In American Sociological Review, Jennifer Sykes, Katrin Križ, Kathryn Edin, and Sarah Halpern-Meekin argue that for low-income families, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is not seen as a stigmatizing “welfare” handout akin to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), but a measure that allows a sense of dignity because it is earned.

Based on in-depth interviews with 115 working parents, the authors find that EITC can help families stay afloat financially—or simply splurge a little. Sometimes the credit is used for necessities, such as paying bills. Other times parents put it toward gifts or other child-centered consumption—think cartoon-themed bedroom accessories, new shoes, dinner out, or an overnight trip. This “fun money” helps take the edge off a sense of precarity. And however it’s spent, the arrival of the money is meaningful: as the authors note, “For most [interviewees], it was by far the largest single check they receive in a given year.”

The authors argue that because of the positive feelings the credit engenders among recipients, the benefit is bigger than a dollar value. The EITC allows low-income recipients to practice what the authors call “incorporative consumption.” In other words, getting and spending the credit however they see fit affords low-income recipients a sense of citizenship and belonging that typically eludes those who live paycheck-to-paycheck in the contemporary U.S.

Men display their success by spending on women: not a new idea. (Cue “Another Saturday Night.”) What’s new is which men in the world have the dough to get the date, argues Kimberly Hoang in a piece published recently in Social Problems. Studying hostess bars in Vietnam, Hoang illustrates how Asian economies’ strength and Western markets’ financial dive after the 2008 recession have affected global gender and racial hierarchies. Before this, non-Western men were disparaged as unable to provide for women, whether as lovers or as businessmen. But as Hoang observed, newly wealthy Asian businessmen and Asians working overseas upended these tropes through their consumption of liquor and ladies at hostess bars. These men demonstrated their success as many in the West lost jobs and fortunes. These Asian men’s ability to flash a lot of cash—through bottle service and lavish, visible tipping of hostesses—signals a challenge to a global hierarchy of men that imagines white Western businessmen at the top.

Hoang conducted 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork at four different hostess bars, working before and after the 2008 financial crisis. This allowed her to examine shifts in the number of bars catering to different clientele, including the emergence of spots serving newly wealthy Vietnamese businessmen. Men’s use of women in these bars is more than simply symbolic. Hoang found that the sex industry is a central space in which Vietnamese businessmen demonstrate their power to other Asian businessmen involved in foreign direct investment. Spending time together at such bars is necessary to “facilitate relations of trust in a country where investors do not have faith in legal contracts,” Hoang writes.

For Western men, hostess bars are where they seek Vietnamese women as sexual partners, girlfriends, or wives, thus asserting their masculinity, especially after the financial crisis. They capitalize on the lower cost of living in Vietnam and hew to an outdated vision of Western superiority and power over “Third World women.” This vision is out of touch with the growth of Vietnam’s economy and women’s own agency. For example, Hoang highlights how some women in these bars take control by bolstering Western men’s sense of national superiority, telling them tall tales about their impoverished village roots to spur a sense of superiority and charity that compels the men to part with large sums of money.

Men position themselves in a global hierarchy through drinking, tipping, and claiming women in these hostess bars. According to Hoang, these acts—usually understood as off-the-clock and inconsequential—are significantly related to financial markets and business deals. Hostess bars help signal rising and falling fortunes for individuals, countries, and regions of the world.

The hunt for “pink Viagra”—a medical solution to women’s so-called sexual dysfunction, identified as an official disorder in 1999—has so far proven fruitless. Sociologists Cristalle Pronier and Elizabeth Monk-Turner suggest in the Journal of Gender Studies that we stop looking. Instead, we need to consider the relational aspects of sex that many women require for satisfaction.

After surveying more than 300 female students, staff, and faculty in university community, Pronier and Monk-Turner found that social factors such as feeling intimacy, sexual agency, emotional closeness, and low levels of stress were key to women’s self-reported sexual satisfaction. Contrary to the pharmaceutical mantra “a pill for every ill,” these researchers believe female friskiness (or at least arousal) has fairly little to do with rerouting blood flow.