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Posts Tagged ‘courtesans’

Fictional Interlude: Visions of Sugarplums

Posted in Fiction, Holidays, tagged , , , , , , on December 18, 2012| 22 Comments »

They err who thinks Santa Claus comes down through the chimney; he really enters through the heart.  –  Mrs. Paul M. Ell

It all started when I got a call from my very best client, offering me several days at one of the most beautiful resorts in known space, during which he’d be busy every daylight hour and most of the evening; all I had to do is look beautiful, be incredibly charming at dinner, make sure his suits were perfect and laid out before bedtime, give him massages when necessary, spend 15 minutes on my back most nights, collect my pay and be home in time for Christmas.  Best of all, it was his wife’s idea; she despises space travel and would rather delegate consort duties whenever her husband goes offworld.  All in all, just about the nicest, cushiest booking imaginable.  And it did turn out okay in the end, but…

spaceshipHang on, I’m getting ahead of myself.  The trip out was uneventful, and these new diplomatic ships are so damned fast we arrived at Alinor in only three days.  And that’s when I got my first unpleasant surprise; like a complete dorp I had forgotten that Alinor is a whole planet, and though there are indeed lots of gorgeous resorts in the temperate zone, we were in the tropics.  And not Hawaii or Tahiti-type tropics either, oh no; we’re talking thirty-five degrees in the shade, eighty percent humidity tropics.  See, the Tsath – those are the aliens my client was there to negotiate with – are rather like enormous frogs, and cool, dry air can make them sick.

But I’m nothing if not professional, so I smiled and resolved to make the best of it.  “Just be friendly,” he said; “you’re certainly good at that.  Think of yourself as a goodwill ambassador.”

“What, to the Tsath?  Do they speak English?”

“Remarkably well.  They’re linguistic prodigies; the consul herself speaks at least eleven that I know of.  But their thinking is emotive and subjective; they rely on intuition over logic and prefer art to science, so we’re trying to work out a deal to provide them with technicians and automated factories.  Just between you and me, they’re really very backward.”

“Is that why you in particular were sent here?”

“Yes.  We’ve been trying to finalize this deal for months, but though the Tsath are clearly eager to trade with us, we just can’t seem to come to an understanding.  It’s as though they were waiting for something.”

“Well, maybe they are.  You said they were intuitive and backward; maybe they’re waiting for an omen or an auspicious conjunction.”

He looked at me as though I had said something he hadn’t thought of before and said, “Maybe they are, at that.”

**********************************************************************

One of the locals had told me about clothes of a fabric designed to draw heat and perspiration away from the skin, which made the climate quite bearable; so, I decided to make an early start on the second day and go out into town to buy an outfit or seven, but as I was crossing the lobby I suddenly found myself face-to-face with the Tsath negotiator.

“Good morning, Miss Kane!  You are just the person I wanted to see!”  Her English was absolutely flawless, but what really amazed me was that she could tell humans apart so easily; she had only seen me once, at last night’s dinner, and to me she was nearly indistinguishable from the others of her party but for her insignia of rank.

I bowed my head and closed my eyes for a moment in the Tsath gesture of respect, then said, “You do me honor, Madame Consul; what can I do for you?”

“When I asked Mr. Ituro if you were his wife, he explained that you were a paid companion.  Is that correct?”

I inwardly panicked for just a moment; if these people were backward, might they have a primitive prejudice against whores?  But her voice sounded pleasant and friendly; I decided honesty was the best policy.  “Yes, it is.”

“Ah, I didn’t know Earth people had the trade, too!  Well, if you don’t mind, I have a contract for you.”

Before I could think of a reply, she called out to someone, and a Tsath child emerged from behind a display she had apparently been reading.  She was cute, in a 30-kilogram-deep-purple-tree-frog-with-spindly-limbs kind of way; fortunately for me, though the Tsath had no visible sexual dimorphism my unschooled eyes could discern, their customs of dress were coincidentally like traditional Western ones: one could tell a girl by her skirts.

“How fortunate I am to have found someone who could keep Nahgi company while I am embroiled in negotiations!  Whatever price you ask will be fine with me; you have an honest face so I know you’ll be fair.”

“I’m, uh, very pleased to meet you, Nahgi,” I stammered, totally unsure how to handle this.

“I’m pleased to meet you too, Miss Kane,” she squeaked in perfect English.  “I just know we’re going to have ever so much fun!”

“I’m sure we will,” I agreed, feeling very trapped as I watched her mother vanish into the lift.

