The Valentine's Day Erotic Economy

Yes, it's a day designed to get you to spend money. For plenty of people, that's the whole point.

I learned in the booklet in my recent Tokyo Treat box that Valentine’s Day in Japan is traditionally celebrated almost exclusively by women gifting chocolate to men. Most all other customs and gifts of the United States — date nights, flowers, cards — have been ignored. This isn’t a practice relegated only to romantic partners. Like here, Valentine’s Day expands well into the realm of the platonic; it’s especially common for women to gift chocolate to their male coworkers in the office. There does, however, remain a hierarchy: the more you like someone, the better your relationship, the nicer the chocolate you give. The most unpleasant coworkers only receive chō-giri choko, or “ultra-obligatory chocolate,” the cheap stuff. Still, it’s probably nice to receive chocolate, regardless.

This sort of hierarchy isn’t all that dissimilar to what we experience here. Kids exchange cardboard cards amongst their classmates, saving their favorite ones from the box for the friends they like best. You give someone you’ve only been dating a short time something nice, but not too nice. There’d be nothing odd about women giving their friends chocolates or flowers or something cutesty, just for fun. But straight adult men doing the same? That’d probably receive a different interpretation.

This sort of economic exchange and the social etiquette surrounding it is one of the defining features of not only Valentine’s Day but our broader culture. The politics of sexuality and romance are intertwined with that of monetary exchange and social hierarchy.

Sex work has always laid this out rather plainly. The straightforward exchange of sex for cash is the most concrete example, but it extends much further: the exchange of intimacy for cash, the exchange of shame and humiliation for cash, the exchange of distraction, companionship, or even just digital content that fulfills some sexual end. And of course, it is not always cash that is being exchanged, either. It is gifts, time, stability, resources, clout. It’s for these reasons that everyone from Andrea Dworkin to, for some reason, Kanye West have pointed out that heterosexual relationships (especially marriage) are akin to sex work: while they differ in the nature and length of the contract, both can be a form of contract in themselves.

Now obviously, I’m a romantic. Marriage and relationships and sex are not exclusively about a material exchange. Such a position is the antithesis of my overall philosophical framework. That these exchanges exist and are a component of our overall sexual culture, however, is in fact part of my overall philosophical framework. Love and eroticism transcend the monetary. But they can also play along with it, just fine.

And given that the average American spends $192.80 on Valentine’s Day per year according to the National Retail Federation, it would seem that most have come to align themselves with this reality. The majority of that spending goes towards significant others and immediate family members, but a good chunk is also devoted to gifts for co-workers, pets and for children to give to their classmates.

Of course, there is also an entire world of spending that likely goes unreported. Today, February 13th, is often colloquially called “Mistress Day” for its popularity as a secondary Valentine’s Day among people having affairs. There is also a ton of spending that occurs online.

YouPay, an online gifting platform popular among content creators, adult models, financial dominatrixes and more (that has also kindly sponsored today’s post) reports that Valentine’s Day is their biggest day of the year second only to Christmas.

As Victoria Gagliardo-Silver, head of creator relations at YouPay explains, there is a massive demand for online gift exchanges — especially for instant payouts and gift cards specific to creators’ wants. “That’s the gap YouPay fills — providing a safe, secure, reliable and private way to send gifts that people want and are always in the right size. Whether you’re a creator that values our privacy-focused features and chargeback protection, or just someone times of getting birthday gifts they don’t want, YouPay exists to help you communicate what you want and get it.”

The most popular gifts are cash, Visa gift cards, and Apple gift cards, but the platform allows for creators to make wishlists with gift cards from essentially anywhere, as well as specific gifts from partner stores like lingerie-maker Honey Birdette. There are currently over 250,000 users, 60 percent of which are in the US. Over the last few years, this sort of straightforward gifting has been difficult for content creators, especially those whose work fits within the adult category. As Gagliardo-Silver mentioned, privacy is a concern: Amazon wishlists are useful in their specificity of gifting, but reveal to buyers the town in which the giftee lives. Other payment platforms like CashApp, Paypal and Venmo are often linked to people’s public identities, and moreover are subject to chargebacks and even complete account shutdowns.

YouPay did not create this economy of online gifting wherein women may utilize their sexuality or beauty for monetary gain, but they are the leaders in it. As mentioned, they are particularly popular among financial dominatrixes, a group I think best embodies the distillation between monetary exchange and eroticism. One could possibly argue that this overall culture here of selling sexuality is exploitative on both ends, encouraging women to objectify themselves and manipulating lonely men into spending money for comfort, but financial domination skirts these critiques. For those who partake in the fetish, it isn’t as though funds are transferred in order to later receive fulfillment from a specific act or content depicting a specific niche. With financial domination, the transfer of funds is the fulfillment itself. There are a swirl of related concepts that feed into it: one might enjoy the idea of a woman living luxuriously without having to lift a finger, some might like the humiliation of giving away the money they’ve worked so hard for, others might simply get a rush of dopamine from hitting the “send” button, just as they would online shopping or gambling. But in all cases, the money is the point. For the dommes who receive the money, there is often little they are expected to do in return, if anything at all. Their job is simply to enjoy.

This dynamic, to me, not only represents the natural relationship of the erotic economy in its most basic form but also turns it on its head. Most of us are participating in this day of gift-giving in hopes of something in return: gifts of our own, sex, affection, friendship, adoration or even just obligatory office congeniality. We likely can’t even say for certain what it is we’re after, except maybe the sex part. Spending money and buying objects has always been a feature in this quest, whether it’s been done on a holiday specific to it or otherwise. That is, in part, what I enjoy about Valentine’s Day. It makes these dynamics clear, concrete. We’re all after something, innocently or not. Valentine’s Day is our opportunity to embrace that.

If you’d like to sign up for YouPay, you can find their website at YouPay.co.