Episode 371: The History of Good Food and Wicked Sex
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This is the Sex and Psychology Podcast, the sex ed you never got in school and won't get anywhere else. I am your host, Dr. Justin Lehmiller. I am a social psychologist and research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and author of the book, Tell Me What You Want, The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. Have you ever noticed how food and sex just kind of go together? For example, we often talk about sex in relation to feelings of hunger or appetite.

People sometimes eat foods like oysters because they think it's going to get them in the mood for sex. And we use food emojis like eggplants and peaches to flirt with our partners. Food and sex have a strong association, and it turns out that this goes back a really, really long time. And that's what we're going to be talking about today, the history of food and sex.

Some of the topics we'll explore include why, until recently, there was a pretty widespread belief that eating tasty and spicy food turned people into sexual deviants. They probably would have thought that I was the world's biggest pervert because I like my food extra spicy. We're also going to explore the fascinating, sexy history of the restaurant.

Believe it or not, the first restaurants were actually places that men went to dine with their friends and get physical with sex workers. That's right, early restaurants were basically just brothels with good food, and they often specialized in serving aphrodisiacs. And even in those early restaurants that didn't have sex workers, they often used women's sex appeal in other ways in order to draw in business, a trend that continues to this day in the form of the so-called breastaurant.

My guest is Rachel Hope Cleaves, a professor of history at the University of Victoria and a member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. She is the author of four award-winning nonfiction history books and one science fiction novel co-authored with her brother. Her work focuses on the history of sexuality and her latest book is titled Lustful Appetites, an intimate history of good food and wicked sex. This is going to be another fascinating conversation.

Before we get to it, here is today's top three segment presented by Field. Field is the dating app for the curious where you can really get to know yourself. While most dating apps are all about pursuing someone else, Field is carved out a space for you to find yourself and go on a journey of self-exploration. It's a space without any expectation or pressure to be someone that you're not, and it opens up the opportunity to find true expressions of yourself.

To that end, our top three segments are designed to equip you with the knowledge you need to assist you on your own journey of sexual self-discovery. In these segments, my friend Ashley Weller, host of the What's Your Position podcast, will be joining me and we'll be sharing our top three tips for exploring a different aspect of your sexuality.

Today, we're diving into the subject of opening up your relationship. So Ashley, are you ready to talk about navigating non-monogamy? Absolutely. All right, give it to me. What is your first tip for opening up a relationship? Understand the why.

A lot of times couples go into this thinking, hooray, more people to have sex with. But really understanding where your partner is coming from and the reason that they may want to open up the relationship is going to give you profound insight into who they are as a person, both sexually and mentally. Understanding your own motivations can create foundations for success across the opening of your relationship in any form.

I love that. And actually, that was the number one thing that I had on my list too. So we're definitely thinking alike. So yeah, think about what it is that you want to get out of opening up. You know, what are your reasons for it? Is it because you want to explore bisexual attractions that you have? Is it because you just want to add some novelty into your sex life? Is it because you really want to cultivate intimate emotional connections with other people?

It could be some of these, all of these other possibilities, right? There can be tons of reasons for opening up a relationship, but getting in touch with your own reasons and your partner's reasons is a super important starting point so that you can design the type of non-monogamous relationship that's right for each of you and that's going to meet all

all of your needs, right? So I think this is a super important starting point, but something that a lot of people sometimes ignore or don't do. And next thing you know, they've opened their relationship without really gone into it with any intentionality. Understanding. Yeah. And that's where things can go off the rails. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really important to also not assume that you know why your partner wants to open the relationship and really understand their truth.

Absolutely. So what's your second tip for opening up? Check in.

in regularly. Have a state of the union, whether it be every three months, every six months, figure out a time point that you're comfortable with and talk about what's working, what's not working, any new fantasies that have come up since your last check-in, anything that you tried that maybe you don't want to try again. Keeping the line of communication open is

constantly with your primary partner so that you don't get into ruts or develop any resentments.

