Shownotes Transcript
Hi Janina. Hi Emma. How you doing? I'm fine. I think I'm just going to apologise at the top for everyone. I have the flu. I've been sick forever. I...
I don't know how my body functions in a normal way anymore. I...
Yeah, but apart from that, you know, I'm alive. How are you? All right. Livia is currently lying on me in the weirdest possible way because she's like across one of my arms and then has her head on the laptop that I use to have my notes on. Yeah. So I'm not the most comfortable I've ever been, I'll be honest, because obviously as a cat owner, I know that the rule is that if she wants to lie there, that's where she lies. That's where she lies. She's in charge of you.
you live in a tiny little dictatorship yeah and if she wishes to lie like this then I just have to be a slight strange angle yeah because if you move she'll stare at you she would stare at me she would be uncomfortable and unhappy and that is not allowed to happen because she's so little yeah
So we're both doing our best. Yeah, I like it when we start with the chaos level set to reasonably high. Yeah. There's no way to go without it. The chaos level is a six at least. Yeah. And we are today...
Still doing proper sexy sex history. Proper sexy sex history. And we are going to be talking about the history of sex work, which is a very big question. Mm-hmm. The question comes from Liliana Luque and Mistress Quinn.
both of whom asked about the history of sex work. And Mistress Quinn asks various follow-up questions, like who is the oldest known sex worker? And is there sex work history in kind of non-European, non-Anglophone world? Is there ever a time when it was looked upon favorably? The one that I got like really deep into the
the weeds with the rabbit hole was was there ever really a priesthood of sex workers which i took to mean was there ever sacred sex work yeah which is you know yeah and yeah uh and so we're gonna we're gonna do our best yeah i will say at the top of this before i also forget otherwise but elena inega's podcast going medieval podcast also did an episode this week
on medieval sex workers and the voices of medieval sex workers from brothels and things so that would be a good companion episode for this one because they have somebody who knows which is all sex work of all time yeah everywhere which is is and therefore is honestly not gonna be missing some details because you either get detail or you get broad brushstrokes and those are the options yeah
Also, people, if you haven't listened to it yet, we put out a bonus episode recently on our Patreon. Well, recently-ish. About Gladiator, Gladiator. Yes.
Glad to wait. We're going to try and get another bonus episode up for Patreon listeners before I go to New Zealand. Yes. Again, I am feeble of brain. We're going to try and do another bonus episode. Yeah, there's going to be one before Janina goes off to New Zealand to return to her homeland to replenish herself briefly. To remember what it is like to feel the sun on your skin. Every so often you have to return to your native soil in order to be...
replenished from the horrors of England every so often I just have to walk into the Pacific Ocean yeah or I die yeah like a vampire every so often you must sleep in your native soil
Yeah. Anyway, yes. So sex work. I got really into talking and thinking and reading about sex work in ancient Mesopotamia because that is the oldest culture in the world that we know about. It's the oldest culture that has writing, that invented writing and also the wheel and also agriculture and also everything else. So I was like, I wonder if they invented sex work as well. Turns out, yeah.
Obviously they did. I will say straight off the bat that if you Google this, you are going to get loads of shit, including on Wikipedia, about how there was sacred sex work and sex work in the temple, that women would either be like priests would either do sex work or that women would sell themselves in the temples for religious reasons. And that is not true.
Not in any religion anywhere ever? Not as far as I can tell. There are two places where it is said to have happened and one that Wikipedia gave me that when I then followed that rabbit hole as far as I could go turned out to be utterly unrelated. And so the Mesopotamia, which covers a lot of different cultures and about 3,000 years of history...
which is a good long time. It's a solid chunk. It's a solid chunk of time. So it's like we're talking about, you know,
If we're talking about ancient Mesopotamian culture, we're talking pretty much from about 3500 BCE, which is when they start learning to write and build cities. And the first cities are built through to probably kind of the end of Babylon, which is about 100 BCE. So it's 3000 years worth of history. That's a lot of cultures in a fairly big swathe of land that in Mesopotamia is broadly between the Tigris and the Euphrates, so Iraq and Iran and Kuwait.
And we have lots of evidence from the Sumerian and the Akkadian and the Babylonian periods, and then lots of external evidence about the Babylonian period, because the Babylonian period is biblical times through to Hellenistic times. So we have Greek evidence, we have biblical evidence, we have lots of other things. So it's a big old broad suede, and quite often people will take Babylonian evidence and then cast it back to 2,000 years to Sumeria. Sure. So they'll be like...
Here's a thing I heard about the Babylonians now in 360 BCE. And I am going to put that into 2500 BCE, which is mad. It's like saying you read something that happened in the Georgian period and then saying that the Romans did it. Yeah. Like, just is a silly thing. It's like saying you read something that someone did last week and put it back. Yeah. The Romans did it. But people love to do this. Yeah.
And the main evidence for this idea of Babylonian sex work, like sacred sex work, is a specific phrase or specific paragraph in Herodotus' histories, which are from the classical Greek period. And he is... The histories are an amazing book and they're full of simultaneously the most fascinating information and the...