**********************************************************************

Though it was rough going at first, I eventually realized she wasn’t all that different from a human seven-year-old, and though I hadn’t baby-sat since I was sixteen it came back quickly enough.  I got to see their intellectual dimorphism firsthand: though technical things seemed to confuse or fascinate Nahgi far more than they would a human child, her facility with languages was quite remarkable.  She spoke three in all, and despite the fact that she had never heard English at this time last year, she now sounded like a native.  I soon realized that she found endless amusement in puns, rhymes and silly word games, though not nearly as much as she found in my painfully-incompetent attempts to pronounce even the simplest words in her language.  She was very excited by my promise to teach her a bit of Mandarin the next day, yet at the same time was mystified by my ability to add up the prices of items in my head.

And so, in spite of my initial reluctance, I actually found myself enjoying the day.  The marketplace was climate-controlled for human comfort, so I had bought her a little winter suit to keep her warm; she laughed at herself in the mirror and I laughed to see the contrast of my pale human skin in summer clothes with her hairless purple head sticking up from a faux-fur collar.  Fortunately, she had been taught which human foods she could eat, but when I took her to the penny arcade after lunch I found that most of the games either bored or frustrated her.  Since I was feeling generous and growing genuinely fond of my little charge, I suggested she show me the sorts of playthings she liked in the toy department; this was met with the same enthusiasm one would expect from a human child, so off we went.

Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1954When we arrived, I thought her already-huge eyes would bug completely out of her head.  The proprietors of the shop had decorated it for the holidays in the antique style of centuries past, with old-fashioned garlands and colored lights; dolls and toy animals ran about the floor, and aircraft flew in formation or performed aerobatics.  A wide selection of Christmas music from many different times wafted through the air, as did the savory smell of baked goodies presented on trays for the taking.  Artificially-created snow was falling in an enclosed playground out front, and colonial children who had never seen the stuff except in video romped and howled, building snowmen and pelting each other with snowballs.  And presiding over the whole from his throne at the back of the area was Father Christmas himself, in the same costume he’s worn since before children first accompanied their parents to the stars.

“Who is that?” Nahgi asked in a hushed voice.

“He’s dressed as a legendary figure called Santa Claus, who is the symbol of our most popular festival.  That’s what all these decorations are for.”

“Is Santa Claus a god?”

My stomach dropped.  I had no idea what Tsath religious beliefs were like, though her question seemed to indicate polytheism.  On the one hand, I might start an interstellar incident by insulting their faith, but on the other hand, I wasn’t about to tell a child of any species that Santa wasn’t real.  So I opted for the diplomatic approach.

“Well, a saint.  Sort of a demigod, I guess; I’m not an expert in theology.”  Oh, good grief; what an inane answer!  As soon as it was out of my mouth I wanted to drown myself in the wassail bowl.

But Nahgi didn’t think it was stupid, at all.  “So, this is a priest dressed as him for a ceremony!”

“Something like that.”

“Why are the children setting on his lap?  Is he blessing them?”

“Well, sort of.  They tell him what gift they would like, and the legend says that if they’ve been good, he brings it to them on Christmas Eve, which is six days from today.”

She was so excited I thought she would wet herself, if Tsath do that.  “May I sit on his lap, too?”

For a moment, all I could see was a vision of myself standing neck-deep in a hole, which I was digging deeper and deeper.  “Well, I would suspect so, but let me ask permission first, OK?”  She gave that closed-eye nod, and I approached Santa to ask; as it turned out he was a retired xenobiologist and was absolutely thrilled to share the ancient ritual with an alien child.  I beckoned her to the throne, and though she at first approached with awe she was as quick as any human child to clamber into his lap once he bade her do so.  And as I watched the timeless scene unfold for a little girl to whom it was wholly new, I thanked the goddess of my profession for tear-proof makeup.

Once she had whispered her Christmas wish to him, hugged him and climbed down, she scampered gaily to my side and took my hand.  “I’m ready to go back to the hotel now, if you are,”  she said.

“What did you ask him for?” I asked, my heart in my fallen stomach.

“For our people to reach an agreement soon,” she said.

I felt a pall of doom descend upon me.  “Sweetie, I’m not sure he can bring you that.”

“Yes, he can,” she said matter-of-factly.

**********************************************************************

She was right.

By dinner the next day, the talks were concluded; the Tsath had clearly received whatever omen they had been waiting for, and the agreement had fallen into place as quickly and neatly as one might negotiate the sale of a used robot.  My patron was mystified; he had no idea what had happened, but being male he was satisfied with the assumption that his own skill at negotiation had somehow broken the impasse.  The consul thanked me at dinner for taking such good care of Nahgi, and the child herself came to see me the next morning, to hug me goodbye and to ask for my address so she could write; neither of them said anything about the resolution, either.

