What Happens Next – Sunday May 9, 2021 Stupidity of War, Inflation, Brooklyn, Cultivating Influence, & Bottle Service Ashley Mears QA

Larry Bernstein: Hi, our next guest is Ashley Mears. The topic will be Models and Bottles: How Beautiful Women are Used to Boost Male Status. Ashley is an associate professor of sociology at , and she recently wrote a book called Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit.

Ashley Mears: Thank you. I'm a sociology professor and I followed an unusual path into academia. Like a lot of young girls, modeling was my teenage dream, much like boy’s dream of becoming professional athletes. When I was in , where I grew up, I started modeling as a teenager, which meant shooting catalogs for the local department store. I noticed even then how hard it was to fit into extremely narrow standards of beauty. Most of the models were white, all of them were very thin and quite young. I noticed there was a very high turnover because of the quest for novelty. Fashion is, by definition, change and models have short careers, especially women, because they're perceived value on the market is tied to youth. So much so that when I turned 19, my agency advised me to actually lie about my age when I went to New York, to claim in auditions that I was 18. That's when I thought maybe this isn't a good career path in the long- term.

I went to graduate school to study sociology in New York because I wanted to understand the market dynamics of the fashion world. In my first year of graduate study, I got scouted to join another model agency. This time I signed up with the goal of being an analyst, to keep track of how the money worked. I interviewed models, agents and clients, just to understand the market from their perspective. I also was sent out on modeling assignments. Now, again, from day one, the agents in New York advised me to lie about my age. By now I was 23, and they told me to say that I was 18.

In sociological terms, people that study labor would see modeling as a bad job. It's structurally unstable, there's high turnover, there's high risk, but indeed, there's also high rewards. The cultural imagery of fashion models is that they're very successful, that it's very glamorous, that they're very well paid, but what I found in my first book, Pricing Beauty, is that actually models, for the most part, are pretty poorly compensated, but they do get a lot of perks, such as the treatment of being a VIP in bottle-service nightclubs.

This brings me to my second book, Very Important People. When I was researching the modeling industry back in New York around 2006, I met several men that work in nightclubs

1 and they are called promoters. Their job is to promote the night for a club. They get paid by nightclubs anywhere between $200 to $1,000 dollars a night to bring the right crowd. Now, for the highest end of nightlife in New York, these kinds of clubs offer what's called bottle service. Bottle service is when expensive bottles are brought to someone's table, at prices that are starting at a markup of a thousand percent on up. Rather than standing at the bar to order drinks, those bottles are brought to people at their tables.

Promoters are expected to bring the right crowd, and in bottle service nightclubs, the right crowd of very important people: It's men with money who are paying for the expensive bottles of alcohol and it's the women who are, or look like, fashion models. They are ubiquitously called girls, regardless of their age.

Around 2010, 2011, I started going out with promoters who are paid in particular to bring beautiful women or fashion models, to these clubs. I followed promoters beginning in 2011 for 18 months, I interviewed 44 of them. What I found is that while promoters can make a pretty good living and the clubs make a quite a big profit in the nightlife industry, a huge multi-billion- dollar industry, what I found is that the girls don't get paid. They add huge value to a space.

This raises a very interesting question. Why do people work for free? What I found is that there's four different reasons to explain why the girls would participate in this structurally unfair arrangement.

First, it's the free meal, because as I had learned earlier, most models don't get paid very much so being able to go out and afford an expensive meal in a luxury restaurant is something most of them can't access. Two, they have strong relationships with the promoters who spend a lot of time cultivating relationships with girls and building friendships. Three, promoters open up access to this exclusive world, which is also connected to a fourth ego stroke of belonging to the elite. By definition, these are very exclusive spaces, and so even though promoters are gaining financially and the girls are not, promoters are opening up an opportunity for them to afford a lifestyle that they otherwise can't.

Larry Bernstein: What is the allure of that encourages beautiful young women to choose that role?

