one exclusive nightclub (Elberse, Barlow and Wong 2009).
Big spending clients are called “whales” as in finance and gambling lingo, and clubs
showcase their expensive purchases by lighting firework sparklers affixed to the bottles
and carried by “bottle girls,” attractive women in revealing clothing, to clients’ tables.
Entry to these clubs requires the purchase of bottle service, or is free (“comped”),
depending on status determinations made by personnel at the door, which are gendered
and class-coded (May and Chaplin 2008; Rivera 2010). The door screening ensures that
the bottle service club is an exclusively VIP space.
METHODS
Ethnography is the best method to observe the interactional processes of capital
conversions, and interviews are ideal for capturing the differential field of meanings
around these capital conversions. I gained access to VIP clubs from previous fieldwork
in the fashion modeling industry, which has substantial ties to nightclubs and specifically,
to party promoters. In my earlier fieldwork, promoters invited me to their parties free of
10
charge with dinner included; to begin this project, I accepted their invitations and began
going out with them.
Over the course of 18 months in New York, I attended 17 clubs and went out
with promoters on over 100 nights, in addition to taking four trips to VIP destinations. I
interviewed a total of 44 promoters (all of them working in New York); of those, seven
are transitioning or have already become owners or managers of clubs or restaurants.
Interviews were recorded and sometimes lasted over the course of several days as
extended conversations. Of the 44 promoters interviewed, I accompanied all but eight of
them to their parties at least once and as much as 10 times, and sometimes I visited three
or four clubs over the course of one night, which generally began with dinner at 10 p.m.
and ended between 3 – 4 a.m., with occasional after-parties stretching beyond 8 a.m. the
next day.
Methodologically I followed Kusenbach’s go-along ethnographic method, a
hybrid of interviewing and participant observation by following promoters on their daily
and nightly rounds to trace the social architecture of elite nightlife (2003). Daytime
observations proved as important as nighttime encounters, as one promoter told me:
“There can be no night without the day,” albeit the promoter’s day rarely begins before
11 a.m. and often as late as 2 p.m. when he wakes up. Promoters generally welcomed my
presence, since their job is chiefly in getting women to hang out. In exchange for
promoters’ participation, I dressed the part and went out with them at night; thus through
my own bodily capital I was able to maneuver the problem of ethnographic access in
studying up (Gusterson 1997).
11
Reflecting the demographics of promoters, my sample is majority men and
includes five women. Half of the 44 promoters interviewed are immigrants (n=22). Most
of them speak multiple languages and can converse with international clients and models.
Out of the 44 promoters interviewed in New York, just eight of them are white
Americans.
I also accepted invitations to VIP destinations on four occasions: five nights in
Miami (March), two separate weekends in the Hamptons (June), and one week in Cannes
(July), with most expenses paid by promoters, clubs, and VIP clients. Two trips, to
Miami and Cannes, were with a promoter named Santos, who I met at a club in New
York. After explaining my research, interviewing him, going out with him, and several
text conversations later, Santos invited me to attend his parties in Miami over the month
of March, during the Electronic Music Festival which draws music industry personnel,
and as I discovered, also clients, promoters, and models from around the world. I paid
for my own flight to Miami and stayed for free with four young women in the
accommodations Santos arranged for all of us together, in the guesthouse of a villa on
Star Island, rented by a group of Californian mortgage bankers (who paid $50,000 for the
weekend rental). A year later, I met up with Santos in Europe, first in Milan for a night
out at a nightclub where he promotes, and next I followed him to Cannes for a week,
staying in his rental villa with eight other women.
Finally, I visited the Hamptons on two weekend trips during the summer season.
The first time was with a promoter named Sampson who I met on the street in Soho with
one of Santos’ associates. The following summer I took at second trip without
12
promoters, when a client invited me to his shared 9-bedroom mansion for a weekend to
join a ten other women guests.
Copious amounts of alcohol and sometimes drugs are supplied to women free of
charge; I generally held a glass of champagne during the parties but refrained from
drinking more than occasional sips, enough to fit in. Taking notes proved easy, as
everyone is constantly tapping on their phones, especially promoters, even as they dance
inside clubs.
I interviewed a sample of 20 women and 20 clients in New York. As it was
impossible to secure lists of clients or women from either the nightclubs or the promoters,
I built non-probabilistic samples composed of participants I recruited in three different
ways: through face-to-face meetings at dinners and parties; through promoters; and
through snowball sampling. I recruited women primarily from the tables. Each night out
I habitually introduced myself to each woman at the table to find out how she met the
promoter we accompanied. At this point in our conversation, I typically would explain
my role as a writer working on a project about nightlife. Interviews with women focused
on their relationships with promoters and clients and their careers in the scene. Among
the 20 women interviewed, their median age is 23. At 31-32, I was regularly the oldest
woman at promoters’ tables but still welcome because I look younger.
Clients were the most difficult to approach for interviews. I might be one of twodozen women in the presence of clients at parties, and few opportunities arose inside
clubs in which I might speak with them about my research, given the loud music. If
clients attended pre-party dinners, I was able to explain my research, and on quieter
nights in clubs I could seize on moments to explain my work and request interviews.
13
Therefore I primarily relied on snowball sampling and recommendations through
promoters to interview clients, focusing the interview on their party careers and
motivations, and their relationships forged in nightclubs.
I coded interview transcripts and field notes using the software Nvivo with a
coding scheme that emerged inductively in accordance with the analytical strategy of
grounded theory (Charmaz 2001). I have replaced all names with pseudonyms and
removed potentially identifying information.
FINDINGS
GIRLS AS ELITE DISTINCTION
A party becomes VIP if it is relatively more exclusive and harder to access, as
scarcity lends higher status (Bourdieu 1986). All respondents identified between 10 – 12
nightclubs in NYC as places for socializing with the global VIP. Respondents were
immediately able to say which among these were the “hottest” clubs at the moment, socalled “A-List” clubs as opposed to “B- and C-List,” citing the quality of a club’s crowd.
A quality crowd with more “very important people” than others will exhibit visible cues
of wealth and status: bottles with sparklers and beautiful women.
Bottles are purchased by clients, almost always men, the most prized being
“whales.” In my own research, whales have paid $200,000 for parades of hundreds of
sparkler-lit bottles of champagne brought to their table (known as a “bottle train”). Also
highly prized are celebrities, who may or may not pay for their drinks but are valuable for
their symbolic capital. Clubs also value affluent businessmen like Wall Street workers
14
and affluent tourists, who spend in regular and smaller amounts of $1,000 – 2,000 a
night. At the bottom of male patrons are “fillers,” men who buy drinks at the bar but
have some cultural capital, which keeps the club from looking empty. One estimate
suggests as much as 80% of the club’s profits come from bottle service customers,
though they account for only 40% of the club’s customers (Elberse, Barlow and Wong
2009). Below fillers, male patrons with low cultural capital are described as “bridge and
tunnel,” so-called because they are not recognized as Manhattan dwellers, and may be
barred entry even if they offer to buy bottle service.
