Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Harlotography’ Category

Volumnia Cytheris

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , , , , , on January 3, 2013| 13 Comments »

The tribune of the people was being conveyed in an essedum, lictors with laurel preceded him; among whom, on an open litter, a mime actress was being carried; whom honorable men, citizens of the municipalities, coming out from their towns under compulsion to meet her, saluted not by the name by which she was notorious on the stage, but by that of Volumnia. A raeda followed full of pimps, thoroughly despicable companions; then his neglected mother was following the girlfriend of her filthy son as though she were a bride.  –  Cicero, Second Philippic

Roman mimeCytheris was born a slave in the latter days of the Roman Republic, about 70 BCE.  Her parents were probably Greek, and her name (deriving from Cytherea, one of Aphrodite’s bynames) may not be the one she was originally assigned at birth, but rather one she adopted (or was given) later when it became clear what her profession would be.  She was the property of the wealthy and ambitious Publius Volumnius Eutrapelus, an enthusiastic patron of the theater, who had her trained as a mime and introduced her to the theater in her early teens.  Roman mime was not the silent niche-art it is today, but rather a blend of singing, dancing and acting, much of it improvised; it is therefore more closely akin to vaudeville than to Mummenschanz or Marceau. As I mentioned in “Meretrices and Prostibulae”, most mimes – like most actresses for centuries before and millennia after – were also prostitutes, and Cytheris was probably in the group of mimes who in 55 BCE began the tradition of ending the Floralia with a striptease (the public sex was not added until imperial times).

Cytheris so excelled at both the public and private aspects of her art that her master freed her sometime in the late 50s, but his action was not motivated by altruism; though she was legally free she was still an actress and whore and thus could not hope to rise very high in stratified Roman society.  Furthermore, she was bound to her patron by a restrictive contract which kept her from choosing her employment freely, and she was obligated to give him free performances (of both kinds) when asked.  In other words he was no longer her master, but he was still her pimp; this is exactly why he freed her.  No man of knightly or senatorial rank could associate with a slave-whore unless she belonged to him, but as an ostensibly free delicata she could be hired by the noble Romans Eutrapelus hoped to influence.  Cytheris was no exploited victim, however; she remained extremely loyal to her patron for the rest of her life, and he treated her more like a modern businessman would treat an extremely valued assistant than like something out of a prohibitionist fantasy.

Mark AntonyAbout 49 BCE Cytheris became involved with Mark Antony, who openly made her his mistress after Caesar appointed him Master of the Horse (second in command) in the summer of 48.  Their relationship did not last much longer; he was forced to give her up by the end of 47 BCE, but the reason it ended is worthy of note because it reveals Antony’s two main personality flaws (politically speaking) and foreshadows his eventual downfall.  Though his family connections predestined him to high office, his heart was never really in it; as a youth he was well-known for drinking, gambling and general partying, and even as a man he was well-known for being fond of the company of theater people, especially mimes.  But the second flaw was the tragic one:  Antony had the unfortunate tendency to fall in love with his mistresses, which of course led to his doom once he took up with Cleopatra only six years later.

Nobody in Rome cared if prominent citizens had affairs with courtesans or other women of lower social class, no matter how many patricians knew about it; what was important was that it be kept out of sight of the plebeians, and given no official recognition.  But Antony seemed unable to maintain this necessary discretion, either with Cytheris or later with Cleopatra. Rather than treating his mistresses as a Roman statesman should, he acted like a young man in love who wants the world to know about his wonderful lady.  While Caesar was off in Africa wiping out the last army loyal to Pompey, Antony made administrative rounds in Italy with the great procession the conservative Cicero (who knew Cytheris personally and disliked her intensely) describes in the epigram: he essentially treated a courtesan like a wife, even to the point of having her addressed by her nomen (inherited from her former master) as though she were a matron, rather than by the cognomen under which she was famous.  When Caesar came back to Rome, he was extremely unhappy about this and insisted that Antony break off relations with her (Cicero mocks Antony by using the word “divorce”) and cultivate a more respectable image.

For the next four years Cytheris worked as a courtesan, being occasionally called upon to seduce one politician or another as her patron required; though he supported Antony until the end, he knew how to play politics and courted the favor of both Caesar’s party and the opposition.  Only one of Cytheris’ regular clients from this period has a famous name: Marcus Junius Brutus, who later became one of Caesar’s assassins.  Her next major conquest came around 43 or 42, when she took up with the soldier-politician Cornelius Gallus, who was also an accomplished poet; Gallus was so smitten with her that he eventually composed four books of poetry in her honor.  It was the tradition in Roman love poetry for the poet to use a pseudonym for his lover; the name so chosen had to have the same number and stress pattern of syllables as the real woman’s name, and so Cytheris became “Lycoris”.  The last of these books was written in 40 BCE, after she had left him; when Antony and Octavian began the first of several major quarrels Gallus supported the latter, so Eutrapelus reassigned her to Quintus Fufius Calenus, one of Antony’s generals.

The flower "lycoris" was named after her.

The flower “lycoris” was named after her.

By the time Octavian became Augustus and the Republic became an Empire, Cytheris (now in her early 40s) had largely vanished from history.  Gallus’ poetry about her was both popular and highly regarded, thanks in part to Virgil’s tenth Eclogue (published about 38 BCE), which was on the subject of Gallus’ pining away for her.  Though Virgil also called her “Lycoris” as Gallus had, her identity was an open secret and she was held in great honor among the mimae; both “Cytheris” and “Lycoris” were popular stage names for the next 300 years.  Though we do not know how she spent her later years, we can hazard a guess:  the new Imperator loved mime, so as one might expect it grew even more popular during his reign; once she grew too old to work as a delicata any longer, the former consort to a ruler probably returned to the stage, ending her days performing as an archimima (lead comedienne) to thunderous applause.

Read Full Post »

Calamity Jane

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , on November 29, 2012| 7 Comments »

I lifted him onto my horse in front of me and succeeded in getting him safely to the Fort.  Capt. Egan on recovering, laughingly said:  “I name you Calamity Jane, the heroine of the plains.”  I have borne that name up to the present time.  –  “Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane”

The legend of the American “Wild West” era is such a powerful and enduring one that it’s sometimes difficult to remember that it lasted only one generation, from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the 20th century; many of those who either played important roles in the story of westward expansion, or who were notable for other reasons, found themselves literally legends in their own time by the early ‘90s.  One of these was Martha Jane Canary, a woman who would probably have lived and died in obscurity had she been born in a different place and time; like so many other women she made the best choices she could among the opportunities available to her, and found to her considerable surprise that they had resulted in fame (but not, alas, fortune).  She was born on May 1, 1852 to Robert and Charlotte Canary of Princeton, Missouri, the eldest of six children (two boys and four girls).  In 1865 the family headed west to Virginia City, Montana, but after Charlotte died of pneumonia en route Canary decided to push on to Salt Lake City.  They arrived in 1866 but he died only a year later, so 15-year-old Martha Jane became head of the family; she packed up the wagon and moved them to Piedmont, Wyoming, where she took whatever jobs she could find.  She is known to have worked as a dishwasher, a cook, a nurse, a driver, a dancer and a whore.

