I Feel…For Money: The Marketplace of Emotions and Feelings
Jas is a professional hugger. He is 24, friendly, gregarious, outgoing, and a self-described people person. Until recently, Jas used his people skills to make a good living for himself as a freelance hugger and ‘cuddle giver’. Social media savvy, Jas advertises his services on Instagram and Facebook, charging anywhere between £15 and £45 an hour for cuddles, hugs, and ‘emotional therapy’, as he puts it. He also does franchise work for cuddle businesses and supplements his income with merchandising cuddle accessories like soft toys.
The pandemic of course put paid to his career, but Jas is optimistic about his future. He feels that the loneliness, isolation, and emotional deprivation caused by lockdowns will be good for his business, provided he makes some sensitive changes to his ‘offer’.
Jas has met a variety of people in his business, lonely singletons, anxiety-ridden students, high powered CEOs, businessmen and neglected housewives, his clients are all looking for affection and the healing power of human touch.
Lisa, 38, is also a ‘cuddler’ although she prefers to label herself an ‘empathy entrepreneur’. She is professionally trained and certified, operates through her own website, and gets the bulk of her clients by word-of-mouth recommendation. Lisa offers hand holding, hugs, cuddles, and the occasional platonic massage. Some clients want ‘more’, she admits but remains tight-lipped. Lisa is well aware of the challenges and pitfalls of working in the field of human contact and the risks of being misunderstood for something else.
Both Jas and Lisa are passionate about their work which they are convinced make a vital difference to their clients’ lives.
The Empathy Entrepreneur
Jas and Lisa are only two examples of entrepreneurs who use their natural instincts, specialist skills and training to monetise human emotions like love and affection. They are commercial suppliers of emotions, meeting a demand and fulfilling a need for something that is in short supply in many people’s lives.
Emotional Labour
Entrepreneurs like Jas and Lisa are practical illustrations of ‘emotional labour’, an idea that describes the process of managing one’s feelings and emotions and their physical manifestations in the service of the job. The term Emotional Labour was conceptualised by author and sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who drew on her work with bill collectors and flight attendants, two sets of frontline workers with high-intensity people contact. Hochschild described it as labour that requires an employee to ‘induce or suppress feelings’ in order to maintain interpersonal interactions in the workplace on an even keel. Emotional Labour also involves extensive organisational intervention by way of ‘effort, planning, and control’ in order to ensure that employees are expressing the ‘organisationally desired emotion during interpersonal transactions’.
Emotional Labour is a popular academic and practitioner field of study and involves a wide range of discussions about managing and regulating emotions in the organised workplace, drawing on both individual and organisational / environmental factors. This is because the workplace makes numerous demands on employees to manage their emotions and feelings differently and demonstrate emotional intelligence in discharging their duties. Frontline workers like teachers, nurses, social workers, caregivers, counsellors, police officers, and firefighters, are often placed in high-intensity situations which heighten emotions. Hospitality and airline workers encounter stress and abuse in their jobs but cannot afford the luxury of giving into emotional responses. Training and standardised operating procedures allow these workers to neutralise their heightened emotional responses to stressful situations and do their job effectively without compromising on empathy, compassion, or service standards.
On the other hand, entertainment and leisure industries demand heightened, exaggerated and often manufactured emotions of their employees. Customer service staff in particular are constantly required to be smiling, cheerful, even hyper in a form of impression management, This is seen to better reflect organisational ethos and brand image, which while being essential for maintaining service standards, can often be exhausting, soul destroying, leading to burnout.
Emotional labour is an essential component in service industries and critical to the expansion of the service economy which is lubricated by customer service and interpersonal interaction. At a time of increased customer personalisation, engagement, and customer ‘love’, the importance of regulating and managing emotions in the workplace cannot be underestimated.
Emotional Entrepreneurs
Jas and Lisa however are typical of those who have successfully extended emotional labour beyond the organised workplace into entrepreneurialism. In their line of work, they have found innovative ways of commoditising and commercialising basic human emotions of love and affection into emotional ‘products’ – kindness, compassion, empathy – and ‘offers’ – hugs and cuddles.
Love and affection are not just the only offers in the marketplace of emotions. Lust, envy, shame, grief – they all have a market value, attractive to emotional entrepreneurs.
In some parts of the world, ‘shame peddlers’ are employed by local and federal authorities, banks and credit card companies to collect debts and unpaid taxes effectively. In societies where personal debt carries great social stigma, the services of shame-pedding entrepreneurs are in high demand.
Elsewhere, professional mourners, or moirologists as they are called, offer grieving services. Professional grieving has a historical tradition going back many centuries in parts of Asia and the Middle East and is still in demand today. Grief entrepreneurs are required to showcase ostentatious displays of grief, from ritualistic wailing to breast beating and tearing out clumps of hair – in return for a fee. Clients come through word-of-mouth and large families make good repeat customers.
