Angela Chen on Asexuality

 

At fourteen, I came across the word “asexuality” the same way most people do: online. I read the words prominently displayed on asexuality.org, the website of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN): “An asexual person is a person who does not experience sexual attraction.” Asexuality, I learned, is a sexual orientation, just like homosexuality and pansexuality and heterosexuality are sexual orientations. A person who is homosexual is sexually attracted to the same gender; a person who is asexual is sexually attracted to no one.
 
All of this made sense. Growing up in Silicon Valley had helped me develop a healthy appreciation for alternative lifestyles and I was pleased that my latest Wikipedia rabbit hole had taught me something new about the world and about other people. I had no trouble believing that asexuality was normal, healthy, and valid, and that these asexual people, or aces, were entitled to long and happy lives without the rest of us pointing and laughing. But learning the term did not change how I viewed myself. I misinterpreted “a person who does not experience sexual attraction” to mean “a person who hates sex” — and so I, personally, could not be asexual.
 
That notion seemed laughable. I spent middle school and high school gossiping about crushes; the idea of sex held great promise. Even through college, there was little reason to suspect I might be ace, only that I might be neurotic, shy, and arrogant. I found Adrien Brody attractive and Channing Tatum less so and had a vulgar sense of humor, full of sex jokes and sly insinuations that made my more proper friends blush. I spoke of longing and listened intently to stories of sexual adventures and never did it occur to me that my friends and I might be using the language of desire differently.
 
For them, a word like “hot” could indicate a physical pull. For me, “hot” conveyed an admiration of excellent bone structure, no different from admiring a particularly striking painting. Their sexual encounters were often motivated by libido. I didn’t even know that I lacked a libido. I was a little curious about sex because everything — books, television, friends — told me it felt fantastic. But I was very curious about what it would be like to be desired and to be loved. That was the real root of my longing.
 
Then, Henry. Henry and I met when we were twenty-one. After our first conversation, I wrote “BE STILL MY FUCKING HEART” in my journal, just like that, in all caps. That conversation took place over the internet, he in Texas and I in California. We fell in love anyway, over emails and chats and hours of talking.
 
I wouldn’t meet Henry in person for nearly a year. A few months after that would be the last time I saw him, but the aftershocks of our relationship would stretch into the future far beyond the amount of time we had actually spent together. Henry will always be one of the ways that I mark “before” and “after” in my life—not just for learning about asexuality, though our relationship provided the impetus for me to do so, but also for understanding romantic love and the obsessive pain of loss.
 
First love always feels like a miracle. That I fell in love with someone far away, someone I had met believing nothing could happen other than friendship; that we needed to coordinate our lives to be together; that what we felt inside really did change outer reality—all of that made this moment in time, this person, feel even more extraordinary.
   
Our investments marked the relationship as special, and the seriousness of our plan became evidence of the seriousness of our feelings, testaments that our tie went beyond vanity and was more than infatuation. In this, I remain sure, we were not wrong. Nothing then or since has shaken my belief that no matter how excruciatingly immature we might have been, at their core the feelings were both rare and very real.
 
Texas and California are far away, but it was senior year of college and everyone’s lives were about to split open anyway. The deal was that we would both move to New York City after graduation. I would take a journalism job and he would go to graduate school. But when Henry was not accepted into any universities in the area, he chose to attend a school in the South and pushed for a five-year long-distance open relationship.
 
I was not equipped to handle this proposed arrangement — I, so untrusting and wary of vulnerability that I had written this to myself in my journal: ‘’Another thing you need to remember, and something that, for some reason, has never really occurred to you before: You can ask things of others too. You can ask them to compromise. It is not always you who have to.’’
 
I should have said no, but I was afraid of losing him. So I made a mistake and said yes.
 
Before Henry headed to the South for graduate school, he arranged to be in New York for the summer, ostensibly to take language classes but in reality to be with me. Without having yet met in person, we agreed to find a place together. The months we would spend together already seemed painfully short compared to what we had expected; there was nothing else we wanted so much, so why waste time on commutes?
 
That summer was painful and there are many reasons we did not work out. Sex was not one of those reasons — not exactly. Our strange courtship might have created problems in many other areas, but we found each other beautiful and I enjoyed having sex with Henry. It felt intimate, like I was special to him and privy to an experience that others were not. It gave me the feeling I had always wanted: not sexual pleasure, but the thrill of specialness.
 
Sex itself did not cause problems, but my fear of a specific aspect of sexuality did.
 
Though we were functionally monogamous during those months, the prospect of five years of an open relationship terrified me, and the fact that Henry wanted to have sex with others was hard to take. Convinced that Henry would fall in love with someone else after sleeping with them, any mention of sexual attraction — his or anyone else’s — prompted tortured projections of abandonment.
 
    Soon, dread of an uncertain future overshadowed the safety I had in the present. I wanted to be strong and wanted to run away in equal measure, and that produced the toxic cocktail that ruined the time we did have together. Over and over, I could feel my emotions spinning out of control as I acted in ways I knew were wrong but felt powerless to stop. My panic manifested in constantly trying to break up, so afraid was I of being left. During the nonstop fights, I waved my hand and gave as reasons any number of issues that never directly included the words “fear” or “insecurity.” I could neither say that I was afraid nor admit how much I cared.
 
One day, on the way home from work, I passed a flower shop and on a whim bought red carnations for Henry. When I arrived home and he asked me where I’d gotten the flowers, I became overwhelmed by the prospect of admitting to a kind, spontaneous gesture. I said that I had taken the flowers from someone at work and thought they’d look nice on the dining room table.
 
Henry eventually had enough and broke up with me, rightly, in the fall.
 
He was gone, but my mind continued to wrap itself around the endless conversations we’d had about why an open relationship was necessary: Henry saying that men would always want to stray because it was natural, that clinging to monogamy was old-fashioned and that I could defeat that desire if I really tried, just a little bit harder.
 
Henry’s statements created a new, gut-deep fear of anything related to flirting or sex or romance. When my roommate started watching old seasons of Scandal, a glance at the protagonists kissing in some dark hallway sent me to my room with the door shut. If anyone tried to hold my hand on a date, I drew back immediately. I had never liked being touched by strangers, but, clammy and cynical, I now actively feared it. I missed Henry terribly and now believed that every relationship would end either in betrayal or with the other person feeling trapped.
 
One evening, nearly two years after I had last seen Henry, I found myself telling my friend Thomas about how badly everything had ended. By this point, I was well-practiced at reciting the events. I was obsessed with them, convinced that people couldn’t understand me without knowing about Henry and convinced that I couldn’t understand myself unless I could answer the question of why we failed—which to me was the same as the question of why I behaved the way I did when I knew better. So many people had heard this story, but Thomas couldn’t understand why I had been so worried that Henry might be attracted to someone else and leave me.
 
 “I get being jealous,” Thomas said, “but not your worry that he couldn’t control himself at all. Being sexually attracted to other people happens to all of us.”
 
“I know, and that’s what terrifies me,” I said. “It’ll happen to everyone and then someone will always be fighting this desire and wanting to cheat, even if they don’t cheat. That seems miserable.”
 
“I mean, yes,” he said. “Sort of. But also, not really. I’m sure you’ve been sexually attracted to someone that you’re not dating, but it’s often just attraction. Physical. That happens all the time and you manage it. For most people, it’s not some horrible thing you can’t deal with, though I guess it can be. Almost all the time it’s no big deal. We all learn to deal, you know?”
 
I didn’t know. Nothing he said sounded familiar.
 
I had never experienced “just attraction,” a physical impulse—only emotional desire for closeness that manifested physically. I wanted sex with someone only when I was already prepared to change my life for them, so I did not believe Henry when he claimed that wanting sex with others did not have to threaten me.
 
When he talked about how everyone was sexually attracted to others all the time, I could not understand attraction as anything but how I experienced it: emotional yearning—love, really—overpowering and overwhelming, a disaster for our relationship if targeted toward anyone but myself. It sounds illogical now, and like incredible naivete, but for me, desire for love and desire for sex had always been one and the same, an unbreakable link. I had been curious about sex but had never wanted to have sex with any person before Henry.
 
Talking to Thomas prompted me to question why statements he took for granted were revelations to me. I wondered what else I did not know that I did not know about sexual desire. ●
Beacon Press
 
Excerpted from Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen (Beacon Press, 2020).
 
 
How I Discovered My Own Asexuality Without Knowing It. By Angela Chen. BuzzFeed News, June  25, 2020.

“I think I am in friend-love with you,” says the narrator of a comic of the same name, written and illustrated by Yumi Sakugawa and published in Sadie Magazine in 2012.
 
“I don’t want to date or even make out with you. Because that would be weird,” the comic continues across a series of panels, but the narrator does want:
 
the other person to think they are awesome
 
to spend a lot of time hanging out
 
Facebook chats after midnight
 
to email weird blog links
 
to swap favorite books
 
to @reply to each other’s tweets
 
to walk to their favorite food trucks
 
to find the best hole-in-the-wall cafes together
 
to have inside jokes
 
but all “in a platonic way, of course.”
 
I want to be close to you and special to you, the way you are to me, but I do not want to be sexual with you, this comic says. I want to be emotionally intimate with you and I want to be in love with you, but not in that way. Just as saying woman doctor implies that a doctor by default is male, clarifying this feeling as friend-love implies that love—the real thing, the romantic thing—is for sex. In truth, Sakugawa’s descriptions of platonic friend-love are similar to what many aces would call nonsexual romantic love.
 