Jane does not seem to have cared that much for sex work; though it would have been the most lucrative of her jobs, her heart belonged to the Great Outdoors.  She had been an avid rider since childhood, and as related in her 1896 autobiography,  “Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane”:  “While on the way the greater portion of my time was spent in hunting along with the men and hunters of the party, in fact I was at all times with the men when there was excitement and adventures to be had.  By the time we reached Virginia City I was considered a remarkable good shot and a fearless rider for a girl of my age.”  Since she is believed to have been functionally illiterate this short document was almost certainly ghostwritten, and many of the claims it makes are at odds with known facts.  For example, it states she worked as a scout under several generals (including the infamous Custer) from 1871-1873 and took part in the Indian wars; in truth, she did not secure her first scouting job until 1874.  It also attributes her nickname to an incident which supposedly occurred in 1873; my own theory is that it was actually her stage name, perhaps derived from a drunken attempt by either a client or Jane herself to say her last name.

The pamphlet did not lie about her skills, however, which were sufficient to win her a man’s job; some historians believe that she actually disguised herself as a man, and was dismissed after the truth was discovered in 1875.  In the spring of that year she accompanied General Crook to the Big Horn River, and was sent to Fort Fetterman with important dispatches; after fording the ice-cold Platte River she rode 145 km straight, and as might be expected she became seriously ill and was hospitalized for two weeks (during which time her sex was naturally discovered).  However, it is also possible that her superiors knew full well that she was a woman (see picture at right) and that she was fired for the same reason she lost so many jobs in later years:  she had a tendency to get rip-roaring drunk and start shooting at people (though she is not known to have ever hit one).  In any case, she soon ended up in Fort Laramie, Wyoming, where she met Wild Bill Hickok; she became good friends with him and accompanied him to Deadwood, South Dakota, and it is clear that she already had a reputation by this time because their arrival was announced in the July 15, 1876 Black Hills Pioneer with the headline, “Calamity Jane has arrived!”  Though Jane only knew Hickok for a few months, she fell deeply in love with him and was therefore understandably upset when he was shot in the back by Jack McCall during a poker game on August 2, 1876, even if she didn’t really go after McCall with a meat cleaver as she later recounted.  After Hickok’s death she began to claim that they had been married several years before and that she had borne him a daughter named Jean on September 25, 1873, but gave the child up for adoption when they separated.  Though this is not generally considered a credible claim, a woman named Jean Hickok (who claimed to be that very child and had an impromptu birth certificate written by a minister in a Bible) was entered into the Social Security rolls on September 6, 1941.

Jane stayed in Deadwood after Hickok’s death, supporting herself by prospecting and occasionally working for Dora DuFran, owner of Deadwood’s largest brothel.  It was during this period that she won her reputation for courage and golden-heartedness, thanks especially to two incidents in particular:  in the spring of 1877 she rescued the passengers of a stagecoach by catching up to it and taking over the reins after the driver was shot by hostile Indians, and in the autumn of 1878 she spent weeks nursing the victims of a smallpox epidemic; three men died, but the rest all survived thanks to her faithful ministrations.  She left Deadwood sometime in 1879, apparently working as an ox-team driver to earn enough to buy a ranch and inn near Miles City, Montana in 1881.  The settled life of an innkeeper did not long appeal to Jane; she sold the place only two years later and wandered across the West for a while, eventually ending up in El Paso, Texas, where she supposedly married one Clinton Burke and bore him a daughter, Jessie, on October 28th, 1887.  As usual, other records conflict with her autobiography, including court records from November 1888 stating that she did “unlawfully bed, cohabit and live together” with a man named Charles Townley; she has also been linked with a Robert Dorsett and a William Steers, all during the time she was supposedly married to Burke and running another hotel in Boulder, Colorado.  The only detail we can be sure about is that her daughter did indeed exist, because the girl accompanied her when she joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1893; Jane gave her up for adoption in October of 1895 by placing her with St. Mary’s Convent in Sturgis, South Dakota.

Calamity Jane had always been a heavy drinker, and by the time she turned 40 it was out of control; though all she had to do for Buffalo Bill was sit on a stage and tell tall tales about her supposed adventures, her drinking eventually led to his firing her for undependability and excessive use of profanity in her shows.  He had a soft spot for her, though, and always rehired her whenever she came looking for a job again.  In 1896 she worked for a circus named the Kohl & Middleton Dime Museum, which produced “Life and Adventures” as a 7-page souvenir booklet; even after she was fired by the circus for the usual reasons, she had the booklet reprinted and supported herself between gigs by selling autographed copies of it.  This went on until 1901, when she was fired from the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York after being arrested for public drunkenness.  Buffalo Bill gave her the money to go home to South Dakota, where she returned to Dora DuFran’s brothel and was given a job as cook and housekeeper.  While on a visit to Terry, South Dakota, she died of “inflammation of the bowels” on August 1, 1903, and was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery next to Wild Bill Hickok.

As we’ve seen, the lives of whores are often full of conflicting details, and this is more true of Jane than of most.  Even other people’s perceptions of her varied wildly; one citizen of Deadwood later described her as “nothing more than a common prostitute, drunken, disorderly and wholly devoid of any conception of morality,” while another said she was “generous, forgiving, kind-hearted [and] sociable,” and one of her biographers stated that “her story is mostly an account of uneventful daily life interrupted by drinking binges.”  But whatever the objective truth might be, the legend of Calamity Jane – adventurer, wanderer, entertainer and golden-hearted whore – will be told and retold for as long as people write stories against the mythic backdrop of the Wild West.

Read Full Post »

Thaïs

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , on October 23, 2012| 21 Comments »

Thaïs the courtesan [conducted] the ceremony.  She was the first after the king to throw her blazing torch into the palace…What was most remarkable was that the sacrilege committed by Xerxes…against the Acropolis of Athens was avenged by a single woman, a fellow-citizen of the victims, who many years later, and in sport, inflicted the same treatment on the Persians.  –  Diodorus of Sicily

In order to give the broadest and most interesting picture of the lives of harlots, I try to choose the subjects of my harlotographies from as wide a range of time periods as possible.  I have decided that I won’t write on anyone who is still alive, but that still means I can cover contemporary figures such as Deborah Jeane Palfrey or Robyn Few, who have passed on very recently.  But on the other end, the boundary isn’t nearly as clear; I would be willing to write about a whore of Uruk or Mohenjo-Daro could I find a biography of one to draw from, but it seems as though Rhodopis of the 6th century BCE may be about as early as I’m able to go; her life story is a mixture of fact, surmise and legend, and though we know the names of earlier whores (such as Shamhat and Rahab), they are largely inhabitants of the sphere of legend.  This is really not so surprising when one considers that we know little more than the names and dates of most kings from earlier times, and virtually nothing about anyone else unless they had some impact on the affairs of kings.