I’ll tell you what I think happened, though.  The Tsath are creatures of intuition; the negotiators probably projected the typical human “serious grown-up business” demeanor, which may have made them uncomfortable and wary.  But when I spent a day with one of their children, and allowed her to see that Earth people were capable of generosity, humor and tenderness, it forged a connection that wasn’t there before.  Maybe the Tsath have a kind of Santa Claus, and the discovery that we do as well showed them our two peoples aren’t so different after all.Omega Centauri
(With grateful acknowledgement to the work of Zenna Henderson).

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Fictional Interlude: The Screening

Posted in Fiction, tagged , , , , , , on November 16, 2012| 21 Comments »

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.  –  William James

Walter savored the Cohiba and poured himself a second tumbler of Glenfiddich, then turned to look down on the city.  Since the year this whiskey went into its cask he had worked to build his business, and after the most recent deal he felt that he had at long last arrived.  In all that time he had rarely relaxed, seldom taken a vacation and never allowed himself the luxuries other businessmen did, but all that was about to change; perhaps he might even restrict himself with the kind of business ethics he had always totally disregarded before.  But now that he had finally reached the goal he set himself at eighteen, he could afford morality as easily as he could expensive indulgences.

With that thought, he turned back to his computer screen and hit “send”.  His days of cheap cigars, second-rate liquor and reasonably-priced escorts were over; now he was playing in the big leagues, and could easily spend the money for a companion of real quality.  For him that meant Sibyl, the woman who had fascinated him since he first encountered her website months ago.  Still, he had hesitated; though her price was well within his comfort zone, he found her screening requirements rather daunting.  He did not like the idea of identifying himself so clearly and definitely to a stranger about whom he knew absolutely nothing, but two generous servings of Scotch had helped to steel his resolve and now he was committed.

Walter wasn’t sure how long Sibyl would take to get back to him, but he certainly didn’t expect it to be within minutes.  Perhaps it was just an autoreply, though it didn’t sound like one:

My Dear Mr. Grey,

Thank you for sending the information I requested!  Though I know you’ve been frightfully busy with that important deal you mentioned in your last letter, I was beginning to think you had perhaps changed your mind about meeting me.  I’m glad to see you haven’t, and I look forward to meeting you in person after I’ve finished my screening process, which I’m sure you will understand must be very thorough.  I’ll let you know by Friday afternoon, but as my preliminary inquiries have indicated that you’re exactly the sort of man I like to see, I don’t imagine any difficulties.

Very Sincerely Yours,
Sybil

Friday!  What kind of damned screening could take three whole days?  Walter shrugged, closed the email program, and barely even noticed the fleeting error message which flashed on the screen during the shutdown procedure.

***********************************************************************

He had thought about taking the next day off, but he was a creature of habit and so eventually found himself at his office again, though several hours later than usual.  It was more than early enough; there weren’t really very many loose ends to tie up, and he would’ve been done in plenty of time for a round of golf had he not been required to deal with a long column of annoying emails on a computer which seemed uncharacteristically sluggish, while at the same time dealing with phone calls from the accounting and contract departments.  It was a singularly frustrating day, and while it was not bad enough to completely ruin yesterday’s celebratory mood, it did demonstrate exactly how much the intense negotiations of the past few months had exhausted him; after his date with Sybil this weekend, a long vacation in the Caymans would be in order.  In the meantime, though, a leisurely day tomorrow would help; he had been cooped up in this damned office for so long he kept receiving the bizarre impression that his computer was watching him, and that the screen was its enormous, unblinking eye.

The night’s sleep did not alleviate the delusion at all; if anything, the next day was even worse.  Every screen he passed or used – his plasma TV, the stereo display in his car, even the touch-screen on his iPhone – seemed to be watching his every move, carefully examining him, peering through his clothes and skin to the nerves, dissecting his brain and smearing his soul onto a slide to be viewed under some impossible, intangible microscope.  Walter was far too rational and self-assured to actually believe what he thought he saw; it was perfectly clear to him that this was merely the inevitable but long-delayed result of years of intense stress which would have destroyed a lesser man, but was now catching up to him.  Sybil would do him a world of good, and he had already told his secretary he might be out of touch for weeks after he left for his holiday next Tuesday.  And though there would be far too many screens at the airport and on the airplane for his liking, he would be far away from the hateful things on a lovely beach in the Caribbean.