To attract whales, clubs use women as bait. Consistent with past research on
nightlife, promoters explained that clubs like to have more women than men (Rivera
2010). By my count clubs averaged about 3:2 women to men and sometimes as high as
3:1. Women are consider to be both safer, with lower likelihoods of fights, and more
appealing to be around since they constitute what Goffman termed “chance,” a driver of
social interaction in entertainment venues that makes the space more exciting for male
patrons (1967).
However, the quantity of women does not alone suffice to distinguish the VIP
space. A club needs a high quantity of so-called “quality” women, measured along a
clear hierarchy defined exclusively by her beauty. Exploiting the correlation between
attractiveness and status (Webster and Driskell 1983), clubs and their promoters target
women whose bodies correspond to those valued in the high-fashion arena as models.
Such women are ubiquitously called “girls,” a term which signifies a distinct social
category (Weinbaum et al. 2008).3 In the VIP scene, girls are young (roughly 16 – 25),
3
The term “girl” came into popular usage in England in the 1880s to describe working-class and middleclass unmarried women who occupied a social space between childhood and adulthood. Globally, imagery
15
thin (size 0 – 4), tall (at least 5’9” without heels), and typically though not exclusively
white.
All promoters described models as inherently valuable for their looks alone, as
New York promoter Sampson explained: “When I walk into the club with ten models, it
catches your eye.” Super models are at the very top of valuable girls, working or
“signed” models with well-known agencies come next, as these girls are understood to be
the most physically attractive (i.e., “hot”) as well as “cool,” meaning high in cultural
esteem. In this field, the model is embodied symbolic capital; she carries the current
status of high fashion to denote a space as elite.4 The VIP nightlife formula is sometimes
called “models and bottles:”
Models and bottles everywhere! The crowd is amazing and the space is designed
so that I can relax, I can have a conversation with important people or I can go
crazy in the club. The door is screened to let in only the best crowd. I won’t go
someplace where door isn’t screened and crowd isn’t beautiful.
- Dre, 40, Black male from France, promoter for 22 years
Because such girls are thought to attract clients, clubs go through elaborate
endeavors to ensure they have a high quantity of quality girls. To these ends, clubs hire
promoters on a contractual basis to recruit a quality crowd, paying them between $200
and $1,000 per night, depending on the perceived worth of their crowd. In addition,
of the girl spread between the 1920s and 1930, such as the “It girl” of American flapper, and she was and
continues to be associated with the “frivolous” pursuits of consumption, romance, fashion (Weinbaum et al.
2008, p. 9).
4
Fashion models have been high status symbols since ever since the “supermodel” craze of the 1980s,
which exalted the fashion world into entertainment spectacle (Entwistle and Wissinger 2011).
16
promoters receive between 10 – 20% commission from bottle sales when they arrange
tables for clients. Girls are typically not paid, but instead offered free dinners in
expensive restaurants, free drinks and occasionally also free trips to luxury destinations
for parties, all paid for by clubs or promoters. Promoters usually focus their efforts on
finding models, recruiting them from Facebook, on the street, at model castings, and
through friend networks.
Promoters believe models make good guests in nightclubs because of their young
ages, flexible schedules and infrequent jobs (especially for newcomers), which allows
them to stay out late and often. Models are also globally mobile workers who move
about major cities where financial elites also congregate. This creates a homogenized
model look throughout the VIP leisure circuit. During fieldwork in the Hamptons,
Miami, and Cannes, I saw familiar faces of girls, as well as clients and promoters I knew
from New York.
Unlike the modeling market, where a woman’s value emerges from her
singularity (Mears 2011), in nightlife, girls are valued for their generic equivalencies to
exacting physical standards: tall, thin, and young. Many high-fashion models are not
conventionally attractive according to dominant tastes, or promoters’ own tastes, Dre
explained while we sat at a trendy sidewalk cafe in Soho. I watched Dre eyeing a very
thin young woman at a nearby table. She looked like a model. “That’s the kind of girl we
are after,” he tells me. “That’s the kind of girl we want with us.”
“Why?,” I asked. “Some men might not think that’s attractive.”
“It’s true, she’s too skinny,” says Dre. “I like a woman with more curves on her.
But to most people, models represent the dream. They represent the elite trendy world,
17
the high-end world of fashion and beauty. They are the dream. I am not attracted to her,
but she is my target, if I see her on the street I’ll stop her and talk to her. We need those
girls.”
As the ubiquitous use of the term “girl” suggests, women’s inclusion in the VIP
party is closely tied to youth. The close coupling of youth and women’s value has long
been critiqued as an unshakable patriarchal feature of social life from tribal to advanced
capitalist societies. The VIP is no exception, but the scene is exceptional in its explicit
denigration of older women. For instance, at one dinner party, Dante, a client and regular
attendee of jet-set parties summarized: “18-28 is the time for girls. After 28, nobody
looks at you.” Another night, at a club in NYC, I spoke with a celebrated musician,
himself 40 years old, who sat at a promoter’s table with his 20 year-old blonde girlfriend.
Surprised to learn my own age of 32, he offered:
It’s because you are brunette. Blondes, they break quite soon. Like Eastern
European girls, they are very beautiful but it fades fast.
Women in temporary possession of this bodily capital, or “girls,”5 are treated to
free nights out in expensive restaurants and clubs around the world, regardless of their
financial means or personal qualities. Physical looks take primacy over girls’ affect or
other embodied cues of class such as accent or comportment; given clubs’ low lighting
and loud music, personality counts less than immediate bodily cues. Eleanor, who is not
a model but approximates the look, explained:
5
When analyzing the production of girl capital, I use the term “girl” to indicate women in the VIP arena,
reflecting the logic of the field where women are disempowered in both discourse and practice.
18
It’s all about how you look, how thin you are, how tall you are. It’s all that
matters. You could have a horrible personality, and you’ll get into the club if
you’re 5’9”. But basically, the promoters will come and find attractive girls, and
tell you to bring friends that are attractive, skinny, tall, you know. And they’ll
bring you out, and you don’t have to pay for anything.
- Eleanor, 22, White American fashion student, from NJ
Of course, promoters prefer to host girls who are “fun” and have high energy, but this is
hardly a requirement at their tables. Frequently I sat at tables with girls looking bored,
tired, or absorbed in their phones, and even on a few occasions falling asleep.
Because the field values above all the fashion model, promoters generally treat
these girls with great care and attention. When a model named Tasha lost her coat, the
promoter Dre spent an hour at the end of the night searching for it, scolding his fellow
promoters to be more careful with girls’ belongings. “What’s wrong with [that
promoter]? She is a model! She’s an asset to our business. Why would you treat her like
that?”
