Fascinating book. Mears spent several years with party promoters—almost all men, often Black men—who made money by bringing models or attractive “civilians” to high-end clubs so that the clubs would be attractive to big-spending men (usually white US, European, Arab, or Asian men). Acceptable “girls” have to look under thirty, be five foot seven or over and wear heels, and thin—and they are mostly white though a real model is always welcome whatever her race; being “hot” isn’t enough because the clubs want a specific “model” look. The big spenders, the promoters say, want “the real thing” if they’re spending $15,000 a night. The girls are there to dance, mingle, or just be there and look beautiful. “[G]irls are valuable; women are not.”

Mears emphasizes all the work that is required to create these experiences of pleasure and lack of inhibition, where—most visibly—hundreds of bottles of champagne can be wasted in displays of excess that no one seems willing to fully endorse while they’re not experiencing it. Almost every client Mears interviewed criticized staged displays of waste, but defended their own large bills. Because of the biggest “whales,” “even the biggest spenders could see their purchases as relatively modest.” Some also attributed the worst excesses to ethnic others: Russians and Saudis. Or they attributed them to people who didn’t work to earn their money, the way they themselves did. One line: “Despite securing his enviable hedge fund job at his family’s firm after having just graduated from an unexceptional college, Ricardo insisted and seemed to genuinely believe that his income reflected his hard work.” It was common for male clients to say that they deserved occasional indulgences because they worked so hard, and also that it was an important way to network with potential business partners.

The distinctions get even more complicated, because the richest men are often comped drinks because of the expectation that they’ll bring even more business, like holding a party at the club or investing in the owner’s next venture. So most clubs make the bulk of their profits from $1500 to $3000 tables populated by “affluent tourists and businessmen” who “regularly run up high-volume tabs because they, too, want to be close to power and beauty,” but who aren’t comped. (They might avoid having to pay a high table minimum if they come in with three or four models, though.)

Conspicuous consumption doesn’t just happen; people around rich people have to work very hard “to mobilize people into what looks like the spontaneous waste of money.” She focuses on “the backstage work of vulnerable women and marginalized men,” in which girls are “a form of capital. Their beauty generates enormous symbolic and economic resources for the men in their presence, but that capital is worth far more to men than to the girls who embody it.” Clubs let clients “act out domination over each other and over girls’ bodies, without the taboo that comes with hiring women directly …. In paying for wildly inflated prices on alcohol, clients buy the invisibility of the labor it took to bring girls to them; they pay to not have to bring girls themselves, or to pay a broker outright to procure girls. They are buying, in part, the illusion of spontaneity.”

And of course the clients and business owners don’t think of the girls as people who might have interesting minds or careers; there is a constant risk of stigmatization as a sex worker, which also usefully functions to limit what girls might ask for. While men used girls to make friends and deals, girls “who demanded a share of profits, in the form of financial support or gifts, were deemed users, schemers, and whores.” This is what Mears means when she says that female beauty was worth more to the men who traded in it than to the women who theoretically had it. Relatedly, the labor required for the girls to be present in the clubs is invisible, assumed to be leisure. Club owners pay promoters thousands of dollars to bring a group of high-quality models in, but owners or promoters would never pay the women themselves to attend, because that wouldn’t be authentic (and many girls would have found that unpleasant, feeling too much like work). Most girls didn’t know how much promoters made, and generally estimated that promoters earned a lot less than they actually did.

Mears also emphasizes that these are complicated mixtures of pleasure, work, and exploitation for both the “girls” and the promoters, who act as friends and often errand runners, housing providers and/or sexual partners for the girls. (Girls rarely have sex with actual clients; the main point is to show off an excess of female beauty, just like the empty champagne bottles that were sprayed around show off the ability to waste alcohol.) The girls get to go exclusive places they couldn’t afford on their own, including foreign locales, but they have to go out and hang out in the clubs in return. The relational work the promoters did highlights that “exploitation works best when it feels good.” The promoters, who are rarely from higher class backgrounds, often think that they’ll be able to join the big spenders who will eventually back their own business ventures—and this has even happened to a few promoters turned club owners—but mostly they too are providing a service and are ultimately replaceable. ( )

An interesting look into elite club promoter scene. Well written, researched, and annotated. ( )