Girls as Elite Distinction - Hierarchies of Participants

= Insert Table: Hierarchies of Participants = 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 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 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 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). 6 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 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 7 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. 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: 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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). 8 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 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 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). 9 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 10 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). 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 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 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.