Wildest thing you ever heard. So he'll be like, I went to Egypt and chatted to a guy and he told me that the rations for carrots were X, Y, Z, you know, like fascinating. And then he'll say, and then another guy told me that over there they have ants that are the size of camels and they steal all the gold. And if you go near one, then they chase you and they'll eat you. Yeah.
very reliable information so it's very tough to know what the fuck's going on basically but he has this bit where he is describing babylon and all of the things that he has heard about babylon and he describes what he thinks are their weirdest customs and so the first is that they get brides through two different auctions so they don't get married like the normal way but
they have auctions yearly where they like sell off the women who are ready to get married and they'll have like a bridal market for the pretty ones where they will just like auction them off normally and which he thinks is a very good idea and then they have like a second market for the ugly ones sure for the ones that nobody wants they have like a dutch market for them and he thinks this is a brilliant idea
Secondly, another one that he quite likes is that instead of having professional doctors, and I sort of love this as like a pre-Google way of looking up your own symptoms, they take the sick out into the town square and just sort of leave them there. And then anyone who comes past can just be like...
Looks like scabies to me, mate. Sure. Have you tried, you know, rubbing the brains of a puppy on it? Yeah. Oh, like, oh, no, no, that's not scabies. That's, you know, bites from a flea or whatever. It's like if you're being treated in a teaching hospital and they're bringing around the interns to have a look at you, except that the interns are just any random passerby. The interns are your neighbours and they don't know anything. LAUGHTER
Yeah. It's like getting your colleagues to diagnose you. Yeah. So he thinks that this is pretty smart. It's not as good, obviously, as having doctors, but sure. Sure. I mean, to be fair, doctors at this point in time also didn't really know anything. Not so much. They did think a lot about the gods were doing it. So have you considered having a dream about it? That kind of thing. It's not...
I honestly think my neighbour would have had as good a chance of anyone is diagnosing and treating me correctly in this situation. He says that they bury their dead in honey, which sounds gross, but sure. Well, honey is a natural preservative. So, you know, probably also that was their medical treatment for a lot of stuff. Probably. But again,
good on a scrape it's preservatives got antiseptic qualities if you're lost in the woods find a beehive it'll be fine yeah you'll be fine I don't know what else yeah
And he also says that after they've had sex, there's this ritual purification that they always do that involves washing and praying and purifying the body after sex, which all sounds weird and unusual and is supposed to freak the Greeks out, basically. But his final one, he thinks, is very shameful and very bad.
And he says that every single native woman at one point in her life has to go to the temple of Milita, which is what he says the Assyrians call Aphrodite Milita. They have to go there once in their life and they have to stay there until they have had sex with a stranger. Sure. They have to sit in the sanctuary and basically wait until somebody... There's like a...
He describes it in quite a lot of detail for a man who never went there. Like that they all kind of sit around and there's like roped off areas. And then the men walk up and down and like choose a woman to and is not allowed to stay to the woman is not allowed to leave until a man has chosen her. And then they go and have sex outside the table and then he's allowed to go away.
They're not allowed to refuse any man, but she's also can't leave until she's done it. And he says... It seems wildly unenforceable, to be honest. Yeah. He says, basically, all of the hot ladies get this over and done with pretty quickly. Mm-hmm. But...
all of those who are very ugly and he says those who have no looks will wait for a long time unable to fulfill the law and some of them will wait for a three or four year spell which sounds very damaging to the self-esteem yeah yeah i wouldn't enjoy it personally yeah this like literally didn't happen you're kidding
Yeah. What you get is a bunch of people after Herodotus repeating Herodotus. So it turns up in loads of later Greek sources and in Roman sources of like, "Oh my God, can you believe the Babylonians did this? No wonder we had to crush them."
And then when in the 19th century people or archaeologists started digging up actual texts from Babylon and from like Ur and Uruk and these kind of ancient cities that are much more ancient than Herodotus, whenever they found a text, because they have all the cuneiform texts, so they wrote loads of writing. Whenever they found a text that talked about a woman in a temple, they were like, ah, a prostitute.
Right. Any woman in any temple, we know what she's up to. Yeah, literally, yes. And so loads of words were broken down into like, literally whenever they found a woman in a temple, they were like, yeah, okay, sex workup.
and it's very a lot of like early 19th century early 20th century stuff when they first start translating Cadian and Sumerian is like and this woman was sent to the temple to be a prostitute and everyone was like yes yes and then in like 1989 one guy there's like two people who have absolutely dismantled this thing one guy wrote a PhD thesis and then another woman called Sarah Budden wrote a book about it and was like what
the hell are you talking about? That is very clearly not what any of this means. These are just all women in a temple. It just it doesn't say anything about sex in this. There's nothing here that suggests that sex has happened. There are a couple of references to like a ritual marriage at certain points in Mesopotamian history between the high priestess of Iannana who's like the main goddess and the king and
but nothing about sex in that ritual marriage, just that there would be a ceremony. There is, however, and I was very, very pleased to find this, one single unambiguous reference from the whole of Mesopotamia to sex in exchange for money, which is for the
Like, I decided that I would be quite narrow in my interpretation of sex work because a lot of people are very, very broad and are like, dancing for money is sex work or talking to men for money is sex work. I was like, well, in that case, therapists are sex workers, but okay.
But there is one unambiguous reference to exchanging money for what appears to be penetrative sex, which comes from somewhere between, and I enjoy how specific this number is, 1894 BCE to 1595 BCE. So it's still a 300-year period, but we are like...
to 1500 years BCE. Sure. Very, very ancient. It's in Old Babylonian and it is a song, like a prayer song written to Inanna, the goddess. Mm-hmm.
