Abstract
Gift-for-sex (GFS) barters are a niche practice potentially representing the commodification of everyday dating practices. We inquire how GFS exchanges are practiced and understood in contemporary Russia. Second, we situate these in relation to contemporary economic culture. Our project provides answers in two steps based on online content. First, we identify GFS exchange practices within a major dating website. Next, we take the signals exchanged in those dating profiles and display their intersubjective meanings in Russia based on blogs and discussion fora. Our analysis focuses on gender roles and inter-gender conflicts, the use of economic jargon, the link between luxury consumption and sexuality, and understandings of gift-giving and generosity, in order to show how GFS barters, despite being contractual, carry emotional and romantic content. As such, love is under a constant conversion process, through the medium of the contractual gift, into the fictitious commodity form.
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Notes
Granovetter's embeddedness and Polanyi's embeddedness are not inherently incompatible.
Moscow, for instance, on which this study is mainly based, has an internet penetration of about 95% for the ages 18–34, and 78 percent for ages 35–44 (Public Opinion Foundation “FOM” 2011).
It is key to keep in mind the distinction between subjectively felt 'market-logic' as opposed to conceptually assigned market logic. As social scientists, we may claim that every relation is an 'objective' market-like exchange. Yet critical for us is the distinction between such blanket descriptions and the ways that subjects actually interpret and practice their social interactions.
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Acknowledgments
Funded by a ‘teacher-student’ grant from the Academic Fund of the National Research University—Higher School of Economics. Significant research support was provided by Margarita Goldberg and Ekaterina Bounich. The authors are grateful to colleagues Grigory Yudin, Rafael Mrowczynski, Vadim Radaev, Tatiana Karabchuk, Leon Kosals, and Inna Deviatko for their critical remarks and suggestions.
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Swader, C.S., Strelkova, O., Sutormina, A. et al. Love as a Fictitious Commodity: Gift-for-Sex Barters as Contractual Carriers of Intimacy. Sexuality & Culture 17, 598–616 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-012-9162-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-012-9162-1