Yeah, I think that's great. And number two on my list was also communication, but I had emphasized somewhat slightly different things. It was really more about boundary setting, right? Which I think is also a really key part of the conversation here. You know, it's what are the ground rules and do we need to revisit them periodically? So, you know, very much builds on what you're saying, but yeah, it's figuring out what it is that's going to make you and your partner feel comfortable and how you're going to manage safety concerns.

to protect your sexual health and to also reduce the emotional risks that can come along with non-monogamy, right? Sometimes people end up feeling jealous or other things like that.

And it's also about, you know, how are you going to communicate and connect with other people and bring other people into your relationship? And sometimes that's a place where you run into a little bit of insecurity and jealousy popping up because if each partner is going out and kind of looking on their own, sometimes partners might get a little suspicious or feel insecure about that. And so I think field can be a great place for couples to go to explore together.

because they have something called their constellation feature that actually lets you link your profiles so that you can search together. And so I think that can be a great way of kind of going about exploring non-monogamy for the first time in a way that makes each partner feel safe.

I actually think that being on an app where you have the ability to work with your partner to find kind of where your common ground may lie. Not everyone wants to be fully open, polyamorous, dating other people. Not everyone wants to swing. Finding that common ground where that Venn diagram sort of fits the both of you. I feel like Field is probably going to be an excellent tool to help couples who want to open their relationships more.

really benefit them in that way. Yeah, and a way to easily identify people who are into the specific type of non-monogamy that you're interested in exploring. Absolutely. So what's your third tip? Read up.

Get some books, get some experience from people who have done this before and have written fantastic articles or books or have classes or workshops that you can take. You cannot just open up your relationship and expect it to not work.

have boulders that fly at you or even little pebbles that cause little chinks in the armor. You need to understand where opening up comes from and what you might be in front of to navigate, like the ethical slut,

polysecure or opening up, which can help you understand and identify intentionality and confidence and areas that you may not have even thought of that may cause some issues down the road. But get smart, read up.

Yeah, totally agree with that. Now, the third one that was on my list was, and this will come up if you do any of that reading, right? They will definitely talk about this and say, make sure that you're starting from a good spot in your relationship. In other words, don't open up a failing relationship in order to try and save it, right? That's one of the cases where non-monogamy can sometimes go very, very wrong is because when the partners don't have a solid foundation and connection and trust and intimacy and all those other things,

It makes it harder when you go through the opening up process because you're not going to have the kind of communication you need to navigate issues, struggles, problems that might come up. So you want to make sure the relationship is in a good place before you proceed down that path.

I can't believe I forgot that one. Well, that's why we're here. We're given six tips because it's impossible to cover everything we need to know in the span of just three. So thank you so much for sharing your tips for navigating non-monogamy with us, Ashley. That wraps up our top three segment presented by Field. A huge thank you to our friends over at Field for sponsoring the segment and for helping us to expand our horizons in the dating world and on this show.

We have much more ahead on today's episode, so stick around and we're going to jump in right after the break. With Valentine's Day upon us, this is a great time to get closer to your partner. It's an opportunity to start the year by fostering a strong, healthy relationship that will set you and your partner on track to achieve your goals. Create strong ties that will last through every season in a simple and fun way with Paired, an app for couples who want to strengthen their relationships.

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Hi, Rachel, and welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here. It's a pleasure to have you here. So we're going to be talking all about your new book today titled Lustful Appetites, which is all about how we came to associate food and the pleasures of eating with sex, and in particular, with naughty sex. So where did the inspiration for writing this book come from? What's the brief story behind it?

Well, I was on sabbatical in Paris for a year and I had just completed a book on the history of sexuality. It was my second book and I had written an earlier book on the history of violence. And since I was

in Paris for a year. I was like, oh, I'll write a history of food and then I'll have done the trifecta of human existence. I'll have done, you know, death, sex and food. And so I started reading a bunch of memoirs by Americans who learned to cook in Paris. That was my kind of gestational idea. And then as I was reading these memoirs, people were just like filled with talking about sex and like linking their experiences of, this was like memoirs by Americans and Brits and

All of their experiences of food and Paris were all wrapped up with sex. I started thinking, like, is it just me? Like, I still have this, like, history of sex brain going on, or I'm just like a particularly like corny person. Like, I see sex everywhere. Or is there something going on? And finally, I decided that actually there was wasn't just me. There was something going on in the sources.