And it is like a back and forth between the goddess and the king. And it is referencing their marriage. And it's also referencing the idea of sex between the goddess and the king. Not the priestess and the king, the goddess and the king. And it is glorious because it is disgusting. I read this aloud to Connor, my husband, when I found this. And he looked at me like our marriage was over. LAUGHTER
And Anna, the goddess, starts and she says, do not dig a canal. Let me be your canal. Oh, sure. I see what she means there. See where she's going with this. Yep. There's a theme. Do not plow the field. Let me be your field. Farmer. And this is the point at which Connor started inching away on the sofa. Do not search for a damp place. Let me be your damp place. Yeah.
So as you can see, I think they're not,
If they were going to be talking about sex, they're not that metaphorical about it. Right, yeah, yeah. The metaphor has lit up with fluorescent lights. It then goes on. So he replies, he's like pretty happy about this, and he compliments her and says, when you speak with a man, it is womanly. When you look at a man, it is womanly. When you stand against a wall, your nakedness is sweet. And when you bend over, your hips are sweet.
Okay. Which is nice. It is nice. So she said, I'm up for it. He says, you're hot. And she says, when I stand against the wall, it is one shekel. When I bend over, it's one and a half. Okay.
I wonder why more for bending over, you know? Yeah. But I guess, I don't know. I mean, she's setting her own prices. I'm not going to say that she doesn't have a right to charge exactly what she wants to. Yeah. So that is one ambiguous reference to the idea of sex in a temple pretty much ever. Yeah.
Right, great. And in exchange for money. Yeah, in exchange for money or in any kind of sacred sense. And it is clearly sex between a king and a goddess. So I don't know that we can really extrapolate that out anywhere further. But I enjoy that that exists. My husband doesn't. It's just a shame that you hadn't heard of it before your wedding. It is because we could have done it on the stage. Could have had a reading. Oh, yeah.
Connor was uncomfortable enough with being on the stage at our second wedding anyway. So this would have made it so much worse. Next time. What is the point of being married if not to make your husband visibly uncomfortable in public? Yeah. Well, that was our one year anniversary when we did the...
So for people who don't know, my husband and I got married during the lockdowns and so didn't have a wedding. And then on our one year anniversary, we had a reception basically and we renewed our vows and Janina was our celebrant and we did it in a theatre. And we did not read that, disappointingly. Maybe we'll do a 10 year anniversary party. Put a reminder in your phone now for like nine years from now. Just be like, if...
You say nine years. It's been three years. It's been three years. Four years. Jesus Christ. It's a four-year anniversary this year. So a reminder for five years from now just to say if you plan this, remember to do a reading. Yeah, of that. Yeah, of some ancient Babylonian love stories. Yeah, so that is basically sacred prostitution, sacred sex in exchange for money did not exist and Herod just kind of ruined everything for everybody. It just really...
confused the interpretation of texts for a long time and made everybody think that the Mesopotamians spent 3,000 years having sex in temples when they just did normal stuff in temples. Yeah. It's a shame. You can imagine there being some Dionysian orgies, you know?
I mean, maybe. They're mostly into like poetry. Although, you know, you get a lot of kind of like quite sexy poetry out of it. Like when's a song of songs? Like 800 BCE. That's kind of Babylonian. And that's quite hot if you like having your neck compared to a tower. Or if your hair compared to goats marauding down a mountain. Or your teeth compared to like, what is it? It compares teeth to, I was about to. Yeah, something wild.
Unfortunately, it's been replaced in my head by the Mighty Boosh bit where he compares her teeth to pearls of cream. LAUGHTER
But there is definitely something in the Song of Songs that's not that. Yeah. All I ever remember is the hare being compared to a herd of goats. Yeah. Everybody's favourite. Yes. So then I was like, okay, so what sex work does exist in ancient Mesopotamia? Like, what is the oldest reference to actual sex work that we have? Like, where are we? Because I...
to the conclusion fairly quickly that where there are cities, there is sex work. Yep. And then where there are courts, as soon as you get any kind of elite, you'll get a split between different types of sex workers. Yeah. And I couldn't really find anywhere where there were cities where that didn't seem to exist. Yeah, it seems like it's everywhere and they've all got their own slight version of what makes... But also all...
Yeah.
Yes, I will say that I could not find much evidence or any evidence really, but not that many people have written about it because everybody has become entangled in this sacred sex work question that when reading about Mesopotamian stuff, they're...
everybody has to spend so much time dealing with that issue that they can't really don't have the time to get to anything else but we do find references to women of the street which is generally interpreted as a sex worker although not necessarily because it also clearly just refers to women who don't have a home but
So that's kind of broad. They do have for pretty much the whole of Mesopotamian history, as far as I could tell, multiple wives and concubines. And when you start to see law courts and contractual negotiations about land emerging and people worrying about who's looking after children, so kind of like the
babylonian period really you start to see people being concerned about whether the children of concubines can inherit and that kind of thing and second wives and main wives concubines are very rarely seen as sex workers because everybody is so unclear about what a concubine is like is a concubine a woman who is there of her own free will it or is she enslaved and
Or is she a girlfriend? But I do think that concubinage is a form of sex work.
yeah i i think so too because what you are doing is giving your company and your like you're not necessarily there just because you're really into them but either way that is your that's your role in society in a way that it's your job and it's kind of your profession yeah like that's what's paying for you to live yeah and i'm open to other people to but i think about i used to have a boyfriend who's
was very, very rich and she had a friend whose job was being the professional girlfriend of an emir from...
Right.