In the meantime, though, the scrutiny from the peering eyes behind the screens grew almost unbearable.  They watched him from his golf partners’ phones after he turned his off, and later from the windows of stores after he covered the car’s console screen with his jacket.  He felt so surrounded in the restaurant that he was forced to cut his dinner short, and though there was a movie he wanted to see the thought of sitting for over two hours in front of a screen twenty meters wide was absolutely unbearable.  So he instead went directly home, took a bottle and glass into his bedroom, and closed the door so he wouldn’t have to see the huge flat screen in the living room.  He then tried to read for a while, but mostly drank until he sank into terrifying dreams of gigantic, long-lashed eyes prying into every corner of his home.

***********************************************************************

When he at last awoke to the sound of a ringing telephone, the day was already half gone.  The nightmares had finally ceased about dawn, and the beautiful, sultry voice on the other end of the phone heralded a far brighter day than yesterday as Sybil told him that she was done with her screening, and would be happy to see him tomorrow evening as he had requested.  She told him the address at which he could pick her up, and suggested they begin the evening with dinner at a restaurant he had heard good things about, but never tried for himself.  He hung up the phone with a smile on his face and a much lighter heart, and he dismissed the lingering scent of a strange and spicy perfume as a figment of his imagination brought on by the unsettling presence of the television set within view of his breakfast table.

Friday afternoon passed without incident, and Walter enjoyed the postponed movie as much as the reviews had assured him he would.  A lovely late dinner and a good bottle of wine made for the perfect conclusion to the day, and back at home he laughed at yesterday’s ridiculous fears as he flipped channels to relax before bed.  His sleep was peaceful and unhaunted by ghastly disembodied eyes, and he awoke the next morning refreshed and optimistic about his date with Sybil and his life in general.  He had always regarded his doctor’s warnings about overwork with a mixture of amusement and annoyance, but now he recognized that he had been wrong and resolved to apologize at his earliest possible opportunity…after his vacation, that is.

He hurried out for a haircut, had his car washed and went through all the other preparations he would have made for an unpaid date; though he knew Sybil was a professional, he also knew she was very selective and might refuse to see him again if he made a bad impression.  He arrived exactly at the agreed-upon time, having already made an electronic payment to her account yesterday as instructed.  She was more beautiful than he imagined; her face and body were flawless, her style impeccable and her personality enchanting.  The only thing which kept her from total perfection in his eyes was her perfume; it was strange and spicy, yet vaguely familiar and somehow associated with the unpleasant memory of Thursday.  But that one sour note soon vanished into the symphony of her presence, and the disquiet it caused was more than drowned out by his rising passion for her.

The next few hours passed in a blur, and Walter felt as excited and nervous as a teenage boy on the drive back.  Her house was nearly as intriguing as she was, and her parlor adorned with all manner of beautiful, unique and obviously expensive furnishings and curios.  She offered him a drink, then suggested with a mysterious smile that it was time for her to change…but he felt an unaccountable chill sweep over him when she glided off to a shadowy corner of the room and slipped behind an ornate Oriental screen.

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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.

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Book Reviews (October 2012)

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 22, 2012| 41 Comments »

Books are never far from a scholar’s hands, just as songs are never far from a singer’s lips.  –  Chinese proverb

Though I was a voracious reader from the age of four until my early thirties, I’m just so very busy these days writing that I don’t have nearly as much time for reading.  More accurately, I don’t have as much time for book reading; I still spend plenty of time reading articles online.  If I didn’t set aside about 15 minutes in the morning and a similar amount at bedtime, however, I probably wouldn’t get to read books at all any more (which is why it takes me so long to get through the rather large stack of books generously sent by my readers).  These four books have something else in common:  they were all written by people who read this blog (at least from time to time).  Three of these are my most recent reads, but I read Sex at the Margins about a year and a half ago and just recently realized that I had neglected to review it.

Paying For It:  A Comic-strip Memoir About Being a John by Chester Brown

By the time I go to bed in the evening I am often so exhausted that I fall asleep over whatever book I’m trying to read, even if it’s something I like a lot (such as reprints of Silver Age sci-fi comics).  But I had no such problem with Paying for It; I repeatedly found myself saying, “I’ll just read for a few more minutes,” and finished it in a very few days.  If I had to sum up this book in a single word, it would be “sincere”; it’s an honest and frank illustrated journal of Brown’s experiences with Toronto hookers, starting with how he came to prefer paying for sex over the serial monogamy he had (like most people) previously practiced, and ending with his becoming a long-term regular of one exceptional lady and planning the book.  Along the way he shares his thoughts, impressions, joys, concerns and misgivings, and also his conversations with friends who had internalized prohibitionist propaganda; he depicts several arguments, discussions and debates with them in comic form, and also includes 23 appendices in which he effectively refutes prohibitionist arguments.  For me, the most fascinating aspect of the book was its revelation of the author’s internal monologue, which is presented so matter-of-factly that its honesty is irrefutable; it’s one thing for a client to say “this is what I was thinking” when speaking directly to me, and another thing entirely for him to share with the world even those thoughts which could be perceived as unflattering to himself.  Though die-hard neofeminists will continue to believe that all clients are evil exploiters no matter what evidence is presented to them, I believe this book is powerful enough to sway many of those who are “on the fence” about the subject, and I really hope it gets the extensive exposure and brisk sales it deserves.

