Money, power, and sex

Abstract

Widespread beliefs that money corrupts intimacy block our ability to describe and explain how money, power, and sex actually interact. The opposite belief - that sex operates like an ordinary market commodity - serves description and explanation no better. The intersection of sex, money, and power, does indeed generate confusion and conflict, but that is precisely because participants are simultaneously negotiating delicate, consequential, interpersonal relations and marking differences between those relations and others with which they could easily and dangerously be confused. In everyday social life, people deal with these difficulties by relying on a set of practices we can call good matches.