Thaïs was an Athenian hetaera who, unlike most of her profession, enjoyed travel.  Nothing is known of her life prior to 334 BCE, but she must have already achieved quite a reputation as a courtesan because sometime around that date she attracted the attention of Alexander the Great (either directly or through a relationship with his general and close friend Ptolemy) and afterward accompanied him on all of his Persian campaigns.  Her exact relationship with Alexander is unclear; obviously the fact that she was often seen with him demonstrates that he was extremely fond of her, but it is unknown whether she was his lover or Ptolemy’s at this time.  It may be that he merely enjoyed her company; she was said to have been very wise, an accomplished orator and a ready wit with a large repertoire of dirty jokes.

Her most famous (or infamous) contribution to history came soon after Alexander took Persopolis, capital of the Persian Empire.  After allowing his troops to loot the city for several days, Alexander decided to rest here for a few months and set up his headquarters in the Palace of Xerxes.  Historians have varying views about what exactly happened next, but let’s look at some facts and see if we can’t connect the dots:  Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 BCE and, after defeating the Spartans at Thermopylae, occupied Athens.  Immediately after he took possession of the city it (including the Temple of Athena on the Acropolis) was largely destroyed by fire; though this may have been an accident caused by Athenians fleeing Xerxes’ approach, naturally the leaders preferred to claim that the conqueror had done it on purpose, and by the time Thaïs was educated almost 150 years later this was taught as historical fact.

Now, Alexander was a heavy drinker, and after one of his legendary wild parties had been underway for long enough for his judgment to be well and truly numbed, Thaïs stood up and made a speech which convinced him that Xerxes’ act of sacrilege against Athena should be avenged by burning down his palace.  A great procession was arranged in which all the participants either played music or carried torches, and Thaïs ordered the building evacuated; when everyone was safely clear she egged Alexander into hurling his torch into the building, and hers immediately followed.  Everyone else then did the same, and the blaze was so great that it soon spread out of control and consumed the entire palace district, though apparently the neighbors fled quickly because there were no recorded fatalities.

If she ever was Alexander’s lover, she had ceased to be by 327 BCE; in the spring of that year he was smitten by the strikingly beautiful Roxana, Princess of Bactria, who married him and accompanied him until his death four years later.  Whether Thaïs had started with Ptolemy or not, it is certain she ended up with him and bore him three children named Lagus, Leontiscus and Eirene.  After Alexander’s death Ptolemy became the King of Egypt, but though he married Thaïs around this time she did not become his queen because he opted for a political marriage instead.  Her daughter Eirene, however, did become a queen as the wife of Soli, King of Cyprus.

Though history records a few minor references to her children, Thaïs herself lapses into obscurity after their births; we do not even know the year of her death.  Like so many people of pre-modern times we see her only in proximity to great events in which she was involved:  she emerges from shadow into the great circle of light cast by that burning palace, is visible while she crosses the area, and then vanishes again into the darkness on the other side.

Read Full Post »

Robyn Few

Posted in Biography, Current Events, Harlotography, History, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 17, 2012| 21 Comments »

Until prostitutes have equal protection under the law and equal rights as human beings, there is no justice.  –  Robyn Few

Last Thursday, sex workers all over the world were saddened to hear of the death (after a long battle with cancer) of the charismatic and tireless Robyn Few, founder of the Sex Workers Outreach Project USA.  When the day finally arrives on which sex work is recognized in the majority of the world as work like any other, hers will be one of the names remembered as instrumental in achieving it.

Robyn L. Spears was born in Paducah, Kentucky, on October 7th, 1958, to Virginia Owen Spears; she had an older brother and a younger sister and lived in the small community of Lone Oak, Kentucky.  She attended Lone Oak Elementary and Lone Oak Middle School, but dropped out and ran away from home either during or after her 8th grade year, when she was 13 years old.  The causes of her leaving are not clear, but whatever they were she later reconciled with her mother and in fact died while visiting at her home.  Like so many runaways she soon turned to survival sex work, and though she later received vocational training to be a materials tester for concrete and tried a few “straight” jobs such as drafting, she was never satisfied with these and became a stripper soon after turning 18.  As she says in the video below (recorded in Chicago in July of 2008), “I loved it so much; it was so empowering to be able to get up on the stage…I came alive, and for me being paid to dance and to show my body [that] I was so proud of anyway…it was just an amazing experience.”

After stripping for a while she started working in a massage parlor, then later escort services and a clandestine brothel; in her late 20s she married one of her clients and had a daughter, but after her divorce in 1993 (after which she retained her married name, Few) she moved to California and began to take college classes with the intent of earning a degree in theater.  She became interested in marijuana and AIDS activism, but the bills had to be paid so she returned to escorting in 1996 and soon became a madam.  Like so many of us, she never told anybody about her sex work; her activism was directed toward other causes until fate decreed otherwise.

The events of September 11th, 2001 engendered a heightened climate of paranoia, and the enactment of the PATRIOT Act soon made an unprecedented level of funding available to any government agency which could make even a remote claim to “fighting terrorism”.  And though then-Attorney General Ashcroft had been strongly rebuked by Congress for devoting more FBI agents to the “Canal Street Brothel” case in New Orleans than to counterterrorist operations, he had learned his lesson and justified later whore persecutions with flimsy “anti-terrorism” excuses.  Robyn’s agency was accused of having “terrorist suspects” as clients and she was arrested in June of 2002,  then convicted of “conspiracy to promote prostitution” and sentenced to six months house arrest (during which the trial judge allowed her to continue her activism).  After her arrest, she was angry to discover that both neighbors and supposedly “enlightened” activists treated her differently once they knew she had been a prostitute; she threw herself even harder into medical marijuana activism, but began to think about how people’s ignorant attitudes and the oppressive anti-sex work laws could be changed.

Her inspiration came a year after her arrest, in the form of the US Supreme Court decision Lawrence vs. Texas:  Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out in his dissenting opinion that “state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult  incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery,  fornication, bestiality, and obscenity  are likewise sustainable only in light of [the overturned Bowers vs. Hardwick decision’s] validation of laws based on moral choices,” and though the other justices tried to pretend otherwise Robyn knew that Scalia was correct, and that the court had opened a door for sex workers’ rights.  So after a Berkeley, California high-school teacher named Shannon Williams was arrested for prostitution in August, Robyn gathered a group of sex workers to protest outside the courthouse at Williams’ arraignment in September.  Unfortunately (but understandably), Williams wanted the whole mess to go away as soon as possible and so had no desire to become the “poster child” for prostitutes’ rights.  Robyn of course backed down, but the fire had been lit; with the help of her partner Michael Foley and sex worker Stacey Swimme (whom she had met earlier that year at a medical marijuana protest), she founded SWOP-USA the following month.

The organization was modeled on SWOP Australia, and Rachel Wotton (who now specializes in sex work with the disabled) was instrumental in securing permission for the American group to use the name and helping to set things up.  Within a few weeks the new organization was contacted by Dr. Annie Sprinkle for assistance in arranging the very first Day To End Violence Against Sex Workers, and for the next year Robyn worked furiously to contact politicians and get the attention of the media so as to let them know that sex workers were not going to quietly accept persecution any more, and were mobilizing like those in many other parts of the world to demand our rights.  But after the failure of “Proposition Q”, a ballot measure she wrote which would have established de facto decriminalization in Berkeley, Robyn and SWOP settled in for the long haul and committed themselves to the slow, arduous task of reversing centuries of stigma and decades of oppressive legislation.