Yeah, there's definitely something going on here. There seems to be a very deep history and association between food and sex. And history is full of a lot of interesting characters who actually advocated for people to eat very bland diets with the goal of helping them to avoid masturbation or committing sins of the flesh.

So, for example, in my human sexuality courses, we talk about John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of cornflakes, who encouraged people to avoid rich and flavorful foods so as to avoid giving in to sexual temptation. And his very bland cornflake was just the ticket.

And likewise, Sylvester Graham, the inventor of the original graham cracker, had similar beliefs. So do we know where this idea originated in the first place? Like, how did people first come to think that tasty food was somehow going to make us sexually impure? Like, how far back does this go?

It goes way far back. So you can find it in the writings of the fourth century desert fathers, who are these Christian ascetics who retreated to caves. And some of them would eat nothing, but even salt was going too far. Salt itself was seen to fire up the lusts.

And this was based on a Galenic theory that things that heated your body increased spermatic production and things that increased spermatic production made you horny. And since women were understood to also produce seeds and were basically like, you know, homologous to men, then this was seen to hold true for women as well.

So it's an old, old theory and it rises and falls, but it comes to quite extremes. And it's really current. Like in the 18th century, at the beginning of my book, you have someone like John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, telling people to avoid any pickled or smoked or highly flavored foods because they're going to unleash some seriously threatening appetites.

Yeah. And so in some cases, it's actually tied in with religious beliefs, but it's not always tied into religion that this idea that, you know, we need to avoid spicy foods, otherwise we're going to be sexually voracious. Can you talk a little bit more about kind of where this intersects with religion and maybe some of the other sources that it comes from?

It definitely intersects with religion and you can find a lot of quotations in the Bible and interpretations of the quotation of the Bible that say like gluttony is the mother of lust or beware fullness of bread. You know, the next step is sodomy. Like I said, it has its roots in this medical theory as well. Humoral theory. I think it also draws on imperialism and colonialism. You can see those forces playing in as well. So like as, as,

Britain is expanding into Asia, you know, into India, for example, you get this sort of anathema, like spicy food that is associated with India. And again, kind of associated with illicit sexuality or like sexual indulgence or like an exoticized notion of Asian sexuality as well. So there's a lot of forces that contribute to this fixation.

Yeah, so there's not one simple or easy explanation for why we have this longstanding association between food and sex. It goes way back and is influenced by a lot of different factors. So early on in your book, you talk about the origin of the term restaurant and how it originally referred to a type of broth that was, quote, intended to reinvigorate the drooping mails.

And over time, the term shifted to describing a place that served this broth. And these restaurants became places where men could go to satisfy both their appetites for food and their appetite for sex. And I found that to be really fascinating. So can you tell us a little bit more about the history of the restaurant and how it was originally a place people went for both food and sex?

So it surprises a lot of people that the restaurant is a fairly recent invention because in our imagination, I think we think, oh, you could always go out to eat. Right. It's so ubiquitous in the present. In fact, there were always places that you could eat outside of the house. And this might be like in France, at least where the restaurant originates. These might have been like traders or like places where you can get like hot food to go. Right.

Or maybe if you were a traveler, you could stop at an inn and be served the tabla d'od, which is like the common meals served at the inn. But these weren't places, they weren't spaces devoted to eating, right? So if you go to the inn and eat the tabla d'od, it's bad.

Like it's just complaints in the travel literature. Like the innkeeper is just trying to like serve you as little and poor food as possible for the money. And if you sit at the wrong seat on the table and, you know, the food comes around, the platter comes around to you last, you know, you're out of luck or you get like only the like stringy, grisliest pieces of meat. Yeah.

So in the late 18th century, we call this like a period of like a culture of sensibility. And there was this idea that aristocratic men were very sensitive, you know, elite men and their brain power, like took up a lot of energy, the body, their bodies were weak and suffering. And so French men,

Chef created this thing called the restaurant, which was a restorative broth that was supposed to reinvigorate men who were like suffering from this, this aristocratic fatigue. And it was served in what we now recognize as a restaurant, like a public room with private tables. And you could come in and sit down at the table at any time and order this, right? You weren't at the fixed meal of a table d'hote at the fixed time. And once these places opened, you,

You know, they were obviously kind of like luxurious places because they're serving an elite clientele. And then they started serving other delicate foods. And this was actually challenged by the Traiteur Guild in Paris. But along comes the revolution, breaks down the old guild system.

