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I recently readThe Sexual Economy of Capitalism, which is somewhat wonkish book with a misleadingly provocative title (an irony I will dwell on at greater length later). Even the first line of the jacket copy promises intrigue, titillation: "Economics has long modelled its theories on bakers and butchers rather than husbands, wives, lovers, and prostitutes." Phwoar! Surely we're in for tales of seamy black markets and back alleys, depraved corners of the dark web, and the scandalous liaisons of the rich and powerful.

In fact, Noam Yuran's book turns mostly on a theoretical observation about capitalism that's so subtle and nuanced, it's more like the apocryphal Victorian lady and her exposed ankle: blink and you might miss it, but catch a glimpse, amidst a flutter of crinoline, and you may well need to sit down and mop your brow.

Said theoretical observation, to very brutally summarise (fetch your handkerchiefs), goes something like this: in a capitalist system, there are certain things that money can't buy, and Yuran's favoured example is marriage. Naturally, you instantly wish to point out a number of gruesome exceptions, but to Yuran these exceptions and their gruesomeness only serve to prove the proverbial rule. It's precisely because money can't buy marriage that any attempts to do so must by definition fail. As soon as you try to buy marriage, it becomes human trafficking; as soon as you try to buy sex, it becomes prostitution. You literally can't buy these things if you try, because the act of paying for them transforms them into something else.

This is different, Yuran emphasises, from the sorts of things money couldn't buy before capitalism. In feudal societies, you literally couldn't buy nobility — and not because buying it would transform it into something else, but because it was something you inherited. The very concept of nobility precludes putting it up for sale. In capitalism, on the other hand, it's precisely because money can notionally buy anything that we're now forced to define the somewhat arbitrary things it shouldn't.

And as a result of this weird conceptual clash, between the idea that not everything can be bought on one hand, and money — which by definition can be exchanged for anything — on the other, we end up creating odd pockets of contradiction everywhere, says Yuran. After all, prostitution is, ultimately, sex you're paying for — but, as Yuran puts it, following Catherine MacKinnon, what you're actually doing when you pay a prostitute is "paying for paid sex."

I know it feels like the ankle is retreating back beneath the crinoline here, but bear with me. The distinction between "sex" and "paid sex" matters, because paying for sex doesn't just transform it into prostitution; it transforms it into something where the fact that you paid for it is the point. In some cases, actually, the fact that you paid for it is the pleasurable or exciting part. That, says Yuran, is the true, beating heart of capitalism.

And once you start thinking about it, you do start to notice that distinction everywhere, and playing out in increasingly bizarre ways. It explains, obviously, luxury goods like Jaguars and Rolexes, which are practical commodities, in a traditional economic sense, but have additional meaning because they meet their practical needs in such luxurious ways. As Yuran puts it, when you buy a Jaguar, you're "paying for a paid car" (p36).

But the same logic also runs through more mundane purchases. You could go to the store and buy an egg to cook at home, for example, or you could go to a diner and pay more, for an egg that someone else has cooked for you. In a more traditional way of looking at things, the egg at the diner costs more because you're paying for the labour that went into preparing it (plus all the other overheads the diner might have); in Yuran's view of it, all that may be true, but it's only half the explanation for why the diner egg is more expensive. The other half is that you're "paying for a paid breakfast", and enjoying that egg in a qualitatively different way than an otherwise identical egg you might have cooked yourself at home. In other words, some of the diner egg's mark-up comes from your willingness to pay for the enjoyment of having bought yourself breakfast.

Likewise, anytime you buy yourself anything, you derive a certain pleasure just from owning that thing, which is totally separate from the putative value that thing has to begin with. (You might, for example, buy yourself a shacket, which has intrinsic use and value as an item of clothing to keep you warm, and then a whole separate set of other values and meanings layered on top.) This makes the standard economic bromide that "the market will always find the right price" meaningless, because there is no right price; what you spend on something immediately changes its value, to you at least.

This is obviously a very different way of thinking about the economy, and Yuran's position is that it explains a lot of things better than traditional economics does, among them: luxury cars, fashion, Apple stores, Wall Street, credit cards, polyamory, The House of Mirth, Nike, "coolness", pornography, dating, and much more. Where it gets really topsy-turvy, though, is when you take the argument to its logical conclusion. The world we've built ourselves, where we have to pretend that money can't buy everything — even when, clearly, it can — forces us into an arms race with ourselves, a constant treadmill of having to come up with new things that money can't buy.

