Home economics: Why we treat objects like women

Anyone but avowed economists would suspect that money today is an obscene object. The question is what economic theory would look like had it acknowledged this. This article traces the obscenity of money to the sexual economy of capitalism as it surfaces in the contexts of marriage, prostitution, and love. With the progress of capitalism, marriage was separated from the social production, circulation, and exchange of goods and money. Obviously, this separation could not have taken place without affecting the nature of goods, money, and exchange. It tied the workings of goods and money to what money can’t buy. Capitalist money is obscene because it is related to what it can’t buy. Rather than a universal equalizer, obscene money upsets equivalence and generates excesses. It fosters an alternative view of the capitalist market as a system of inherent imbalance.