Nonsexual romantic love sounds like an oxymoron. Almost all definitions of the feeling of romantic love—separate from the social role of married partners or romantic acts like saying “I love you”—fold in the sexual dimension. People might not be having sex, but wanting sex is the key to recognizing that feelings are romantic instead of platonic. Sexual desire is supposed to be the Rubicon that separates the two.
 
It’s not. Aces prove this. By definition, aces don’t experience sexual attraction and plenty are apathetic or averse to sex. Many still experience romantic attraction and use a romantic orientation (heteroromantic, pan-romantic, homoromantic, and so on) to signal the genders of the people they feel romantically toward and crush on.
 
Intuitively, it makes sense that people can experience romantic feelings without sexual ones, and few are confused when I define romantic orientation as separate from sexual orientation. The understanding breaks down once someone asks what it means to feel romantic love for someone if wanting to have sex with them isn’t the relevant yardstick. How is that different from loving a platonic best friend? Without sex involved, what is the difference people feel inside when they draw a line between the two types of love? What is romantic love without sexuality?
 
 Once again, this isn’t a question only applicable to aces. Allosexuals (allos, for short) might feel infatuated with a new acquaintance or be more attached to their best friend than to any romantic partner, yet they can deny the possibility of romantic feeling because of the lack of sexual attraction. Allos can wave their hand and say, “There are people I want to sleep with, and I don’t want to sleep with you, so it’s only platonic.”
 
As convenient as it is that allos can use sexual desire to distinguish the categories, this is also a constricting way to evaluate the world, and allos can seem as bewildered by their feelings as aces. For them, emotional intimacy and excitement can be confusing or nonsensical if they don’t include sexual attraction. Many allos have shared with me their puzzlement at feeling like they were in love with friends despite no sexual attraction on either side. The writer Kim Brooks published a long essay in The Cut puzzling over how it could be that she has obsessive relationships with women despite being straight. Of her college roommate she writes, “the relationship was never sexual, but it was one of the most intimate of my young adulthood. We shared each other’s clothes and beds and boyfriends.”
 
Aces know that sex is not always the dividing line that determines whether a relationship is romantic. We take another look and say, “Maybe you’re in love with your friend even if you’re not sexually attracted to her.” Questions about the definition of romantic love are the starting point for aces to think about love and romance in unexpected ways, from new, explicit categories beyond friendship and romance to the opportunities (legal, social, and more) of a world where romantic love is not the type of love valued above all others. Asexuality destabilizes the way people think about relationships, starting with the belief that passionate bonds must always have sex at the root.

 For 16-year-old Pauline Parker, June 22, 1954, was “the day of the happy event.” She wrote those words in neat script across the top of her diary entry, marking it as a much-wished-for occasion. “I felt very excited and ‘the night before Christmas-ish’ last night,” she wrote underneath. “I am about to rise!”

 The happy event would take place as Pauline hoped, though the long-term consequences would not be what she intended. Later that afternoon, Pauline and her friend Juliet Hulme, age fifteen, took Pauline’s mother for a walk through Victoria Park in Christchurch, New Zealand.  As the three went down a secluded path, Juliet dropped a stone. When Pauline’s mother bent down to pick it up, the two girls bludgeoned her to death with a brick inside a stocking, taking turns bludgeoning the woman to death and smashing her face almost beyond recognition.

 The teenagers had met a couple of years before, when Juliet—beautiful, wealthy, and from a high-class British family—was then new to the country. Pauline was less comely and less moneyed; her father ran a fish store and her mother a boardinghouse. The two became inseparable, often lost in their own rich fantasy world. The bond was threatened when Juliet’s parents decided to send her to live with relatives in South Africa. Pauline could come along if Pauline’s mother would allow it, but everyone knew that this suggestion would never be approved. For the girls, the only way forward seemed to be the brick and escaping to a new life in America.

 From the murder to Heavenly Creatures, the Peter Jackson film it inspired, to the lasting fascination the case holds today, Pauline and Juliet have never been able to dispel the suspicion that they were having sex. Juliet has denied that the two were lesbians, but her denial means little in the eyes of a world that believes only specifically sexual love could inspire that type of mutual obsession. This belief—that platonic love is serene while intense, passionate, or obsessive feeling must be motivated by sex—is common. It does not track with reality.

 If you don’t believe aces who say that passionate feelings can exist without any sexual desire, believe University of Utah psychologist Lisa Diamond, who says the same thing. (Diamond refers to the feeling of “infatuation and emotional attachment” as “romantic love,” so I will too here.) Diamond theorizes that the two can be separate because they serve different purposes. Sexual desire tricks us into spreading our genes, while romantic love exists to make us feel kindly toward someone and willing to cooperate for long enough to raise those exquisitely helpless creatures known as babies. Romantic love can be more expansive than sexual attraction because heterosexual sexual attraction, while usually necessary for producing kids, is not required for successful co-parenting. To use ace lingo, sexual attraction and romantic attraction don’t need to line up.

 Diamond first noticed this conflation of passion and sex when interviewing women about how they became aware of their sexual attraction to other women. “So many [women] would tell these stories about having a really strong emotional bond to female friends when they were younger, and they’d be like, ‘So I guess this was an early sign,’” she tells me. Close female friendships do frequently use affectionate, quasi-romantic language that can confuse burgeoning sexual desires. Sometimes though, the story can be more complicated, and Diamond, an expert in sexual fluidity, began questioning whether passion must always equal secretly sexual.

 If sexual desire were necessary for romantic love, kids who haven’t gone through puberty wouldn’t have crushes. Many do. Surveys show that children, including ones too young to understand partnered sex, frequently develop serious attachments. I had elementary school crushes and so did many of my allo friends. Adults have gone through puberty but their sexual desires don’t always dictate their emotional ones either. In one study Diamond references, 61 percent of women and 35 percent of men said they had experienced infatuation and romantic love without any desire for sex.

 It is already taken for granted that sexual desire doesn’t need to include infatuation or caring. one-night stands and fuck-buddy arrangements are all explicitly sexual and explicitly non-romantic. The opposite conclusion—that for some, infatuation never included and never turns into sexual desire—is harder for people to accept, at least in the West. The story is different elsewhere. Historical reports from cultures in Guatemala, Samoa, and Melanesia describe how these close, nonsexual relationships were acknowledged. Sometimes honored with ceremonies such as ring exchanges, these relationships were considered a middle ground between friendship and romance and were often simply called “romantic friendship,” Diamond tells me.

 In these cultures, marriage was often more of an economic partnership than a love match. The marital and sexual bond was not automatically assumed to be the most important emotional relationship, unlike in current Western culture. Romantic friendships were not considered a threat to marriage and it was easier for people to believe that a nonsexual relationship could be as ardent as a sexual one. Romantic friendships were passionate on their own terms because passion is possible in many types of relationships.

 Excerpted from Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen (Beacon Press, 2020).

 

Let’s Rethink How We Talk About Love, Intimacy, and the Absence of Desire. By Angela Chen. LitHub, September 18, 2020. 

When we think of what makes a person or group of people “queer,” a common understanding is their having a sexual orientation and/or gender identity that separates them from the heterosexual, cisgender majority. But what about asexuals—those folks who don’t experience sexual attraction toward others? Are “aces” part of the queer community, too? In this month’s episode of Outward, Slate’s LGBTQ podcast, the crew tackles that question with Angela Chen, a journalist and asexual activist who’s just written a book on the subject: Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. A portion of the discussion is transcribed below. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

 
 Rumaan Alam: One of the subjects of your book is an artist named Lucid Brown, who describes coming across a letter to Dear Abby from an asexual reader. And they describe seeing this letter in the newspaper at age 13 and then stealing the newspaper from the dining room table. This felt really, really familiar to me as someone who was once a gay teen reading the tea leaves of the culture for some validation of the self. I’d love to hear you talk about the tension or the complication around understanding ace identity as fitting under the queer umbrella.
 
Angela Chen: I think that’s a delicate question. I have a line in the book that’s a little bit of a throwaway line, and maybe I should have elaborated on it more, where I say that today, overall, asexuality is accepted as part of the queer umbrella, of the broader LGBTQ+ umbrella, but it feels conditional in many ways. I think there is a discussion around whether people who are ace and heteroromantic—romantically attracted to the opposite gender—should be considered queer. I believe that aces are queer, but I wanted to point out that in some ways, this is not a simple question. I think that there is this understanding, this idea that because asexuality in many ways is invisible and invisibility gives you this form of protection, it feels like you don’t need to come out. It feels like if you’re on the street with your partner, many times, you are not going to be a target in the same way. In many ways, being asexual doesn’t require feeling like you need to hide yourself in the way that has been the case for the other identities in the queer umbrella.
 
And so I think that there is that discussion: Where does asexuality fit? What connects people in the queer community? What does that mean? There is also this question of resources and a feeling of scarcity. So every ace activist has always said, “We don’t want to take resources away from people who are trans or people who are homeless. It doesn’t seem like this competitive thing to us.” We’re not saying we’re the most oppressed, but we feel like we are in many ways outside of heteronormative, straight culture, and we want to build coalitions and we want to be part of that.
 
But despite that, I think many aces, especially heteroromantic aces, struggle with feeling queer enough. Almost every hetero ace I’ve spoken to has said, “Oh, I completely support all other hetero aces identifying as queer if they want, but I feel afraid because I feel like am I taking away from the struggle?” So I think these discussions around gatekeeping, what actually connects the community, are very, very much alive here. And also I want to mention, of course there are people who are ace and biromantic. There are people who are ace and nonbinary trans. So, the ace community itself is very diverse and there is a lot of cross-cutting identities.
 