Say, for example, there's a particularly elegant and stylish movie star, one that other people wish they could be more like. Obviously we all accept that money can't directly buy elegance or style. But say the movie star is pictured wearing a particularly fetching shacket, and that shacket is available for sale... Some people might buy that shacket thinking it will, finally, give them the elegance and style they've long desired. Yet as soon as that shacket is owned more widely, it immediately loses the elegance and style it might have once had, purely by virtue of being so widely owned — clear evidence that money can buy it — to the point that, even the people who didn't buy it because of the movie star are now forced to find something else to wear. As soon as money can easily buy something, it loses the qualities that made people want to buy it in the first place. If every diner in town will fry you the same egg, the one place with waffles will have the queue out the door. And onwards rolls the bulldozer of consumer capitalist ephemera.

All in all, it's an interesting argument, though I don't know if I agree with the blurb on the back that "each chapter brings with it a paradigm-shattering insight that culminates in an unforgettable conclusion." I also don't really understand why we need (heterosexual) sex or marriage to explain any of this. The Sexual Economy of Capitalism does indeed make for a provocative title, but the theory itself seems to somewhat pull the rug from under its own feet. After all, as I somewhat glibly did above, you can make the same argument pretty convincingly with an egg or a shacket. (And Yuran likewise makes it convincingly with many similarly contemporary examples.)

Yuran's explanation for focusing so doggedly on sex and marriage is that (heterosexual) marriage is in fact the root cause of our current relationship to money. When marriage stopped being about economic exchange, he says, as it was in pre-capitalist societies, and started being about "love", that was what forced us to start differentiating between things that can and can't be bought. This was an especially tricky task, Yuran points out, given that even today marriage hasn't really stopped being about economic exchange; witness wedding registries, witness giant weddings, witness stay-at-home spouses. As Yuran puts it, marriage "cannot escape its status as an economic arrangement," yet it also "cannot be conceived as an exchange" (p111). From that seemingly minor contradiction has spun out everything else described above.

But I don't (ahem) buy it. What about slavery, for example? Around the same time we were deciding marriage couldn't be bought, we were also quite forcefully deciding, and in much starker legal terms, that people couldn't be bought — and that decision reconfigured global economies just as significantly as "love marriages" did. So why couldn't that be the thing that made us realise some things can't be bought? Or why couldn't both love marriages and outlawing slavery be two symptoms of some other cultural shift towards this kind of thinking, rather than the cause? Why, for that matter, does there have to be a single cause at all? It's a valuable observation to make either way.

Meanwhile, it seems bizarre to just blithely exclude non-heteresexual love and marriage. I take the point that in the time periods Yuran is talking about, heterosexual love and marriage were the norm in every sense of the word, and economies were explicitly organised around them. But that doesn't mean non-heterosexual love and marriage just didn't exist at all, and more to the point that they didn't meaningfully impact attitudes about love, marriage, and anon, money.

Indeed, Yuran is at great pains to point out that, back when marriage was becoming about love rather than about economic arrangements, men wanted different things from wives than from mistresses — and that, as a result, there was "an opposition between two sexual economies: that of traditional marriage, on the one hand, and of illicit love, on the other" (p106). But surely some men also wanted different things from wives than from their secret gay lovers, and love couldn't get more illicit than homosexuality back then. If you're going to insist that the subtle distinction between sex and "paid for sex" colours our entire economic and social outlook, then you can't turn around and say that the — arguably far less subtle — distinction between heterosexual love and homosexual love has no meaningful effect at all.

Yet that is exactly what Yuran says: "Nonheterosexual relationships did not play an equivalent role in precapitalist economies," he explains, and "it falls outside the scope of the argument of this book to inquire into [contemporary forms of nonheterosexual relations]" (p19). Oh, okay then. Feels like the rhetorical equivalent of saying "Germany lost the First World War so it's not worth talking about their effect on twentieth century Europe," but I guess I'm no economist. I am a cynic, though, and I can't help feeling the conceptual frame here was put before the argument's horse.

Anyway, is it a book worth reading? Sure; I had a good time. The real question, I suppose, is whether buying it will turn it into something else.