Rayafication

On the dominance of capital in the dating market

Where do you turn when Hinge fails you? When you’re up for some romance-based social climbing? Maybe Raya, the (allegedly) exclusive, members-only, celeb dating app. Lily Allen allegedly caught her husband cheating on there, and celebrities like Charlize Theron and Lewis Hamilton have seemingly used signing up for the app as a way to announce they are newly single. It costs about twenty pounds a month, and requires an application and references from current members in order to apply. There is also a lengthy waiting list, sometimes taking as much as several years. I gained access after about a three month wait in autumn, confirming my suspicions that it’s not really that exclusive. I was hoping I might meet some similarly minded people in the arts world, maybe a fashion photographer or a session musician or an author. Instead I was met by a flood of venture capitalists and startup yuppies pictured on holiday in Dubai, each one’s teeth whiter than the next. On the women’s side it was a barrage of the most beautiful Instagram influencers you’ve ever seen, all with jobs in marketing or galleries. There were also some celebrities, who I will not name drop because that’s gauche, but the artsy lovers I had been imagining came few and far between.

Some of these people may have been perfectly charming, but the structure of the app profiles make it difficult to discern much. It’s entirely photo based, with minimal text beyond a name, job title, and link to Instagram bio. Compared to the heavily text-based profile of apps like Hinge, this felt pretty stark and impersonal. In a sense though, I think Raya lays bare its intent more clearly than many of its competitors. It is not a site for facilitating organic connection in the way we fantasise dating apps to be, but it operates in the way dating markets have for hundreds of years: a way for pretty and charming young women to find a rich husband.

There is a common mythological cultural belief that our approach to dating has evolved beyond the unromantic Victorian notion of an ‘advantageous match’. The sexual revolution and women’s access to the white collar job market has made us less reliant on husbands, and therefore freed us from the shackles of arranged marriages, dowries, and Jane Austen-esque social matchmaking. Women are marrying less, and when they do it is at an older age. We imagine our marriages as made solely for romantic, unquantifiable love, giving ourselves freely to whoever we like best. This is a lovely way to conceptualise dating, but it rings hollow and false. In the world of online matchmaking, capital is still king.

Capital in this context does not explicitly mean financial capital. In his seminal 1986 essay Forms of Capital, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu theorizes three forms of capital. The first is economic capital, which is plainly what it sounds like: money and things directly convertible into money. The next is cultural capital. Cultural capital encompasses things like education, knowledge of art and music, etiquette, and values. You may have come across the terms ‘high culture’ and ‘low culture’ to differentiate between things like opera and soap operas, things stereotypically enjoyed by the upper classes versus the lower classes. The way this manifests among young dating people is a bit different, but it is demonstrable in things like knowing what restaurants are cool (Brat vs Sexy Fish) or what areas are trendy (Hackney vs Chelsea). Obviously these things are a matter of taste, but there is a certain capital that comes with being ‘in the know’. These new forms are dictated by the way that being explicitly posh, expensive, and upper class is not necessarily ‘cool’ anymore, but there is still a definitive sense of what is ‘cool’. Social capital, on the other hand, is about the networks to which you belong, the clubs to which you claim membership, and the contexts in which you are recognised. Getting invitations to exclusive gallery openings, guest lists at certain nightclubs, and even having significant social media followings are all manifestations of social capital. More so than economic capital, these are the forms of capital that dominate our modern dating spheres.

There is another form of capital, not theorised by Bordieu but following within his lineage, that comes into play in the dating market. This is erotic capital, theorised in 2010 by Catherine Hakim. Erotic capital is a generally more feminised form of capital that comprises the personal assets that make one (usually a woman) more sexually appealing. This can be physique, beauty, charm, social presentation, or general sexual capability. This form of capital is particularly prevalent in the dating market, but also omnipresent in other spheres of society. Having higher erotic capital will help a woman in her career, particularly if it is public facing. It is politically advantageous, artistically advantageous, and socially advantageous in general.

The argument, then, is that modern dating markets still consist of an exchange of capital, the forms the capital takes are simply more diffuse. For instance, a woman with high erotic and cultural capital may seek out a match with a man with high economic and social capital. While social and cultural capital are not as especially gendered in modern society, economic capital remains somewhat masculine while erotic capital is somewhat feminised. For many young upper to middle class women, a university degree is not a way to obtain a high earning job so much as a high earning husband. An arts or humanities education may function similarly to a Regency era aristocrat’s young daughter taking lessons in piano, drawing, and French. This may seem like a cynical, or even overtly patriarchal, worldview, but it is in many cases an unfortunate reality.

This idea of dating as a market is often utilised by men on the right, especially those branching from the pick up artist and incel worlds, to reduce women purely to their ‘SMV’, or sexual market value. This utilisation is an incredibly misogynistic method of objectifying women that I of course wholly reject. The forms of capital I discuss here are, as Bordieu notes, often consequences of certain privileged class backgrounds, economic advantage, or white and western concepts of beauty and sexuality. The alt-right concept of ‘sexual market value’ is not an analysis of what role one’s class positionality or various privileges play in the dating ‘market’, but a way of objectifying and degrading women by reducing them to their sexual traits and how well they conform to the conservative ideal of submissive femininity.