And all of a sudden, these restaurateurs who are serving these restaurants have the opportunity to really widen their menu. And so by the 1780s and 1790s, you get the emergence of what we now recognize as a restaurant, which is a public room, often quite luxuriously furnished, you know, mirrors on the wall and the nicest new gas lights and nice china and nice silver and a menu where each item is priced discreetly and

And a broad menu. The focus is on the food. This isn't a place you go to sleep. It's a place you go to eat. You're sitting in public, but you have your own table and you're enjoying other people, the sight of other people, the sound of other people, but you have this illusion of privacy. And then on top of that.

These restaurants, many of them also offered some sensual, erotic attractions. One of the main ones were these beautiful women who oversaw the restaurants as cashiers who are called the dame de comptoir. So they were seated on these high thrones. So they were highly visible to all of the male clientele because most of the early diners are men.

And, you know, they were often dressed quite provocatively, like exposed cleavage and earrings and jewelry, and they're like renowned for their beauty. And men would go to specific restaurants to see like specific women. And then these restaurants also had these private rooms called cabine particulier that would be furnished with a table and chairs and a couch. And

And as one French journalist said at the time in the early 19th century, the couch was the plat de résistance, right? Like that is why people are going. And they had doors that locked and very discreet waiters who would not enter without knocking first.

And might not even enter if they heard screaming, right? These could be sites for sexual assault. But typically, they were sites for men to enjoy meals with sex workers, often a type of sex worker known as a supuz, who was like a woman who specialized basically in meeting men at restaurants for sex.

That is so interesting. And I'm sure will be surprising to a lot of listeners of my show. I mean, we don't typically think of restaurants as places that people go to eat and have sex. But at one point in time, that was kind of the norm in terms of how these establishments operated. And it sounds a little bit like they were kind of all like the early version of a Hooters or something, right? But a much fancier version, but where they're using sex appeal to try and like lure in customers and keep them there.

Absolutely. Yeah. The restaurant sector, as it's now known within the marketing, is a direct outgrowth of this early model of the restaurant. And cabernet particulier are very common in French restaurants in the United States and Britain in the 19th century and in the early 20th century. And famously so, like they market them. So I talk in the book about this restaurant in San Francisco called the Poudalogue.

which markets, it has marketing material advertising its Cabernet Particulier. They have these great advertisements of poodles holding a platter with champagne coupe on it in an elevator. And it's going up to, it's the waiter going up to the private rooms with champagne for the diners there. And they were notorious for places where high-end sex workers would meet clients. Yeah, so interesting. Yeah.

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Now, as you describe in the book, these early restaurants often served foods that were considered to be aphrodisiacs, which supposedly enhance sexual arousal and desire. So tell us a little bit about the kinds of foods that were commonly served. And also, you know, what do we know about how people came to associate these particular foods with sex in the first place?

So one of the most common items you would find on the menu would be seafood, and that's an old aphrodisiac association. And it comes out of classical mythology and the idea that Aphrodite or the goddess of love was born from the sea. And so in classical Greece,

All seafoods are associated with sexual pleasure and they have this erotic reputation. And that just persists into Western culture and up to the modern day. And I think it's also based on like the obvious homology between shellfish and women's genitals. So like an oyster looks like a vulva, it tastes like a vulva, like it's not a hard leap to make.

the sort of salty brininess of the oyster and other seafood. So you would find a lot of seafood. Crawfish was a very common menu item in Cabernet particulier and were seen as particularly erotic. A

A lot of like light and delicate fare. Some of the time, the menus in these cabernets particularly were made fun of for being kind of like foofy. And then there were like special dishes that were created by some of the great French chefs of the 19th century to celebrate specific courtesans.