Shortly after the two shorter videos were recorded at the International Conference on the Reduction of Drug Related Harms in Warsaw, Poland (May of 2007), Robyn was diagnosed with cancer; she continued to work tirelessly for the cause all through her chemotherapy, and though the disease appeared to have gone into remission in January of 2010 it returned by July of 2011, and this time proved terminal.  She died on September 13th, 2012 while visiting her mother, and there will be a memorial service on what would have been her 54th birthday (October 7th, 2012) at the Milner and Orr Funeral Home in Lone Oak .  I never had the pleasure of meeting Robyn, but as you can see from the personal accounts on her website and the many expressions of grief all over the internet, those who did speak without exception of her warmth, her strength, her good humor, her courage and her plain human decency.  And though it’s an oft-used phrase, there is no other which sums up the way everyone in the sex worker rights community feels about her passing:  she will be sorely missed.

(I am indebted to the Sin City Alternative Professionals’ Association (formerly SWOP-LV) for information and links, and also to a group of Robyn’s school friends from Lone Oak, who contacted me Sunday morning and filled in a number of vital details I could not find anywhere else.  If anyone reading this can correct an error or omission, please email me with the info.)

Read Full Post »

Mary Anne Clarke

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , , on August 17, 2012| 19 Comments »

The smile…was what they remembered in after years. The rest was forgotten. Forgotten the lies, the deceit, the sudden bursts of temper. Forgotten the wild extravagance, the absurd generosity, the vitriolic tongue. Only the warmth remained, and the love of living.  –  Daphne Du Maurier

For a courtesan, attracting a royal patron can be a mixed blessing; on the one hand, such an man can confer privileges far in excess of those available from even the wealthiest clients outside of the ruling class.  But on the other hand, there are unique difficulties inherent in such an arrangement, particularly if the lady in question is either indiscreet or abusive of her position; Mary Anne Clarke was both.

Mary Anne Thompson was born in a working-class section of London on April 3rd, 1776, the daughter of a tradesman who died when she was young; her mother soon remarried a man named Farquhar who worked as a proofreader at a printing shop in Fleet Street.  Beauty, charm and wit were hers by nature, but it would appear that her stepfather was the one who taught her to read and write; both contributed to winning her a position correcting copy for the shop by her early teens.  An 1809 biography (which she may have written herself) claims that the manager, Mr. Day, paid for her education with an eye toward marrying her in the future; apparently, that didn’t work out and young Mary Anne took up with a pawnbroker who is said to have ruined his business in the process of feeding her already-expensive tastes.  In 1794 she married Joseph Clarke, the son of a wealthy stonemason, but he was as profligate a spender as his bride and declared bankruptcy only a few years later.  The marriage produced two children, George and Ellen; the latter eventually married Louis-Mathurin Busson du Maurier and was the mother of the cartoonist and novelist George du Maurier, from whom Daphne du Maurier  was descended (in 1954 the latter published Mary Anne, a fictionalized account of her ancestress’ life.)

After leaving Clarke, Mary Anne decided to support her children by a more professional and consistent style of harlotry and so became a courtesan, advertising herself as so many did at that time:  on the stage.  Though it is likely that her only interest in acting was as a means to an end, she is said to have been a natural talent (as are so many whores) and was often described as an “actress” for many years afterward.  In any case, she developed quite a reputation in the late ‘90s and had achieved such a lavish lifestyle that no one man could reasonably support her…which is why it was inevitable that her attempt at such an arrangement eventually led to disaster.  In 1803 Mary Anne became the kept mistress of Prince Frederick, Duke of York, the second son of King George III and Commander-in-Chief of the British Army.  He set her up in a mansion with numerous servants and an allowance of £100 a month (about $5600/month today), but the total cost of the household was roughly five times that.  It wasn’t nearly enough for her extravagant tastes, and she soon figured out a means of supplementing it:  for a fee (£2600 for promotion to major, other ranks in proportion), she would add the name of an officer who felt he wasn’t being promoted quickly enough to the list sent to the Duke for approval.

The scheme might’ve gone on indefinitely had she been more discreet, but her greed made her careless and she allowed the word about her promotion service to spread a little too widely.  In January of 1809 Colonel Gwyllym Lloyd Wardle, a veteran turned Welsh MP, discovered the whole business and decided to make his whistle-blowing even more scandalous by alleging that the Duke not only knew about his mistress’ actions, but was actually in on the deal.

I’m sure you can imagine the stink; the Duke resigned his post on March 25th, but was reinstated after the ensuing trial proved he knew nothing about Mary Anne’s side business.  She managed like the professional she was and avoided prison, though at the cost of her reputation and connections.  It is very likely that her escape was at least partly due to her foresight in turning over the Duke’s letters – in which he had been far too critical of relatives and other government officials – to her solicitors for safekeeping.  After the trial, they negotiated a very sweet deal for her:  she received a settlement of £7000 and a large annuity which would pass to her daughter after her death, plus the costs of her son’s education and military commission, in return for the letters and her promise never to criticize or reveal anything she knew about the royal family.

The story might’ve ended there had Mary Anne been able to keep her mouth shut; she never broke her agreement to remain mum about the Hanovers, but kept publishing pamphlets in which she said things other powerful people didn’t like, and was sued for libel several times.  None of these charges stuck until 1813, when she was convicted and sentenced to nine months in prison.  Upon her release she travelled in Europe for some time before settling in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, and lived the rest of her long life in comfort before dying on June 21st, 1852, over a decade into the reign of her former patron’s niece, Queen Victoria.  Though some whores ensure income for their declining years by careful investment, Mary Anne Clarke managed by a little shrewdness and a lot of dumb luck.

Read Full Post »

Polly Adler

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Perception, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 12, 2012| 9 Comments »

If I was to make my living as a madam, I could not be concerned either with the rightness or wrongness of prostitution, considered either from a moral or criminological standpoint.  I had to look at it simply as a part of life, which exists today as it existed yesterday…The operation of any business is contingent on the law of supply and demand, and if there were no customers, there certainly would be no whorehouses.  Prostitution exists because men are willing to pay for sexual gratification, and whatever men are willing to pay for, someone will provide.  –  Polly Adler

One thing that must strike anyone who has read extensively on the history of prostitution is the way that mainstream writers are so often tolerant, sympathetic or even enthusiastic about whores of the past (even into recent times), yet so judgmental of those who have worked in the last few decades.  In “Courtesan Denial” I stated that “I suspect that they are lawheads engaged in a process of doublethink designed to protect their minds from having to deal with the fact that the EXACT SAME profession which was legal and respected in many preindustrial cultures is illegal and demonized in ours.”  But in the past 19 months I’ve come to realize that theory is inadequate for the simple reason that even past whores whose work was illegal in their own day are often glamorized; the dividing line seems to be not the Industrial Revolution or the advent of large-scale prohibitionism about a century ago, but rather the appearance of second-wave feminism.  Harlots who lived before the advent of the feminist saviors are given a free pass (like Dante’s “virtuous pagans” of pre-Christian times), but their modern sisters should “know better” and are thus condemned as infidels for rejecting the anti-sex work Gospel.  Of course, that doesn’t explain why so many people celebrate the fun times of violating alcohol Prohibition while demonizing modern drug use, but a theory has to start somewhere.