Sex at the Margins:  Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry by Laura Agustín

The term “groundbreaking” is regularly and carelessly thrown about in reviews on books which cover controversial topics, but in this case it is wholly accurate and entirely deserved.  Regular readers are already familiar with Dr. Agustín, whose blog The Naked Anthropologist I have often quoted and linked, but what you may not realize is how much those of us fighting “sex trafficking” hysteria owe to her and especially to this book.  She started studying the intersection of migration and sex work back when “human trafficking” still meant the smuggling of undocumented immigrants across international borders, and hers was among the first voices raised in protest when the moral panic around it went into high gear in 2004.  Sex at the Margins doesn’t only challenge the mythology of millions of passive, helpless, exploited victims, but also clearly and thoroughly explains what is really going on with most of those labeled “trafficked”, how their actions are viewed through a sexist, racist and colonialist prism to interpret them as some kind of global disaster, and why it’s so important to listen to what migrants (in sex work or otherwise) have to say about their own experiences rather than forcing an ignorant, biased interpretation onto them.  Furthermore, the book has not only helped many people (including me) to understand these phenomena, but has also given us the language to talk about it:  for example, the term “rescue industry”, now a common one in sex worker rights discourse, was coined by Dr. Agustín and first widely disseminated herein.

The Sex Myth:  Why Everything We’re Told is Wrong by Brooke Magnanti

Dr. Magnanti, as the big yellow sticker the publisher has pasted on the cover  reminds us, had already published a number of books as Belle de Jour, the stage name she used as a London call girl while working on her PhD in Forensic Pathology.  But this is her first written specifically as a scientist and statistician, and I hope it’s at least as successful as her previous books because she thoroughly and effectively debunks nine myths about sex (including “sex addiction”, “premature sexualization”, “negative secondary effects” and myths about porn, prostitution and “sex trafficking”).  She does this not only by presenting facts and studies which disprove the myths, but also by demonstrating how the entire approach of those who create, define and spread them is designed not to discover the truth, but rather to promote a predetermined agenda by picking and choosing only those facts, pseudo-facts and opinions which can be made to fit the desired pattern and excluding the rest.  Her writing is sharp, clever and compelling, and she has a gift for coining useful terms like “constellation maker” (one who chooses which data points to include in the desired “picture” just as the ancients chose which stars made up a constellation).  Though she is generally more polite to the prohibitionists than I tend to be, let that not be mistaken for her being soft on them:  she convincingly demonstrates that those who manufacture and define sex myths are fully aware of what they’re doing, and in fact her last chapter refutes the claim that prohibitionists are largely well-meaning, if deluded.  The book has not yet been released in the United States, but is available from a number of British vendors who offer international shipping for a competitive price.

You Will Die:  The Burden of Modern Taboos by Robert Arthur

Rob Arthur defines a taboo as “a topic that a culture prevents its people from discussing freely,” and this book is based around the philosophy that “taboos are a burden on society…[and] hinder progress toward greater happiness.”  Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while knows the truth of that statement:  if it weren’t for the general ignorance about sex in general and sex work in particular, an ignorance maintained by sexual taboos, no reasonable person would accept laws against consensual sexual behavior and the ridiculous lies about the harms which supposedly result from sexuality would be widely recognized as the ravings of miserable prudes.  Arthur also discusses taboos against drugs and bodily wastes, though the latter doesn’t get nearly as much space as sex and drugs because there is no vast, expensive and oppressive “War on Poo” whose chief result is human misery.  In a sense, You Will Die is two books in one; it is written in a pleasant, conversational style and presents fascinating, often obscure facts in such a way as to make it a great pleasure read, but is both exhaustively researched and so extensively footnoted that it will make an important addition to my reference library.  Note:  I read this book in the third edition, but the link and picture are for the fourth, which will be available in a few weeks; Rob consulted me while updating the section on prostitution and sent me a copy as a thank-you.

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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.)

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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.

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Q & A (July 2012)

Posted in Perception, Q & A, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 31, 2012| 20 Comments »

When I pressed her for a reason
She refused to even answer…  –  Billy Joel, “The Stranger”

Got a question?  Email me at maggiemcneill@earthlink.net.  The last question is from a recent comment thread, but I thought it was worthwhile repeating in a more prominent location.

