Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. Let's do it, let's fall in love. But in fact, love is a social, cultural phenomenon.

It is supremely political. Let's see. Great Minds, One Take. Welcome to Wee Dae Han Soo Up, The Great Minds.

I'm Eva Illouz, and I'm a sociologist of culture. I am a sociologist of emotions, of love, and I think what really interested me in my life is really to understand how private life, how the inner life, are actually shaped by social and economic forces we neither see nor touch.

We all assume that love is a powerful, universal, and eternal emotion. Yet this is not how sociologists think of emotions and love in general. In psychology, in social psychology, there have been lots of experiments which tend to show the point that I've been trying to make or that is made by sociologists, namely that language and metaphors and models play a key role in emotional life and in particular in romantic love.

In the 1960s, two psychologists, Donald Dutton and Arthur Aaron, did the following experiment.

We have two groups of male participants. Each group walks across two bridges, but very different styles of bridges.

One bridge is very scary. It is a suspended bridge over a big office, and it's very narrow. And the other bridge is actually safe and sturdy and stable.

At the end of each bridge, there was an attractive female experimenter who gave the participants a questionnaire and also her number.

She jotted her number down on the questionnaire, asking them to call her if they had any further questions. They found that the males who walked across the scary bridge were much more likely to call the women and to follow up on the study.

Why? Because the scary bridge was actually created a general state of arousal.

If the bridge scares me, I am aroused by fear. But then I see an attractive person, and I attribute my arousal to the attractiveness to the person.

This is more or less what the theory is saying. A great deal of our experience follows um the model they offered.

That is, we have a general state of arousal, and we will use known scenarios, known models, known mythologies or stories or metaphors to interpret our emotions contextually.

A word of conclusion: We have come to think of love as mostly a problem in our psyche, as something we should resolve perhaps with psychologists.

But love, as I have tried to say and as I will develop here, is a sociocultural phenomenon.

In the movie Pretty Woman, Richard Gere hires a prostitute played by Julia Roberts, and she's his girlfriend when he needs to close a big business deal.

Now, he offers to pay a large sum of money, and we understand slowly that she develops feelings for him, but he views her only as a body for hire.

At some point, she is hurt by him, and she throws that away at him, his money, and leaves.

And we need to be convinced, we the viewer need to be convinced, that she loves him truly. And we are convinced of that only if she is disinterested.

In this movie, love and money are presented as antithetical. And of course, I mean, this is a formula that has been endlessly used in movies.

Today, I want to show you the ways in which romantic practices have come to depend on consumer capitalism.

Economic system capitalism aims to the production and exchange of commodities with the aim of accumulating a surplus value, that is, making a profit.

with some part of the profit being reinvested in order to maintain the condition of future accumulation. In capitalism, the notion of self-interest and of mutual economic benefit become legitimate.

Transactions are justified by calculating their effects on the bottom line, whether they're efficient or not. Now take this definition of capitalism and look at romantic love.

Romantic love, in contrast, puts two individuals together, and they seem bound by the capacity to realize spontaneity and empathy in an erotic relationship.

This is in contradistinction to the marketplace where partners are trading something together and where people are ultimately interchangeable, where interchangeable, and people are also reduced to a kind of economic value, what they're worth.

This is how salaries, for example, are sometimes decided.

This is in contrast to romantic love. In romantic love, the person we love and feel united with and to is unique and irreplaceable.

It's not reducible to any monetary value, of course, for love is the most important thing in the world to which all other considerations, particularly material ones, should be sacrificed, exactly as in the movie Pretty Woman.

So romantic love is irrational rather than rational. It seems gratuitous rather than profit oriented.

It gives us pleasure, it doesn't give us a utility. It is private rather than public. In short, romantic love seems to evade conventional categories within which capitalism has been conceived.

Now, in popular culture and in common sense, as well as in scholarship, romantic love stands above the realm of commodity exchange and even against the social order writ large.

Before we analyze how romantic love and consumer capitalism are actually more connected than it seems, we should not confuse love and marriage, which was until the 20th century a largely economic affair.

For example, members of the landed aristocracy in Europe married people of similar or superior birth and fortune in order to maintain their patrimony and social status.

And this was true for most social classes.

Actually, until the beginning of the 20th century, marriage was considered by most members of all levels of society to be one of the most, if not the most, important financial operations in their lives.