Right. Yeah. And as a result, she couldn't really leave the relationship unless she wanted to leave everything that she had. Yeah. Because he owned her houses. He owned, technically had purchased all of her clothes. He, like everything that she had was paid for by him. And so that was her job. Yeah.
And she was in it. She loved him. They loved each other. And she was in it very willingly. But at the same time, there's a power dynamic there that is like he's also kind of... It's not a relationship that is on equal standing. No. But then that then brings in lots of other questions into what constitutes a job in a patriarchal society that requires a capitalist patriarchal society that encourages women to be
reliant on men like a woman who chooses to not work and therefore is entirely economically dependent on her husband and also doesn't have the freedom necessarily to leave because she has no independence she's no way to support herself without him like that's also there are all of these under patriarchy and under capitalism these
These are very blurred lines. They are very blurred lines. And this is, you know, to go classic on the situation, this is why Engels said that marriage itself was sex work and why a lot of people, you know, in second and third wave feminism rejected marriage as a form of sex work. And I think that there is a very blurry boundary as to what we call sex work. And it means that people get very focused on sex
It's weird because people get very focused on a particular form of prostitution, basically. Like a woman in a brothel or on the street who sells sex acts and that is it. But then when you look up like...
One of the questions was like, who's a badass sex worker? So I was like, okay, let's see what comes up when you Google who comes up as famous sex workers. And what you get exclusively in these lists is courtesans who are not that at all. But for the purposes of this, they're not being studied as sex workers, but they are being put in this line where they are poets
They are dancers. They are accomplished women who sell their company as much as anything. And very often will sell a long-term kind of girlfriend experience to people.
rather than, you know, it's a very different thing. And if you try to look for famous women who existed within the form of sex work that gets studied, then like, you know, when anthropologists and sociologists and health workers and whatever are going out and talking to sex workers, they're never talking to women like that. Yeah.
They're always talking to women in the kind of the much lower class of sex work. And so I think it's a very, very blurry, blurry thing. And so you can you can talk about this part forever, to be honest. Yeah. Like and there isn't an answer. So everybody will have their own answer about what it is. But I will say that I did find that.
The oldest named sex worker that I could find. The oldest woman who appears in any kind of record as a woman who is penalized for being a sex worker because obviously she is. Mm-hmm.
Also because often the records that we have of people doing a thing is because someone sued them for doing the thing or they got arrested for doing the thing. Yeah, it's not illegal. And in most cultures, it's not illegal. It's a fairly modern thing to make a criminal act for anybody involved. But she basically her name is Bolter.
And in the year 573 BCE, she lives in Babylon. And she came to an arrangement with her brother because she had become pregnant and had had a child. And she wanted to keep the child. But during her pregnancy, her brother had been paying for her to live. And he basically said...
Give me the kid or I'm going to cut you off. Essentially, I learned like you'll be stuck with the child and no way to earn a living or I'm going to raise your child as my own. And so she gave up her...
son and he was to be raised by her brother um so that and then she would then go off and continue her job and basically he was like like i don't really approve of what you do for a living and so you have a choice you either give up the kid or um it's not great incentive um yeah
like a bare incentive would be I'll pay for you to not do sex work anymore but basically he for whatever reason he takes her child and she signs a contract that says that she is handing over care of the child to her brother and that she can now do whatever she wants as long as she doesn't try to reclaim the child so that is Bolter is I think from my investigations the oldest
sex worker in history which I think is pretty good that's pretty good two and a half thousand years ago yeah it would definitely mean before her but we don't know who they were we don't know who they were sadly but she is the oldest named one and after that we are basically in classical period
It is so hard to find anything proper, what I would consider to be properly ancient about the rest of the world because...
there's so few documents and where there are documents, it's not the kind of thing that they talk about. And also because I'm not an expert in any other field and burying through stuff is also quite hard. But, and there is such a focus on, see, I consider anything after like 600 CE to be effectively modern. Like,
And anything after a thousand, I'm like, what are we doing here? We can practically ring them up. This is essentially yesterday. Exactly. And so many of the books and articles and stuff that I found were also post-colonial. There's a real fascination, for fairly obvious reasons, with what colonialism does to the world. And what it does is change it fundamentally and radically. Yeah, it makes it extremely hard to know what happened before because...
It also destroyed trust in oral systems. It creates a break between the modern era and pre-colonial history in loads of different nations. And we should go and think about what we did there. We should because we, you know, Europeans not just really messed up a load of places and imposed their own moral systems on it. So we'd march in and be like, oh, sex work's illegal now.
but would also destroyed records, like deliberately destroyed records and forms of knowledge that might have preserved anything about daily life prior to their arrival. So one of the rabbit holes I went down was the Inca Empire, because one of the things that is referenced on Wikipedia for sacred prostitution is an Inca goddess whose name I'm not going to try and pronounce that day.
there was a ritual because Inca did do human sacrifice. It was a ritual where a woman would be sacrificed and then a man would put on her skin and kind of dance around in it. And somehow in some kind of popular culture, like blurring of stuff, this has turned into that this was a goddess of
sex work and that there was some kind of ritual sex work involved. She seems to be a goddess of maternity and fertility and I could not find any actual academic writing about
this that was anything to do with sex work. So I think that might be imaginary, but also there's so little lust. And I found a couple of articles about pre-colonial Africa, most of which were like, we have absolutely no idea. All we know is that sexual behaviors and sexual standards were massively disapproved of by the Christians and Catholics
and Muslims as well when they showed up. And we know that there was polygamy. We know there were non-conjugal sexual relationships. We know that there were ways in which, because Nigeria is often the main focus of pre-colonial studies or any kind of African studies. So I found one about pre-colonial Africa by Mfunamaren Ekputu, who said, basically, we don't know, but we can say that, and this is a quote,
certain salient features of prostitution, such as the indiscriminate sale of sexual services, were lacking in the pre-colonial environment of Nigeria. So that seems to be the conclusion for, at the very least, pre-colonial Nigeria. But so much of that information is just lost that we don't know. And we only know about stuff that's ancient, really, in China and Japan. But even then, people fucking love to talk about.
