fields". This is definitely applicable to the word and manipulation of the word "use". In terms of sexuality, it is commonly thought that the speaker is "advising the young man on the proper 'use' of his semen". The same critic also interprets the sonnet as the man misusing his semen by masturbating. Seen throughout many of the Procreation Sonnets is the idea that "the proper 'use' of semen involves not the creation of life as such but the creation of beauty". The sonnet may not only be referencing masturbation though, the "language of usury in the procreation sonnets [is a language that] has strong associations with both prostitution and sodomitical relations". There is, however, an economic aspect as well, changing the connotation of the quatrain. "Usury may denote a specific economic practice," but also at this time, "it [meant] all that seemed destabilizing and threatening in the socioeconomic developments affecting early modern England". Sexuality The poem can be read simply for its ideas regarding the young man's beauty being expressed metaphorically in terms from the world of money, but the sonnet contains subsidiary meanings or innuendoes that refer to masturbation or auto-eroticism. The innuendos suggest it is a waste for the young man to spend his seed on self-gratification, and not use it for reproduction. Beauty Joseph Pequigney said that Shakespeare's sonnets have "erotic attachment and sexual involvement with the fair young man with whom all of sonnets 1-126 are concerned". Sonnet 4 clearly is a part of this group and does indeed have some references that can be taken as emotional descriptions. However, many critics seem to think that sonnet 4 is an exception in the sense that it points something much deeper than sexual attachments. Pequigney states that the sonnet "correlate economic and carnal operations, and it abounds in inconsistencies". These inconsistencies that Pequigney mentions are things like "unthrifty beauty" is later then "beauteous niggard" and how this "'profitless user' who invests large 'sums' yet cannot 'live'". They allow for the following description of the Youth: One that can "at one and the same time be a prodigal and a miser, can be extravagant with himself yet unable to 'live in posterity,' and can utilize while refraining from utilizing the sexuality of his fetching self". This complexity is what creates a "transmission of beauty" and, according to Pequigney, this is what makes "the masturbation" unacceptable. Simon Critchley says