Markkina-arvoteorian edeltäjiä, osa 1

The Secret Ranking.

A person’s erotic rank is defined as a privately kept probability that he can induce a state of emotional overcomeness among persons of the opposite sex.

The erotic hierarchy, as well as love, belongs in "the hidden society." The erotic rank is one of the secrets of love. "Love is sacred in that its secrets are essential and must remain secrets if the phenomenon is not to change character," says Aubert. An erotic rank may also be one of the aspects of a profound sexual union and as such resist public analysis.

What Doris Lessing in her Golden Notebook says about the difficulty in writing about sex for women applies particularly to the emotional overcomeness that defines erotic rank, "Sex is best when not thought about, not analyzed. Women deliberately choose not to think about technical sex. They get irritable when men talk technically, it’s out of self-preservation: they want to preserve the spontaneous emotion that is essential for their satisfaction."

Erotic rankings are particularly significant among teen-agers, who have not yet grown into the ordinary community ranks that dominate adult life. One may surmise that teen-ageing will forever remain puzzling unless we learn to understand interaction in erotic hierarchies.

When an erotic hierarchy is made public to the participants and their environment, there seems to spread among them an unusual amount of disgust and sense of degradation. This may again be mostly a result of our puritan culture, or, as previously suggested, this may be the nature of the beast. The erotic hierarchy never seems the same after it has been publicized.

Those who gossip about erotic ranks and give them away are treated very much like informers, wreckers of something worthwhile. Even the one who takes a problem involving an erotic ranking to a marriage counselor or psychiatrist may be given the stigma of an informer, and, as such, he is never really welcome back into the group whose secret was revealed.

Resentments are generated among those who see others obtain high ranks without commensurate effort. Bitterness particularly besets those who in spite of committed strivings fail to advance and are left by the wayside. It is conceivable that this applies also along the erotic hierarchy. For the erotically high might be envied much like the very rich or the very powerful.

They surrender to each other in equal shares and seem to have a wide range of conversation and fun. The matchmaker is probably most successful when pairing off equals. Yet minor asymmetries in erotic ranks are as common as in other kinds of status; one person usually outranks another, and one usually surrenders more than the other. When the asymmetries are large, the problems may be great; for there is immeasurable agony in loving without being loved in return.