And Greece and Rome and the Greek and Roman world where we know tons of stuff because they love drawing stuff down and they loved talking about sex.
So that was basically a very long-winded way of saying like all things that try to do a history of always just do, they start with Greece and then they do Rome and then they pretend like the rest of the world didn't exist and that always really annoys me. So I did try. Yeah.
But this is exactly the problem with that, right? Like we have all of historical record being obsessed with such a small slice of the world. That's why stuff gets lost from everywhere else because it's not valued and replicated and reproduced and maintained. Yeah, or translated, which is the other problem. But so Greece, I think, exemplifies a...
a situation that I found over and over again all around the world that I found in medieval China, in Japan, in India, in all kinds of places, which is that there are
Sex work is legal. It's open. It is absolutely fine for people to engage in it, for men to engage in it specifically. It is legally permissible, very often taxed for women to engage with it. But the women and men, because there are plenty of male sex workers as well, are going to be stigmatized by it.
And they're going to be stigmatized in the same way that entertainers are. And it is seen as a form of entertainment that is fine in its place, but you wouldn't want to bring them home to mum, basically. And then you have two...
You have the lower classes who sell sex, many of whom will be enslaved, who will very much not necessarily be there of their own free will. And you are going to have a higher class who are more likely to be free and
And whose job is going to be entertaining and accommodating and stimulating on a level that includes sex, but does not necessarily include.
finish at sex and honestly sounds like fucking hard at work yeah but the the power that you have there is the ability to turn people away and in classical greece there are some very famous courtesans so that that you know that is what a courtesan is basically so the the
Athenian general Pericles who fights the Peloponnesian war and then dies and then they lose but he
But he has a long-term relationship with a woman called Aspasia, who is a foreign woman. She's non-Athenian and she is considered to be a sex worker, basically. There is a tradition that she was tried for impiety because she was an open sex worker. She had his son,
And she's considered to be kind of a very... Certainly in modern kind of understandings of her is considered to be a very accomplished, independent woman, essentially. And there are several other kind of relatively famous courtesans from this period who are... They're called Hattairai. And they have this ability to...
choose their clients, charge as much as they like, and they give a kind of good old girlfriend experience, I suppose. And so there are quite a few that appear. So another very famous one is a woman called Frinae, who appears in lots of Roman era stuff because she erected a golden statue to herself or had a golden statue erected at the Sanctuary of
Delphi. And so in amongst all of these statues of like kings and gods and various other people and, you know, and athletes and things like that, there is this woman who is, according to the legend of her, a courtesan, a sex worker. I think that's also where you get the name Franny Fisher from Miss Fisher's. Oh, really? Yeah.
I assume so. She's called Phryne. I think it's... There may be another, like, important Greek figure she was named for, but... It seems likely there was probably this one. It seems likely it was probably this one. Yeah. So, according to Pausanias, it stood next to a statue of Philip II of Macedon, the dad of Alexander the Great. And the story about her, basically, is that she was a sex worker and everybody loved her so much that they put up a statue to her. It's also possibly...
that she funded the rebuilding of the walls of Thebes, the city of Thebes, after Alexander the Great destroyed them. In which case, their statue is because she paid for the walls to be fixed. But either way, that's nice. It's lovely.
Yeah. And then in Xenophon's book about Socrates, a memorabilia, he has Socrates in conversation with a Hittite called Theodote, who basically he keeps trying to persuade her of ways to make her business better and make more money. Yeah.
And she's like, no, I'm cool with my life. Like, I could see more people and, like, maximize my efficiency, which is what Socrates really seems to be saying. But I don't really want to. Like, I'm quite chill with, like, I can choose my clients. I can hang out with who I want to hang out with. I don't hang out with people who suck. And he's like, but you could make more money. Feels like a Joe Rogan podcast, but...
What do you mean you enjoy your life as it is? That's not possible. Yeah, like it's two steps away from have you considered getting into crypto? Have you considered re-optimizing every single minute of your day and like counting your fucking macros? Can we talk about biohacking for a moment? Yeah. Who are you measuring your erections? That's the question. Yeah.
Yeah. And so there are these women who have like, and it is an acceptable place in society, basically. And then we also see references to lots of other women who are just like everyday sex workers who are women.
working in brothels working in much less like delightful surroundings musicians like flute girls is a kind of low-key euphemism for sex worker because they play the parties are the only women who are allowed and then they have sex with the men it's kind of a considered part of the job and
And a very similar situation carries over into Rome, although Rome, because they love writing stuff down, just bureaucrats to the core, obviously just codified everything.
So they're like, sex work exists, that is fine. We're chill with it. Like, pay your taxes. Like, we've got no real interest in who goes or what you're doing. Just you can't do it if you are a senator's wife or daughter. Although there is a fairly famous example of a woman who was so adulterous that I think she's in the reign of Tiberius that she basically registered herself as a prostitute. Yeah.