So, you know, a bunch of foods with aphrodisiac reputations. Artichokes were common. Truffles. And I think you also mentioned poultry as another one in the book. I mean, I don't know that I think of chicken as being super sexy, but tell us about poultry as an aphrodisiac.

Certain poultry, so like partridges, because they have like a lot of eggs. So like any animal that's associated with reproductivity. So rabbits can also be seen as aphrodisiacs because they're seen as like particularly lustful animals. Because like if you've ever lived in an area with rabbits, you see like there's a lot of bunnies constantly, more bunnies and more bunnies and more bunnies.

So yeah, anything like that, anything homologous, like, you know, things that are phallic, like things that look phallic are often seen as aphrodisiacs. One of my most favorite historical aphrodisiacs, not out of fashion by the time restaurants were invented, but it just cracks me up, were any flatulence producing food. And this was because of a medical theory that the erection was caused through gas and

And so flatulence was seen to inflate the penis. And so like anything flatulent was aphrodisiac. Well, that might explain why some people have fart fetishes, I guess. But yeah, I had not heard that before about that. Good to know there's a deep history. Yeah. Flatulence foods and as an aphrodisiac. Fascinating. Quick sidebar, since we're on the subject of aphrodisiacs, you know,

Lots of the things that people think of as aphrodisiacs even today, you know, things like oysters that have had this longstanding association with desire and arousal.

they don't really work biologically the way that people think that they do. And the effect of aphrodisiacs more often than not is just psychological. And so if you are consuming a food that you think is going to make you horny, it might very well make you horny due to that power of belief or suggestion, as opposed to it actually having some biochemical impact on your body. And while it is true that some of these foods do have chemical compounds in them that theoretically could

create more arousal or desire, you would need to eat them in such large quantities that no one would ever actually be able to eat that much in order to get the effect. And then you'd probably be sick because you had eaten so much food. But yeah, the effect of aphrodisiacs, I just always like to point out, is more often psychological. It's a placebo effect more than anything.

But you said just psychological, which I take issue with. It's not just psychological. I mean, the biggest sex organ is between our ears. Well, yeah. So it is everything in sex is biopsychosocial. It has complicated. But yeah, my point with aphrodisiacs is just more it's the power of belief usually than anything.

I agree, but that's a strong power. It is. We can will ourselves to do a lot of things. And you know, that's why placebo effects in drugs and medicine are so common. It's just the act of taking a pill. People strongly believe that it's going to make them better. And lots of times people taking a sugar pill will get better from a certain disease or infection simply by virtue of taking that pill and believing that it will work.

So getting back to these early restaurants, you know, they were a place that sex workers of the day frequented. And in fact, there were even some people at the time who thought that women became sex workers precisely because they had an inordinate appetite for food. And some actually pointed to the fact that many sex workers at the time were women of size as proof that their lust for food was at the core of what drove them to this line of work.

So tell us a little bit more about this. How did the collaboration between sex workers and restaurants work? Oh, I found that so fascinating when I was reading kind of mid-late 19th century French, like early sexological work, right? I'm like, what is driving these women to sex work? And there's these theories and they're almost like French...

phrenological as well, right? There are these embodied theories that like, well, you could tell from the women's shape and their large breasts, you know, that they have these outsized hunger, that they have to become prostitutes. And of course, it is true that like,

to be a working class woman in France in the second half of the 19th century is to go hungry a lot. So in fact, yes, hunger probably did drive a lot of people to sex work. It's like they needed to eat. They needed money. You know, when there were like what were called Maison de Tolerance or legalized brothels in France,

like the women were well fed. So this is, you know, this is not a totally imaginary connection and both in France and then also in the United States and in Britain, actually brothels become like high end brothels, not like low end brothels, but high end brothels become often well known for having like good French menus. They host balls, you know, they often have chefs and like serve up good food to their guests. And it's part of what like makes,

you know, although we think of sort of sex work as like a one-on-one experience, historically, a lot of brothels were social places, right? Where men would go with friends and they would socialize collectively in the parlor. And then like, they might go upstairs to the room with a sex

worker, but that was just like one part of what they were doing there, right? You were enjoying the music and you're enjoying the furnishings and you're enjoying the entertainment and the company and you're doing it collectively with other men and like forming bonds. So yeah, food was part of that too.

