Tyler Cowen interviews Ashley Mears, a former fashion model turned academic sociologist, author of Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit.
Bonding
COWEN: Say I want to be known publicly as a man surrounded by many of these beautiful women. What sector am I likely to be in? Or what age am I likely to be? Or what’s predicting that correlation?
MEARS: It would be people who have a lot of disposable money, where their money is coming in quickly. Money comes in quickly. It goes out quickly. People who get the bonus in Wall Street were a lot of the people that I met in these spaces. The people are in their 30s and their 40s, recent divorcees. So, recently single people who are going through a wild moment in their life.
There would be occasional businesspeople who are interested in doing business, and this is one of the forms in which they can bond with one another, especially the case in some forms of finance, so they might be in these arenas as well.
It’s a bit of a mix. Some people are really into this VIP club experience for a couple of years. For men, it wouldn’t be uncommon to see men that were in their 50s and 60s, certainly uncommon to see women in their 50s or 60s. But for the most part, it would be younger men who have a lot of money that they can spend.
Note that the men are bonding with one another, not with the women they dance with, not with the party girls.
Loud music and synchronizing
COWEN: I have so many naive, uninformed questions, but why is the music so loud in these clubs? Who benefits from that?
MEARS: Who benefits?
COWEN: I find the music too loud in McDonald’s, right?
MEARS: Clubs are also in this business of trying to manufacture and experience what Emile Durkheim would call this collective effervescence, like losing yourself in the moment. And that’s really possible when you’re able to tune out the other things, like if somebody is feeling insecure about the way they dance or if somebody is not sure of what to say.
Having really loud music that has a beat where everybody just does the same thing, which is nod to the beat — that helps to tune people into one another, and it helps build up a vibe and a kind of energy, so the point is to lose yourself in the music in these spaces.
Work that's not work
COWEN: Why don’t they just pay the women to go to the clubs? As you know, in economics it’s typically assumed a cash payment is more efficient than free tuna rolls. What stops that from happening?
MEARS: I was always asking this of the women. I would say, “Why don’t we just band together and agree to show up at the club together, and then we’ll each get paid a hundred dollars as opposed to going through all of these efforts of the promoter controlling us and mobilizing us, and then he gets paid a thousand dollars?”
And the answer was always, “No, I don’t want it to be work. I want it to be fun. This is leisure, not labor.” And there’s all of these efforts that are expended to make it look like it’s not work, although it is. The women are performing really valuable labor to the club, and lots of profits are being made off of them, but they don’t want to think about it in terms of work.
Occasionally some promoters, if they’re running low on girls or they’re in a desperate situation for the night, they’ll call a girl and offer her, say, $40 or $80 to come out as paid. And this is looked down on by the other women as being an act of desperation. It’s going to ruin the fun of the night because you have to be there as opposed to wanting to be there.
COWEN: But that seems like a funny norm. Occasionally I’m paid, say, to give talks. I can assure you that does not take away from the fun of what I do. Couldn’t the young women all just drop this norm, and they would get paid and be better off? Aren’t they laboring under some kind of false consciousness here? It’s a degrading experience in some ways, right? The loud music. So why not, on the money side, get the better outcome?
MEARS: It’s a degrading experience if it’s not fun, if it’s not made meaningful. The promoters that are really good at their job — they do it really well to make it meaningful with the young women. They’re not just recruiting models off the street, giving them some free tuna rolls, and then saying, “Wear your heels and dance.”
It’s actually that the promoters spend a lot of time developing intimacy and connections with the young women. They talk about each other as friends. They use this language of friendship. They see themselves as supporting one another, and the girls are loyal to the promoter.
Under these kinds of terms, when the women go out with the promoter, it’s usually a combination of things. Maybe she’s needing free dinner. Maybe she doesn’t have any friends because she’s new to New York City. Maybe she’s sleeping with the promoter, and she thinks that she’s his girlfriend, or maybe she really likes the promoter because they go to the movies every Wednesday afternoon.
Promoters do that. They’ll invite girls for bowling or for picnics or to, whatever, Disneyland. These are relationships that the promoters are cultivating, which they’re then profiting from. So it feels meaningful. It doesn’t feel degrading. And for the women for whom it does feel degrading, they typically don’t last very long, or they leave over the course of the night, and they say, “This isn’t for me.”
Profiting from the labor of unpaid women
MEARS: Well this is kind of out there. As a labor issue, this shows the really unequal and unfair terms of the modeling industry in particular. The modeling industry is generating so much profit for the club industry. These unpaid women in the modeling industry — they’re also generating huge untold profits to all of these other industries that benefit from their presence in the clubs, like finance or real estate, where all of these networks of powerful businessmen get consolidated, in part softened through the presence of unpaid women from the modeling industry.
So I think that there could be some case to be made that unpaid fashion models or low-paid fashion models are doing enormous unpaid labor for all of these other hugely profitable industries, where disproportionately the profits are going to men. So I could see redistribution working in that direction.
In Japan
COWEN: In your work on modeling in Japan, you once wrote that Western female models in Japan are often portrayed as “silly, harmless, and incompetent.” Why is that equilibrium in Japan?
MEARS: Yeah, I modeled in Japan, and these are just some observations. I didn’t do a comparison with the local models, like Japanese models. But indeed, there were lots of observations I took of the Western models coming into Japan and doing all kinds of just bizarre, silly things, infantilizing things. There’s some interpretivist cultural studies that I reference in that paper that suggested this is a way of diffusing the Western hegemony, or maybe bridging the divide between Western beauty and Eastern beauty, but I’m really not sure.
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