Just because she wanted to have that much sex? Basically, she was going to get into trouble for adultery. This is after Augustus's adultery legislation came in, where they could send you to an island for adultery. And she was going to get into trouble for it. And so she was like, well, I'm just going to register as a prostitute then, and then I'm just doing my job. Yeah.
And it's not adultery because of work. Can't argue with it. And they were like, no, you're a senator's wife. You can't do that. So they had to, like the emperor had to step in and be like, look, we've got rules about senators and we have to protect them. But anybody else could. And then, but legally they are put into a category alongside like,
People who own bars, actors, gladiators, like anyone who does entertaining for a living as infamies. So they're not allowed to make a will. They are not allowed to use the courts for anything, essentially. Everyone always has it out for the arts. Yeah, exactly. LAUGHTER
Exactly. But you do get things like one of my favorite facts about the Romans and one of the things I find just eternally fascinating about them is alongside the lives of the Caesars and the lives of the famous grammarians that Suetonius wrote, he also wrote a lost book called
blame the medieval monks called lives of famous whores there is such a tragic loss it is a tragic loss this is why you shouldn't leave important things to the church yes and i don't know if there was one thing like i would want to come out of any lost thing in herculaneum it would be top five yeah
But yeah, so there is this idea that there can be famous. And there's also Hispali Fakiena, who I wrote about in 21 Women, is described by Livy as a well-known prostitute, like a woman who has a reputation as a relative. She's quite famous in her field. I love the idea of famous sex workers. Yeah.
Yeah. A concubinage is very much a thing as well and it's legally. Once again, if the Romans can make a law about it, they absolutely will. Yeah.
is like legally defined. But most of those women, most concubines are enslaved women or formerly enslaved women who are kept on as kind of sex slaves. Sure. Yeah. And there is also a full class of boys called long haired boys. Imaginative. Yeah. That I'm kind of obsessed with at the moment because they appear over and over again as an example of
amongst the Roman elite is having long-haired boys and they are I'm so sorry about this I'm going to content warning here for pederasty they are prepubescent boys who are very very pretty who are many of whom are North African or Arabian or kind of West Asian who are
kept in slavery and are purchased because they are pretty as sexual objects. They are paraded at dinner parties. They're very often cup bearers. So cup bearer also becomes a euphemism. And many, many references are very, very explicit that these are children that men are having sex with.
Sure. That they are... And there's a famous letter of Seneca where he says, you know, you have to feel sorry for the boys who are approaching puberty knowing that they still have to, like, go. Like, they're getting older. And on the one hand, they're in a privileged position, but at the same time, they're going to have to go and entertain their master tonight. So, I mean, this is a full...
class of sex slave that exists that is one of the more visible because they have become a byword for decadence and and eastern luxury but happens constantly and that is that is something that happens all the time i then after that was like okay i'm gonna go through i found a book in
about sex work in the city, a global history of prostitution that was mostly about 1600s onwards, therefore effectively modern, but did contain a good amount of stuff like before the 1600s, which I appreciated. So what I found, so I looked at Cairo and Egypt from the Fatimid period, which is like 1000-ish, then Ottoman Istanbul and
Ming China and I think that was it I think that's all I had time for but I did my best a few places and all of these places have a very similar setup whereby sex work is considered to be part of the urban workforce basically and
Like it is something that happens that is legal. It is tolerated, but it is socially ostracized. Yeah. Where you are occasionally going to find a situation where people move into places where they're not wanted. But for the most part, they are just, it's considered to be labor. Yeah. In the same way that like fullers are considered to be labor, but gross. Yeah.
Like so like fillers and tanners, like they do stinky jobs that make them socially ostracized in a way and that will kind of pollute them in a certain sense. So you wouldn't like want to go home and say, oh, here's my new...
boyfriend he's a fuller and you don't want to say this is my new boyfriend he works in the brothel but effectively the same there's no like huge difference between those things they're considered to be entertainers and are largely kept in entertainment kind of districts
So a fun thing that I did find from Ottoman period Cairo was that there was this, there were a couple of lake areas around Cairo that were considered to be like party lakes for the class system, a bit like Baiae in Roman period. Mm-hmm.
And there is one lake called the Azbacaya Lake, apologies for my Arabic pronunciation. And this is a place that was well known for being a massive party place. It is a drink and hashish and loud music and dancing and parties and late nights. And it's where you go. It's like going to Benidorm or something. It's spring break.
Yeah, exactly. And so there's sex workers there. In order to advertise their trade, women and sex workers would do a dance called the bee dance on the street.
where they would do effectively like a striptease, like stripping themselves down to kind of a light covering and then would kind of wiggle away to their place of work and they would attract the boys behind them. Sure. They use their milkshake to bring all the boys to the yard. Exactly. And I find that quite delightful. I love how they call it the bee dance. Yeah. And they go back to the hive. Yeah. Yeah.
And as you go through, so it's effectively the same thing. Once you get under the Ottoman law, they're considered to be... Things start to get harsher as time goes on and moral imperatives start to emerge. And so...
sex workers as the Ottoman regime goes on in Egypt kind of reduce in status and then they start to be seen as the same as like snake charmers and hashish sellers, like not even actors anymore. And then they get associated with crime and then there were like multiple attempts to outlaw sex.
sex work and you can tell that that worked because they do it like once every 15 years until the French come and then Napoleon
appears in Cairo in 1798 and is just like, well, what if we just killed everybody? Classic. Yeah. And it doesn't wipe out sex work because sex work is a universal form of labor. Yeah. But it does make sex workers' lives loads worse. Yep. That's everyone's favorite way of legislating sex workers. Just how can we make their lives worse?