Ashley Mears: I think that there traditionally has been a split along gender of the importance of beauty and the importance of looks, capturing attention, has been something that women have been encouraged to do. Even at a young age, girls have the princess fantasy and that involves a very

2 certain body, a very certain kind of decorative role. Whereas boys are socialized early on to be more active, to be the agents, to be the ones that are looking and not the ones that are looked at. The male heterosexual gaze, in which men are the ones that look and women are the ones who decorate themselves to be looked at.

Larry Bernstein: Two weeks ago, we had Terry Williams, the sociologist from The New School, on our program. He talked about his new book, Le Boogie Woogie, which is about an after-hours cocaine club, it's where men and women went to do drugs. There was also substantial sexual energy in the place and there was a lot of hooking up going on. What I found incredibly surprising about the clubs that you describe was two things. One, that there were very little drugs and it was discouraged by the promoters, and second, that even though there were all these beautiful women next to these very elite men, sex and interaction was not common. What's going on? Why is Le Boogie Woogie different than your bottle service clubs?

Ashley Mears: Nightlife has all kinds of different niches and specific clubs, specific crowds, on specific nights as well. Promoters that have been doing this for a long part of the reason that they're so successful and they have that longevity is because they're sober and they take this very seriously as a business. It's not to say that drugs aren't in the clubs. I mean, certainly, it's a club. There's lots of loud music and, people are taking MDMA and cocaine, but it's not the main point. It's certainly not that the promoters are going to be using because that comes with all kinds of liabilities.

The hookups. Yes, of course it's a nightclub, there's a sexual aspect to it and that kind of energy is arguably one of the reasons that nightlife exists, the possibility of sexual chance and flirtation and innuendo, and all of that is very much there. People hook up, they kiss, they dance close, they touch. There's a lot of touching actually, the people who don't know each other very well. The question about is there a lot of hooking up and people going home, particularly in this match between beautiful women and the rich men who are ostensibly paying for the company of beautiful women, not directly, they pay for it with the price-inflated bottles of champagne that they're buying, they're buying the experience of a luxurious setting and they're also buying the feeling of being high status.

Clubs are using beautiful women's bodies in order to help communicate that, in order to help stroke a man's ego so he can look around and say he partied in the company of a Victoria Secrets model. Whether or not he goes home with them, it's enough that they're present. That's one of the underlying purposes of this kind of VIP space.

Larry Bernstein: In the book you say that one client describes the girls as furniture women, because they would

3 be making us look good, like furnishing the house.

Are women like furniture? And then you further go on and you say, "Businessmen barely talk with the girls. Girls break the ice and help everyone to get comfortable in a homosocial world of business where most of the power holders are men." It's just helping men talk to other men, and they rarely have an interest in even speaking with these girls.

Ashley Mears: I'm laughing at furniture women. Of course, it's not funny, but just the expression. I remember too, also being like, "Wow, that's such a way to put it. I hadn't thought of it." I'm also reminded, when I interviewed this person who books the fashion shows for Prada, he was explaining to me how he chooses the models, because he sees hundreds of them and he has to choose 10 for the show. And he was explaining it, "How can one account for taste?" He said, "How did I choose this sofa that we're sitting on? I don't know. For me, it ticks the box. It's just taste." And I remember thinking like, "Oh, he just compared women to the sofa." But in that context, these are ways that people are speaking about young women as commodities, as objects.

I don't think that it's the sex that girls are offering. It's sexiness. It's the visual feeling: here's a lot of really beautiful women.

When I interviewed the wealthy men who are paying in these clubs, I asked them if the women that they met out in clubs, these girls that were so valuable, I asked if this was the pool of romantic partners, if they were looking for a girlfriend or a future wife among these women. And their answer was very stern, no. They would say. Models are great decoration, like furniture, but this is not the pool of future marriage material.

Larry Bernstein: In the book, you mentioned that some women can use this modeling experience to jump up in social class, you were quoting a French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, that there are traditional social classes and that beautiful women can sometimes jump from one class to a higher class because of their beauty. I'm just surprised that high status men aren't drinking the Kool-Aid to take in lower status, beautiful women into their social circles. Why do you suppose that is? And is that shaming by high status women, when they're around beautiful, less socially status women?