Case in point, Pearl “Polly” Adler (April 16th, 1900 – June 11th, 1962), a Russian Jew who was sent to New York ahead of her parents (Morris and Gertrude Adler) and eight younger siblings in 1914.  When the First World War interrupted her family’s plans to join her, young Polly was forced to support herself by working in a sweatshop that made corsets; though she tried to attend school at the same time, it just didn’t work out that way.  At the age of 17 she was raped by a foreman she was dating, and after an abortion decided that since she was “ruined” anyhow she might as well profit by it.  She made good contacts in the Broadway theater crowd and soon moved in with an actress and part-time working girl; in 1920 that roommate introduced Polly to her first client, a bootlegger named Tony, who kept her in an apartment on Riverside Drive.  Before long she was providing space and management for other girls, and thanks to her wit, charm, intelligence and business acumen she was soon clearing $100/week ($1100 in 2012 money).

That modest initial success grew by leaps and bounds; by 1924 she was known as the “Queen of Tarts” and opened her best-remembered brothel, the Majestic, at 215 West 75th Street.  The building featured hidden stairways and secret doors so clients could escape in case of a police raid, which was necessary because it was more than just a place where men went to have sex; it was a club where patrons of both sexes came to drink, play cards or games, and enjoy conversation, and Adler made as much money selling bootleg gin as she did collecting her cut from the girls.  The place was lavishly decorated and the walls were lined with books, many recommended by members of the Algonquin Round Table (including Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker), who became regulars soon after it opened.  Other regulars included actor John Garfield, boxer Jack Dempsey, mayor Jimmy Walker and gangster Lucky Luciano.  Her place was so well-known that she could not escape being shut down eventually, but she bribed her way out of trouble and simply moved the operation elsewhere…eleven times by the end of the decade.  It is very likely that bribes and kickbacks to cops and politicians constituted her largest operating expense.

After the stock market crashed in October of 1929, Adler’s fortunes began a slow decline.  In 1930 she was subpoenaed to testify before the Seabury Commission, a probe of a huge conspiracy by cops, prosecutors and judges to frame innocent people (often for prostitution) so they could be robbed of their life savings under threat of imprisonment.  Because she knew that testifying would probably not be a good idea for her she fled to Miami, where she remained until she grew homesick and tried to sneak back into town in May of 1931; informants sold her out immediately and she was hauled before the Commission the next day.  Not that it did the investigators any good; Adler claimed (perhaps conveniently) a poor memory, and provided almost no information of worth.  And though the Commission ended with the fall of many of her political connections, it actually made her business easier because she no longer had to pay out so much in graft – a godsend in the deepest part of the Great Depression.

Still, getting re-established wasn’t easy, and gangster Dutch Schultz became Adler’s business partner (bankrolling the venture in return for half the profit).  The two were friends, and Schultz often hid from his rivals or the police at her brothel.  This caused her considerable stress, because she was terrified that she or her girls (of whom she was extremely protective) would be killed by assassins trying to “hit” Schultz.  Still, the period proved fairly lucrative for her, and she once again attracted a celebrity clientele (including then-rising star Milton Berle).  She was only arrested twice in the next five years, but the second time – at 5 a.m. on March 5, 1935 – actually stuck.  The police had carried out an expensive, protracted, modern-style investigation as part of mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s campaign against “incorporated filth”, and she was charged with “maintaining an objectionable apartment” (at 30 East 55th Street) and “possessing a motion picture machine with objectionable pictures”.  Public sympathy was with her; a New York Daily News editorial thundered, “It is this crusading against personal and private habits and instincts — the sex instinct, the deep rooted human fondness for gambling — which is futile and sickening, just as the prohibition of liquor was.”  But the evidence was steep and so, in an early example of plea-bargaining, she pled guilty to the bawdy house charge on May 6th in exchange for dismissal of the more serious obscenity rap.  She paid a $500 fine and was sentenced to 30 days, of which she served 24; she spent the time scrubbing floors on the order of a warden who declared she must be taught the value of “honest work”.

Polly was back in business by the end of July, but things were never the same again; clients’ tastes were becoming more utilitarian, and upscale, full-service brothels like hers were declining in popularity.  She was arrested for the 17th time on January 15th, 1943; that was the last straw for her.  A year later she left New York (for only the second time in 30 years) and moved permanently to Los Angeles, where she fulfilled her lifelong dream of an education and obtained a university degree in 1949.  She then set to work on her memoirs, which were ghostwritten by the novelist Virginia Faulkner and published in 1953.  The book, A House Is Not a Home, became a bestseller and was made into a movie starring Shelley Winters which was released in 1964; unfortunately Polly did not live to see it, since she died of cancer in 1962.

But while the book is terribly honest and shows both good and bad aspects of “the Life” equally, the censors wouldn’t allow anything positive to be said about whores and so the finished film bears only a vague resemblance to it.  What remains is essentially a 98-minute morality play on the evils of harlotry, populated by fallen women who are victimized by men’s lust and so get addicted to drugs and/or commit suicide while “Polly” stands helplessly by; though it appeared over a decade before the advent of neofeminism, the anti-sex crowd couldn’t have written a better screed.  Oh, well, at least the people illegally drinking were depicted as enjoying themselves, even if the girls violating a still-current prohibitionist law were not.

Read Full Post »

Rhodopis

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 7, 2012| 12 Comments »

The Egyptians relations affirm that Rhodopis was a most beautiful Curtizan; and that on a time as she was bathing her self, Fortune, who loveth to doe extravagant and unexpected things, gave her a reward…  –  Aelian, Various Histories (XIII, xxxiii) (tr. Thomas Stanley)

As I pointed out in my biography of La Belle Otero,

…the details of [the] lives [of courtesans] tend to be vague and often contradictory…[because] when one is in the business of selling an illusion, the details of one’s life may become as fluid and embellished as advertising copy, and one’s biographers are forced to choose between conflicting reports from letters, rumors, the rose-tinted memories of favored clients, the gossip of rivals and the propaganda of moralists.

But though many fanciful tales are told of courtesans from Acca Larentia to Mata Hari, none are as romantic and enduring as the story of Rhodopis, which eventually became one of the world’s most beloved fairy tales.

She was a Thracian enslaved in Samos sometime in the first half of the 6th century BCE; her birth name may have been Doricha, but since the source of this information is Strabo (who lived 500 years later), we cannot be certain.  She was the slave of Iadmon, who also owned Aesop, the great fabulist; by this we may infer that Iadmon was an enlightened man who educated his slaves well and allowed them considerable freedom.  Sometime in her teens she was sold to Aesop’s original owner Xanthes, a merchant who traded extensively with Egypt (one of the traditions of Aesop’s life is that he was Ethiopian, which would make sense in the context of Xanthes’ business).  It is unclear whether she started working as a hetaera for Iadmon or if it was her second master who first employed her thus, but the fact that she was educated (as other Greek women were not) indicates that this was the career for which she was intended from the start.  Her stage name, like those of many hetaerae, was based on a physical feature:  “Rhodopis” means “rosy cheeks”.