Just significantly worse. Like what if we like, what if the social ostracism wasn't enough? What if we just really, what if we can just make them really scared for their lives all of the time? Yeah. And what if we made sure that there were no protections whatsoever because they couldn't go anywhere? Yeah.
And yeah, so that's basically how it goes for a lot of this. And then in almost all places, there will be some kind of courtesan situation. So you have a lot like in China and India, you have these lots of different types. So you have Mingzhi, like professional courtesans.
hostesses you have uh in in ming china geisha you have uh nagavadu in india you have qiyan in the caliphates hetairai courtesans you have like all of these like types of entertainment work that contain an element of sex or sexuality yeah and therefore is considered to be
higher class basically and you like to have these people about because they what's the word improve the atmosphere of a place that is the attraction of a of a courtesan it always also seemed to me and and a lot of this is is inspired by watching my favorite six-week movie dangerous beauty about veronica franco who was a famous a famous venetian courtesan where it's like they've restricted the roles of women of wives and
They've restricted the roles of virtuous women to such an extent that men cannot relate to women in the way that they want to. So they have to introduce a class of prostitutes to fill that slot that they have denied themselves from the ordinary social circles.
yeah which is a fest of patriarchy that i've always found very fascinating like where are you going to allow women to be what you actually want them to be and where are you going to try and control them yeah but then it also means that you have excluded women who are interesting and and accomplished and witty and fun to be around from the category of respectable woman yeah and they're
You have stigmatized being interesting and hot as a woman. Yes. I feel this every day, you know. It's a struggle where you're hot.
Yeah. And you're like, well, my wife, like the woman that I marry has to fit into this box of respectability. And the box of respectability means that she can't be a fun time. Yeah. And it's like, it's like the Anne Boleyn trap almost. Like Anne Boleyn is, is, is hot and fun and delightful when she's not his wife. And then when she is his wife and she's like, can you come home? And it stopped talking to Jane Seymour. He's like, Oh God, you're such a drag. Yeah.
Yeah. But if she talks to a boy and is fun and witty and delightful, he's like, stop being disgusting. Yeah. You're my wife, not some whore. Exactly. You're not the woman that I like. I don't write sexy letters to you now. I write sexy letters to other people. And so it is a, you know, it's a misogyny trap, really, like it all is. Yeah.
And it's interesting, I think, that in so many cultures, effectively the same kind of situation arises whereby there is this understanding that sex work is a form of work, that it is a form of labor, that it is something that is available that both men and women want to buy and sell. I say men want to buy it, both men and women want to sell it.
or can sell it and that there are layers within that and that it is quite a modern kind of
like closing in on that and criminalizing and making something that's going to happen whether you like it or not into something that you're constantly trying to rescue people from. And I think that there is a, yeah, but also, and I do think that this is actually important to say, there has always been a class of sex workers who were not there voluntarily. For every woman or man who has chosen to
intersex work or who has experienced sex work as a form of work. There have been women and men who have experienced sex work as profound sexual exploitation.
Yeah.
because they are not the same although they get treated as the same very often and it is like that is one of the reasons to argue for legalization right because you can't as easily if you're in that exploited class you can't find help if what you are doing is illegal yeah
And it is so hard to go and say, or even, you know, yeah. And it's so hard to go and say, I have been, you know, trafficked or I have been in a situation when there is so little help for you. Yeah. Yeah. All right. The last bit.
I'm going to list a couple of people that I found who did not really appear on lists of famous sex workers. Most of the famous sex workers that appeared were courtesans and it's like she did a dance for Buddha or whatever. Or she was an actress and then she had an affair with the king. Or she was the Empress Theodora, which came up a lot.
It comes up in all of these lists. So one I found that I really liked and thought was very interesting was a woman called Alice Smith, who was in San Francisco in the early 20th century. So when San Francisco is really just starting, which actually we're going to talk about next week, she wrote a series of essays for a San Francisco newspaper called A Voice from the Underworld.
about her experience as a first-person account of a woman entering sex work in California in the early 20th century, her experience in various different types of sex work, and then how and why she left sex work and her kind of thoughts about it, basically. And for a couple of years, she caused an absolute sensation and she prompted thousands
thousands of letters from sex workers and former sex workers in San Francisco writing about their experiences, which are fascinating. And she, basically her experience is that she grew up outside of San Francisco in a small town. She moved to San Francisco because she thought she could earn more money there. But when she got there, she realized that the cost of living was significantly higher. So she was earning kind of more money-ish, but
she still couldn't afford to really live. She was earning $6 a week as a washer woman and also was working like other jobs at the same time struggling to survive. When she was offered a kind of like offer you can't refuse, essentially, she needed somewhere to live. And a man said to her, like, you can stay with me if you
I can have sex with you. Sure. And he would pay her $10 a day. And so she immediately discovered that she could earn significantly more money doing that kind of sex work than she could doing cleaning. Yeah. And that is how she entered it. So, which I think is an interesting and probably very common, like it was an exploitation that she took
control of yeah and was like didn't choose it for myself but I can use it yeah uh she then he then abandoned her I will say she got pregnant and he was like lol classic yeah uh and just kicked her out and sent her and she had to go and work in a very bad place in order to earn enough money to have an abortion uh
And this is a 1913, actually it's before that because she was writing in 1913. So it's probably like an 1899 abortion. So bad times. But she continued working in various different brothels with different experiences and wrote a lot about her, like the different types and what she thought was a good one and how she thought that they worked the best and good clients and bad clients and just life as a sex worker, basically.