Bryan Lowder: In the book you introduce the term “compulsory sexuality.” We know that the term “compulsory heterosexuality” comes from Adrienne Rich, but can you explain how this other term builds on that?*
 
Angela Chen : Absolutely. I think it’s just the idea that everyone who is “normal” wants sex and desires it. The example that I always think of is a person I interviewed, someone named Hunter, who grew up in this religious environment, and he is hetero. He is only attracted, romantically attracted to women. So he fulfills the compulsory hetero part of going through heterosexuality, but it was sexuality itself. Even though he’s attracted to women, he wasn’t super into sex, and that made him feel like there was something wrong with him. That everything he had been taught about how good sex was and how you were only an adult if you loved sex and how you’re only a real man if you loved sex, that really made him feel like he was broken.
 
I think that is an easy way to understand that. And there’s so many other examples, like low sexual desire is medicalized. The FDA is trying to sell and approve drugs for low sexual desire. And of course, that’s telling you that there’s something wrong with you. Or for women again, if you say that you’re not that into sex, oftentimes very well-meaning people will say, “Oh, you just need to free yourself from shame. You need to, like, be in touch with your true self and throw off the chains of patriarchy”—which is definitely true sometimes. But sometimes you’re just not that into sex and it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you or that your life is going to be worse if that’s not a source of pleasure for you.
 
Listen to the full conversation with Angela Chen on the podcast.
 
Slate, September 16, 2020.
 

Do Asexuals Belong Under the Queer Umbrella? Slate , September 22, 2020.

We all know that there’s an “A” in the LGBTQIA+ acronym, and no, it doesn’t stand for “ally.” It stands for “asexual,” or ace, and it’s a branch of the queer community that is too often ignored or even erased. Like all labels, it means different things to different people, but on a most basic level it refers to people who don’t experience sexual attraction. What does this mean? That’s what writer and science journalist Angela Chen, who herself identifies as ace, explores in her new book Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (out now from Beacon Press).

 The crux of society’s difficulty with accepting asexuality is, Chen argues, because compulsory sexuality is ingrained in societal narratives about mental and physical health, politics and liberation, and interpersonal relationships. Compulsory sexuality posits that sex is a primal human need, ties sex to maturity, and places sex in relationship hierarchies. Even in the queer community, though we hate to be oversexualized by the straights, we often sexualize ourselves and each other. And while queer sex is indeed liberating for allosexuals (or those that do experience sexual attraction), so is the ability not to have sex. Chen argues, through a fantastic blend of nuanced and clear-eyed reporting, research, and personal reflection, that true liberation requires the dismantling of compulsory sexuality.

 them. sat down with Chen to talk about relationships, sexuality, consent, and the possibilities and limitations of labels and language.

 Sarah Neilson : How did you grapple with the limitations and possibilities of language while you were writing this book?

 Angela Chen : In many ways the book is about language. It is about, what does the word asexual mean? Which is not really apparent. When people are confused about asexuality, there's a part of me that's enormously sympathetic, because I understand why semantically it would be confusing to include people who do have sex and do have positive sexual experiences under the umbrella of asexual. And many parts of the book are about the fact that language hides specific experience. Early in the book, I talk about how I never realized I was asexual because I never realized that when I would say that someone was hot or attractive to me, that I might be using the same words, but that my experience wasn't the same — because they sounded enough alike there was no way for me to probe deeper.

 I tried to be very careful when talking about language in the book, especially in the section that's about romantic or platonic attraction, because language is tricky. Every time I wrote the word platonic or about sexual desire versus sexual attraction, I questioned what I meant.

 Something else I thought about a lot was the role of language in centering ace experience. One thing that I initially wanted to do was to not say when people were asexual and only say when people were allosexual [people who experience sexual attraction], because we accept this idea that being allosexual is a default. I thought it would be interesting to try to assume that everyone is ace unless otherwise noted. But what I found is that it just didn't work. I found that it became confusing for my readers, and it became confusing for me. Maybe there was a way I could have made it work, but that to me was a lesson in showing that, even if you have the best intentions around language and you think about language pretty carefully, you are in some ways limited by society and structure.

 I would love to say that tomorrow we would have an entirely new language that all of us would understand. We would have a new definition of platonic and romantic. We would decouple sex and romance. But it's not going to happen tomorrow. I think it's going to happen in a series of small discussions and people disagreeing and then eventually a consensus will be built. And all of that takes time.

 SN : You mentioned the section about romantic versus platonic. In that section you write, “‘Platonic’ and ‘romantic’ are types of feeling while ‘friend’ and ‘romantic partner’ are social designations, and the latter molds to the former.” You also use the phrase "queering the social border" to describe broadening of possibility within relationships. Can you talk about that phrase and the reckoning between interpersonal emotions and societal categories?

 AC :

 Language tells us how we're supposed to feel. I think the best way to think about that is to make it concrete. Like the term queerplatonic. As I write in the book, for some people, queerplatonic relationships feel unique. They feel different from how you would feel toward a friend or romantic partner, but for other people, queerplatonic is a tool of language that allows us to let go of so much of the baggage and expectations that we have for specific linguistic roles like friend or partner. There are so many different roles that people can have in our lives, but we really have a very narrow number of words for them. And they really feel, to me at least, inadequate.

 Relationships are so different in so many ways, but they're all encapsulated by the same words, and whether we like it or not, I think we all have ingrained expectations of what a friend is supposed to be and especially what a romantic partner is supposed to be, what we're allowed to ask for and what we should expect to receive. And so queerplatonic I think is a way to get rid of that, because right now I don't think we have that many assumptions of what a queerplatonic relationship is. For most people, it's a very new concept. It kind of resets and lets you start from a new place.

 I think that's so freeing because otherwise people spend so much time wondering, do my emotions fit this category? Do I care about my friends too much, and therefore maybe there's something “more than friendship” there? Or if I don't want to see my romantic partner every day, is that inappropriate somehow for this romantic relationship? Labels can be really comforting because they give us some guidance and stability and instructions, but oftentimes we all try to fit our feelings into the labels instead of trying to fit them to the relationship and what actually works for the other person.

 SN : I really liked the chapter where you wrestled with the idea of consent and a “good enough” reason to say no to sex. Can you talk a little about that section and the ways in which consent is not always as simple as yes or no in a society that operates on compulsory sexuality?

AC :

 Compulsory sexuality is the idea that all normal people want and desire sex, that everyone has this baseline level of sexual desire. If you assume that everyone has that baseline, then when they say no for seemingly no reason, then it seems like they're being mean to you or they're being withholding or they are denying you something, right? Because if the reasons are like, I'm sad or you're not a good partner or things are stressful, those seem like good reasons. But if you can't point to what seems like a good reason, then compulsory sexuality makes you think, they don't love me or they don't care about this relationship, and that could create all kinds of relational problems. But the truth is not everyone has that baseline of sexual desire. And for many people they don't want to because they don't want to.

 That's very hard for many people to accept. I've spoken to many aces, both for the book and privately, and they say there's this sense that they can't say no forever. Maybe they can say no this time. Maybe they're on their period and they can say no. Maybe it's long distance, but there's the sense that they at some point they owe sex to their partner. And I simply don't believe that's true. And I think most aces do not believe that is true. If we think that no one should have unwanted sex with a stranger, we should also believe that no one should have unwanted sex with a partner, even if their partner is great. And of course you always have to caveat by saying the partners are allowed to have their own boundaries. I think it's fine if the partner says that not having sex is a deal breaker for them, but that's their personal deal breaker. It's not that the lower-desire partner is broken. I think many people, not just aces, feel coerced and like they are not allowed to say no, that no alone is not a good enough answer.

 SN : Because sex is, as you write, part of a maturity narrative, I as an ace person sometimes feel infantilized, and worry that I’m seen as a “safe” or “innocent” person. Do you have thoughts like that? What kind of things do you do to combat that internalized acephobia?

 AC :

 Yes, I definitely do have experiences like that. And I've talked to a lot of people who have had similar experiences. For example, I was recently writing an article about a three parent family in which it's basically a straight couple who are co-parents with someone who is asexual. And when I was telling people of the article, a lot of people were like, "Oh, that sounds so great. I'm too jealous to be in a poly relationship, but it would be great to have this asexual third." And there was nothing really wrong with saying that, but something about that rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed very infantilizing, like this person could never be a threat. And I think implicit in that idea that this person could never be a threat is the idea that sexual infidelity or sexual jealousy is the greatest threat that there could be. Not that we should be threatened by others, but it's funny how aces are often infantilized, even though aces who are not aromantic can still be an emotional threat.

 But there are many interesting ways in which I think being asexual has affected how other people see me. I noticed that my friends tend to talk to me about sex less than they used to. And sometimes when they do they'll preface it by saying something like, we don't have to talk about this, if you're uncomfortable. A part of me will be like, we've been friends for longer than I've identified as ace. We used to talk about sex all the time in college in graphic terms. I'm not different. I'm not made uncomfortable by sex just because I identify differently. I'm not any more repulsed by it than I used to be.

 I was just talking to someone else who said that after coming out as asexual, she thinks her allo female friends take her advice more seriously, like she somehow now has more objectivity when she speaks. I think that's really fascinating. So all this to say is, yes. I think the asexual label can change how people view us. And it bothers me a little bit.

 I don't know if I have any tips for how to solve that. It's just something that I'm aware of. And when I'm aware of it, I just try to remind myself that I am the same person, and I'm not any less mature than I was before no matter how people's reactions to me might've changed.

SN :
 
You write about people’s lack of vision and imagination when it comes to creating a more equitable society around sexuality. Where is your vision and imagination around creating equity and justice right now? What do you see ahead, what are you working toward?
 