Ashley Mears: So going back to the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, he observed that one way that elites and the upper classes are able to maintain power amongst themselves is by carefully controlling marriage, in and marriage out. And we do see this in demography of the family, that people who are upper-class tend to partner with similarly high-status partners. So rich men will marry women who come from rich families, or the same kind of educational credentials. Actually, it is

4 quite rare to see, or the anomaly is like Melania and Donald Trump. And they met at a party that was organized by somebody who hangs out very much in this club world.

Larry Bernstein: So much for Cinderella. Moving on to the promoter. What makes a good promoter? Are they incredibly extroverted? Are they good businessmen?

Ashley Mears:. They're really good at making girls feel comfortable, making girls feel valuable and making girls want to come out and work for free.

Larry Bernstein: One of the discussions in the book related to one of the promoters hanging on Grand and West Broadway, in his car. And he sees an attractive girl walking down the street. He jumps out of his car, leaves his car with the keys and runs over to talk with this girl, gets her number and encourages her to go out that night and join him at the party. Is that a perfect example of what these guys do for a living? They're constantly on the lookout for beautiful women and encouraging them to come out for free to some party?

Ashley Mears: So, there're different strategies to do that, but that's the key thing about their job. One of them told me, there can be no night without the day. So, what they're doing during the day is identifying girls, recruiting them, building a relationship with them, and then trying to mobilize them to come out and so street scouting, this scene that you just described, that's one way to do it.

Larry Bernstein: I want to talk a little bit about the elite businessmen. I don't know many people that go to these clubs. But who are these people? And what is special about these particular sets of businessmen, that they want to hang out in these clubs, and who's going to do real business in these clubs?

Ashley Mears: The men are quite a mix. They come from a range of backgrounds. Some of them are occasional participants in this scene. They drop in once a year or twice a year. If some of them are regulars, they're not spending huge sums, they might go out with a couple of friends and share the bill.

There are people who are affluent from Wall Street, from tech. it's really a mix. The elite: They're hypermobile, they're global. Old money, new money, different industries, and so on.

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One thing that most of these rich men had in common is relative youth. They're not as young as the girls, but it would be men who are not typically much older than their 50s, but not 60s. You can certainly see a silver fox in the crowd, and that wouldn't be unusual. It would be to see a 60-year-old woman in this space, would be very unusual.

So it's more young money, or men who are starting out and making a lot of money, the working rich, people who didn't inherit.

Even within a nightclub, it's not all men who have lots of money. If you think about how big a nightclub is, 500-person capacity. They have to get filled somehow. The doorperson will make these distinctions of people who have money and have evidence that they're going to lay down their credit card and pay for renting a table. And then women who are beautiful, and they get in for free. But then there's lots of other people that are valuable to the club because they keep the place from looking empty. And these are people that are sometimes called fillers. They might not have thousands of dollars to spend on a night, but they could pay for $50, for their drinks at the bar. And they'll fill the space. And they look well-dressed enough that the club values those people as well.

Larry Bernstein: You mentioned good civilians. These are women who are very attractive, but aren't model-like. What is the role of the good civilian for the club?

Ashley Mears: So, good civilian was my role in this space. A good civilian is somebody who is not a model, because the fashion modeling industry has very exacting and very narrow standards of beauty, of height, and thinness, and youth. But a good civilian is somebody who is maybe off a little bit in one or more of those categories, but when the lights are low, she will still look close enough to a model. So pretty enough, but not quite a model.

When I was doing the field work, I was already 31, which is way past retirement age for fashion models. But the reason that they tolerated me was because I was a good civilian. If I was a little bit shorter, or a little bit older, like I am now, or a bit heavier, I would not have been able to get that access that I did.

Larry Bernstein: In your modeling book, you mentioned that look changes all the time, and that even the people who are in the booking agency business are constantly surprised at what works and what doesn't. How has it changed in the time that you've been in the industry?