Inasmuch as “trafficking” is a problem, what should be done about it?  I personally think that full deregulation of voluntary personal physical activities would pretty much take care of the problem, but I don’t think my countrymen would go for that.  I understand that nothing will satisfy the anti-sex zealots who use trafficking as an excuse to persecute sex workers, but is there any degree of regulatory compromise that you would be comfortable with that could also allay the fears of those who talk about trafficking?

The short version is that there isn’t any such thing as “trafficking”, at least not as depicted by the fanatics.  It’s a boondoggle, a moral panic, a new version of “white slavery” or the Satanic Panic.  There are no vast criminal cartels “trafficking in humans” for sexual or any other purpose, and the overwhelming majority of the people labeled “trafficked” are actually either regular hookers, or people who have migrated to work; of course there is sometimes exploitation just as there is everywhere, but to depict these incidents as part of some gigantic conspiracy is no different from pretending all child sexual abuse is part of a Satanic cult network.

According to a recent study done of the decriminalized sex work industry in New South Wales, your surmise that deregulation would solve most of the problems is 100% correct.  As for the rest of your question, it’s a lot more complex issue than “trafficking” fanatics pretend; here are a few columns which will serve as a good introduction of those issues:  A False Dichotomy,  Chupacabra,  Déjà Vu,  Don’t Buy It,  Held Together With Lies,  Here We Go Again,  Rhinoceros,  Rooted in Racism,  Thought Experiment and Umpteen Thousand People Can’t Be Wrong.  And here are a few others on the problems caused by a criminalization, law enforcement or “rescue” approach:  Against Their Will,  As Young As Possible,  Bad Fantasy, Good Reality,  Enabling Oppression,  Finding What Isn’t There,  Hard Numbers, Knights Erroneous, Law of the Instrument and One Size Fits All.  Finally, you can learn a great deal from Dr. Laura Agustín, many of whose essays are real eye-openers.

Have you had a regular job since retiring from prostitution?  How do you deal with nasty comments about prostitutes from people who don’t know your background?  And have you ever met a prostitute and had her “read” you as a former whore?

I haven’t had a “straight” job  since I left the library in 1995.  When my husband proposed he knew full well I would never agree to retire if that involved working for someone else again, so he had to agree to support me or it was no deal.  Technically, I’m still a whore, but I only have one client now and it’s a very long-term contract.  That’s really a good thing for my readers, because writing this column is literally a full-time job so I wouldn’t be able to do it if I had to spend 40 hours a week plus commute time doing something else.

Though I’m not really “out”, I publicly oppose all laws restricting consensual behavior, so my support for whores isn’t really a giveaway; my recent Friday the 13th column listed the sort of arguments anyone can use to argue impersonally against anti-whore bigotry one might hear in public.  And I’ve done a whole column on the topic of people “reading” me.

Will you ever let your husband write a column?

My husband has written three columns, actually; a two-part interview and an account of his visit to a “soapland” in Japan.

How did you go from being a sex industry pro to being married and living in a completely remote area?  Do you miss the variety, and do you do anything about it if you do?  Also, do you think jealousy is ingrained in us, i.e. part of our instincts, or do you think it exists due to socio-cultural imprints?

The best way to answer the first part of your question would probably be to refer you to the interview with my husband linked in the question above; the second part was covered in my Q & A columns for  November 2010, May 2011 and August 2011.  As for jealousy, the proof of its biological origin is the fact that men and women tend to experience it differently.  Most men are far more concerned with physical infidelity, and most women with emotional infidelity (which is why most well-adjusted women don’t really care about whores).  This makes sense when you realize that since a woman can only have one baby per year, physical infidelity results in a huge genetic opportunity loss and resource drain for the male if his woman is impregnated by someone else.  For women, it doesn’t matter how much seed her husband spreads around because he has plenty; it’s his resources being diverted to other women and their children which concerns her.  That’s why men tend to feel more threatened by hearing about their wives’ past one-night stands than about ex-husbands, while women tend to feel more threatened by ex-wives than by past flings.

Maybe you’ve commented on this before, but do you think there is a connection between intelligence (or, more accurately, intellectual vigor and curiosity) and sexuality?

I think there certainly can be.  People who are intelligent, open-minded and imaginative tend to be harder to restrain by arbitrary rules because they see no rational reason for those rules.  And a woman with a mind of that sort who is faced with bills is far more likely than her duller, less imaginative sisters to recognize that sex work is a viable source of income, and far less likely to buy the propaganda designed to keep her from doing it.  So although I don’t think it’s correct to make the broad statement that “whores are smarter than amateurs”, I do think it’s fair to say that the average intelligence of high-opportunity-cost sex workers is probably higher than that of their amateur sisters, for the simple reason that in situations where there are multiple options of which sex work is the best, less-intelligent women are far more likely to discard it as a viable option due to arbitrary rules and false propaganda which are more readily disregarded by women of greater intellectual agility.