Far from the modern idea of love, the ideal of marriage was one in which the fortunes of both partners aimed to be similar.

So the ideal marriage was a kind of equitable bargaining. And historian Theodore Zeldin notes even that in such an atmosphere, love was for parental authority the great enemy, the rebel, likely to cause disasters for all its projects.

Really, precisely because of that, I think romantic love has been traditionally perceived to oppose strategies of social reproduction, of economic strategy, which was normally represented by the institution of marriage.

And yet, ironically, it is capitalism which, so to speak, liberated love and made it appropriate for marriage.

Why? Because with capitalism, people no longer depended on inheritance of their parents or on the material benefits that marriage could bring them.

They could go to work in an open market where they could sell their body or their competence or their skills to someone who would uh hire them for a salary.

So romantic love um actually became favored by capitalism and um I would say more than that, that romantic love reinforced such aspects of the ideology of industrial capitalism in that it was a vector for individualism, for privacy, for the nuclear family, for a new conception of the family that the bourgeois class had privileged.

During the first quarter of the 20th century, the theme of romance became increasingly associated with the new media industries, cinema and advertising in particular, this process where romance was used for the promotion of a wide variety of products and presented in movies in as a way to consume leisure.

I call this process romanticization of commodities. Um, so you you have both real commodities such as refrigerators or Dior or perfumes, as well as commodities like leisure that were all associated with romance.

And this is a way of bestowing a romantic glow on these commodities. But there was another process which I call the commodification of romance.

And this is now what I would like to explain. To understand the relative novelty of this, let me say something about the 19th century American way of courting.

In rural America, people spent their free time in informal get-togethers like picnics and other food-oriented meetings or combined it with such practical activities as quilting bees, barn raisings, or religious functions such as revivals or camp meetings.

And going to church or fairs or dances were also other popular forms of entertainment.

In short, in rural areas, leisure was essentially communal. Now let me see how this has an impact on courtship.

In middle-class America, courting was called calling. A suitor courted a woman at home, a practice that had its source in the upper classes of England, whom the American middle class was eager to imitate.

Thus, formalities and dinner parties became important avenues for socializing in the home.

Public amusements were forbidden, actually quite often, by the middle-class Puritan morality, and these amusements were viewed as responsible for lowering the moral standards of young people.

And calling on a woman was considered to be the most gentile way of courting a woman.

So courting was expected to take place within the protected boundaries of home and the family. Even when the family was not necessarily present to chaperone the courting couple, the family and the home were the invisible yet always present context of courtship.

Actually, the practice of calling was in fact fading away and was being replaced by dating.

Historians and sociologists have observed that by the third decade of the 20th century, going out among both adolescents and adults had spread to the middle classes who had previously been very much opposed to courting in public.

As a historian noted, both the custom of extended visiting and calling declined after World War I.

Going out replaced not only the formal urban practice of calling, but also the more informal rural get-togethers of small town and village youth.

And so this is how, you know, classic study of the 1930s, uh, the sociologists, uh, Robert and Ellen Lind, noticed a growing tendency to engage in leisure time pursuits by couples rather than in crowds.

And so by the 1940s, we may say that going out and dating had replaced actually uh calling.

And dating meant not only going out alone in public and consuming together a leisure commodity and also being in an intimate, isolated situation.

These changes took place thanks to such technologies as the car. Um, and the number of people who were using cars had tripled by the 1930s from the 1920s.

And the car facilitated the search for privacy and replaced the parlor as the scene for courting for the middle class.

We can say also that dance halls increased tremendously, and dance halls provided also very adequate arena for people to interact and meet in a situation that was far more erotic or sexually inviting than in the past.

And so we have here a new, if you want, a new practice, which is to go out on a date, to use the leisure industry, which was not only the result of the desire of people of all classes to participate in this new realm of leisure, but it was also the result of profound cultural changes.

Other profound cultural changes such as a looser parental control, a decline of religious morality, and within a relatively short time, forms of entertainment and romantic encounter, which were previously decried by middle-class morality, became acceptable and standard for all the middle classes and working class as well.

So attendance at such entertainment venues as movies, dance halls, and amusement parks satisfied the need and desire for privacy and intimacy.

It is a location-based dating app that allows users to like by swiping right or to dislike by swiping left other users and to chat if both parties liked each other.