After working models, clubs’ next prefer girls who look like they could be
models. These are called “good civilians,” as in military terminology designating people
who do not belong to the field. Good civilians have the height and slenderness to denote
high status, but club workers can spot their slightly inferior bodily capital. A promoter
named Jay (29 years-old, African American and a promoter for eight years), explained as
we walked down New York’s Spring Street, after his head turned with the passing of a
young woman:
19
“She’s hot,” he said casually as we kept walking. “She’s not a model but she’s
hot, I’d definitely get with her. That’s what we call a good civilian…. There’s
models and there’s good civilians. A good civilian is a girl who fits the
description of model but is not really a model. Like she’s not as slim or, you
know what I mean, she’s not 5’11,” but she might be 5’8.” She’s just a pretty hot
girl, something that the clubs will see and say ‘Ok, she’s pretty hot.’”
Near the bottom ranks of acceptably good civilians, girls’ bodies are more likely
to be curvaceous with mainstream sex appeal, ethnically non-white, and visibly older
than their late-20s. The least valuable are short and overweight women, who are
discussed with vitriol as liabilities for the reputations of both clubs and promoters.
Explained Mike, a 23-year old white American and promoter for two years: “I will use
the term muppets or hobbits to describe the, like, less-than fortunate-looking girls.”
Other terms used to describe women who do not conform to fashion standards, and are
therefore of low value in the VIP space, are “pedestrian,” “civilian,” and, more derisively,
“midget.” Such women are regularly denied entry and screened out by the door
personnel, who are under strict instructions to grant entrance only to those female bodies
who fit the club’s image of “cool.” One policy at an NYC club prohibits entry of any
woman shorter than the 5’7” woman who screens the door.
Thus, the “quality” of a club’s crowd comes down to two factors: the wealth of
men and the perceived beauty of female guests. The VIP is a space restricted to people
with recognizable stores of cultural, social, symbolic, economic capital, and in the case of
women, bodily capital.
20
= Insert Table: Hierarchies of Participants =
Clients
Whales
Celebrities
Affluent New Yorkers
Fillers
Bridge and Tunnel
Girls
Models
Good Civilians
Civilians
Primary Capital
Economic, Social
Symbolic, Social
Economic, Social
Cultural
None
Bodily Capital
High
High
Low
Payments
$5,000 - $100,000+ or Comped
Comped
$500 – 3,000, avg. $1,500
Entrance fee ($20 – 100), Bar drinks
Denied Entry
Payments
Comped
Comped
May Be Denied Entry
Girls therefore act as a means of distinction. As Godart and Mears found that
models can lend status to the fashion houses that employ them (2009), similarly, in the
VIP club industry, nightclub organizations can boost their status with the presence of
girls who look like models. The value of such women resides both in women’s bodies
and in the class distinction such bodies project, even if they don't necessarily come from
upper-class backgrounds.
Analyzed in Bourdieusian terms, the VIP is field-like in that it is a structure of
relations between positions endowed with different volumes and compositions of capital.
A recognizably stable set of participants play in a social contest over status, in this case,
over who counts as “very important,” akin to the sexual field more generally where
participants struggle for desirability (Green 2008). In this field, women’s main resource
is bodily capital, defined as the field-specific look of fashion models, an exaggeration of
traditional standards of youth and beauty for women in the sexual field more generally
(Green 2008). This bodily capital is convertible for resources like access to fun parties,
trips, drinks, and the chance to meet wealthy men. Sociologists have made this kind of
21
analysis, approaching nightlife as a field where people wield “nocturnal capital” (Grazian
2007) to “cash in” on the prize of entry to nightclubs (Rivera 2010, p. 250). This
approach illuminates how embodied capitals yield individual, personal advantages.
Yet by focusing on personal capitalization strategies, this approach sidesteps how
fields are embedded in power inequities that allow some actors the opportunity to extract
more value from capital than the bodies in which it is endowed. Following feminist
analyses on the unequal access to the value of bodily capital (e.g., Skeggs 2004), below I
show how men are able to extract more value from women’s bodily capital than are
women themselves.
THE WORTH OF GIRL CAPITAL
It’s 2 a.m. when I exit an exclusive New York City nightclub with ten girls in
heels, tight dresses and skinny jeans. We have been dancing and drinking
champagne, free of charge, after a sushi dinner, also free. As we leave the dark
club and its strobe-lit splashes of color and pile into a white florescent elevator,
Beyoncé’s hit dance single, “Run the World (Girls),” booms loudly. The music
shakes the walls, and the girls continue to bounce and dance out the doors to the
song’s well-known chorus, “Who run the world? Girls, Girls!” Philippe joins in
the chorus, adding a line at the end, “Who run the girls? Boys, Boys!” Philippe
high-fives his fellow promoter, who laughs, as do the women, who continue
dancing out into the street.
-- Field notes, 2 a.m. Downtown nightclub, April
22
The comped evening was arranged for us by a club promoter named Philippe, a
45-year old black man from Ghana, looking far more casual but no less cool in baggy
jeans, bright sneakers, t-shirt, and backwards baseball cap. Philippe works in team
composed of four men: himself, age 44, his 45-year old cousin Thibault, their associate,
a 56 year old light skinned Jamaican immigrant named Nicolas, and their “sub,” or
assistant, a racially mixed 21-year old Brazilian named Jack. They come out four nights
a week with at least 12 women, sometimes up to 25, and they visit between two or three
VIP clubs often owned by the same corporate group. Philippe reports the crew makes
$3,000 per night, plus an additional 20% of what their clients spend on bottle service.
Three of the four promoters drive big escalade SUVs, spacious enough to fit several
women in the backseat. Into one of these SUVs I will now squeeze with six other
women, heading to the next club, and eventually, home at around 3:30 a.m.
In the VIP arena, men use “girls” as a kind of capital, or “girl capital,” for
shorthand.6 As a symbolic resource, men use girls to generate profit, status, and social
connections in the exclusive global leisure circuit. The convertibility of girl capital does
not work equally for women.
Girls as Symbolic and Economic Capital
Girl capital generates profits for clubs and promoters. The revenues of one
successful nightclub surpass $6 million a year, and the firm that owns it had sales over
$20 million in 2007 (Elberse, Barlow and Wong 2009). These profits are largely
6
My use of “capital” here is akin to Bourdieu’s use, which is essentially a stand-in for “power” or
“resources,” which “amounts to the same thing” (1986, p. 243).
23
concentrated in men’s hands. Of the 17 VIP nightclubs I attended in New York, just one
is owned by a woman. The male-dominated club industry hinges on this conversion of
girl capital into economic capital:
If I’m working at club A and club B, and club A, I bring all the models and the
super attractive people, and just lots of other people like a mix to club B. Now,
when a client goes to A, he sees our crowd, and tells all his friends, “I was at this
party with all these models.” And he wants to go back and he’ll pay a lot to be
there, but to club B, maybe he won’t. That’s the difference. It’s good to be
beautiful. It’s valuable to me and to the client and the clubs. Beauty sells.
- Trevor, 21, Black promoter for 9 months, from Miami
Clients confirmed that a high volume of girls is an important draw for them to spend
money, for example:
To me, it matters that she’s good-looking, not necessarily a model but good
looking. You won’t see a promoter getting a black 200-pound girl to the table.