6 Ashley Mears: So that distinction between the editorial market and the commercial market, I think you see this in a lot of arts fields, where the editorial fashion doesn't appeal to a mass market. It's really communicating taste to a rarefied audience that has been trained, so other fashion insiders or photographers and designers can see beauty in something that your average consumer in middle America ... I'm just going to use my mom as an example ... that my mom just wouldn't get because she's not in high fashion. She doesn't read the magazines; she doesn't look at all of the Instagrams. And I'm always fascinated assessing the value of any cultural good, a work of art or beauty and so on.

I will say your question was about the content of the look and how are those looks at the editorial end changing. I think that they've opened up enormously, and that's because the visibility of people and the assertion of people to proclaim loudly and in public, and to be heard that they have a right to be visible in the beauty industry, that has been transformed with social media. There've been very large women who wear a size 20 who have become top models because the platform of Instagram has allowed them to contest these hegemonic standards of the fashion modeling industry.

Larry Bernstein: In the book, you also discuss the role of race for models, that at the clubs, they would allow a few African-Americans, but not too many. And you also mentioned in your modeling book something similar to that as well, that there would be a few black models in a magazine. Recently, I think since the Black Lives Matter movement, fashion magazines are full of African- American women. How do you think about that?

Ashley Mears: The distinction between editorial and commercial modeling is actually really important here. So, in the commercial end of the market, where catalogs are being marketed to everyday middle American consumers, those kinds of bodies tend to be much more ethnically racially diverse. You'll see just a lot more black bodies in the commercial end of the market. Also, you'll see more "full-figured", large sized, plus size bodies in commercial catalogs than you would see on a high-end catwalk. So, a commercial catalog that I worked for, for instance, they were conscientious that they needed to have a black woman, an Asian woman, a red head, and a blonde.

They needed to have everybody that will look at their ad and say, "This appeals to me." It's still aspirational. At the editorial end of the market, because editorial fashion production is insiders speaking the language of high-end fashion to one another, they're not beholden to what their consumers want, necessarily. They're just beholden to their own sense of taste and what they think is fashionable. And in my interviews, I found in interviewing people that are booking the shows for the catwalks and so on, their default aesthetic was a thin, young, white woman, and

7 everything else outside of that was noticeably different.

And in the editorial end of the market, they took pains to try to when they're casting the shows for a fashion show, they would take pains to try to get at least one black model that could be on the catwalks, because they want to avoid the accusation of a racist vision of beauty. "We have to get one, but there's only one that's really good this season. Everybody's getting that one good black model."

Larry Bernstein: I usually end each session with a note of optimism, what would you have to say, Ashley?

Ashley Mears: The thing that makes me really optimistic, I have two little kids. I have a six-year-old and a three-year-old, and they've both gone back to daycare or kindergarten. And my six-year-old is so excited to be back in the world and back with friends. I am incredibly optimistic about that. I've been vaccinated and I've seen the kind of excitement of my little one being back in school and connecting with other people, I'm thinking I think I might go to a ... maybe not a club, but I think I might go out to maybe a bar soon. I'm very optimistic about this. Larry Bernstein: Jon Levy, I want to ask you a question. You just heard Ashley describe this bar life, this club life and how there's intimacy and interaction, but it's done without trust and without that same sort of connection like your dinner parties. How do you think about this other method of influencers and network building as a comparison to some of the techniques that you talked about in your book?

Jon Levy: So I think there's this funny characteristic called the misattribution of arousal. And the famous example is that men were asked to cross, these are two different groups of men, but the men crossed individually across a standard bridge like the Brooklyn bridge and some crossed a high ropes bridge. And on the far end, there was an attractive woman that said, "If you have any more questions about the study or you need to get in touch with me, here's my number." And the men that crossed the high ropes bridge disproportionately called her and asked her out. And the argument was that they misattributed the high heart rate and the excitement that they felt from being up so high on the unsteady high ropes bridge for the way that they felt for her.

And so I think that nightclubs produce theater. You have a stage where the lights are low. You can't really hear each other so that you have to start whispering into each other's ears, which means that you're often physically touching a person and it creates this odd intimacy. And you mix that with alcohol and late hours and drugs and all that. And suddenly you have this kind of misattribution of arousal, this, "Oh, I had such a great time so it must have been because of you." And it's interesting. I believe at one point, there's this crazy, crazy club in New York called

8 The Box. And it had I think the largest corporate accounts of any venue in the entire city because it was literally theater.