AC :
 
One thing I want is ace discourse to be part of the culture, part of the language in a way that so many other things have become part of the language. In recent years we have become much more comfortable talking about various types of privilege, for example, or talking about racial inequality. And while I'm definitely not trying to make parallels, I want ace ideas and concepts to seep into the discourse in the same way, so that people can have discussions using this alternate point of view or so that when ace people want to talk about these things, it doesn't require a 30 minute Ted talk in which you lay the groundwork for all of your ideas. I think that once we have a language and we have the framework and we have the thoughts, then we'll be able to really get to the next level, because right now we're not there. Right now many of the ideas that I bring up, maybe they sound a little bit academic, even though I think that they're very relevant to many people and not just to ace people.
 
On another level I think asexuality should be normalized in sex ed. It should be on census forms. It should be something that people learn about in order to be a therapist, especially sex therapists. I think that ace perspective should be brought to discussions when it comes to medicine and the medicalization of sex and the way that narrative of “broken” is used to sell various libido boosting drugs. I think representation is important. I would love to see ace characters who aren't used purely educationally. Characters who have complex storylines.
 
Read Me: Angela Chen’s Ace Challenges Us All to Reframe How We Talk About Sex. By Sarah Neilson. Them ,  September 15, 2020.

In case my job title of "sex and relationships reporter" isn't a clue, I'm a sexual person. Since coming of age, I've thought about sex, watched sex (either pornographic or simulated in mainstream media), talked about sex, written about sex — and, as you can assume, had sex.

 I can't say whether my interest in sex is more or less than the "average" person — whatever average even is — but I do know for certain that I'm allosexual. An allosexual is someone who experiences sexual attraction and is the counterpart to an asexual, someone who does not experience sexual attraction.

 While I've known about asexuality for awhile, I only learned of the term "allosexual" from the new book Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by journalist Angela Chen, out Sept. 15.

 In Ace, Chen doesn't just describe allo and asexuality. She explores the nuances of desire and passion and how we as a society have created a hierarchy of love, where romance is considered superior to friendship. Chen examines how our culture isn't just one of compulsory heterosexuality — the assumption and enforcement of straightness — but one of compulsory sexuality at its core, the assumption that everyone wants sex whether straight or not. What's more is that she frames asexuality through an intersectional lens, pointing out the ways the ace movement has been whitewashed and dismissive of disabled people.

 Ace is an illuminating look into the asexuality spectrum that I'd recommend to anyone, allo or ace. It's a read that won't just teach you about asexuality, but it will also position you to ask your own questions of desire and love and passion.

 

Mashable: What inspired you to write Ace?

 Chen: I wrote this book because I had started to identify as asexual and because asexuality is so misunderstood, it's one of those things that you have to go searching for to understand. If you're straight, you don't have to search to discover what heterosexuality is. Asexuality is very much hidden.

 When I started to think about identity and what it meant about my life, I couldn't find much about asexuality. Everything I found was either in an academic anthology — which is great, but not that accessible — or it was on Tumblr, which is also great but not mainstream. It was a subculture and by definition, not that available.

 I'm also a journalist. I was a journalist before I identified as asexual, so [this] felt like something I could do because I knew how to report and had connections. It just felt important to me because learning about asexuality really clarified so many things in my life personally. Also, when I was talking to my friends who are asexual and I would tell them what I learned, it seemed interesting and important to them, too. It helped them think about their own lives and their own relationships and what desire felt for them versus romance versus sex, and I want everyone to have those conversations.

 I really don't think that the ace lens is only valuable if you happen to be asexual — just like if you're straight, there's so much value in learning about queerness. I wanted to make that more accessible.

 Mashable : I completely agree. I've had friend breakups from years ago that I still think about and beat myself up for it. I wasn't dating this person, why am I still upset about this? The chapter in Ace on romantic and platonic love was really helpful to see that platonic love is legitimate love and the hierarchy [that romantic love is superior] is fictional.

 Chen : Absolutely. Last night I was watching the new NXIVM documentary. Have you watched?

 Mashable : I haven't.

Chen :

In the second episode, one of the first people to leave the sex cult talks about how she reached out to someone who also left and she said something like, "I reached out to her because I didn't know intellectually what I was looking at, I knew how I felt." When I was watching this, I felt like that's such a good metaphor for the experience of learning any kind of new lens. You know how you felt — you have these confusing feelings that don't make sense. And then once you have intellectual grounding, all of a sudden your life makes so much more sense, or your feelings make so much more sense. I think that's really powerful.

 Mashable :

That does make a lot of sense. Going back to what you said about Tumblr, the site was definitely like that for me, too. People on Tumblr would describe what I was feeling as a bisexual person. Do you think that's still the case for Tumblr as a source of learning, or do you think the internet has moved on? I looked at the asexual tag on TikTok today and there's over 200 million views. For teens today, what resources do they have?

 Chen :

Tumblr, TikTok, the internet remains a huge resource. There was a study where a huge portion of people first learned about asexuality on Tumblr, and I think that continues. But it's a bit of a double-edged sword. You learn so much on Tumblr and TikTok and Twitter and because of that, asexuality is often considered to be this kind of "internet orientation" in the same way that everything that teen girls do is seen as stupid. Everything that has a huge following on various corners of the internet is seen and dismissed as something just for young people and not worthy of the mainstream. That's part of what I wanted to do with the book — there's so much more about asexuality than in my book, but I hope that asexuality will reach people who are not in these places.

 I think that there's a lot of ageism issues with that. The average age of someone who's asexual is quite young, and even after we published excerpts of my book a few months ago, people who are older — in their 30s — reaching out to me saying, "I thought I understood what asexuality was but I didn't really and this really spoke to me... I didn't feel connected to the culture." The internet culture of asexuality is very specific and if you're not a part of it, you just don't vibe with it. I think asexuality can be so much broader than that; the thoughts don't have to be connected to an aesthetic or a vibe.

 Mashable :

 While I was reading Ace, I felt a sort of kinship [as a bisexual]. In the broader LGBTQ community, I sometimes feel like I don't belong. With terms like gold star [lesbians or asexual], there's a certain wanting of being an archetypal example of what you "should" be. As the queer community is essentially counterculture, being counterculture to the counterculture is a weird place to be in. What are your thoughts on this? Is education like your book the answer to, say, a gay person not wanting to date someone who's bisexual, or someone who's aromantic [has no interest or desire for romance]?

 Chen :

You're right, there's so much gatekeeping in so many ways. Even in the queer community, I think there's a lot of misconceptions and questions about whether aces should be part of the queer community.

 I don't have an easy answer. People will sometimes say to ace people, "What kinds of discrimination have you suffered? It's so easy being ace." There's these misconceptions about what the ace experience means from people who are allosexual and some other people who may be queer but not asexual. In the end, I think there's a lack of understanding about specific experiences.

 Mashable :

 In the book, you talk about your own personal history. Partway through, you mention not wanting to be honest about some of your experiences. How did it feel to share these details about your self-discovery in such a radically honest way?

 Chen :

It made me confront the extent to which I've internalized many forms of acephobia. Like I write in the book, intellectually and morally I believe everything I write, that being asexual is in no way inferior and all of that. But as I was writing the book there were parts of me that were defensive — and of course that's part of my personality, some of which has nothing to do with my identity whatsoever.

 I'd write parts of this and would feel myself wanting to be like, "Oh but you know, I'm not a prude. I like 'WAP'!" I wanted to prove myself before anyone could dismiss me because of what I thought they believe about what it meant to be asexual. So it really showed me the extent to which I struggled to not be defensive, the extent to which I struggled to prove how 'down' I am, so ironically the extent to which I actually believed all of those things emotionally. I didn't, and I don't, intellectually.

 Mashable :

 Several asexual people you spoke with were also members of the kink community. From what I gleaned, there's a lot of emphasis on consent in kink, and there's intimacy in kink. Why do you think some asexual people may be drawn to the kink community?

 Chen :

 One reason is because, for them, it's just interesting. Obviously for some people, kink can be sexual. I'm not saying kink is inherently non-sexual, but I don't think it has to be. People have said they like the dynamics of it, they like the feeling of interesting sensations, the same way some people like the sensation of wearing velvet. It doesn't have to be sexual. They like the emotional dynamics of it even if it's not sexually gratifying to them. There are so many parts of kink that, while they can be sexual, it doesn't have to be for them.

 The other reason many people have said is because they do think that the norms in kink often make it safer for them because there's better consent practices — which is not to say kink is perfect, every person in every culture can improve. But what people have said specifically is that it's encouraged to negotiate beforehand. If you're doing a scene together you're supposed to talk about what's okay and what's not. One woman I spoke to said something like, "I can say, 'I don't care if you get hard, I don't care if you get wet, I'm not going to do anything about it.'" And she felt like she could say that in the kink context. It was okay, it was encouraged, whereas she said that she felt less safe in the vanilla context because it was considered kind of libido-killing to negotiate these things. She would feel like if she stopped them, then it wouldn't be okay and she'd feel pressure. The norms [in kink] felt safer and better for her, even though I think many people have this erroneous assumption that kink is a dangerous place.

 Mashable : What advice would you give someone questioning whether they're asexual or aromantic or both?

 Chen :

The first thing I would say is that it's okay to question. There's so much pressure on aces to be different, like we're encouraged to question too much. We're encouraged to be like, "Oh, I'm not actually ace. I'm just shy, I just haven't found the right person." That's not what I'm saying. But I do think in general questioning is good because all of us change and all of us have different experiences. Don't feel bad for questioning, even though you don't have to question if you feel you already know who you are.