For people I meet when I’m out, I don’t wanna see 200 guys. I prefer to see girls.
It makes the club look better if you put 50 hot girls in the club, you think, “This is
worth the check.”
- Ricardo, 23, White, Finance associate from Columbia
Promoters, recall, are paid between 10 – 20% commission on bottle sales in
addition to their salaries; girls do not typically receive payment.7 The presence of girls
7
Sometimes promoters pay girls to come out with them, but this is rare and looked down upon by girls,
promoters and club managers as “ruining the fun,” i.e., explicitly framing the exchange of girls as labor
24
for Philippe and his crew did more than make them money; girls lend them symbolic
status. They are widely discussed on blogs and nightlife press reports, and recognized
around the world. They openly discussed the ways in which girls made them personally
more appealing, especially to women. Jack was dating a top Brazillian model at the time
I met him, something Phillippe described as only possible since joining the promoter
crew:
You see Jack? He’s the guy we used to always see outside the club, like trying to
get us to get him in, ‘cause he didn't have swag, didn't have social skills. Since
getting with us, like, I joke his pussymeter went way up. Like this girl [indicates
Jack’s model girlfriend], you see? … Now he’s hanging with us, he’s getting
girls.
Men are more likely to be promoters as well. In New York, after some effort, I
tracked down eight women promoters (interviewing five of them); I met male promoters
nightly. Girl capital is therefore useful for male promoters and club owners to elevate a
club into a high-status space, from which individual and organizational profits can be
made.
Girls as Mobility Projects
Men also use girl capital to strategically meet and network with other men in
important social and business circles. Most clients and promoters simply believe that a
rather than leisure, and the relationship between promoter and girls as economic employment, rather than
friendship. On framing economic relations, see Zelizer 2005.
25
room full of men is less comfortable than a room with girls, explained Artem, a Russian
male model promoting in Hong Kong and NYC:
Sometimes management calls me or big guys calling like, “Hey I have clients in
town…” Because it’s five guys, with a magnum of champagne, and they look like
fucking faggots. “So please,” they say, “get us the girls.” So it’s not like
prostitution and shit like that. They don’t even talk to the girls… They just look
nice, and it breaks the ice, to get comfortable.
- Artem, 28, White promoter for three years, from Russia
Without the presence of girls, men risk losing face in heteronormative business settings,
where most owners and mangers are male.
Girls are key to helping men form and maintain social ties that will be valuable to
expand their business opportunities. In interviews, promoters and clients widely evoked
the value of girls and their importance for the men’s mobility projects. The client Dante,
in explaining his climb from event planner to real estate broker among the jet-set,
explained the importance of girls for his own professional success: “Everyone needs
some decoration. Especially in the beginning.” As an unknown face in the VIP, Dante
used girls as décor in two senses of the word, as embellishments intended to make plain
things look better, and in the sense of a mark of honor.
Another client, Luc, described how girls capture his attention, through which he
recognizes power in other men:
26
When these guys go out, they bring like 15 girls. It’s just decoration to show off.
Even if they don’t sleep with them they have them to show off: “Oh, who is this
guy? Look at all those girls, wow! He must be rich; he must be famous.” It’s just
superficial.
- Luc, 48, Food and beverage entrepreneur, Inherited wealth
Girls indirectly perform “recognition work,” which Sherman (2007) identifies in
the luxury service economy as the labor of bestowing class entitlement upon high-end
consumers (also Hanser 2008, p. 106). VIP girls allow men to recognize power in each
other to facilitate a man-to-man exchange of money and information. Of key difference,
girls are not paid for this service.
Observations with clients in the Hamptons provide an illustrative example. I first
heard of the nine-bedroom mansion in the Hamptons upon meeting Grant, a tech
entrepreneur of about 40, whom I met at a group dinner in NYC’s Meatpacking District.
Grant described the mansion, which he shares with three other businessmen from the city,
as having an “exclusive guest list.” They aim to host at least 20 models each weekend
during the summer season. With 18 beds, including bunk beds, he referred to it as
“model camp.”
Later when I interviewed one of the mansion’s co-owners, Donald, I was invited
to visit their home for the weekend. With Donald, a 60-year old associate at a Wall
Street investment fund, I attended one nightclub, one daytime pool party, and one
luxurious house party hosted by the CEO of a private equity firm. By the end of the
weekend, Donald explained frankly that, “Girls are currency,” by which he means that
27
with lots of girls, he is assured a steady stream of invitations to the most exclusive parties
and dinners in the Hamptons VIP scene. He also means that important people are more
likely to take up invitations to pay social visits to his mansion. (I observed Donald invite
a real estate tycoon and former model agency owner to his house: “You should come to
our house one of these days… It’s quite the menagerie, if you want to relive the old
days.”)
I did not observe Donald talking about concrete business or investment deals at
these parties, but when asked, he confirmed the importance of the Hamptons scene for his
finance career: “It’s always good to get invited to these things.” The girls also offer
romantic chance: Donald, for example, met his previous girlfriend, a 19-year-old model,
when she came through his house one weekend.
Sexual chance with girls, while clearly important, frequently took a backseat to
the business opportunities men seek with each other. This was the case at a dinner party
at an upscale restaurant in Miami, where Santos brought me along with three models to
dine with his “best friend,” an NYC commercial real estate developer and big spender
named Sergie, relayed here in field notes:
Sergie sits in the middle of a long table, surrounded by older men, his business
associates. He is engaged in intense and quiet conversation all night with them, and
he rarely speaks to the girls or to Santos; we are seated on the opposite side of the
table. The girls barely speak to each other or to the men, except when we are
occasionally talked to with flirtatious banter. One man asks Jenny, sitting next to
28
me, what the plan is for tonight’s nightclubbing, and when Jenny doesn’t know he
says, “You girls just have to show up and smile, don’t you?”
Aside from these light remarks, men dominate the conversation with talk of
marketing, politics, mutual friends in Gulf States, and real estate. Two of the men
exchange phone numbers, one man offers another to take him for a tour of a Miami
neighborhood primed for redevelopment. After two hours, all of the girls are silent
and looking bored on our phones. So is Santos, the promoter. Jenny whispers to
me that she wants to leave. “I hate when they just talk about money and extend
these dinners, blah blah blah.”
- Field notes, March 25, Miami
At this VIP dinner, the men showed little interest in talking with us, but rather, to each
other about their world of business. By drawing on the labors of women to establish
relationships with each other, clients are able to form and maintain business ties in these
leisure settings.