Xanthes took her to Naucratis, the first permanent Greek colony in Egypt, where she quickly became very popular.  She had not been working a very long time when she was hired by the merchant Charaxus, elder brother of the poetess Sappho; he soon fell in love with her and purchased her freedom for a very dear price, for which he was scolded by his sister in verse.  It is from this now-lost poem that Strabo derived the name Doricha; some sources say the lyric also chided Rhodopis for taking advantage of her brother’s good nature by stealing his property (i.e. accepting her freedom rather than becoming his slave).  This helps us to pin down the time somewhat; Herodotus tells us that the reigning pharaoh was Amasis II, whose reign began in 570 BCE, and Sappho is believed to have died not long after that.  Rhodopis remained in Naucratis and became very successful; she was religiously devout and tithed to the temple at Delphi, which had to be rebuilt after being destroyed in a fire (the Pharaoh also donated 1000 talents of gold as a gesture of friendship toward the Greeks).  Large contributors were commemorated by iron spits engraved with their names; Herodotus (who lived a century later) said that he counted ten inscribed with hers, which gives you some idea of her wealth.

This is all that can be considered historical about Rhodopis; the rest belongs to the realm of legend and fantasy.  The first of these stories, which began shortly after her death, claimed that she had built the third of the Great Pyramids.  This is of course ridiculous; it was actually built by Menkaure in the 4th Dynasty, about 2500 BCE.  The story may have arisen through confusion of Rhodopis with the legendary 6th dynasty Queen Nitocris, possibly due to the name of her city (Naucratis); Nitocris was herself confused with Menkaure because her throne name was said to have been Menkaura.  Herodotus thoroughly debunked the idea that Rhodopis had anything to do with pyramid-building, but did repeat the legend of Nitocris…who may not have existed at all.  Historians believe that she appeared in the historical record due to a mistake in a catalog of pharaohs compiled during the reign of Ramses II, and that previously independent legends were then attached to her.  Incidentally, Herodotus’ account of Nitocris’ life inspired the young Tennessee Williams’ first published story, “The Vengeance of Nitocris”, which appeared in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales; this story in turn inspired H.P. Lovecraft to mention her in two of his tales, thus bringing her into the Lovecraftian tradition drawn on by many writers since.  And Ramses II, who inadvertently created her legend, himself inspired Shelley’s “Ozymandias”.  It’s almost like I planned all this to fit together, isn’t it?

The confusion of Rhodopis and Nitocris (a lady of very different background and temperament) was no doubt facilitated by the legend that the former also became the Queen of Egypt.  Strabo repeats the story, already old in his time, that after Rhodopis had become successful and wealthy she bought a fine house with a pool in the garden.  And while she was bathing there one day, an eagle swooped down and stole one of her sandals, carried it to nearby Sais, and dropped it in Pharaoh’s lap.  The monarch was of course fascinated by this strange omen and by the richness and beauty of the sandal, and so sent men throughout the capital and other nearby cities to discover who the owner of the dainty lost shoe might be.  Rhodopis’ maids had of course gossiped about the singular occurrence at their mistress’ bath, and by this word came to Pharaoh, who summoned the hetaera to the palace.  When he beheld her beauty he interpreted the omen as a sign he should marry her, and she therefore became Queen of Egypt and they lived happily ever after.

Though there is no clear historical record of the latter part of Rhodopis’ life, we do know the names of Amasis II’s consorts and she is not among them.  It’s certainly possible that she became one of his concubines; she would be neither the first nor the last courtesan to become a royal mistress, and an earlier folk tale may have become attached to her name because of it.  But in the end, it doesn’t matter because the magical romance of a king and a commoner enabled by a lost slipper proved greater than either of the living people who inspired it, and Rhodopis – or as we have called her since 1697, Cinderella – is undoubtedly the only whore ever to inspire a Walt Disney movie.

One Year Ago Today

“Full of Themselves” reveals the incredible pomposity of certain women who would be considered sex workers but for the existence of an arbitrary legal line.

Read Full Post »

Deborah Jeane Palfrey

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 2, 2012| 39 Comments »

If taken into custody, my physical safety and most probably my very life would be jeopardized…rape, beating, maiming, disfigurement and more than likely murder disguised in the form of just another jailhouse accident or suicide would await me.  –  Deborah Jeane Palfrey

Four years ago yesterday, Deborah Jeane Palfrey was found hanged in a shed behind her mother’s home in Tarpon Springs, Florida, the victim of government persecution that literally drove her to her grave.  I’ve been asked if I knew her, and I regret to say that I did not because I’ve been told by those who did that she was a kind, sweet, wonderful person whose philosophy of running an escort service was the same as mine:  treat one’s girls fairly and honestly, as one would like to be treated oneself, and extend the same courtesy to one’s clients.  Indeed, her only important ethical breach is the one forced upon all whores by criminalization:  in order to protect ourselves, our associates and our property we must deny what we are, and officially cloak our legitimate and socially-vital profession under ridiculous disclaimers about “time and companionship”; escort services (including mine) must even require subcontractors to sign documents stating that they agree not to have sex with clients, even though we’d have to let them go if clients repeatedly complained that they obeyed such contracts.  As I discovered in my own (insignificant in comparison to Deborah’s) experience with the injustice system, we are forced to commit felonies such as fraud and perjury in order to escape tyrannical persecution for running a business that is neither wrongful nor fraudulent.

Deborah was born in Charleroi, Pennsylvania on March 18, 1956, the daughter of Frank and Blanche Palfrey.  Mercifully, Frank Palfrey died in 2002 and so was not forced to endure his daughter’s lynching by his government, but Fate allowed her mother no such kindness; she was the person who discovered the lifeless body of her first-born.  The Palfreys moved to Orlando, Florida, but returned to Charleroi in 1966; this was not a happy homecoming for Deborah, who was bullied so mercilessly she eventually asked for and received her parents’ permission to finish high school in Florida.  She earned a degree in criminal justice from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, then paralegal credentials from a law school in San Diego.  But after a few years at this grind she learned what so many women do:  that far from being a liberation as many second-wave feminists pretend, a career can be stifling to the point of unendurability.  In the ‘80s she became a cocktail waitress, then an escort, but discovered (as I did a decade later) that criminalization allows seedy, sleazy escort services to flourish, and so decided to start her own agency.

In 1990, she was entrapped by a police “sting” operation, but was terrified by the prospect of conviction on the bogus felony charges leveled against her (which included “extortion”) and so fled to Montana, where she was captured in 1992 while trying to cross into Canada.  She was returned to California, convicted of “pandering” (i.e. helping whores to advertise) and locked up for 18 months, resulting in a record which ensured she could never again work in the field of her degree.  After her release she founded Pamela Martin and Associates, a Washington, D.C. escort service which she ran mostly by phone and email from her home in California.  Though she probably figured her long-distance management would protect her, in reality it did the opposite because she underestimated the government’s dedication to wasting huge sums of money and thousands of man-hours on persecuting citizens for having sex.  Inspired by the Bush administration’s newly-minted “anti-prostitution policy”, the IRS enlisted the Post Office’s help in “investigating” Pamela Martin; after two years of by-the-book spying failed to turn up anything incriminating they tried to get a warrant to raid her home, but were refused.  Undaunted, the Post Office sent a man and woman in October of 2006 to pose as a couple interested in buying Deborah’s house so she would let them in without a warrant, and while they were there they managed to steal enough “evidence” to secure one.  Thus armed they raided her house, arrested her and froze all of her assets so she could not hire proper legal representation.