 Give yourself a sense of space. I think it takes people a lot of time to understand this kind of lesser-known orientation and what it might be, and what integrating in the identity might mean for them. One thing that's interesting about ace identity is that everyone always says very specifically: Only you can decide if you're ace. I can't "diagnose" you as asexual and people will often say if this doesn't work for you — if identifying as asexual is harmful for you — then maybe you don't have to do it. I think giving yourself that kind of space is important.

 People have reached out [after reading excerpts] and they'll say things like, "I feel so conflicted. In some ways, thinking about identifying as ace makes me feel so free. In other ways, it just makes me feel kind of bad about myself." And that's okay, too. Most of us have been conditioned to think of asexuality as something inferior — it's okay if you maybe have that reaction. Give yourself the time and the space that you need. You don't have to commit to anything right now.

 Mashable :  What broader hopes do you have for Ace?

Chen :

Many aces know a lot of the basic stuff, but I think it's rare for them to see actual narratives of other ace people. And of course, just because you're ace doesn't mean you necessarily know what it might mean to be an ace person of color if you're white, or to be disabled. There's many intersections and I hope that's illuminating.

 I also really hope it makes people just question and think about themselves as they're reading it, regardless of whether they're ace or not. Some people who've read galleys said, "You know, as I was reading this I started thinking, how do I define desire? Where am I on this ace/allo spectrum? Are there relationships that I thought were platonic but they were romantic but not sexual?" These are questions that people can all think about, especially questions regarding consent which I think is super important.

 I hope that regardless of whatever someone's orientation might be, that they read this and apply it to themselves. Hopefully they can open up and think about the way we combine sex and desire and love and romance. A lot of times, they're all very separate things.

 

'Ace' is the first book of its kind. Here’s why anyone, asexual or not, should read it. By Anna Iovine. Mashable , September 10, 2020. 

Harlots, Prostitution in London in the 18th Century

 

In 1757, Samuel Derrick, a penniless and homeless poet, created The Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a compendium of information about London’s prostitutes. Historian Hallie Rubenhold, author of a book investigating the handbook of the '18th-century pimp', found it revealed much about the situation of the courtesans of the Georgian period…
 
It has often been claimed that the story of history’s underclass is a difficult one to tell as so few details of the lives of these individuals have been documented. However, in the second half of the 18th century, one astute observer left a remarkable and colourful record of London’s working women. In 1757, Samuel Derrick, a penniless and homeless poet, created The Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a compendium of information about London’s prostitutes. Designed as a necessary accessory for the Georgian “man of pleasure”, the guidebook became an annual publication for the next 38 years. For 2s 6d, men like James Boswell could purchase this small leather-bound volume and read about the physical appearances and personal histories of London’s “votaries of Venus”.
 
As its name suggests, The Harris’s List was not entirely the invention of Samuel Derrick. For several years prior to its publication it existed in handwritten form as the sole possession of the self-proclaimed “Pimp-General of all England”, Jack Harris. Harris (whose real name was John Harrison) served as the head waiter at Covent Garden’s emporium of drink and sin, the Shakespear’s Head Tavern. Having gained a reputation for “making introductions” between patrons and ladies of the town, Harris fell back on the tradition of documenting his business by maintaining a ledger of prostitutes. As Covent Garden, with its theatres, bath houses, taverns, and coffee houses, was considered to be London’s centre of entertainment, Harris and his “ladies” did a booming trade. At the height of his dominion, in the late 1750s, it was rumoured that Harris’s handwritten list bulged with no less than 400 names. The head waiter of the Shakespear’s Head had also grown wealthy by his well-managed enterprise, claiming to have earned, “four or five thousand pounds in a half dozen years”; roughly £500,000 by today’s standards.
 
While prostitution and the “procuring of women” was illegal in 18th-century London, the law made few significant attempts to apprehend men like Jack Harris, its primary perpetrators. Sex was a profitable industry for the capital’s brothel-keepers, pimps, procuresses and courtesans, many of whom, like Moll King, the keeper of Tom King’s Coffee House, were able to retire to a comfortable existence with a fortune of thousands. It was natural, therefore, that those who found themselves in financial need often looked to the flesh trade for assistance.
 
Samuel Derrick was in just such a position when he alighted upon the idea of creating his own version of Harris’s list. Born into a family of Dublin linen drapers in 1724, Derrick had always fostered ambitions of becoming “a poet of the first rank”. This was never to be. Derrick set out for London around 1751 and attempted to establish himself, trying his hand as both a dramatist and actor. Although he managed to secure a meagre living as a literary translator and a Grub Street author, Sam chose to squander his money on the pleasures of Covent Garden. While his literary friends like Tobias Smollet occasionally offered him shelter and “slipt a guinea into his hand” at the worst of times Derrick was forced to sleep rough on the streets of London. In 1757 the author’s irresponsible spending finally got the better of him. Unable to pay his bills he was apprehended by the bailiffs and imprisoned in a “sponging house”, a privately operated lock-up for debtors. It was from these confines that Derrick concocted a money-spinning scheme designed to regain him his liberty.
 

Years of merry-making in the company of London’s prostitutes meant that Derrick knew the women of Covent Garden as well as Jack Harris. His version of The Harris’s List is not merely a record of those whose services were available, but a witty and journalistic chronicle of the area’s female characters. As a publication, its intention was to entertain Covent Garden’s regular crowd of “bucks and bloods” as much as it was to advertise the women listed within it. Derrick’s hastily scribbled manuscript was snapped up by the elusive Fleet Street publisher of obscenity, H Ranger, who was said to have paid “a handsome sum” for it, which “thereby secured Derrick his freedom”.
 
The Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies became an instant sensation. It has been suggested that approximately 8,000 copies of it were sold yearly, though it is likely that these numbers are slightly exaggerated. Nevertheless, its production became an enduring enterprise. After Sam Derrick’s death in 1769, The List continued to appear on booksellers’ shelves, though the names of its ensuing editors are unknown. Increasingly, its succeeding authors were not as interested in documenting the area’s colourful personalities as they were in creating bawdy advertisements for the listees. By the time the publication was stamped out in 1795, the work was little more than a guidebook of names and addresses featuring reprinted stories from earlier editions.
 
Today, only a handful of The Harris’s Lists (those from 1761, 1764, 1773, 1774, 1779, 1788–90 and 1793) remain in public collections. When examined alongside additional material from the period, such as diaries, newspaper articles and popular literature, they assist in painting a picture of the lives of poor and lower-middle class Georgian women.
 
In 1758, shortly after the first edition of The Harris’s List came into print, the magistrate and moral reformer Saunders Welch estimated that of a population of 675,000, London was home to approximately 3,000 prostitutes. Although Welch suggested that the majority of these women came from a class of “industrious poor”, a level just above the truly impoverished, there is much to suggest that their backgrounds were more wide-ranging than this. Among those names that appear on The Harris’s Lists are those who had previously worked as trained milliners, glove makers and seamstresses, in addition to domestic servants, shop-keepers, actresses, singers and married women. Women are often described as being literate or “having received a tolerable education”.
 
Information gleaned from The Lists also provides an insight into these women’s daily existences, and in particular their living arrangements. As each woman’s listing is accompanied by her address, it is possible to gain a picture of the demographic distribution of prostitution across London’s west end. Prostitutes were not geographically confined to “red light districts” during the 18th century. Instead they lived cheek-by-jowl with their more respectable neighbours and businesses, not only in and around Covent Garden but in Soho, St James, Piccadilly, Mayfair, Bloomsbury, Fitzrovia and Marylebone. Rather than facing ostracism from within these communities, many trades-people let out lodgings to prostitutes. Sally Forman, for example lived “At a Chandler’s Shop, in Fleet Market”, while Sally Straton, could be found “at a Grocer’s in Little Wild Street”.
 
Similarly, not every prostitute worked out of a brothel. Many shared accommodation with fellow ladies of the town, like the notorious duo Miss Townsend and Miss Charlton of 12 Gress Street, who not only lived under the same roof but also shared the expenses of their own carriage. Others, like Becky Lefevre of Frith Street, who were fortunate enough to be placed in “high keeping” by a wealthy admirer, frequently let out spare rooms in their own houses to other members of “the sisterhood”.
 
As might be imagined, the experience of prostitution in Georgian London varied immensely. The Harris’s Lists contain an array of women’s stories, from that of the celebrated beauty Emily Coulthurst, who resided in splendour at Mrs Mitchell’s King’s Place “nunnery”, to the tragic Kitty Atchison who “more than once endeavored to extricate herself” from the grasp of her profession. The entries also reveal that the capital’s “legions of Venus” were a far from homogenous group. A surprisingly diverse population of continental and eastern European as well as American and West Indian women swelled its ranks. Some, like Madam Dafloz, came to London to escape from French revolutionaries. Others, like the Sells sisters, were the daughters of immigrants. It is their previously unheard tales that make The Harris’s Lists such a unique and fascinating set of documents.
 