Larry Bernstein: Jon, I want to end on a note of optimism from you. Jon Levy, what are you optimistic about?

Jon Levy: I'm optimistic about seeing how excited people are to be around each other. A year and a half ago, you invited somebody to a social experience, they might be like, "Oh, I'm so tired from work. It's not really something I want to do. I might feel obligated from work." But now people are literally realizing I need other human beings and I can't wait to spend time with them. And I can't wait to catch up with them about meaningful things. And I can't wait to see the world. And I think that that's a really healthy attitude.

Larry Bernstein: John Mueller, what are you optimistic about?

John Mueller: Well, we're willing to predict that we've now undergone 75 years without World War III. And I think we're going to continue that record for a while. But there may be a couple of short range issues. One is the exhaustion with war by the United States in terms of Afghanistan and Iraq. And I think that's probably going to last, we're going to have sort of an Iraq syndrome. Let's not do that again. I think that'll be an improvement.

The other thing is that one of the big problems has been intervening in other countries' civil wars. And that has gone fantastically awry, both in Syria and in Yemen where these civil wars probably would have been over much earlier had it not been for outside intervention. In other words, the total damage, you might end up with a bad government, but you wouldn't end up with this catastrophically long war. And I think that is perhaps going out of style, which would be a distinct improvement.

Larry Bernstein: Kay Hymowitz two questions: What are you optimistic about and what did you think of some of Ashley's comments about the nightclubs?

Kay Hymowitz: Well, I'll start with Ashley. I don't know how much she talked about evolutionary psychology, but when you talk about youthful beauty, young women who are beautiful and rich men, I mean that's one of the first principles of evolutionary psychology is that the mating dance involves beautiful women trying to attract powerful men and powerful men trying to attract the best mate. And it's built into our nature. I don't know if that's part of what she talked about or not, but seem to be crying out for an evolutionary psychology explanation.

In terms of optimism, I think I watched Brooklyn turn around and become something nobody

9 imagined could happen. And there was every reason in 1982 when I moved there to be quite worried about the future of the city and about Brooklyn. But that's not what happened. What happened was it utterly transformed itself. There are many, many problems to face in the immediate future and the long-term future. But we've gone through a lot of phases in Brooklyn and in . And there'll be a lot more to come.

Larry Bernstein: That ends today’s session, but I want to take a minute to plug Next Week’s show. Sunday May 16th Brad Stone will join us to discuss his new book that will be released this Tuesday entitled Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. This is Brad’s second book on Amazon. His first book The Everything Store is one of my favorite business books. So, I am really excited to read his latest work that is coming out this week. Our second speaker will be Dietrich Vollrath who is a Professor and Chair of the Economics Department at the University of Houston. We will be discussing his new book entitled Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy is a Sign of Success. Our third speaker will be Michael Moss who is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter formerly of . You may recall that Dr. David Katz the Yale nutritionist recommended on What Happens Next that we read Michael’s new book entitled Hooked: Food, Free Will and How the Food Giants Exploit our Addictions. Michael questions the motivations of Large Food makers and compares them to the tobacco companies of old. Our next speaker will be Paul Rossi who is a math teacher who was recently barred from working at the Grace Church School in NYC. Paul was ostracized for his opposition to the racial indoctrination program at the school. I expect this conversation to be very controversial. Our final speaker is Vivek Ramasamy who is the founder of the biopharmaceutical firm Roivant Sciences which announced an IPO using a SPAC this past week. Vivek has a new book coming out entitled Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. Vivek will speaking in opposition to the new ESG movement which refers to Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance that measures the sustainability and societal impact of a business.

If you are interested in listening to a replay of this program or any of our previous episodes or wish to read a transcript, you can find them on our website Whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Replays are also available on Apple Podcasts, Podbean and Spotify.

I would like to thank today’s speakers for their insights. I would also like to thank our listeners for their time and for engaging with these complex issues. Please stay tuned for next Sunday to find out What Happens Next.

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