Affection, costs and revenues (1996)
After the gritty and cynical period of the eighties, in the nineties, the newspapers began to carry advertisements explicitly seeking staff with human qualities such as thoughtfulness, kindness and caring, as well as technical skills. With the specialists in feeling, the user builds a society and a field of solidarity. And so they bring together a world of emotions, memories and hopes.
An entire professional business sector is taking off as a recipe against the irrecoverable wound of the contemporary world, the affection deficit. Affection is invisible and intangible, but it has noticeable effects on everyone’s quality of life. The union of profit and feelings is one of the significant social and economic trends of the second half of the 1990s. The danger is that the market will not offer something authentic but merely surrogates to minimise discomfort, avoid trauma and mislead on the possibility of not suffering.
Index
Introduction
The combination of usefulness and loving-kindness against the Van Gogh syndrome
Do-goodism, heart and bon ton, infantile diseases of the affection trade
The quality of daily life in the sentiment hypermarket
Kindness professionals, emotionalists and affection organisers
Profession, family
New family members
Virtual family members
Salesmen of friends
Friends by contract
Dealers in fraternity
Media-friends
Company supporters
Escorts and entertainers
Agency staff for getting to know each other
Specialists in communication services for companionship
Bridges between invisible acquaintances
Affection assistants
Affection helpers
Human crutches
Angels for parents
Samaritans on a thread
Marriage brokers
Media-Cupid
Address brokers
Builders of meeting opportunities
Love brokers
Manufacturers of do-it-yourself engagement kits
Courtship and love maintainers
Teachers of amorous seduction
Third party Romance
Marriage support
Engagement to marriage guides
Wedding magicians
Anti-cheating professionals
Human bonding agents for couples
Soluble marriage professionals
Virtuous divorce practitioners
Business and occupations of hard separations
Props for re-singles
The professions of the hard heart
Professionals of emotional intercourse
Therapeutic lovers
Workers in pink-light
Doctor of seduction
Eros affective guides
Experts in affective reproduction
Affective procreators
Demiurges of life
Baby carers (of all ages)
Open-hearted Hippocrates
Sanitarians with feeling
Professionals of the neo-mythology of AIDS as a business of love
Professionals of affective-biological freedom by surgery
Utero-psychotherapists
Specialists of the good death
Virgilio for an exit surrounded by human warmth
Vip-corpse organisers at work
Conclusions
The mercantile feeling, new social glue
Affection, incubator of new entrepreneurship
The social obligation to emotional enjoyment
Affection can be sold, but first it must be learned
A boot at good manners school
When white gloves are not enough
Loving robots and indifferent humans
Pills of affection against the daily apocalypse
Experts “with heart” between business and bureaucracy
Making products by giving
The image-places of the affection market
The seduction and tragedy of human touch: the emotional swindler
From volunteering to emotional non-profit
Analytical index of affective jobs and professionals