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I went to Las Vegas, Nevada a couple of weeks ago to see two of my good friends get hitched.  After congregating with the families of both the bride and the groom for dinner, a small contingent of us hopped in a limo and went out to paint the town red.  We ended up at middle-range strip club off The Strip called Seamless.  After shelling out $30 a person for cover charges and another $300 to be seated, the typical transactions took place.  True to form, my strip club experience was unerotic and largely anthropological.

On an only mildly related note, I engaged in a short conversation over carbon credits on the drive back to Albuquerque with some friends.  A number of companies sell these credits to guilt-ridden consumers, who shell out a pretty penny to offset the carbon footprint left behind by their choices.  In the course of the conversation regarding the mostly questionable value of carbon credits, I came upon a realization.

Now, as anyone who has spent more than just a few minutes in a strip club can attest, the mechanics are complicated.  The complexity is not just in the quasi-acrobatic hijinks that have to take place in order for a stripper’s ass to make any tangible contact with a person’s genitals through several layers of clothing.  In reality, the real mechanic of the strip club isn’t even about bodily contact—that’s just the end result.

What strippers are really peddling is desire or, if you want to get technical, feigned desire.  Desire is difficult to feign and even harder to portray in a way that is marketable.  After making the initial contact, the stripper typically sits on the customer’s lap and chats him up—learns a little about him, pretends to be genuinely interested in his interests, genuinely concerned about his concerns, and genuinely drawn to him like he is drawn to her boobs.  Ultimately, these interests build up and finally reach their erotic zenith in the lap dance.

In a lot of ways, the process mimics what you get in the dating world.  First contact, followed by an ongoing dialogue between the two parties, consummated with an erotic act.  This is not a coincidence.  However, in the realm of dating, there’s a reasonable assumption that the parties share a mutual interest in one another.  The mutual interest is pointedly lacking in a strip club, but the process is there to trick the customer into thinking that there is desire and actual erotic feelings.  Again, it’s not about the erotic nature of a nearly-naked woman rubbing up against a person—it’s about making the client think that the stripper is doing so out of a genuine erotic desire.  They’re not selling skin.  They’re selling a (hopefully convincing) performance that tricks the client into buying into a facade of desire.

And carbon credits are pretty much the same mechanic.  The companies marketing carbon credits are effectively targeting guilty yuppies who like the idea of being worried about the environment, but can’t be bothered to make any substantial lifestyle changes to help the environment.  Instead, they purchase carbon credits to offset their environmental impact and they go on driving their SUVs to work every day.  The issue, of course, is how carbon credits work.  The details of this are downright nebulous and the industry remains largely unregulated and startlingly unscrutinized.

In the case of the strippers, desire—however disingenuous—is being produced and sold to customers.  In the case of carbon credits, environmental responsibility—however false—is being produced and sold to consumers.  But the very idea of producing abstract things like desire and responsibility is absurd.  Desire is a product of genuine contact between two people; responsibility is realized through thoughtful, committed behavior.  These things cannot be bought and sold.  Given the relative success of each industry, though, it certainly seems like they can be bought and sold.  Or, at the very least, people are convinced they can be sold.  And being convinced that something can and should be bought is really all you need in this, the era of consumer hypercapitalism.

In each case, commodification makes itself perfectly clear to the critical eye.  This is the result of the capitalist consciousness working its way into nearly all parts of life.  In this breed of capitalism, anything can be assigned a value and sold to a willing customer, reason or common sense be damned.  While the trend itself is troubling, what’s most worrisome is the fact that these purchases, however false or contrived, are considered by many people to be the real deal.  You can’t produce desire.  You can’t sell responsibility.  But commodification tells us otherwise.

And apparently some people are actually convinced.

Filed under: culture by Jesse