It's the partially examined life, episode 375 part two.

We've been discussing Luce Eriguerai with guest Jenny Hanson here.

We were in the middle of this,, which is not one book from 1977.

There is an essay in there called Woman on the Market that is very tightly related to the

Carl Marx on commodity fetishism that we talked about earlier this year.

Folks might want to even pause and go listen to that if you don't know anything about that.

But we'll try to lay out the relevant portions. Seth, did you want to get us going on this?

Sure. I'm going to start with a quote because I think it's a strong opening. So this is on page 211 to

212. It is because women's bodies, through their use, consumption, and circulation,

provide for the condition making social life and culture possible, although they remain an

unknown, quote-unquote, infrastructure of the elaboration of that social life and culture.

The exploitation of the matter that has been sexualized female is so integral a part of our

sociocultural horizon that there is no way to interpret it except within this horizon.

And when I read that at first, I was, you know, I wanted to say, okay, well, what do you mean

when you say women are commodities?

What does that mean?

And she elaborates a little further, but essentially,

she's referring to the fact, just the bald fact, that if you think about, let's call it a family

unit or even a tribal unit or something like that, if women don't leave their families and go and

marry, I'm not even saying marry, do not reproduce with men from other families,

then the human race essentially can't perpetuate itself. And so the whole, the family structure is

kind of the nucleus of the system of production, which involves the exchange of women from one

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