"The single woman... is a real, living phenomenon...
who ceaselessly wages the grim struggle for existence" and fights in the
ranks of the proletariat for the right to work. The "younger sister"
paves the way for the truly independent "free" and "equal"
woman of the future. “ Alexandra Kollontai
“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is
about power.” Oscar Wilde
: “sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love”
― Gabriel García Márquez
Mia Levitin's book belongs to a genre that has proliferated
in recent years: cultural criticism of romance, desire, and courtship in the
digital age. These works, such as Eva Illouz's Cold Intimacies and
Sherry Turkle's work on technology and relationships, often offer genuinely
interesting observations about how capitalist modernity has transformed
intimate life. But they consistently stop short of the one conclusion that
would make their analysis truly radical: that the pathologies they describe are
not accidents of culture or technology but are rooted in the very structure of
capitalist social relations.
Much of the book focuses on Mia's early life. She explains,
"When my marriage ended, I thought I had chosen the wrong partner, but I
never doubted that a relationship was essential for happiness. Determined to
find Mr Right 2.0, I started dating with an Excel spreadsheet and advice from a
celebrity love coach. Despite my positive attitude, success has yet to come. If
someone had told me then that I would still be single after 111 first dates
over about five years, I would have found it hard to believe. But honestly, I
am grateful for the time spent alone." The sooner you stop seeing yourself
as a victim—even in the face of a terrible ex's behaviour—the better. Take
responsibility for what went wrong, even if it's just a small part. She
deserves a medal for 111 dates, but perhaps it was more about research than a
desire for love or sex.
Sexual Relations
Under Capitalism
Levitin isn't a radical thinker; she generally holds
conservative views on sexual relations within the framework of capitalism.
Understanding how capitalism influences intimate relationships is essential.
Engels' 'The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State' (1884)
illustrates that sexual and family structures are shaped by specific historical
relations of production, rather than being innate or unchanging. The nuclear,
monogamous family emerged alongside private property to regulate inheritance
practices. Consequently, women's oppression isn't solely rooted in male
psychology or "patriarchal culture" isolated from material conditions;
it is deeply linked to class society. To eliminate this oppression, dismantling
capitalism is necessary.
Various forces shape intimate life in distinct ways. The
commodification of human relationships, reducing everything to exchange value, penetrates
sexuality just as deeply as other areas of life. Dating apps exemplify this
clearly: they turn human beings into consumer products to be browsed, rated,
and discarded, applying marketplace logic to the pursuit of love and
companionship. This leads not to liberation, but to a new, especially
disheartening form of alienation. Exhausted, financially insecure,
time-starved, and atomised workers, victims of decades of capitalist social
policies, do not see each other as complete human beings. Instead, they
encounter each other as commodities amid artificially managed scarcity. The
loneliness epidemic and the "crisis of intimacy" that authors like
Levitin identify are genuine social issues. However, the key questions remain:
what causes these problems, and how can we address them?
The Limits of the
Liberal-Cultural Approach
Cultural criticism concerning sexuality and modern romance,
from Eva Illouz's Cold Intimacies to articles in the liberal press,
often accurately identifies symptoms but misdiagnoses their causes and fails to
propose effective solutions. Typically, it blames the crisis of intimate life
on "neoliberalism" as a cultural mindset, on technology, changing
"emotional styles," or on patriarchy as a standalone system. However,
this approach consistently neglects the class issue: who actually gains from
the atomization and commodification of human relationships?
Capitalism depends on isolating individuals and discourages
strong, lasting bonds of solidarity, which are vital for collective resistance.
The loneliness, anxiety, and transactional nature of modern sexual
relationships are not flaws but integral features of the system. The ruling
class benefits not only from unstable jobs, unaffordable housing, and the
decline of public life but also from industries that thrive on loneliness, like
dating apps, therapy, and self-help sectors.
Capitalism not only shapes how people connect but also
influences desire itself. Dating apps like Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble are not
neutral; they promote the commodification of humans. User profiles become
commodities, with individuals showcasing attractive features—photos, wit,
credentials—for evaluation in a swiping marketplace. The logic of exchange
value governs intimate life, where relationships are judged like consumer
products for utility, status, and compatibility. This is not just metaphorical;
it reflects the real subsumption of personal life under capitalism. Cultural
critiques that see these issues as problems of "seduction,"
"desire," or "emotional culture" and suggest fixing them
through better individual choices or enlightened attitudes remain trapped in
the very framework they criticise.
Much of today's discussion on seduction, gender, and desire
is viewed through identity politics, often reducing these issues to gender
power dynamics, male privilege, or heteronormativity. Although gender
oppression is genuine and historically grounded in the material conditions
Engels examined, the identity-politics approach causes political harm by
disconnecting gender from class. It treats patriarchy as a standalone system
instead of recognising how it is deeply influenced and interconnected with
capitalist property relations.
The result is that the critique of alienated intimate life
gets channelled into individual empowerment narratives on how to navigate the
dating market as a woman, how to assert your boundaries, how to optimise your
romantic self, which are perfectly compatible with capitalism and ultimately
reinforce the commodified framework rather than challenge it. Genuine
liberation from alienated relationships requires the overthrow of the system
that produces that alienation, not better personal strategies within it.
What Genuine
Liberation Requires
The Marxist position is straightforward: genuine human
liberation, including the liberation of intimate life from commodification and
alienation, requires the socialist transformation of society. This means
abolishing the material conditions that force people into isolated competition
with one another: the wage system, private property, the housing market, and
all the economic pressures that deform human relationships from the outside in.
Alexandra Kollontai, writing in the early Soviet period, understood this
clearly. The "new woman" and "new man" she wrote about were
not products of cultural attitude shifts; they were to be forged through
collective struggle and the building of a new social order in which human
beings could relate to one another freely, not as economic units.