And was like, you know, you pretend that we don't exist, but I know who you are when you come to visit us. Like, I see you take off your suit, basically. And, you know, really wrote a very early version of the Juno Mack and Molly Smith book, The Revolting Prostitutes, of like advocating for sex worker rights. And her real name was never found out. But she wrote, like, basically as a result of her articles, like,
thousands of other sex workers wrote in like with their experiences and the paper became like for a while, like hundreds of published, like a, a real space for talking about sex work and in, in the open and in the public sphere, um, at a time when you do not associate like 1913 America with talking about sex work in the open that much. Um, and so, um,
I I appreciate her um she eventually um she left and became a landlord uh which is much worse it is much worse yeah uh she started she saved up enough money to with her sister start buying flats and then renting them out um
Significantly worse for the soul. Yeah, so I liked her and I also liked a woman called Laura Bell, not only because she was from the north of Ireland or because she started her job, her sex work in the 1840s in Belfast when she discovered she could make more money doing sex work than she could working in a shop. She then moved to Dublin where she kind of presented herself as a
an escort and one of her clients was allegedly Oscar Wilde's dad. Nice. And then like a lot of people from Dublin in that period she went to London where she became known and called herself the Queen of London Whoredom. Ha ha.
Beautiful. That is perfect. It is. She became so desirable amongst the crowds of the 1850s that she spent 90 days with the Prime Minister of Nepal where he spent 250 grand on her. He is the Prime Minister of Nepal, so he did not have 250 grand. So the Governor General of India paid that. Yeah.
And then she married a guy called Captain August Thithlethwaite. Perfect. Great name. Classic English upper class name there. Found religion and became wildly evangelical. That is also worse for the soul. Yeah. And spent, she was friends with William Gladstone, which is also delightful. That is delightful. But she spent the rest of her life throwing parties, inviting people around and asking them if they found Jesus as their saviour yet. Hmm. Hmm.
That's not so fun. Not so fun. But if she was friends with William Gladstone, she might have had some alright theology. Because he had some alright theology. That's true. Let's hope. I don't know. To be fair, I don't know what flavour of evangelical she was. But...
But yeah, but I just like the name Queen of London Hordom. It's fantastic. And it delights me that a woman from, she's from Glen Abbey in Antrim, went over and became, and I think that that is quite delightful. It's perfect. I love it. Yeah. So that is a very brief and as nuanced as I can do in an hour. Yeah.
Yeah. A study of sex work in history has always existed. It will always exist. You can't legislate or punish it away. Fancy sex work and unfancy sex work.
Yeah. And it will never disappear. And it did not change my general belief that it will always exist as a form of work and that the best thing you can do is ensure that nobody is there against their will. Yeah. And protect those who are so that people don't kill them. Yeah. That's preferable, I think. Yeah. I think that I maintain my position on this. Yeah. And that
That is the end of that. That's sex work solved. We've solved sex work forever. What are we solving next time? This is our new system. Apparently we don't just talk about things, we solve them.
Yeah, I don't know why I decided that we were solving things, but we are now. So next time, we are talking about Manifest Destiny. Baddies. So this is from Patrick Thompson, who said, what is the history of Manifest Destiny in American expansionism? And this, I don't know that there is... What a time to be talking about that. Yes. Sometimes history just really lines up with the question that we've got lined up.
This is a good question that I think is unanswerable because the follow up is how did the US square throwing off the shackles of European imperialism via revolution with doing some shackling themselves, especially e.g. Hawaii, the Philippines and Guam? I get so hit up about Hawaii, but I mean, the short answer to that is that they were always imperialist. And just because they didn't like King George III doesn't mean they weren't imperialist in the revolutionary spirit.
We'll get into the details of that. We'll get into the details of that next time. Yeah. Thank you for listening. Thank you to everybody who supports us on Patreon. We appreciate you. I've just sent out another load of stickers. I'm getting through them now, which is very pleasing. I always like it when I get to go and torment my poor postman by putting a big pile of stickers in the post. And
And yeah, they're very cute. So if you would like a sticker, if you would like some bonus episodes, if you would like to know that you are helping keep us in cat food and cold medicine, then we appreciate you very much. And you can go to Patreon, you can go to historyofsexy.com and ask us a question by merch, do other things. You can look at the show notes. I put show notes on there every time. If you're ever really fascinated to know by what I read and see some
DOIs. They're all there. That's a lie. I never put DOIs on. I'm sorry. But I do put links and I do always put a big list of everything that I read so you can see where I get the stuff from. Anything else? Have I missed anything? I don't think so, but I can't be trusted. I'm pretty sure not. I'm pretty sure not. Yeah. In that case, Janina...
Feel better. I hope that you have some hot whiskey and a good lie down for at least a week and a half. I've been lying down for a week already and I just don't think that I'm going to stop lying down anytime soon. Maybe your body just knows it's time to go to the Southern Hemisphere soon. It's just like I can't give up until such a time as I get to summer. Yeah.
Yeah. I guess that's it. It's just done. It's done with this shitty hemisphere.
Yeah. I'm going to get people writing to us now like, how dare you malign the Northern Ember. They won't. All of our listeners are very lovely. They never, never berate us and I like that very much about them. All right, Janina. Until next time. Bye.