Many dating apps attempt to obfuscate the role that capital plays in matchmaking with their emphasis on radical free choice and women’s empowerment. Bumble is the perfect culprit, exercising a ‘women message first’ structure to try to convince women they are in control. Feeld, with its diversity of settings optimised for polyamory, gender nonconformity, and other progressive and atypical structures of sex, relationships, and gender, provides another illusory haze. But these are all ultimately offering a postfeminist illusion of choice. A focus on empowerment and individual identity cloaks the way that dating profiles are structured to lay out the facts of one's capital as clearly as possible. Why else have adults list what university they attended and what degree they obtained? Even Hinge prompts provide ample opportunity to demonstrate one’s cultural capital, just as Raya’s mandatory policy of linking an Instagram account serves to demonstrate one’s social capital. The structure of the dating app profile reifies these hierarchies of Bourdieusian capital into an almost quantifiable box checking exercise. It lays out individuals as marketised items to be assessed for their various capital values.

This illusion comes as a natural result of the neoliberal bastardisation of radical liberatory feminism. The postfeminist neoliberal order has mangled the feminist concept of personal freedom to mean that any choice made by a woman is inherently a feminist act. While this is true in some contexts, for example a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a baby or to have an abortion, ‘choice feminism’ also dictates that choosing to do things like have plastic surgery, be a submissive housewife, shave your legs, or engage in potentially risky forms of sex work are also ‘empowering’ and feminist choices for women. This is not to say women shouldn’t do these things necessarily, but they are absolutely choices shaped by patriarchal capitalism rather than feminist liberation.

This language of empowerment is frequently evoked by dating apps, especially those like Bumble and Feeld that market themselves as somehow explicitly feminist or queer. Bumble, for instance, says it ‘was designed to challenge outdated heterosexual dating norms. We empower women to make the first move by giving them the ability to control the conversation’. I don’t feel particularly empowered by having to be the one to start the conversation every time with someone with whom I have already expressed mutual interest, and I don’t think anyone else does either. I don’t really know what it would mean to be ‘empowered’ in this context, or what the ‘ability to control the conversation’ means. A flirty conversation is a two way street, ideally nobody is ‘controlling’ it. Bumble is not offering anything different to any other dating app, or indeed to the way dating functions off of the apps.

There is one aspect of choice at play in the dating world which is a genuinely positive bastion of feminist progress; the choice to not date, or marry, at all. It is much easier for women today to remain single than it was for some generations before us. Marriage rates are at one of their lowest points in history, as well as the average age of marriage being up nearly ten years versus the 1950s. The UK’s Divorce Reform Act of 1969 and the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act of 2020 have made it easier for women to leave marriages where they are unhappy or unsafe, and the massive increase in women in the workforce over the last century, especially married women, have made it more financially viable for women to divorce. This is real, tangible, and important feminist progress, and these are the rights to choose that have been co-opted into the concept of ‘choice feminism’.

In a piece I wrote last year on Andrea Dworkin, I described the modern ‘postfeminist dream’ that launders the neoliberal patriarchal order through the language of empowerment, positivity, and choice. The same thing happens here. Neoliberalism, the ideology under which we live, works to constantly normalise the dominance of the market as an essential and integral part of life. If the market dominates every other segment of our lives, why not our dating lives? This market orientation of romance does predate the rise of neoliberalism- I often quote Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving making this same observation in 1956:

“In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labour market.”

We all seem capable of acknowledging on some level that dating as it exists in our capitalist society operates as a market. What dating apps do is reify the forms of capital involved in this market as inherent and natural, even good. They reaffirm that someone’s instagram following or university degree is something important to relationships, and that it should be a central criteria. We can only work with the information we’re given, so if the information is a picture, a job title, and an instagram handle, it reinforces the idea that you should want a super sexy partner with an impressive job title and digital presence. Maybe that is what you really want, and if it is then who am I to stop you? More importantly, maybe this is the only way we can make dating work in a neoliberal, postfeminist, capitalist society. As Erich Fromm points out, this pattern of exchange dominates most fields of our lives, so it seems potentially futile to try anything else in our current situation.

So what are we supposed to do, wait for after the revolution to find love? We could be waiting a very long time. It’s a frustrating state of affairs, and even more frustrating the more one becomes aware of it. I hate spending time on dating apps crafting the perfect list of interests that’s appropriate amounts of intellectual, tasteful, and sexy. I hate fine-tuning my profile based on what seems to get the most interest (apparently working in a bookshop is a sexier job than I realised?). I hate trying to decide which pictures make me look cool-and-hot-but-not-trying-too-hard. It’s all an elaborate farce that it feels like I have no choice but to participate in. When I go on dates with people I’ve met on these apps we often complain about it, but we continue to participate in it. We are on that very date because we successfully attracted each other by listing socialism and jazz as our interests and having black and white film photographs of ourselves on our profiles, or whatever. Honesty and vulnerability are two things I (and many other people, I assume) value highly in a relationship, but in a market where we are all selling very stylised and polished versions of ourselves through carefully curated profiles, they are incredibly difficult to find. Everything feels cold and clinical and businessified. Dating app conversations feel like job interviews, and much like job hunting, it’s frustrating to try so hard to succeed at a game you don’t want to play.