Moirology is also now an accredited profession in the West, with its own training, standard operating procedures, institutions, and marketplace actors.
One striking observation is that in many parts of the world, professional shamers and mourners are predominantly drawn from trans communities. In societies with hostile attitudes towards socially stigmatised trans people, the commercial marketplace of emotions offers lucrative work opportunities, economic self-reliance, and social empowerment to members of these communities.
The Marketplace of Lust
Emotions like lust and envy offer equally lucrative market opportunities. Entire sections of social media platforms like Instagram are entirely given over to wanton displays of envy. From fashion and fitness, travel, food, and even mukbang, influencers make their careers by monetising envy.
For the Love Island generation however, lust is a prime motivator in the online world. Social media platforms, websites and apps enable influencers and content creators to commoditise and monetise lust-inducing content, creating a dynamic marketplace of lust. This is a thriving commercial space with a variety of market actors – Only Fans, Sugar Daddy, My Girl Fund – offering a variety of ‘products’ and offers – from hard-core porn and prostitution to softer options like tasteful nudity, saucy chat, and explicit on-demand content – across a range of pricing options – subscriptions, pay-per-view, and extras – and a huge range of suppliers – predominantly young, attractive women but equally egalitarian about a variety of suppliers in all shapes, sizes, and identity groups. Sex sells like never before.
What is on display in sites like Instagram and Only Fans is a prime example of erotic capital, where attractive people accumulate sexual capital and leverage their physical to generate lucrative sources of income. The demand for their services however arises from a variety of emotions which allow these emotion entrepreneurs to peddle through lust-inducing content, emotions like love, affection, romance, and even pain and compassion.
Market-Mediated Emotions; Managing and Making Families
In this marketplace, it is not just the buying or selling of emotions that carry commercial value but the associated socio-biological functions that colour family structures and relationships. Traditional gender norms and associated family roles have long been given over to the market. Typical female roles within the family unit– cook, cleaner, housekeeper, nanny, child minder, babysitter, care giver– with the attendant emotional burdens, are all now easily and efficiently filled by professionals, freeing women up to pursue interests beyond the family confines.
Even primal biological acts such as breastfeeding that bind mother and child in emotional ties, have historically been supplied by wet nurses. The market however now steps in to provide an assortment of solutions.
Caring for vulnerable family relatives, another role traditionally associated with women and fraught with emotions, is of course the biggest socio-economic issue facing much of the developed world. With the gradual weakening of social fabric and the traditional family unit elsewhere, this will soon be a global problem. The market again steps in here with a variety of solutions, enabling customers to manage the emotions associated with such roles more efficiently.
If the market is so efficient in commercialising emotions associated with managing family relationships, what about the emotions associated with creating a family in the first place? Where does the market come in? How does it commercialise emotions?
In a digital world, dating sites and apps are now seen as the de facto option for those looking for love. Global dating market revenues are estimated to be approximately US$3.8 billion in 2021, expected to grow to US$5.3 billion by 2025. From straightforward relationships to those looking for flings, swings, and extra-marital affairs to the lonely hearts looking for the professional girlfriend or boyfriend experience, this market has something for everyone. Love, and illusions of love, is clearly big business.
After love and relationships comes family, the most complete and visible sign of emotions. How does the market help here? For men, the emotions attached to procreate, care, and provide within a family are now being supplanted by the sperm donor industry, estimated to reach US$4.8 billion by 2027. Similarly, birthing, nurturing, and nourishing children and all the emotions associated with pregnancy and motherhood, are being met and fulfilled by the surrogacy market valued around US$27.5 billion by 2027, and the growth of professional ‘gestational carriers’. Market growth is further driven by celebrities who like to have babies without going through the emotional and physical fuss of pregnancy. As for the emotional strains of childbearing and child rearing, fear not. Robots are here to help, taking away much of the burden.
We see here that the market offers efficient solutions to maximise social, biological, and economic benefits of emotions. Where does that leave us with the issue of emotions themselves. Do we need them? What role will they play in our lives?
Whither Future Emotions?
A Zoom-tastic new world of online and remote working and the growing impact of automation in service work has considerably mitigated the need to manage emotions in the workplace. Emojis are now considered invaluable shorthand for generating and expressing emotions in interpersonal communications, while apps and devices help us detect these very same emotions in others, sometimes even controversially. Technology mediates and shapes a marketplace of emotional vocabulary. While some may argue that this robs human beings of vital social skills in reading people and emotions, stunting our personal development, it also allows us to channel our emotions productively only to those spheres of our lives where we derive the maximum benefit from emotions.
Could we legitimately see a future where we can outsource the creation, communication, maintenance and replenishment of emotions to pre-programmable emotion machines? Could we escape the exhaustion of modern life and the demands it places on us through the supply and demand dynamics of the marketplace of emotions? I suspect it won’t be very long before we find out the answers.