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Fictional Interlude: Empathy

Posted in Fiction, tagged , , , , , , , on July 19, 2012| 77 Comments »

Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies. – William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (II, ii)

“I’m looking forward to seeing you at seven-ninety then.  Thank you, Lord Zolan!”  Marilith covered the glass and settled back onto the cushions of the divan; the feelings of a new patron were often overwhelming at first, and she would need much of the next hour to sort through them.  “Tea please, Cynthia,” she said when her handmaiden appeared in response to the bell.

“Red lotus as usual, mistress?”

“Yes, and the incense too.” Then as the servant turned to go, she added, “And you’ll need to stay close for this one, I think.”

Cynthia’s face remained as impassive as ever, but she asked, “Do you think he’ll be dangerous?”

“Dangerous?  No.  Very ardent, though; I can feel his intensity even now, and I’ll need your capable hands if I lose myself in so deep a pool.”  No answer but a deep bow was necessary, so Cynthia gave no other, and a moment later she was gone.  Though she had been here for six months now, Marilith was still impressed with her efficiency; she had indeed been a wise investment, just as Dr. Galen had promised.

This house, too, had been a wise investment; its proximity to the palace and the spectacular view of the cloud-piercing Tower of Heaven would have justified its expense even without the space and amenities it offered.  As a child, she could only have dreamed of living in Yian, much less owning a lovely mansion and the finest servants human ingenuity could produce…but that was before her talent had manifested itself, and before she had recognized how she could improve her situation by its use.

A wave of lust spread through Marilith’s body, momentarily startling her with its intensity; her new client was presently transacting some business in the Tower, and by looking toward it she had inadvertently opened the empathic channel more widely.  She inhaled deeply of the calming incense (when had Cynthia brought it in?  As silent as she was quick!) and explored Lord Zolan’s feelings, gliding through them as though swimming in a strong current, not fighting them yet not allowing them to carry her away, either.  He was an important man, high in the Imperial bureaucracy, and such men usually have powerful passions; once she had mapped the rugged and complex landscape of his desires and fully learned how to appeal to them, he would be an excellent and loyal client.  Today he would only be here for an hour, but that was almost too much for the first time with such an intense lover.

The tea helped her to master the invading emotions, and when she was done she went to her closet to dress.  The contact was more than strong enough for her to divine how best to appeal to him, and by the time his heightened anticipation told her that he was on his way she had dressed, made up and had her hair arranged for maximum effect.  All that remained was her customary prayer at the small shrine adjoining her boudoir, and she was ready; when she sensed he had touched down on the landing stage she moved into the parlor and artfully arranged herself on the cushions.

“Lord Zolan of Orissa,” Cynthia announced, and he entered the room in a burst of excitement which sharply increased the moment his eyes fell upon Marilith.  He crossed the room in a remarkably dignified fashion considering his emotional state, and raised her hand to his lips with something closely akin to awe.

“Your images fall utterly short of the reality,” he said in a hoarse whisper.  She knew that this was a totally sincere statement; no image, still or moving, could adjust its posture and facial expressions to appeal to the viewer’s individual preferences as she had learned to do.  She pitied courtesans without her gift; feigned lust and interest, no matter how perfectly imitated, could never match the real ones she borrowed from her clients.  She was the perfect dance partner, and followed as effortlessly as a shadow.

Some of her callers relished the anticipation, their passions mounting as she prolonged the preliminaries until the point they could stand it no longer, but Lord Zolan was not one of them; his need was a raging fire, and there would be ample time for conversation once it had been temporarily quenched.  For now, only two words were needed:  “Take me.”

It was as though she had thrown a lever to release some mechanism powered by a tightly-coiled spring.  Her own passion rose in tandem with his as he literally tore the gown from her body and covered her bosom in rough kisses, all hope of self-control lost to her now; she wanted him as badly as he wanted her, and there was absolutely nothing artificial about the ecstasy she felt as he entered her, nor about her synchronous climax when he reached his own within a very short time as all her lovers did.