A closer look at the ‘Ladies’ of Harris’s Lists
 
The following are extracts from later editions of the List, which was constantly updated to keep up with the changing fortunes of London’s ‘votaries of Venus’
 
Miss Wilkins
 
“What an angelic face! – but what a form!” This lady very lately resided in Princes Street, Bloomsbury, at a midwife’s. She is not above twenty, and has a very engaging countenance, with fine, dark, melting eyes, and very regular teeth. Her person does not entirely correspond; she is short and very crooked; but she has a certain latent charm that more than compensates for any deformity of body. In a word, take her all in all, she is a very good piece; and, if you can forget she is hunch-backed, she is a little Venus. (1773)
 
Mrs Horton, No 3, Beauclerc’s Buildings
 
“Ah! La jolie de petite Bourgeoise” Keeps a shop and sells gloves, garters, &c. and drives on a very capital trade, considering she has no shop-woman to assist her; her customers are but few, yet they are good ones, and always pay ready money; she is short and plump, has a good dark eye, and is full-breasted; her legs are remarkably well made, and she is reputed a most excellent bed-fellow. In trying on a glove she will create desire; and in selling her garters, she will commend that pattern which she wears herself, and will make no scruple of showing her legs; she has great good nature, and we do not recollect any woman who is better qualified as a shop-keeper; her age is twenty-six. (1779)
 
Lucy Bradley, Silver Street, Cheapside
 
Alow, square built lass, with a good complexion, void of art; her face is round, and her features regular; her hair is dark, and her eyes hazel. She lived as a nursery maid with a foreign practitioner of physic, near Soho, who took first possession of her, not without some force. She gets up small linen and works well with her needle; has some good sense, and honest principles. Necessity first compelled her to see company, and she seems conscious of its not being right. (1761)
 
‘The Abbesses’ of King’s Place
 
During the 18th century, King’s Place, a passage that ran between King’s Street and Pall Mall, was home to England’s most exclusive brothels or “nunneries”. It was patronised by the aristocracy and royalty. Prostitutes who plied their trade there included these two colourful figures:
 
Harriot Lewis
 
Born in Guinea, Harriott Lewis (or “Black Harriott”, as she was known) began life as a slave on a plantation of Captain William Lewis, who brought her to London as his mistress in 1766. The death of her lover left Harriott alone in the capital. With the help of John Montague, the Earl of Sandwich, she opened a brothel on King’s Place. Her business prospered until 1778, when her servants robbed her. Unable to recover financially, Harriott was committed to debtor’s prison where she died shortly thereafter.
 
Charlotte Hayes
 
The daughter of courtesan and brothel keeper Elizabeth Ward, Charlotte was born into a life of prostitution in 1725. Called “Santa Charlotta of King’s Place”, she was renowned for her “unaffected charm” and honesty. It was these qualities that inspired Samuel Derrick (her one-time lover) to bequeath the profits of his List to her. Charlotte, however, was a calculating business-woman. Despite a period imprisoned for debt, by 1769 she and her partner Dennis O’Kelly had built an empire around horse racing and brothel-keeping said to be worth at least £40,000.
 
The real Harlots: Hallie Rubenhold on Covent Garden’s courtesans. By Hallie Rubenhold.  History Extra, August 10, 2020.

In 1760s London, sex was big business. There were brothels on almost every street corner, and thousands of enterprising women collecting their share of the massive wealth that poured through the city.

 
Most people's views of sex workers in Georgian times are limited to a few glimpses of courtesans in paintings, or the occasional character on TV. However new show Harlots (which is now airing on BBC Two) follows the fortunes of women selling sex in the 18th century, giving us an intriguing insight into their everyday lives – and there are some surprising similarities with the sex we have today...
 
18th-century sex workers had client review websites (kind of)
 
In 2020, sex workers can post adverts online to market their services, and on some sites clients can even leave comments and reviews. The Georgian version of this was a book called Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies. A bestseller in its day, it effectively functioned as a Who's Who of Covent Garden sex workers, telling potential punters where the best brothels were, who to ask for, which services could be procured and – of course – the price.
 
But as well as the headlines, Harris's List also contained intriguing snippets of back story, often explaining how the women came to be working in the city. Miss Le__ of Soho was a "tall and genteel" lady who was caught one day "with a certain naughty book". After being whipped by her governess, she ran away and was eventually taken in by a city merchant who was himself "fond of the rod". This submissive suitor helped Miss Le__ find her feet.
 
Sex work in Georgian times was big business
 
How big? Estimates vary but historian Dan Cruickshank, in his book The Secret History Of Georgian London, posits that the sex trade in London at the time had an annual turnover of around £20 million. That's close to £1.5 billion in today's money.
 
Why so much money? Well, back in Georgian times there were far more women working in the sex trade – it wasn't just the quickest route to riches, it was one of the few ways women really could earn money. As historian Dr. Kate Lister explains on her blog Whores of Yore, there were far fewer options than there are for women today: “Historically, men have always held the money and the power and there was only three ways a woman could access some of that for herself; she could inherit it, she could marry it, or she could shag it.”
 
Sex could cost anywhere from a few pennies to £9,000
As a Georgian sex worker, how much you could charge depended on a number of factors. Your Harris review would certainly make a difference, but so would the reputation of the brothel you were working in. Apparently, the average cost was just under one guinea (about £1), although haggling wasn't unheard of. Harris's List explains of one woman:
 
“Her price is one pound one, but, like many others of the fraternity, she will not turn her back on a less sum, she will rather accept of half a guinea, than her friend should return home with his burthen.”
 
More genteel establishments could command much higher prices, though. It is estimated that a night at one of the most fashionable and successful brothels in Soho – with an emphasis on well-groomed women and high-class clientele – could cost up to £2,000 in today's money.
 
Special services cost even more. Many would charge huge sums – up to £50 (£9,000 in today's money) – to people who wanted to buy a woman's virginity. Naturally, there was big money to be made, as a savvy businesswoman could sell her 'virginity' many times over.
 
Some rose to the status of major celebrity
 
Kitty Fisher, a real-life sex worker, was such a celebrity in her day that she even attracted the Georgian equivalent of paparazzi: newspapers and ballad-writers mocked her for falling off her horse one day, playing on the notion of the 'fallen woman'. Her portrait – by one of the most prominent painters of the time – hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
 

They used condoms (though not as we know them)
 
Long before the invention of latex there was... sheep intestine. Condoms in Georgian times were made from washed-out sheep guts, tied at the end to stop leaks, and sewn at the other end with ribbon. The resulting condom could be tied on to the penis before sex and rinsed out afterwards.
 
The Georgians were as keen on porn as we are
 
The more you look at the sex lives of the Georgians, the easier it is to spot similarities between the sex industry of the time and what we have today. Though our tech might be a little better – porn sites, webcams, nude selfies and the like – Georgians weren't limited to using their imagination. One of the reasons Harris's List was a bestseller was because it wasn't just used as review material, it also served as the Georgian equivalent of porn. People would buy it purely for the titillating reviews inside.
 
Like the review of Miss S__tt of Cavendish Square, who was “amorous to the greatest degree, and has courage enough not to be afraid of the largest and the strongest man that ever drew weapon in the cause of love.” Or Miss Fra___r, who “enjoys the sport with all the vigorous ardour that may be expected from a girl of one and twenty.” Or Miss H__y: “very active and nimble, and not a little clever in the performance of the art of friction.”
 
What Life Was Like As A Sex Worker In The 1700s. By Girl on the Net. Refinery , August 5, 2020
 

"The year is 1763. One woman in five makes a living selling sex.” So opens ITV Encore’s latest period drama; Harlots (Hulu in the US). Created by Alison Newman and Moira Buffini and directed by Coky Giedroyc, the eight-part drama follows the rising fortunes of London bawd, Margaret Wells (Samantha Morton) and her daughters, Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay) and Lucy (Eloise Smyth). Harlots has gone beyond simply dusting off the tit crushing corsets and has deftly woven historical facts into the warp and weft of this bloomer dropping, gin swilling, cinematic trupenny upright, and I love it. But, I'm not here to tell you how much fun the show is (and it really is!) I'm here for the history. Harlots tells a hell of a story, but there is more to consider here than a corseted dose of how’s your father in a sepia filter. That Harlots so clearly uses historical truth to embellish the show is what really piques my interest.

 Numbers

​We’ll start with that statistic “The year is 1763. One woman in five makes a living selling sex.” The simple truth is that we do not have accurate estimates for the numbers of sex workers in eighteenth-century Britain (or anywhere else) for several reasons. Sex workers were, and still are, a marginalised, criminalised community and ran the risk of being publicly shamed, punished and even deported if identified; subsequently, few people were open enough about selling sex to collect accurate data. The eighteenth century lexicon did not include words such as ‘sex worker’, but rather used words such as whore, harlot, strumpet or lewd woman. The definition of each of these terms covered women selling sex to those who had sex outside of marriage, or lived with a man they were not married too; so when number of whores are being recorded, it does not necessarily men someone who sold sex for a living. Quantitative data analysis around sex work in the eighteenth century was far closer to what we could politely call ‘guess work’, than anything that would pass peer review today. However, this did not stop people from having a damn good guess.

 In 1758, Saunders Welch, a Justice of the Peace for both the County of Middlesex and the City and Liberty of Westminster, published A Proposal to render effectual a Plan, To remove the Nuisance of Common Prostitutes from the Streets of this Metropolis and conservatively estimated there were some 3000 women who made their living selling sex in the capital. When Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz visited London in 1789, he estimated there were 30,000 ladies of pleasure living in the district of Marylebone alone (Archenholz, 1789). Michael Ryan, author of Prostitution in London (1839), estimated that by 1802 there were 80,000 sex workers and some 5000 brothels in London (Ryan, 1839). In 1795, police magistrate Patrick Colquhorn calculated there were 50,000 sex workers in London – which had a population of around 730,000. Viewing Colquhorn's data as the most reliable, modern historian Dan Cruickshank suggests that sexually active women will account for around 250,000 of that figure, which roughly equates to one in five women selling sex in Georgian London (Cruickshank, 2010).