It's also now known as a match. Users' profiles usually include their picture, their age, their distance from you, and a short bio.

So Tinder is what we may call a techno-commodity. It is a technology that is supposed to provide an emotion, and it is disruptive of ordinary practices of romance.

What is disruption? Disruption has been discussed as a principle of the economy, which means a disruption of the infrastructure supporting the technology.

But in the case before us, I want to say that Tinder has primarily disrupted the infrastructure of encounters, how, where, how quickly people meet, and thus to this extent, it is a disruption of romantic relationships.

not reputation or character, but first and foremost, what is first and foremost important in selection is visuality. So the most salient feature of applications of apps like Tinder is the prominence of visuality, of the visual cues.

Now, face-to-face interactions have always been visual, but online visuality, I think, is different from face-to-face visuality because it actually is mediated by photography, by photography, and more specifically by the fact that people take shots of themselves to present themselves, to present their best self to others, which is not exactly the case with face-to-face visuality.

Tinder revolves around an interaction with a fixed image of the self that has been meticulously engineered and quite often actually also photoshopped.

Now, this is connected to another aspect, which is that the sexual self has become very prominent. When you want to meet someone on a Tinder app, what you're trying to put forward is a sexually attractive self, which is a new definition of selfhood.

Visuality is also connected to another, a second feature of the app, which is quick judgment. Visualization mobilizes snap into instantaneous evaluations, because when we see objects, we typically apprehend and evaluate them in a matter of milliseconds.

And cognitive psychologists have shown a visual evaluation relies and needs very little information to form a preference toward an object.

Now, because of the speed of visual evaluation, people will tend to seek and privilege conventional features of attractiveness, and those features precisely which have been codified in media images and fashion industries, such as cleavage or narrow waist or long legs or blonde hair or fair and smooth skin or thinness, etc.

The structure of visual evaluation, connected again to its speed, is that it transforms the attribution of worth into a binary process. This person is either hot or not.

attractive or unattractive. This is actually quite different from, you know, what happens I think in day-to-day interactions where we quite often can start by finding somebody not extremely attractive and then come to find them actually quite attractive as they speak, and with the opposite being also true.

So visuality actually privileges these kind of binary emotional logics. So we have here really characteristics of capitalism, which is velocity, abundance, and efficiency.

All of these are characteristics of these dating apps, and it presupposes a self that I think is mobile, liquid, unattached, on the go.

It offers quick and efficient ways of processing and selecting mates. So we see here how capitalism and technology shape the infrastructure of our romantic encounters.

Encounters have become disconnected from what we may call a social ecology, from community, from our group of reference. There is, if you want, a radicalization of the autonomy of the individual and her disconnection from her community.

Till now, I have neglected to speak about a very important change that has happened in romantic relationships, and it is the sensuality that sexuality has come to take.

In her book, Sexuality: A Short Introduction, sociologist Veronique Mottier asks, "How have we come to believe that sex is so important to who we are?

" This is a question really we can ask ourselves as modern people, given that sexuality is so important to us.

Our sexuality, I think, is lived as the value and the practice of freedom.

In fact, we had to give a short answer to this question: it is because freedom is so important to us as modern people, and sexuality has come to embody our freedom as individuals.

But sexuality, like freedom, is always institutionalized in multiple arenas.

So what we call our contemporary notion of freedom is actually institutionalizing the law in consumer culture, in politics, in the market.

Freedom is I think the main idea that saturates our society. Freedom also is not only institutionalized, but it also evolves and it changes its form and meaning.

For example, the freedom in the name of which women and homosexuals fought for their freedom and fought against patriarchy is very different I think from the freedom to engage in live sex in webcam rooms, because I think the sex in webcam rooms does not have a political or moral intent.

Now, I think that sexuality has profoundly changed how we conduct our relationships. It has become dominant to how we define ourselves.

So how did sexuality become so important? I think it there is it is the result of different processes. First of all, sexuality was fought as a right to privacy.

That is, it was fought as the right of the individual to hold his or her life without the intervention of the say of the state.

Second, I think that the emergence of modern sexuality was the result of a process which started roughly at the end of the 19th century with the emergence of what we may call sexual science.

Beforehand, women's bodies had been thought as I would say the kind of imperfect imitations of male bodies.

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