Likewise, through girls, promoters build ties to clients, who are useful for their
future goals of opening their own businesses. Thirty of the 39 male promoters
interviewed began the job by virtue of accompanying beautiful girls to nightclubs. Once
in the job, they use girls as a key means of attracting attention from club owners and
clients, and to climb hierarchies among the elite. Sampson is a good case of the uses of
women in promoters’ upward mobility. His entry into nightlife began when a promoter
noticed him out with a beautiful woman, who invited Sampson to join his team. To climb
upward to work at the most exclusive clubs, Sampson surrounded himself with more
29
beautiful women, and he subsequently utilized girl capital to build economic relationships
with clients. At a pool party on the roof of a Manhattan hotel, I observed Sampson share
drinks with George, the owner of a software company from California, whom Sampson
described to me as “one of the biggest ballers in L.A.” and a prospective client. Talks
were underway for Sampson to begin organizing George’s parties in L.A. and in St.
Barth, a conversation which orbited around Sampson’s claims to girls:
Standing poolside, we clink glasses of rose wine and Sampson begins to
show Instagram photos of a girl, Krissy, to the client, who nods and notes that she
is “hot.” “See, I said George will love her. She’s the hottest girl I know right
now.”
“She’s definitely my type,” says George. “Bring out some girls like that
to L.A.”
Sampson says, “Yeah, she’s one of mine. Look at this--“ and he shows
more pictures. “The girl is crazy though, she can drink so much.”
“Bring her out to L.A., that’s the kind of girl we need to have out to
party.” They discuss the details of George’s upcoming month-long parties
planned for August in L.A. and next January in St. Barts, which Sampson will
play a role in organizing.
Whereas male promoters regularly boasted about their status in terms of the
quality of their girls, the status signaling function of girls was noticeably absent in all of
the women promoters’ interviews. This is in part because women promoters look like
girls; whereas men promoters dress casually in cool t-shirts and sneakers, women
30
promoters wear the obligatory 4” high heels and revealing dresses. They are physically
indistinguishable from the girls they broker. Explained Kia:
It’s hard being a girl in promotion, because women in the club are just ass,
basically. That’s it. Selling girls as sex, and that’s all that girls are there for.
- Kia, 20, African American promoter for one year, from NYC
They are also sensitive to being in the disreputable position of brokering girls for
money, a paid trade that aligns them closely in the realm of sex work. Three of the five
female promoters were adamant that they did not want to be publicly identified as
promoters; one of them wears wigs when she goes out, fearing she will spoil her
reputation by association as a madam. Rather than being able to use girls to demonstrate
their status, these women faced the continual challenge of asserting their right to possess
girls as capital in the first place.
Finally, in sharp contrast to clients and male promoters, girls seldom discussed
business networking as a motivation for going out. They emphasized instead that going
out was a fun experience in its own right, with access to free drinks, dinners, and a
chance to hang out with their friends, including the promoters. When directly asked
about networking opportunities, a few responded with vague allusions to the value of
meeting business and political elites. Renee, for instance, responded: “Oh, absolutely,
absolutely. Because you meet people, who knows, other people or whatever else, you
know, even just like little things”—and she began discussing times she and her friends
met celebrities, though most of these encounters she described as brief and sexually
charged.
31
One of two girls who prominently discussed networking was a 24 year-old model
named Pria from Russia, who claimed to have secured an internship in finance through
connections she made in nightclubs. The internship, however, had not yet materialized,
and she was still modeling at the time of our interview. While girls certainly meet very
important people, they conveyed fewer strategies for how to use these ties.
Rather than capitalizing on business ties through their participation in the VIP,
girls were more commonly assumed to advance through their romantic involvement with
wealthy men. When I asked the client Dante, for example, if girls build businesses via
VIP parties as successfully as he has, he nodded enthusiastically: “Some of my friends
are married to the richest men in the world.” While men use girls for both romance and
as conduits through which they establish valuable business ties with other men, girls are
expected to use the VIP to expand their horizons of romantic partners—but, as I show
below, this risks being perceived as strategically intimate, akin to stigmatized sex
workers.
THE SYMBOLIC MEANINGS OF GIRLS
Why is girl capital convertible for men into economic, symbolic, and social
capital, but less valuable for the girls who possess it? While “girls” is the dominant term
for women in VIP parties, over time in the field I became aware of a typology of girls
ordered around their perceived moral qualities, distinct from their physical markers of
worth. These are party girls, good girls, and paid girls, all distinct from the social
category of women. The symbolic differentiations among girls influence how men in the
32
VIP engage with them, essentially marking most girls as inadequate partners in both
business and romantic relationships.
Party Girls and Good Girls
“Party girls,” a term used mostly by men, denotes women who are regular guests
of promoters at VIP parties. They go out often and free of charge. They can be models
or good civilians; the term describes not physical attributes but level of participation in
the VIP scene. Such girls are seen as generic and interchangeable. One club owner
described the tables full of girls at his club as “buffers.” He explained: “Yeah buffers,
you know, the girls that are on the yacht in St. Tropez and they’re on the sides in the
picture with everybody. The party girls.”
The very qualities that render girls ideal for the VIP party – being young and
without demanding or regular work so they can go out often and stay out late – marks
them as unserious and unpromising partners for either business or long-term romantic
involvements. Clients dismiss party girls even if they are in fact students or
professionals, as a number of the young women with whom I sat at tables identified.
Many are students with majors ranging from fashion, law, business, sociology, and
international relations. At various promoter tables, I’ve sat beside women professionals
in fields as diverse as accounting and finance to medicine and real estate. Among the 20
girls I interviewed, twelve of them were in professional jobs or in school, with only three
of them earning below minimum wage. Despite their range of backgrounds, by virtue of
being regular guests of the club, men generally see them as girls who are unstable in their
33
work and personal lives. For example, a finance associate rebuffed the idea that serious
women could be found in the club, particularly late at night:
Client: These girls will tell you stories that being at the club at two o’clock in the
morning is an amazing way to network. No way, that’s bullshit. You don’t
do any business at two a.m. except one business! I’m not expecting anything
from the women I meet in the club. For me, it’s a red flag. C’mon, who on a
Wednesday or Thursday night is out at 2 a.m.? What do they do for a living?
Author: They could be students?
Client: Students? They should be studying in the library, what the fuck! The
education inflation rate is seven percent, and their parents are paying that.
- George, 35, White private equity investor from E. Europe
Related to assumptions of their poor work ethic, party girls are seen as lacking
cultural capital and education credentials, rendering them undesirable beyond the VIP
scene:
Well, every man would be lying if he said he doesn’t like to be around a bunch of
beautiful girls. But it’s not the place I look to find a relationship. I just think, a
woman who works as a model, she poses and walks the catwalk, I imagine …we
would have trouble relating. So I would think I’d have more in common and
could talk more with a girl that studies, or a girl that has a career, or is at NYU for
example, than one that is brought in to the club by a promoter, and just stands
there, and – that’s not fun, I don’t think, to talk to someone who’s there because
34
she’s paid. Or, if not paid, then compensated in some way. I mean, call me
crazy! [laughs]
- Max, 33, Asian American finance associate from CA
Considering the effort VIP club personnel expend to bring in models, it was
surprising how devalued models in particular are outside of the club as clients described
them in interviews:
I’ve definitely dated some models but there’s few of them that I find interesting.