When her senses eventually returned, Marilith glanced at the wall clock and saw it was just after eight; that left ninety minutes of their appointment, so there was no need to awaken her guest right away.  While he slept peacefully she could regain her composure and get a better look at him through eyes unblurred by the intense emotions she had felt while he was awake.  He was a well-built, good-looking man with strong features, every bit the son of a sirdar; according to the peerage records Marilith had consulted last week when he first contacted her, his mother was a great-great granddaughter of the royal house of one of the Outer Worlds.  So in addition to the generous fee and the undeniable physical and emotional pleasure she would gain from his visits, he had good family connections on both sides which could prove very valuable to her; his patronage might provide the means by which she eventually secured a title, an advantageous marriage in a class far above that into which she had been born, or both.

But there would be plenty of time for that later; right now she was enjoying her life as the most sought-after companion in the capital…the attention, the intense pleasures, the comforts and most of all the wealth.  Political power would come as easily and naturally as the rest had.

She smiled, and began to kiss and caress her noble visitor’s head.

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Sexual Healing

Posted in Call types, Perception, Philosophy, Q & A, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 17, 2012| 38 Comments »

When I was a call girl, men were not paying for sex.  They were paying for something else.  They were either paying to act out a fantasy or they were paying for companionship or they were paying to be seen with a well-dressed young woman.  Or they were paying for someone to listen to them.  –  Roberta Victor

I recently received an email from a gentleman with two friends, each with confidence issues that my reader thought might be ameliorated with the help of an experienced professional.  This is not at all unusual; in my early column “Madonna and Whore” I wrote,

I have gently coaxed sexual response from the impotent or inhibited, or those sexually shell-shocked by disastrous relationships; on a multitude of occasions I have provided a man with some sexual outlet he needed, yet for which he could not or would not ask his wife (usually because she had turned him down cold when the subject was mentioned).  I have given much-needed intimacy to men so deformed most women couldn’t bear to look at them, held men while they cried because they were too ashamed to do it before their wives, and played mother-confessor for a host of sins.  I have lent a sympathetic ear to clients’ problems, given them relationship advice, comforted them when they were in pain and reassured them when they were overcome by uncertainty.


I’m not remotely unusual in this respect; most whores can say the same.  Though prudish American culture prefers to deny it, sex has a powerful healing function (especially for men), and sex professionals can often do far more for a man than a doctor, psychiatrist or priest.  In addition to the basics like massage and release of debilitating tension we give virgins their first experiences with women, minister to the sexual needs of the disabled and even help to relieve stress in men who have suffered through traumatic situations; in the following questions we’ll look at two more cases in which a talented professional would be more therapist than tart.

My first friend is a gentleman in his late 40’s who has not been with a woman in the 3 years since his divorce.  His friends believe he is completely over his ex, but we have noticed an uncharacteristic lapse in his confidence; we’ve tried to reintroduce him to dating, but it’s as if he doesn’t remember how to behave around women and he pulls back within his shell.  Do you think it a good idea to arrange for a discreet professional to meet with him as if by accident and accompany him for an evening, but conceal the true reason for their serendipitous meeting?

Though you can probably find a lady who would be willing to playact with your friend, I’m not at all sure that would be the right thing to do.  I’m a big believer in honesty, and though there are certainly some circumstances in which duplicity for a good cause is acceptable, I honestly don’t know if this would be one of them.  My concern is that if he ever found out it could be even worse for his self-confidence, and there are a number of ways in which he could find out; it might happen during the date due to perceptiveness on his part or a slip on her part, and what happens when he asks for her phone number at the end of the evening (as he certainly would)?  Or what if he goes surfing escort sites (you may think he doesn’t, but what if you’re wrong?) and discovers her pictures online?  Spending an evening with an experienced call girl can do wonders for a man’s sexual self-confidence, but I honestly feel it’s better for him to know what’s really going on rather than being fed a fantasy.

My other friend is much younger (in his late 20s) and has almost the opposite issue; he gets so excited that he finishes much more quickly than he would prefer.  I shared with him some tips to calm himself, and though he said one of those suggestions has truly helped him it only increased his time from immediately to a few minutes.  His last girlfriend moved away and now he’s afraid to deal with another one because he doesn’t want to embarrass himself by “being so disappointing”.  He can’t really afford a sex therapist, so I was wondering if a lady of the evening might help him?  If so, should he let her know exactly what she’s signing up for? 

It’s possible you may already have corrected his problem.  You say he used to climax immediately, but now can last “a few minutes”; how many is a few?  Because as I explained in an interview with the London School of Attraction,  most women don’t want nearly as much actual intercourse as most men seem to think we do.  If your friend can go for five minutes that’s enough for most women, especially if he takes the time to give his partner all the foreplay she wants.  A good escort might indeed help him, but maybe not in the way you’re thinking:  she might be able to teach him to slow down if necessary, but more importantly she could help him develop his confidence and foreplay techniques, and let him know if he really is too fast or just thinks he is.

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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.

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