 As you can see, estimates differ wildly and really the only thing we can say with some certainty is there were more than a few women on the game in eighteenth-century London. But, it shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise that so many women sold sex to earn a crust. Historically, men have always held the money and the power and there was only three ways a woman could access some of that for herself; she could inherit it, she could marry it, or she could shag it. Far from being a last desperate resort, as perilous as it was, sex work could offer a decent income, independence and social advancement in a deeply patriarchal world that barred women from positions of power. Of course, women could try to earn an income as a seamstress or some kind of domestic worker, but this was a long time before Destiny’s Child asked independent women to ‘throw their hands up’; working in the eighteenth century (especially for women) was damn tough. The eighteenth-century wage gap was not so much a gap as a vast, unforgiving ravine with horny sharks at the bottom; and the only kind of employment rights on offer was the right to work yourself to death (preferably quietly and without making a mess.) But, a sex worker could make serious cash, and there were many honeys makin' money.

 If a lowly female domestic servant could expect a wage of around £2 - 4 a year (with accommodation and food), a sex worker could earn that in one night (Oldbaileyonline.org, 2017). Of course, there was no standard charge for sexual services, and there were kept mistresses who could wouldn't get into bed for less than a hundred guineas (Casonova recorded that Kitty Fisher once ate a thousand guinea note on a slice of bread and butter). But, there were also many destitute people who would exchange sex for food. In 1762, James Boswell walked through London and recorded in his diary that he was "surrounded with numbers of free-hearted ladies of all kinds: from the splendid Madam at fifty guineas a night, down to the civil nymph with white-thread stockings tramps along the Strand and will resign her engaging person to Honour for a pint of wine and a shilling’ (Boswell, 1762).

 The amount charged by the sex workers featured in Harris’s List varies, but averages at around one guinea per customer, which is slightly over £1 (12 pence to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound and a guineas was worth 21 shillings.) Despite significant risks to health and well-being, many people sought out sex work and the wealth it promised.

 The eighteenth-century literary blockbuster, Harris’s List (1757 to 1795) is featured in the opening scenes of Harlots. Harris’s List was an annual almanac of London sex workers. A forerunner to TripAdvisor, the list detailed the appearance, skills, and prices of up to two hundred women selling sex in the capital. One source I heartily recommmend if you want to learn more about the list is Matthew Sangster's research project for "Romantic London". Sangster has created an incredible resource in an online map of Harris's List, using the addresses provided in the 1788 edition here. You can see exactly where these women lived in London, as well as read their description in the list; it's fabulous.

 The list seems to have been the result of a collaboration between an Irish Grub Street hack and poet, Sam Derrick, and London Pimp, Jack Harris. Only nine known volumes of the list survived today (1761, 1764, 1773, 1774, 1779, 1788, 1789, 1790 and 1793), and they are scattered throughout various archives around the world. There have been a handful of reprints, but until 2005, if you wanted to see the list, an appointment at an archive and a pair of white gloves would have been required. It wasn’t until historian Hallie Rubenhold undertook the herculean task of researching and editing the list in her publication The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the extraordinary story of "Harris' List" (2005), that the list was dusted off and shown to the public anew. Rubenhold and her work remain the leading authority in the study of the list, and this article is likewise indebted; so, thanks Hallie!

 As you may well imagine, Harris’s List was a hugely popular work. As well as being a practical resource, the list also provided titilation. As Delinger notes, the list functions in two ways: ‘names, addresses, and prices all point to their practical use, while the lush descriptions of women also function as soft-core pornography’ (Denlinger, 2002). The list itself straddles the boundaries of fact and fiction; and we will never be able to attest to its accuracy; were Betsy Miles’s breasts ‘of immense size’? Was Nelly Anderson truly a ‘squat, swarthy round faced wench’? Were Miss Simms ‘low countries’ like ‘a well-made boot’? (Rubenhold, 2005). We will never know.

 

Episode one of Harlots opens with an excited group of young women anxiously awaiting their reviews, and with good reason; Harris’s List could make or break the fortune of London’s sex workers. In episode one, Emily Lacey’s favourable review as ‘young votary of Venus’ allows her to leave Covent Garden and approach an elite brothel in Golden Square to seek a better position. Like every profession, sex work was (and still is) densely layered, and a favourable review would allow a girl to command more money, richer clients and go up in the world. A bad review, or an accusation of carrying the pox (like Miss Young of Cumberland Court, who is described as spreading ‘her contaminated carcass on the town’), would see business dry up quicker than sawdust on sick.

 Despite Jack Harris’s narrative style of a cheeky scamp about town, sampling the delights of the city at random, the selection process was highly competitive; Harris knew the marketing value of his list. The memoirs of Fanny Murray, one of the most celebrated eighteenth-century courtesans, provides valuable insight into the processes. Fanny had to apply to Harris to have her name ‘enrolled upon his parchment list’. She then had to be interviewed, submit to a medical examination, agree give Harris a fifth of the money she earned and sign a contract that stipulated she must forfeit £20 to Harris if she is found to have lied about her health during the examination (Memoirs, 1759). Expensive this certainly may have been, but it could be a worthwhile investment, Harris’s List helped to launch the careers of several London’s top courtesans; Fanny Murray, Lucy Cooper and Charlotte Hayes.

 Cast of Characters

 Harlots has an impressive cast of characters and whilst the plot is fiction, many of the characters are impressions and composites of real lives lived on the fringes of the Georgian underworld. In an interview with The Radio Times, Alison Newman is quoted as saying when they ‘were dreaming up Charlotte Wells (Jessica Brown Findlay), they were thinking about Kitty Fisher’ (Griffiths, 2017). Whilst Kitty Fisher is a fascinating character (you can read more about her here), Charlotte Wells is clearly based on one of the most notorious and successful eighteenth-century courtesans turned madam, Charlotte Hayes. Charlotte Hayes is favourably described in the 1761 edition of Harris’s List.

 "Were we to enter into an exact description of this celebrated Thais; that is, were we to describe each limb and feature a party, they would not appear so well as taken altogether, in which we must acknowledge her very pleasing; and in our eye (and sure nobody can better tell what is what) she is as desirable as ever". (Harris, 1761)

 Despite a single entry in the list, a much fuller account of Charlotte’s life is found in another eighteenth-century text, Nocturnal Revels (1779), which you can read at this link. The most comprehensive studies of Charlotte’s life are to be found in Rubenhold’s The Covent Garden Ladies (2005), Dan Cruickshank’s A Secret History of Georgian London (2010) and Fergus Linnane’s Madams: Bawds and Brothel Keepers of London (2011). But, it is Rubenhold's biography of Charlotte that is most clearly expressed in Harlots.

 Charlotte clawed her way up from desperate poverty to become one the most successful bawds in London, and Madam of the King’s Place brothel. When she died in 1813, she had amassed a fortune of over £20,000, achieved celebrity status and hobnobbed with royalty; not bad for a girl from the gutter. Rubenhold’s biography of Charlotte suggests she was the daughter of another London bawd, Elizabeth Ward (who is on record in 1754, accusing Ann Smith of stealing clothing from her.) Rubenhold’s details how Elizabeth Ward bred Charlotte up for a life on the town and eventually auctioned off her daughter’s virginity to the highest bidder, which would have proved ‘one of her mother’s greatest business transactions’ (Rubenhold, 2005). This narrative is certainly played out by Harlots, where Charlotte’s mother, Margaret Wells, is shown taking ‘sealed bids’ for her youngest daughter’s virginity (which she sells twice), just as she did for Charlotte’s some years earlier (Harlots, 2017). Alas, I do not have access to the sources that confirms Elizabeth Ward was Charlotte Hayes’ mother. Nocturnal Revels seems to suggest that Ward was Charlotte’s madam, rather than mother, and ‘initiated her all the mysteries of a Tally-Women’ (Revels, 1779). But, Nocturnal Revels provides explicit details about the selling of virginity several times over, and quotes Charlotte herself as saying a virginity is ‘as easily made as a pudding’ (Revels, 1779). However, rather than her mother selling her virginity, here Charlotte reveals she had sold her own ‘thousands of times’ (Revels, 1779).

 Whomever Charlotte’s mother was, she managed to secure herself a very rich ‘keeper’ in Robert 'Beau' Tracy. Just like in Harlots, Charlotte financially drained her patron and was ‘notoriously unfaithful to him’ (Revels, 1779). When Tracey died Charlotte ended up in debtor’s prison. It was here that she met and fell in love with an Irish sedan-chairman, Dennis O’Kelly (Daniel Marney in Harlots). According to O’Kelly’s memoirs, before he met Charlotte, he had earned additional income by having sex with wealthy women who hired his chair, also seen in Harlots (O'Kelly, 1788). And it seems that whilst in prison together, Charlotte also called upon Mr O’Kelly’s services. She was soon ‘devoted to him’, and he in turn was ‘devoted not only to her person, but to her purse’ (O’Kelly, 1788). Whilst I do not know how this will play out in the show, the various historical texts tell is that the real life Charlotte’s patronage allowed O’Kelly to quit his job as a bar tender and sedan chair carrier and become a kept man. O’Kelly began calling himself ‘Count’ and after Charlotte had liquidated his debts, he became the owner of the most famous racehorse in Britain, Eclipse. He and Charlotte went on to open the exclusive brothel, King’s Place. A satirical list of services and prices available at Kings are given in Revels, and it gives some idea of just how lucrative this business could be.

 Mary Cooper, who is found dying of the pox in an alleyway in episode two of Harlots, seems to be based on Lucy Cooper, a courtesan who really did blaze her way through the ranks and beds of the London elite. Lucy’s life is detailed alongside Charlotte’s in Nocturnal Revels, and a description of both Lucy and Charlotte is found in the 1761 edition of Harris’s List; both women achieved fame and fortune, but Lucy did not have the business acumen of Charlotte and failed to save for the inevitable rainy day. In Harlots, Mary Cooper is celebrated for her sexual prowess, street smarts and dazzling beauty.

