The Honest Courtesan

Regular readers need no introduction to Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist, whose groundbreaking book Sex At the Margins introduced the term “rescue industry” and set the bar for conversations about sex work and migration for two decades.  When she told me of her new project, I invited her to write about it; I think you’ll find the result as interesting as I do!

What do you do when you get pretty old and have no pension but do have your health?  I had to confront this during a couple of years of lockdowns, living in someone else’s house because I was trapped by airports closing.  But for some years before that I had wanted something new to happen.  I wrote a crime-novel, The Three-Headed Dog, and would have been glad to write its sequels, but it seemed impossible to get the book seen by more than a small number of readers, and anyway I didn’t want to sit in front of screens all the time.  So after enormous amounts of walking and exploring during lockdowns, I thought about becoming an on-the-street guide.  Not to take tourists to the bucket-list sights but to lead the kind of walking tours I like, with guides who take you to places far from the obvious, such as weird industrial areas, backwaters, and neighbourhoods no one ever tells you to visit.  I’ve been a house- and cat-sitter for many years so was always doing this on my own, but here were guides who could tell me histories of these places.  So I thought I might run walks where I could give my own kind of history, ignoring mainstream events and personages – monarchs, prime ministers, wars, celebrations of capitalism – and instead talk about ordinary working stiffs, especially women, who usually get left out.  It would just be me having my own point of view as always, only on the street, talking with anyone who wants to sign up – no institutions or classrooms involved, even virtual ones.

Is it possible to include sex work in guided tours without being a jackass?  Ever since I began talking in public about the sex industry, I’ve dealt with the problem of language; always someone is offended, if not by the topic itself then by the words used.  I wondered if I would ever discover the perfect vocabulary that would enlighten without someone in the audience looking hacked-off.  Then I realised it was a hopeless goal.  My PhD thesis-proposal was called The Production of “Prostitution”, a term impossibly fraught and divisive and yet it’s the one everyone knows.  “The Sex Industry”, “Commercial Sex”, “Sex Work”: all require explanation and endless quibbling about which phenomena are to be included.  Spin-offs like “the Sex Trade” and “Survival Sex” and absurd inventions like “the Sex Work Industry” add to the chaos.  On top of that, many sex workers use and affirm the word “Prostitute”.

For my own label, I’m keeping the “Naked Anthropologist” handle because it continues to describe my point of view.  “London Walks with Gender, Sex and Class” tells what my commentary focuses on, and I’m still the same person thinking about sex work and other ways women choose to get by, make ends meet or make more money than they would in the usual jobs available to them.  Remember, I got started in the Caribbean 25 years ago listening to poor women planning to migrate to work in Spain, where they had two job-options: live-in maid or sex worker.  Conversations went like this:

Woman 1:  I’m going to be a prostitute, I’d rather die than be someone’s maid.
Woman 2:  I’m going to be a maid, I’d rather die than be a prostitute.

My walks will always include people who sell sex.  For my walk in September’s Totally Thames Festival, “Scratching Out a Living”, I created six characters whose jobs were common amongst the poor in 14th-century London.  One is a laundress who can’t make ends meet unless she also sells sex part-time.  Another prefers picking pockets to selling sex.  The language of the time called these two women “common”; being without a husband was grounds enough to assume the worst.  A third woman is a migrant who manages a regulated brothel with her husband and is on the house’s roster of prostitutes: married but fully professional.  Historical language shows us how women who deviated from the norm were stigmatised. In another walk, “The Backside of Knightsbridge Barracks”, a woman from the country comes to London to work as a maid; she meets a dashing horseguard in the park and becomes his dolly-mop: This term for an unmarried woman having sex with a soldier indicated to listeners of the time that she was “an amateur prostitute”.  She gets pregnant, he helps her out from his paltry pay, and after a couple of years they get permission to marry.  Their daughter grows up, marries and leaves home, but that doesn’t work out and her life ends when Jack the Ripper finds her sleeping in an East End courtyard.  There’s no evidence she ever sold sex, but police and newsmen of the time said she did.  In this same walk Harriette Wilson is an author and demi-rep: this term, composed of “demi” meaning shady or doubtful and “rep” for reputation, indicated Wilson was a certain type of prostitute, who tries to blackmail the Duke of Wellington.  Catherine Walters, courtesan on horseback in Rotten Row, sometimes got the label horsebreaker (another term for prostitute); she lives a long life discreetly listening to old men’s stories and persuading them to contribute to her maintenance.  I’m creating other walks all the time, full of ideas about the women omitted from histories.  And I suppose I’ll never offer a walk that doesn’t have paid sex in it because it wouldn’t be real life.  Sometimes the women are called mistresses, and sometimes they may have managed to preserve their technical virtue by sticking to hand-jobs, but the language always marks them out.

Luttrell Psalter, Add. 42130, British Library

If you come to London and are interested in Plain Talk on the subject of sex work, come on a walk with me.  Selling sex isn’t going to be a special emphasis, but it’s always going to be there, the way food, drink and politics always are.  To know the dates of scheduled walks, follow my blog and see the Walks Calendar tab on the top menu of my website.  Or follow me on Eventbrite: The Naked Anthropologist.  You can also contact me for a private tour, either on the platform ToursByLocals or via the contact-form on my website.  For private tours I’ll do the research required to come up with history of a particular area or person that I can recount on a series of pauses in a walking tour of a few hours.  I like research, and I’m good at it; I do it in the British Library, where during lockdown-years I focused on the late Middle Ages because I was annoyed at the superficiality of commentary on the medieval regulated brothels of Southwark.  When the dearth of references to the existence of working women was a yawning crevasse I took to perusing illuminated manuscripts in a special room, because for a short period illustrators in East Anglia decorated the margins of religious texts with figures: mostly antic, often grotesque, occasionally realistic.  Just above is an example: a detail from the early 14th-century Luttrell Psalter described as “A Lady at her Toilet with her maid”.  Some interpreters of these marginalia go further, however, to say the lady is obviously a prostitute.  You know what they mean by prostitute?  A woman looking at herself in a mirror.  Go figure.

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