Yeah, it's so interesting how brothels and restaurants went together for a period of time. And I remember when I was younger that in our hometown, there was this new place that had opened, and it was a combination of a Chinese buffet and a strip club.

And, you know, it was kind of scandalous at the time. And, you know, I thought that's an interesting combination of things to put together. But historically, no, that's actually not that different from kind of how the early restaurants look where you'd have this combination of food delivery and sex work at the same time.

It makes a lot of sense. Yeah. You can find it too in like the 12th century, 13th century London in the public baths, you know, where you would go to the public bath as a man, go to the public baths and eat food and meet with sex workers, you know, all in one. Yeah. And the job of sex workers at a lot of these establishments was really to try and upsell the men, right, on buying more expensive food or champagne or things like that as well. That was part of it, wasn't it?

Yeah, they work like, you know, modern day drink solicitors and strip bars. So this is a practice that stays with us. Absolutely. So these sex workers who are known as soupers would meet with men. Sometimes they'd linger outside restaurants, like men would go to restaurants and look outside for drinks.

Sometimes they would, you know, meet men on the street or wherever else and like bring them to a restaurant and they would bring them into the private room. The menus in the private rooms were often priced at like twice the cost of the public room. So the restaurateur like really wants people in there just the same way someone who's running a strip club right now wants the strippers to bring men into the champagne room. Right. The prices go up.

And then there's all sorts of cash grabs. The private rooms would often have fans and little collectibles on the mantelpiece. And the sex worker would be like, oh, will you buy me this beautiful fan? And then the customer would buy her the fan. And then she would come back the next day and exchange it to the restaurateur for cash.

kickback and it would go back up on the mantelpiece to be sold again, you know, later that night or, you know, she would order the most expensive things off the menu and get kickbacks on that. Or sometimes the restaurateurs were, would work with the sex workers to get them to move certain menu items that might be like close to expiring, you know, like get the guy to order these foods because otherwise they're going to be in the trash.

Or they were all just like so many different schemes for where sex workers would work in hand in hand with restaurateurs to like part customers from their money.

Yeah, so interesting that very complex interplay of how they work together in terms of, you know, supporting one another in that business. But beyond sex work, restaurants at that time, and even to this day, you know, often used sex appeal, the sex appeal of women in particular,

to draw customers in. And so even if they weren't necessarily selling sex in a private room, they were trying to capitalize on female sexuality in some way, for example, by having attractive women seated up front in the restaurant or having them work as the cashiers or as the hostesses. So tell us a little bit more about how restaurants were using women's sex appeal and various ways to try and draw in tourists and attract business.

This expands a lot in the mid-19th century with the rise of waitressing. In the very beginning, you have these dames de comptoir, but there's not that much opportunity for personal interaction between the customer and the dames de comptoir. She's mainly there to look at.

But then in the mid-19th century, some American restaurateurs, both in New York and San Francisco, get the very bright idea to start using women to run food. So prior to this, all the waiters are men. But there are these theatrical establishments in New York City called concert saloons.

And then there's restaurants in San Francisco that do this at about the same time. But in these concert saloons, there's women who are performing on stage. And one of the concert saloon operators thinks, oh, what if when this woman is not singing, she's actually shepherding drinks to the tables? And it takes off like lightning. And they become known as pretty waiter girls. And

In New York City in the 1850s, you look at the newspapers and they're just filled with classified ads for all these different concert saloons with just the word pretty waiter girl, pretty waiter girl, pretty waiter girl, pretty waiter girl repeated over and over. So it's seen as this like stunning innovation and it spreads like wildfire all throughout the United States.