The media vultures descended instantly, branding her the “D.C. Madam” and indulging in the usual orgy of lurid speculation and holier-than-thou pomposity which distinguishes any news story involving commercial sex.  This intensified on February 6th, 2007 when Brandy Britton, a former  anthropology professor who had worked for the agency and had a number of important clients, was found hanged; Palfrey assumed a brave demeanor but was almost certainly perturbed about the incident, considering that in 1991 she had already described (in the letter to the judge quoted in my epigram) the fate of arrested whores with clients in high places.  In an apparent attempt to protect herself she appeared on the TV news show 20/20 on May 4th, 2007 and announced that she had retained almost 15,000 client phone numbers, prompting a deluge of phone calls from clients trying to make arrangements to keep their names secret despite the fact that prosecutors already had their hands on the information.  Gambling that full disclosure might help her case and certainly couldn’t expose her to any greater danger, Palfrey and her civil attorney Montgomery Sibley released the phone number database in TIFF format on July 9th, sending CD-ROM copies to hundreds of journalists and activists.  Of course, most powerful men make such arrangements by proxy or at least using aliases and private numbers, but three names from her unreleased client list did leak out:  Louisiana Senator David Vitter, Global AIDS Coordinator Randall Tobias and military strategist Harlan Ullman (who invented the “shock and awe” concept).  The rest of the names were suppressed by judges, but one more was whispered:  then-vice president Dick Cheney.

Thirteen escorts and three politically unconnected clients were given the usual choice described by Harvey Silverglate in Three Felonies a Day:  go on the stand and lie under oath by repeating the script we write for you, and we’ll let you go; or, refuse to cooperate and we’ll bankrupt you, destroy your family and imprison you for decades.  They submitted, sang as directed, and on April 15, 2008 Deborah Palfrey was convicted of money laundering, racketeering and mail fraud (the usual charges government uses to convict people of victimless, consensual “crimes”); she faced a maximum of 55 years in prison, though it’s likely she would have been actually sentenced to about seven or eight years.  She never made it that far:  two weeks later she was dead, giving the court a convenient excuse to vacate her conviction, thus washing its hands of guilt and ensuring no more important names would be exposed.

Her dramatic death unleashed a tidal wave of speculation.  Alex Jones and his Infowars organization pointed out that Palfrey had repeatedly stated in interviews that she would not commit suicide and stated that if she was found dead it would really be murder.  Her mother had no signs that she was suicidal, and some handwriting experts claimed that the suicide note was either forged or written under compulsion.  Journalist Dan Moldea told Time that Palfrey had told him she would commit suicide before enduring prison again, but Jones pointed out that Moldea has a known history of fabricating quotes.  In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether she put the noose around her own neck or it was put there by men in black:  it was murder in any case.  There is no moral difference between directly executing a victim, inducing her to kill herself by threats against her mother and sister, or driving her to suicide via persecution, robbery, psychological torture and the looming threat of a horrible jailhouse death by rape, torture and disfigurement.  “Suicide” has been the preferred method of execution for women who embarrass the rulers of decaying republics since at least Roman times, and the purpose of the kangaroo court which precedes the murder is merely to humiliate the victim, to tantalize her with false hope of acquittal and to allow the sleeping masses the illusion that there is still such a thing as justice.

One Year Ago Today

“Real Heroes” presents for your consideration the New York Initiative, a group of real-life superheroes who have offered their services to protect working girls.

Read Full Post »

La Belle Otero

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 30, 2012| 13 Comments »

Women have one mission in life: to be beautiful.  When one gets old, one must learn how to break mirrors.  I am very gently expecting to die.  –  La Belle Otero

Regular readers have probably noticed by now that most of the courtesans of whom I’ve written have two things in common:  many die in their forties, and the details of their lives tend to be vague and often contradictory.  For the former, I have no explanation except perhaps that “the light which burns twice as bright burns half as long”; a quick scan of the harlotographies will demonstrate that the causes of their deaths vary widely, from communicable disease to cancer to execution, which rather eliminates any common factor.  But as for the vagueness of their biographies, that I can explain; it’s simply that when one is in the business of selling an illusion, the details of one’s life may become as fluid and embellished as advertising copy, and one’s biographers are forced to choose between conflicting reports from letters, rumors, the rose-tinted memories of favored clients, the gossip of rivals and the propaganda of moralists.  Carolina Otero was unusual in that she lived to a greater age than any of the others I’ve written about, but typical in that it’s difficult to separate the facts of her life from the romantic legend of La Belle Otero.

One thing is for certain; she was definitely not the illegitimate child of a Greek nobleman and a gypsy from Cadiz.  She was in fact born on November 4th, 1868 of a poor family in Galicia, nearly as far as it’s possible to get from Cadiz without leaving Spain.  She was baptized Agustina Otero Iglesias, but changed her name to Carolina Otero sometime in her teens.  As was not uncommon among the desperately poor of that time, her mother placed her as a maid when she was still quite young, and she is said to have been violently raped at ten; though I was not able to confirm this, it was not at all an unusual fate for pretty servant girls of the time, and could account for her sterility.  About two years later she ran away to Lisbon with a boy named Paco in order to become a dancer, and though she later claimed to have married a handsome young Italian nobleman named Count Guglielmo when she was 14, this hardly seems credible considering that she had nothing to show for it and on other occasions claimed to have been the mistress of at least three different Spanish noblemen during the same time period.  It does seem as though she married someone around the age of 15, but was divorced by the time she turned up in Barcelona as a 19-year-old café singer and prostitute.

She soon attracted her first long-term patron, who took her to Marseilles and financed her debut on the French stage; the affair lasted only as long as she needed it to, and soon she was billing herself as La Belle Otero, the gypsy dancer who had launched her career on funds she had won in Monte Carlo.  By the early 1890s she made it to the Folies Bèrgere, where she soon became a star; by 1895 she was the most desired courtesan in Europe, and her list of patrons eventually included King Edward VII of the UK,  Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Czar Nicholas II of Russia, King Alfonso XIII of Spain, King Alexander II of Serbia, Prince Albert I of Monaco, Grand Dukes Nicholas and Peter of Russia and a number of other noblemen and business tycoons.  She did marry again in 1906, to an Englishman named René Webb, but this does not seem to have lasted very long.  She claimed that six men had committed suicide over her, and though this was almost certainly just part of her hype it is known that at least one duel was fought over her.  In August of 1898, she was filmed performing a dance called “La Valse Brillante”; the one-minute movie was played in music halls all over Europe, further increasing both her fame and her demand.