Like a lot of them are just like very young, and don’t know what the fuck they’re
doing in their life. … You can generally tell whether a girl has something more to
her or is a party girl, or if she’s more interesting.
- Anton, 33, White finance associate from Italy
By “more interesting,” Anton means that he values drive and cultivation in a romantic
partner. Models in particular were disparaged for lacking these attributes. Marco, a
client and fitness club owner, bluntly put it: “I hate models. You can usually tell by
talking to them who’s a model and who isn’t.”
Because party girls are thought to be valuable solely in terms of their bodily
capital, they are mocked for possessing only bodily capital, and hence, too reliant on their
looks:
Ricardo: Definitely, most girls out there I expect to be sluts or dumb bitches,
basically.
35
Author: Interesting, and what’s a dumb bitch, in your mind?
Ricardo: You just recognize when you talk with them, they’re just empty, no
word to describe, just empty… If you’re a serious girl, you’re not going out
with a promoter, because you don’t need anybody to pay for your drinks. … I
might hook up with them but won’t date them, I take them out and they don’t
know what sushi is. They say “Oh, what is this? I never tried it before!” No, I
can't deal with that.
- Ricardo, 23, White, Finance associate
In opposition to the party girl, clients and promoters mobilized the trope of the
“good girl,” a social type perceived as a rare exception in the VIP club. Unlike party
girls, good girls go out only occasionally, take their careers and education seriously, and
are unlikely to be out late on weeknights. Related to perceptions of her privileged and
educated position, good girls are valued for their perceived sexual virtue.8 Dre described
someone at his table: “If you are a good girl, you don’t sleep around. Like Anna, she’s a
good girl, not a party girl. She’s not out every night.” Party girls are therefore suitable
for hookups, while good girls are candidates for relationships.
Clients note that while it’s possible to meet a good girl in these clubs, it is
unlikely. They are more likely to rely on friends, work, and family ties to meet
prospective girlfriends. For instance, Ricardo:
Definitely not in the club in NYC or Cannes or St. Tropez, I definitely don’t think
I’ll meet a serious girl there. Someone will introduce me to her or she’ll be the
8
Similarly, on college campus, women draw symbolic boundaries between “good girls” and “sluts,” a
distinction that supposedly signifies sexual behavior but is, in fact, largely determined by women’s class
positions and correlated status groups (Armstrong et al. 2014).
36
daughter of someone I know, or in the family of someone I know.
All but four of the 20 clients I interviewed did not expect a long-term relationship to form
from meeting girls in the VIP, though half of them had in fact dated girls they met in
clubs.
Paid Girls
Men in the VIP drew distinctions between party girls and good girls in part on the
basis of their perceived sexual morality, meaning rules of sexual conduct (Parrenas
2011). Related to their stigmatized sexual morality, girls are subject to distrust for
strategically using their bodily capital for upward mobility. The very fact that she
receives free drinks and trips makes a girl suspicious. For example, Luc positioned
himself as a victim of girls who strategize for men’s wealth:
Client: I mean the Russians, Brazilians, they know what they are doing. Because
if they ask for money, it’s a turn off. But they can pretend they like you, and
then they ask you slowly and slowly, you end up paying, no matter what. You
end up paying. No it’s horrible. I feel like a loser but when you know about it,
this is the way it is. It’s like an exchange.
Author: How do you find out about it?
Client: It’s obvious. Because the girl—the first time you get excited you think,
“Oh, she really likes me”—but the next day, you see her with another guy at a
37
different table, with a bigger table, bigger bottles, bigger boats. Bigger this,
bigger that. … It’s contradictory because you want easy girls but then on the
other side you want good girls. It’s like, it’s confusing.
- Luc, 48, white F&B entrepreneur, from France
Like Luc, most clients expressed weariness of escorts and frequently discussed
how to tell if a woman is for hire or if she is “normal,” e.g., if a girl is beautiful and alone
at a club in St. Tropez, she is probably an escort. Escorts fall into the social category of
paid girls, which encompasses a range of women who are paid to be in the club,
including the “bottle girls” (waitresses), who bring the bottles to clients’ tables. Bottle
girls are widely described as “slutty” and “gold diggers,” who perform a “dirty job.”9
Paid girls are disliked for too explicitly engaging in strategic intimacies, that is, the
pursuit of intimate relations in order to achieve economic and lifestyle goals.
However, as Luc’s comments illustrate, clients also tended to conflate girls with
sex workers (“the Russians, Brazilians”) because of their strategic exchange of bodily
capital for men’s economic capital. For example, one financial advisor describes the club
as a place where girls try to “harpoon” wealthy men (“whales”). Another described girls
as “soft hooking,” he explained:
The girls don’t even know they’re soft hooking. They’re just enamored by the
trips and the clothes and the shoes. They actually never take money. Every now
9
In popular and legal discourse, the term “bottle girl” has associations with sex work and criminality. In a
recent FBI investigation of theft in Miami, agents called a ring of con-women “bottle girls” (and “B girls”
for short) for targeting men at bars and aggressively upselling them alcohol, in exchange for a share of 20%
from the bar’s profits (Conti 2014).
38
and again someone will pay their rent, but they don’t actually think they’re
whores. I don’t think they are. I think they’re just girls.
-- Adam, 29, White entrepreneur from California
Girls, too, draw boundaries between themselves and sex workers. Policing these
boundaries and the behavior of each other, girls put down others whom they see as too
interested in looking for wealthy men. Such a woman is likely to be called a “slut” or a
“bitch,” the latter a term I learned from Eastern Europeans in Cannes. “Bitches” perform
sex for money and gifts, as opposed to girls who just want to have fun:
Anna, a 23-year-old Czech model, talks about last night’s party and laughingly
tells me: “Don’t write about Czech girls are bitches!…“Normal people don't
know,” she says, about this VIP world. “I didn’t know. My friend in Milan when
I came she was telling me there is free lunch, dinner, party. I was like,
‘Why? How can it be?’ If I tell people from back home they think you have to do
something more, you know, you have to do a lot, like bitches.”
In interviews and informal conversations, girls downplay their interests in
meeting men. Romance was conspicuously absent among the girls’ professed
motivations for going out, despite almost half of the girls I interviewed having dated a
man they met in the VIP scene. In interviews, all but one of the girls firmly stated, as one
Lithuanian in Cannes put it, “This is not the place to meet a boyfriend!”
Because the party girl enters into an exchange of bodily capital for goods (drinks,
dinners, trips, etc.), she exists on the edge of a thin moral boundary separating her from
paid girls. In short, clients distrust girls’ motives for being in the VIP scene with
promoters. While girls are rich in bodily capital, their capacity to “spend” it beyond the
39
VIP field is limited. Girls in the VIP are mostly assumed to be just for show, valuable
within the party or for casual sex, and generally, dismissed.
Women
While girls are of central importance in making the VIP scene, women are nearly
absent. A woman at a promoter’s table would almost always be recognized as a girl, just
as clients that purchase bottles are almost always men. Frequently I saw wives and
girlfriends join their men at tables, but they were young, rarely appearing over the age of
35, and they did not order or pay the bill.
Given the double standard of aging, by about the age of 30, if a girl is still
frequently out in this party circuit, clients and promoters assume she is “desperate” and
trying to “cash in” on her fading capital to meet a wealthy boyfriend. In short, she is a
“loser,” as the client Luc explains:
I mean, a 30 year-old girl, she does this, she’s sad actually. You’re 30 and you’re
with one of the promoters and go out every night — that’s really sad. It means
you’re a bit of a loser, no? No job, no family. You should have a boyfriend by
now and be more steady.
- Luc, 48, white F&B entrepreneur, from France
Girl capital is a depreciating asset as women grow older, given the coupling of beauty
with youth, but girls are renewable assets for men who can continually refresh their
supply of girls.
Nor do older women fit in as clients, because women do not buy bottles. In
interviews, everyone used male pronouns to describe clients. When asked about women
40
clients, promoters explained that while women occasionally buy bottles, these women are
strange or silly exceptions, with wealth assumed to come from their husbands, as one
promoter recalls a female client:
Yes, there was a one…Her story’s funny. She married this Saudi Arabian, and
they got divorced. And I think the settlement is a few hundred—not hundred
thousand, a few hundred million. And so when she got the settlement, she just,
like, partied her brains out… I don’t think there’s a lot of women, no. Because
women—our tendency, if we have that much money, we’ll shop. You know?
We’ll shop for clothes and bags. Men, they want to be looked up to. They want
that feeling of “Yeah, I’m a man. I’m having this much fun, surrounded by this.”
- Vilma, 25, Asian female promoter for three years, from Korea
Women are understood to be culturally incompatible with the VIP patron role,
given the gendered associations of dependency and the organization of the club, which is
predicated on men’s heterosexual pursuit of women. Another promoter put it, “You see
sometimes well-heeled ladies at tables. But it’s not the norm. I think that’s just how
society is, you know, men are the ones that pay the dinner.”
During fieldwork, I saw older women at tables on two occasions. The first time,
in Miami, a woman who appeared to be in her 50s, wearing a conservative and
expensive-looking dress, and she sat at a table with a group of wealthy older gentlemen
flanked by models. She was clearly uncomfortable and soon left. (In fact, after a week
of parties with a promoter in Miami, I caught a 7 a.m. flight directly from an after-party,
and was struck while boarding the plane by the sight of so many older women, whose
41
presence had been near absent from my eyes for the past five days—despite Miami being
a longtime retirement haven.)
On the second occasion, I was out at a club in NYC, when Penny, a 25 year-old
model, and I were asked to move from the table because, the promoter explained, a
famous jewelry designer is coming and they need to sit there. He said he would
introduce us to the designer. “Hell yeah, I want some jewelry!” Penny said to me. But
when the clients arrived to the table, effectively kicking us to the dance floor, Penny was
incensed: the client was a middle-aged and heavyset woman.
“NUH-Uhh!,” Penny shouted in my ear over the music. “I mean, seriously,” she
continued, “Who is that fat old bitch in the club? It’s disturbing. That’s someone’s
mother!” Penny looked with disgust at the table and shook her head. As Penny made
clear, it is problematic for a woman to be old (and “fat”) at the VIP party. Older
gentlemen with white hair were hardly the norm, as most clients in the scene appear
younger than 50, but never did their presence elicit such hostility.
Even with money to buy a table, social connections, and cultural capital, women
may still be excluded if they lack valued bodily capital. This was frustrating to several
male clients I interviewed who could not go to clubs with their female “civilian” friends
and work associates. Such gendered exclusions bring into sharp relief women’s location
in the hierarchy of worth. One finance associate recounted going to a club in a group
with a woman from his finance network:
She was the only girl among a few guys, they were buying a table, and the club
didn’t want to let her in. And she’s a very good-looking girl, 5’4,” you know, she
had really tall heels but they gave us a hard time at the door. We were getting a
42
table and they said, “Sorry she can’t come in.” And it became this back and forth,
and I felt so bad for her, because this is a girl that’s very pretty and nothing like
that had happened to her in her life, you know. Anyway, we all got in, but it was
just so awkward.
-- Max, 33, Asian American man, Finance associate
This suggests implications for the exclusion of women from business sectors. Max
continued:
If you go out with someone who’s a business contact, and meet women and party
with girls —one of the things we can enjoy talking about is women, like in
following-up with the clients… I’ve seen it be a problem for some women in my
business… [Clubbing] is very weird because so much of the fun is around
pursuing women. … A lot of business is won through experiences like this.
VIP clubs make exceptions for women with recognizably large sums of symbolic
or economic capital, such as women celebrities, or women who have access to girls,
namely, women that work in fashion and modeling agencies, who are welcome because
of their ties to fashion models. Generally, however, women have little capital in the VIP
field, because it is organized around the value of girls.
DISCUSSION: CAPITALIZING ON GIRL CAPITAL
43
Men in the VIP are able to convert girl capital into economic, symbolic, and
social capital, which they use to network and climb elite social and business hierarchies.
As “sign-bearing capital,” women advance men’s class projects (Skeggs 2004). They are
integral to generating a “cool” environment which VIP club operators consciously
construct, thereby setting a stage for elite men’s conspicuous displays of wealth and
status.
Female bodies are more frequently marshaled than men’s bodies to signal elite
distinction, but the particular kinds and shapes of these bodies depend on a specific
social, cultural, and historical constellation of power and meaning (Otis 2011). Other
studies have found that organizations seek women who are young, pretty, and thin to
signal distinction (Allison; Hanser 2008; Hoang 2015; Otis 2011). In the global elite
leisure scene, the fashion model body is a highly prized symbol of a “very important”
space.
Historically, women in elite men’s social spaces possessed both bodily and
cultural capital. Athenian hetaera, Roman courtesans, and Japanese geisha were valued
as skilled intellectual interlocutors, in addition to their beauty and sex appeal. Unlike
such historical cases, “the girl” has relatively little cultural capital. That “the girl” is used
for elite distinction is not so surprising. After all, elites can consume popular culture to
produce distinction and exclusivity, regardless of the cultural contents being consumed
(Prieur and Savage 2011).
By virtue of occupying the social position of “girl,” men perceive her primary
value is in bodily capital alone.10 Consequently, by using bodily capital to access to the
10
Comparative historical cases illuminate this tension faced by working women—typically called “girls”—
who displayed their bodily capital in paid work. The early retail “shop girl” in Victorian consumer society
44
VIP, women enter into an exchange relationship that is morally suspect as strategic
intimacy. My concept of strategic intimacy builds upon Viviana Zelizer’s research on the
co-mingling of money and intimacy (2005). Strategic intimacy is a variant of what
Zelizer theorizes as relational work, the careful management of interpersonal ties and
economic exchange, in which people match appropriate relationships, exchange media
(gifts, tips, or cash), and intimacy (2005). People enter into strategic intimacies all the
time, and they continually negotiate the co-mingling of romance and commerce in
everything from sex work, sponsorship (Swader et al. 2012), “treating” (Piess 1986) and
even breadwinner marriage.11 The concept of strategic intimacies is useful to consider
the degrees to which partners perceive relationships as strategic, and hence, legitimate or
disreputable, and how partners manage such perceptions.
Unlike the escort and the bottle girl, the “party girl” does not receive payment to
be in the VIP, but like other paid girls, she is suspect for using bodily capital to climb
social and economic ladders—or as one client described it, “soft hooking.”12 However,
this very exchange is one that VIP men engage routinely and with relative ease. Success
as a girl at the VIP party is precisely what detracts from her value beyond the party,
was displayed along with merchandise for sale in stores, enticing customers with the suggestion that she
herself might be for sale (Sanders 2006). Chorus girls in fin-de-siècle Europe, young stage performers who
danced in unison (such as Berlin’s “Tiller girls”), were subject to both admiration for their youth and
beauty and disdain for their spoiled reputations (Latham 2000).
11
This leads to a number of potentially disreputable exchanges, such as exchanging sex for money. On
how actors’ obfuscate such exchanges, see Rossman 2014.
12
Similarly early 20th century women who traded sexual favors for gifts, treats, and a good time were called
“charity girls,” morally distinct from prostitutes because they didn’t take money, but subject to critiques of
sexual immorality (Piess 1986). For instance, in 1913, the vice society of New York City undertook an
investigation of a popular working-class nightclub frequented by distinct types of women identified as
“near whores” or “whores in the making,” distinct from “professional prostitutes” but still compensated for
their intimacy (Clement 2006). The practice of “treating” was widespread among urban working-class
women, who partook in city entertainments like dinner and theater tickets paid for by men in exchange for
sexual contact, including sexual intercourse, depending on how a girl negotiated her sexual debt (Piess
1986).
45
where elite men look to each other for business, and where consider “good girls” only as
romantic partners.
Women clearly gain benefits as they circulate through these luxurious scenes;
they gain access to the high-status world of business elites and celebrities, and they get
access to a dating pool of rich men, although this benefit is tempered by the whore stigma
and the distrust men exhibit toward them by virtue of their position as girls in nightclubs.
Compared to men’s social, symbolic, and economic capital however, drinks and dinners
are relatively ephemeral benefits and not asset growing as is the revenue they generate for
the clubs. Nor are these perks likely to afford women as much potential in the long term
as are the social ties which men generate with each other. Ethnography has
methodological limits to investigate these long-term business outcomes and their role in
forging institutional power (e.g. Domhoff 1979); however, interviews with clients
confirm their economic interests in being at the VIP parties among other elites, and
notably in interviews, women do not reference networks and social capital to the same
extent.
Previous feminist scholars have concluded that as “vessels of signs,” women are
in a double bind (Otis 2011, p. 22). Because beauty and femininity are thought to be at
odds with intellect and professional competence, to successfully reflect on men’s status
with feminine beauty is to lose out on realms with greater status and rewards—and all the
while, women’s embodied capital depreciates in value over time (Greene 2013; McCall
1992). This article both confirms and explains this scholarship by showing how men
draw moral boundaries among women who participate in parties for the global elite. By
succeeding as prized girl capital in the VIP space, women entered into a symbolic
46
constellation of failed moral character encompassing a lack of cultural capital, economic
dependency, and the twin failures to be committed either as sexual partners or as workers.
As such, beauty is a mobility strategy, but it is more valuable for men than for women.
CONCLUSION
The gendered and unequal uses of girls as capital has implications for the study of
capital conversions and stratification. Girl capital, like all capitals, is useful to explain
advantages conferred in specific fields. Unlike the multiplication of similar concepts
around embodied cultural capital, this analysis of girl capital is useful not only because it
describes personal advantages and rewards in a field, but because it reveals accumulation
and appropriation dynamics of a type of cultural capital, and suggests the beginnings of a
critical theory of ownership of the forms of capital.
Marx’s original critique of capitalist production hinged on ownership to establish
his central claim, that owners of capital and the means of production are able to
appropriate surplus value from laborers, who are unable to benefit beyond the immediate
wage-labor exchange (1977). A political economy of Bourdieu’s forms of cultural capital
would begin by outlining four parts: 1) systems of ownership, by considering who profits
from the value of symbolic and cultural capital; 2) mechanisms of acquisition, by
considering how one actor establishes ownership from another’s cultural capital; 3)
mechanisms of conversion, with attention to how unequal conversions happen from one’s
cultural capital. Towards these ends, scholars should attend to the limits of capital’s
convertibility, for example by addressing the differences between short and long-term
47
gains, and how various kinds of capital can or cannot be converted in other fields. Girls’
bodily capital, in this instance, is limited to short-term profit in the VIP field, whereas
men’s girl capital is convertible for resources beyond in business and political fields in
the form of social ties and business deals.
Finally, such a theory should attend to 4) mechanisms of producing consent. The
women in this study were willing and even eager participants in the VIP scene. That
people take pleasure in systems that are vastly unequal calls for analyses of both the
conditions of inequality and the subjective desires that drive consent to them (Hamilton
2007). Future scholarship should consider the role of consent and subjective pleasures of
being circulated and appropriated. For instance, do people know when their embodied
capital is being appropriated, and to what extent does consent enable the unequal
transubstantiation of capital?
By highlighting ownership, scholars can attend to systemic inequalities in capital
conversion processes. In a rare posing of this question, Wacquant analyzes a system of
ownership of bodily capital in the circulation of bodies in the boxing circuit, tracing the
social and emotional the mechanism through which men’s bodies consent to a market
structure that extracts value from them, thus transforming their bodily capital into
“pugilistic capital” that is owned and controlled by brokers (1995).
Such an approach could be usefully applied to cultural production fields, for
instance fashion modeling, the bodily capital of models leads not only to financial and
symbolic rewards for young women (Mears 2011), but to disproportionate economic
gains for owners of luxury fashion conglomerates. To take the example of “spatial
capital,” the approach outlined here shifts the emphasis from individuals’ advantages in
48
cities (Centner 2008) onto the urban boosters and corporate interests who engineer the
presence of young professionals in their neighborhoods, reaping enormous and invisible
benefits as a consequence. Finally, women’s “erotic capital” reaps some personal
advantages (Hakim 2010), but women’s commitments to beauty projects most likely
generate vastly unequal benefits to beauty and fashion industry owners. Across such
disparate cases, questions of ownership should be explored to consider mechanisms of
appropriation: what forms does appropriation take, what subjective beliefs must be
constructed to enable value-extraction from someone’s capital, and how are these
processes specific to fields?
This research presents the case for greater engagement with political economy in
studies of cultural capital, with a call to shift sociological interest from how capitals
function as personal advantages, to how systems of power relations enable unequal value
accumulation from the resources one possesses in one’s own body.
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