New York tries to ban it. The theater operators get upset because theaters had been the place where the prostitutes were, and then men went to the theater to meet the prostitutes, but then the prostitutes move into the waiter girl saloon. So New York tries to ban it because of the theater keeper lobby. But it spreads all throughout the U.S. You can find them in every city, and it spreads back to Europe. So France, Paris develops this

institution called the Brasserie FM, which are a brasserie which have women servers. And what I argue in the book is that waitressing, which emerges out of this moment, is what we'd understand as a parasexual profession. So

You're not necessarily selling a specific sex act for cash, but what you are doing is trading sexual allure, sexual possibility, like a sexual thrill for tips. And so from the very beginning, these New York City concert saloons start dressing up

the waitresses in uniforms that are totally familiar to us today, like kilts or like, you know, kind of ethnic costumes, Turkish trouser loons, you know, all sorts of sort of exoticized. They wear short skirts, boots with bells on them, all sorts of like kind of uniforms. And of course, any in like 19th century thinking, like any woman in a uniform is sort of like open for sexual activity.

at least.

But I was a waitress in the mid-90s and late 90s when I was a college student. And I mean, this held true for me, too. I was dressed up in a uniform. I wore like, you know, black with like a little white apron, like a little French maid. And waitressing remained, in my experience, absolutely a parasexual profession. My tips depended on my illusion of sexual availability to the men I served. And in my experience, the people who tipped me well were men.

not women. And they tipped me well on the basis of how open I was to smiling and flirting with them at the table. Yeah. And that still happens a lot today. It's not to say that everyone who has an experience working in the service industry feels that way or has the same exact experience, but it goes back to what we were talking about with regard to the restaurants, right? The places like Hooters and Tilted Kilts and other places like that. It also is reflected in

the Las Vegas cocktail waitresses who tend to wear pretty skimpy outfits and are leveraging their sex appeal for tips. And so, yeah, in a lot of ways in the service industry, there is kind of an expectation that you're going to use your sexuality to make money. And those who lean into that more often tend to be more successful because again, there's just sort of that kind of longstanding association between restaurants and bars and sexuality. Yeah.

And I should say this is not restricted only to women and definitely it's not restricted only to cis women. So waitering becomes a profession that is super popular among gay men. And there's a lot of sexual flirtation between gay male. And I mean, in the 19th century, I don't just mean in the 20th century, there is a lot of flirtation between gay male waiters and customers. There's a lot of parasexual work. It remains the case today. I mean, wait, like restaurants, restaurants,

hire attractive men and gay men, both to appeal to straight women and to gay men as well. And also I found evidence that there were trans women waitresses in New York City in the mid-19th century, which I found totally fascinating. Places just hints at it in the sources that there were places where people went specifically to be served by trans women. And there were also cross-dressed women

women, you know, who cross-dressed in male uniforms in these concert girls' saloons. So there's all sorts of like gender play going on. And while at this point, waitressing is a predominantly female profession in the United States, at least everywhere except at the most elite level of restaurants, this is absolutely the sexualization and parasexuality of waiting tables extends far beyond women. Yeah. Or far beyond cis women. Yeah.

Yes, absolutely. You know, it has me thinking I could do just a whole podcast episode alone about that and how people leverage and utilize their sex appeal to make money in various industries, right? There are so many different ways that sexuality is commoditized in ways in which people wouldn't necessarily consider themselves to be sex workers, right? So even if you're not a sex worker, a lot of people are still in the business of selling sex in some form. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Well, thank you for sharing all of this information, Rachel. I'm really looking forward to continuing our conversation in the next episode and talking even more about food and sex. Can you please tell my listeners where they can go to learn more about you and your work and get a copy of your new book?

It has been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. You can visit my website, rachelhopecleaves.com, which is R-A-C-H-E-L-H-O-P-E-C-L-E-V as in Victor, E-S as in Sam. You can follow me on Blue Sky, where I think I'm at Rachel Cleaves. And you should be able to order my book through any independent bookstore. Well, thank you again so much for your time. I really appreciate having you here. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for listening. To keep up with new episodes of this podcast, visit my website, sexandpsychology at sexandpsychology.com or subscribe on your favorite platform where I hope you'll take a moment to rate and review the show. If you listen on Apple Podcasts, please consider becoming a Sex and Psychology Premium subscriber to enjoy ad-free listening for just $3.99 a month.

You can also follow me on social media for daily sex research updates. I'm on Blue Sky and X at Justin Laymiller and Instagram at Justin J. Laymiller. Also, be sure to check out my book, Tell Me What You Want. Thanks again for listening. Until next time.