The late Victorian and Edwardian periods in France are referred to as La Belle Epoque, and while England and the United States were descending more deeply into persecution of whores France loved hers, especially Les Grandes Horizontales (as the great courtesans were called).  They were in a sense the first modern-style celebrities; reporters followed them about to the opera, the theaters or Maxim’s restaurant (a favorite of the demimonde), and newspapers reported on their doings, including their pastimes and rivalries (such as the infamous competition between Otero and Liane de Pougy, who was less famous but probably wealthier).  They even licensed their images for postcards (as Princess Clara did), producing a sizeable secondary income for the most popular. 

Otero was sought-after until she was 50 years old, and retired just after the First World War to a large and well-appointed mansion; she had accumulated a fortune of about $25 million (about $360 million in today’s dollars), but neglected to adjust her extravagant lifestyle to her greatly reduced income and burned through it all in the next three decades.  Probably the greatest contributing factor was her love of gambling in Monte Carlo, because unlike her fantasy persona she lost prodigious sums.  The sale of her estate and the modest success of a musical based on her life (La Bella Otero, 1954) kept her going through the ‘50s, but by the time of her death on April 12th, 1965 she was living in a one-room apartment at the Hotel Novelty in Nice in a state of poverty nearly as abject as that in which she entered the world 96 years earlier.  The last of Europe’s great courtesans had outlived her fame, her fortune and her era; France had turned her back on harlots and declared herself officially “abolitionist”, and the time when a woman of Caroline Otero’s profession could be an admired celebrity had faded with her wealth and beauty.

One Year Ago Today

“Backwards Into the Future” demonstrates how South Africa, once considered among the worst regimes for human rights because of its apartheid policies, is now moving forward on that account while the US slides steadily backwards.

Read Full Post »

Olympe de Gouges

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , on February 25, 2012| 14 Comments »

Woman, wake up; the tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights.  The powerful empire of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and lies.  The flame of truth has dispersed all the clouds of folly and usurpation.  Enslaved man has multiplied his strength and needs recourse to yours to break his chains.  Having become free, he has become unjust to his companion.  Oh, women, women!  When will you cease to be blind?  What advantage have you received from the Revolution?  –  Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen

When one reads the histories of famous women who started out as whores, one cannot fail to be struck by the way their harlotry is frequently downplayed, couched in euphemisms or completely ignored.  Theodora and Nell Gwyn are described as “actresses”, Lola Montez as a “dancer” and Édith Piaf as a “street singer”.  And Wikipedia diffidently describes Olympe de Gouges’ means of support with the evasive, “She chose to cohabit with several men who supported her financially.”  One can almost excuse this Victorian stuffiness in 19th-century biographies or those written for children, but in a modern account written for adult readers it constitutes an unforgiveable distortion of the truth designed to render the lives of “feminist” heroines palatable to prudish modern sensibilities and to disguise their refutation of the neofeminist dogma that prostitution is degrading.  This would no doubt have infuriated de Gouges, who rejected traditional norms of female propriety, specifically listed women’s beauty as one of the qualities we “bring to the table”, and argued that the sexual freedom of women is an intrinsic part of our political and social freedom.

She was born Marie Gouze in the south of France sometime in 1748 (her birthday is variously reported, but was probably either on May 7th or December 31st) to the beautiful Anne Olympe Moisset, wife of a butcher named Pierre Gouze.  The marriage was not a happy one, and Anne was rumored to have had an affair with Jean-Jacques Lefranc, the Marquis de Pompignan; this rumor, together with the facts that Gouze died when Marie was two and that his name does not appear on her birth certificate or baptismal records, convinced her that the Marquis was her biological father and contributed to her passionate support of the rights of illegitimate children.  Historians now generally agree that Gouze probably was her real father, and that Marie preferred to believe otherwise for the same reasons many exceptional or unhappy children like to believe that they are “really” the child of someone other than their common or disliked parents.  She also felt a burning desire to climb the social ladder, and a noble pedigree (even an illegitimate one) supported this drive in her mind.

Marie was not formally educated, and in 1765 her mother married her to Louis Aubrey, a minor government official from Paris.  He died in 1768, a year after the birth of their son, Pierre; Marie was actually quite relieved because she despised him.  She refused to conduct herself as a widow was supposed to, instead moving to Paris in 1770 (sources disagree as to whether she left Pierre with her mother or took him along) and changing her name to Olympe de Gouges.  She supported herself as a courtesan, relying on her exceptional beauty and the carefully-encouraged rumor of her noble paternity to gain entry to higher social circles and a wealthier clientele.  In 1773 she established a long-lived association with the wealthy and educated Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, who introduced her into the salons where she made a number of influential friends and professional contacts.  Around this time she learned to read and write, and decided to become an author; accordingly, she embarked on a campaign to educate herself by reading everything recommended to her by her intellectual friends and clients.  By 1784 she began to publish essays and plays, always on social and political topics; Zamore et Mirza, for example, had an anti-slavery theme.  Unfortunately, her plays were terrible; the dialogue was awkward and wordy, and her grammar was very poor.  But her essays made up in energy what they lacked in style; she was extremely passionate about human rights, and therefore supported equal rights for men and women and the abolition of slavery.  She did not believe that men and women were the same, but rather argued that our different strengths and weaknesses combined to form a better and more balanced society.

Maximilien Robespierre

As political tensions increased in the 1780s, de Gouges advocated reforms which she believed would head off revolution, accomplishing change without violence.  She urged the King to grant reforms, and when he failed to do so she suggested he abdicate in favor of a regent government which could bring the growing revolution under control.  Her writings criticized and lampooned extremists on both sides, and she continued to preach moderation as conditions degenerated into chaos.  Though she supported the Revolution, she abhorred its violence and the fact that women had been denied equal rights; she considered this a betrayal of one of its core principles, égalité.  In October of 1789 she spoke before the Assembly and proposed a feminist agenda which included legal equality, marriage and divorce reform and better education for girls, but her concerns were dismissed and she grew increasingly disenchanted with the new government.  In 1791 she organized a feminist association called the Society of the Friends of Truth and published Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne, a response to Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen (the primary declaration of Revolutionary principles).

The situation continued to spin out of control, and de Gouges became increasingly vociferous; she believed in a constitutional monarchy, and after Louis XVI was arrested and tried in the latter half of 1792 she spoke out against his execution.  But the Jacobin party (led by Maximilien Robespierre) was in the ascendancy; Louis was executed in January of 1793, and on June 2nd the moderate Girondists, de Gouge’s allies, were arrested.  Her own arrest came in July, following her publication of a poster which demanded the people be given a choice between a republic, a federal government and a constitutional monarchy.  Her house was searched and unpublished writings used against her at her trial three months later; she was found guilty of sedition and executed by guillotine at 4 PM on November 3rd, just 18 days after Marie Antionette.  Though she attempted to delay her fate by falsely claiming to be pregnant (a doctor examined her and pronounced otherwise), she mounted the scaffold without tears and said to the crowd, “Children of the Fatherland, you will avenge my death.”

Though her last words are not known to have come true in any direct fashion, I gave them a fictional consummation in my story of one year ago today, “Carnival”, which takes place almost four months later.  Even in real life, though, history has a far higher opinion of Olympe de Gouges – courtesan, writer, philosopher and feminist in the truest and noblest sense of the word – than it has of her enemies, whose names have become synonymous with bloodthirsty tyranny.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »