Carrol wrote: > the concept of "stealing" a girlfriend turns the girlfriend into portable property.
The same applies to men. Indeed, these days a problem for some busy men is how you can get other men to screw the women under their care. But the concept of stealing is ill-defined, as shown by the discussion about intellectual property rights. If a person is spied on for the purpose of obtaining information from which the spy derives income or tangible benefits, this is frequently presented as benefiting the person being spied on, for example because the person spied on, is provided with contact opportunities and a network of relations that could improve his life, a sort of "love capitalism" which relies on the sacrifice of personal autonomy for private gain. In this way, exchange relations invade the communication between the individual and the world, in a way which allows the appropriation of a surplus-value, and indeed invade the personal emotional world such that communications are converted into transactions and the whole living personality becomes a marketable asset which must be presented in a manner adequate to its market value. Thus Michigan psychologist Barbara Frederickson whom I quoted on 4 October remarks "Positive emotions seem to broaden people's repertoires of things they like to pursue. They broaden ways of thinking beyond our regular baseline, and they accumulate." The concept of accumulation is easily linked to the concept of growth, and through this a sexual reference is likewise easily established, such that self-enrichment and sexual relations become synonymous. But having accumulated cash through all sorts of new relations, the individual not infrequently uses the cash only to shut himself off from the external world as much as possible. Jurriaan