 "Mary Cooper, Mary Cooper. 

She's had every Lord and Trooper

Mary Cooper, Mary Cooper

Leaves her lovers in a stupor 

Ridin' high, no man can dupe her 

London's Venus, Mary Cooper!"

 The real Lucy Cooper also had a reputation for debauchery and songs were sung about her too.

 "Must Lucy Cooper bear the bell

And give herself all the airs?

Must that damnation bitch of hell

Be hough’d by Knights and Squires?

Has she a better cunt than I

Of nut brown hairs more full?

That all mankind with do her lye

Whilst I have scarce a cull?"

(The Gentleman's bottle companion, 1768)

 Whilst Mary Cooper dies of syphilis in Harlots, Lucy Cooper lived a life of excess and saw her wealthy, elderly protectors die one by one. Finding herself grog blossomed, partied out and the wrong side of thirty-five, Lucy was unable to replace them. Having set nothing aside from her heyday, Lucy could not meet her debts and soon found herself destitute and in debtor’s jail. She died in squalid poverty in 1772, just four years after being immortalised in song as the woman who ‘all mankind’ wanted to lie with. 

Nancy Birch, the bawd who birches her culls bloody in Harlots also has a real life counterpart in Ms Nancy Burroughs of Drury Lane, who appears in the 1789 edition of Harris’s List. This Nancy was said to use ‘more birch rods in a week than Westminster school in a twelvemonth’ (Harris’s List, 1789). Other women specialising in BDSM that appear in the list include Miss Lee of Soho who is ‘constantly visited of amateurs of birch discipline’, and Mrs Macatney who birches young girls for the amusing of her paying customers, both of whom appear in the 1793 edition.

 Harriet Lennox (Pippa Bennett-Warner) and Violet Cross (Rosalind Eleazar) are both black sex workers in Harlots and both have real life counterparts. Moira Buffini revelled that Violet was based on a thief who appears in the Old Bailey records, a black woman called Ann Duck who was hung for highway robbery in 1744; “we sort of based Violet on her" (Griffiths, 2017). Harriet bears more than a striking resemblance to the real life story of ‘Black Harriot’. Harriot was brought to Jamaica as a slave, where British born plantation owner, William Lewis, fell in love with her and they married. Upon moving back to England, Harriot learnt all the airs and graces of high society, but when Lewis suddenly died, she found herself in a desperate situation. However, Harriot decided to take this lying down – quite literally; she turned to sex work and eventually opened her own establishment, becoming the only black madam in London (Arnold, 2010).

Trade in Virgins

 Sex work is a highly complex experience that resists simple stereotypes; sex work in the eighteenth century was no different. There was a dark side and for all the celebrated grande horizontals, when there is that much money at stake, many people were chewed up and spat out by the cities’ never ending demand for flesh. Harlots depicts the eighteenth-century sexual obsession with virgins; as Lady Repton quips in episode one at the auctioning of Lucy Wells’s virginity, ‘my husband loves a hymen’. In Nocturnal Revels, Charlotte Hayes discusses how easy it is to fake a virginity, we also see this trick in Fanny Hill where Fanny is instructed in how to fake a maidenhead;

 "In each of the head bed-posts, just above where the bedsteads are inserted into them, there was a small drawer, so artfully adapted to the mouldings of the timber-work, that it might have escaped even the most curious search: which drawers were easily opened or shut by the touch of a spring, and were fitted each with a shallow glass tumbler, full of a prepared fluid blood, in which lay soaked, for ready use, a sponge, that required no more than gently reaching the hand to it, taking it out and properly squeezing between the thighs, when it yelded a great deal more of the red liquid than would save a girl's honour". (Cleland, 1749)

 This tells us two things; firstly, women have been faking things in the bedroom for a long time; secondly, there was such a demand for virgins, knowing how to pass yourself off as an innocent was a staple of any self-respecting harlot’s repertoire. But, for every virginity faked, there were real girls offered up for sale.

 William Hogarth’s 1732 A Harlot's Progress (a series of engravings) depicts a young Moll Hackabout who arrives in London fresh from the country, only to be tricked into prostitution by the cunning bawd, Elizabeth Needham. (In 1731 Mother Needham was convicted of keeping a disorderly house and sentenced to be pilloried, she did not survive the experience.) The madam seeking out young girls and tricking them is also seen in Harlots when Lydia Quigley stalks registry offices and stage coaches to find virgins to offer up to well-paying clients.

 Nocturnal Revels details how Charlotte Hayes procured an endless supply of new ‘nuns’ for her ‘cloister’. Just as Lydia Quigley did in Harlots, Charlotte would dress in a ‘plain and simple manner’ and approach employment offices, searching for any young girl who was seeking domestic work. Charlotte would then tell her she required a maid for her mistress and offer ‘very handsome’ wages. The unsuspecting victim would be taken to a house, plied with drink and be put to bed, only to wake in the night being raped by whomever had paid Charlotte for a virgin. Revels tells us after such a traumatic experience, the victim would be given a few guineas and removed to the ‘nunnery’ in King’s Place ‘in order to make room for a new victim, who is to be sacrificed in the like manner’ (Revels, 1779). When victims could not be procured in this way, Charlotte and other bawds placed advertisements, like the one opposite, in newspapers to bring the girls to them.

 Hellfire Clubs

 In Harlots, Lydia Quigley is supplying virgins to an anonymous, but aristocratic and powerful group of men; it is later revealed these men are murdering these girls. The eighteenth century saw the rise of the Hellfire Clubs across Britain and Ireland. These were exclusive, secretive clubs for wealthy libertines who met to engage in ‘the most impious and blasphemous Manner, insult the most sacred Principles of Holy Religion, affront Almighty God himself, and corrupt the Minds and Morals of one another’ (Gordon, 1721). The clubs were shrouded in mystery and historians have long tried to understand exactly what happened there. Rumours about Satanic abuse of women, devil worship and debauched behaviour circulated around the clubs from the beginning. Did these rich men really deflower virgins and worship the devil, or was it simply as case of, as Evelyn Lord suggests, ‘wealthy men with too much time and licence on their hands, wanting to assert their masculinity’ (Lord, 2010). The most notorious club was formed in 1746 by Sir Francis Dashwood with the motto "Fais ce que tu voudrais" (Do as you will). Lord Sandwich, Lord Bute, the Duke of Queensbury, the Prince of Wales and even Benjamin Franklin were all rumoured to be members (Arnold, 2010). Whist we will probably never know exactly what happened there, the public have always been willing to believe the very worst of them; including the kidnap and rape of virgins. It seems the secretive world of the Hellfire Clubs provided inspiration for the elite group of aristocrats seeking out and murdering virgins in Harlots.

 Harlots is a delicious peep up the skirt of the eighteenth-century sex trade. Far from being a make believe world, here fact and fiction lie side by side in a sweaty bed, smoking a post-coital cigarette and asking ‘how was it for you?’ The lives held up here are nods to history, but we must remember that the lives of the infamous, people like Charlotte Hayes, Black Harriot and Lucy Cooper, have always been subject to sensationalism. What we know about them is left to us through a series of texts that were designed to inflame the senses and have us clutching our pearls whilst eagerly turning the page for more. For me, the most fun part of Harlots are the background details; the reusable condoms, the women squatting over basins to wash themselves between clients, the perils of pregnancy, butter as lubrication, and the Foundling Hospital - all documented facts about sex in the eighteenth century. (If you would like to read more about birth control and abortion in the eighteenth century, you can read another article I wrote here.) I would urge you to enjoy Harlots for the fantastic romp in the hay it is, and view its reference to historical facts as the delicious sprinkles on top. But, remember a little history can be a dangerous thing and must not be understood to be the full picture. If you want to learn more about sex work in the eighteenth century, I cannot recommend Dan Cruickshank’s Secret History, or Rubenhold’s Covent Garden Ladies enough. And once you have read that, please read about current sex workers and sex worker rights. Historical sex work can be bawdy fun because it allows us to look at a distance and to tell fun stories, but always remember this is the history and heritage of sex work today, and that such stories really do matter to the people fighting the same systems today.

 ‘’I am Sunk in Lust and Lechery ‘’ : The History behind ITV’s Encore ‘’Harlots’’. By Kate Lister.   Whores of Yore, May 24, 2017.

 

People think I’m obsessed with syphilis, and maybe I am. But it’s only because of my recent indoctrination into 18th-century history by aficionados of the period, such as Lucy Inglis, Adrian Teal and Rob Lucas.  I can’t read 10 pages of a medical casebook without coming across a reference to lues venerea. By the end of the century, London was literally crawling with the pox.

 And it’s no surprise. Sexual promiscuity was as much a part of Georgian England as were powdered wigs and opium. For a few pennies, a gentleman could pick up Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, or Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar—a pocket guide to London’s prostitutes published annually starting in 1771—and peruse it as he might do a fine wine list.

 For three guineas, a man could partake in the pleasures provided by Miss L—st—r at No. 6 Union Street, whose ‘neighbouring hills [are] full ripe for manual pressure, firm, and elastic, and heave at every touch.’  If three guineas were too much, one could always spend a third of that for a night with Miss H—ll—nd at No. 2 York Street, who, ‘tho’ only seventeen and short, is very fat and corpulent…a luscious treat to the voluptuary.’   And for those who fancied a woman ‘rather above the common height’, they could visit Miss S—ms at No. 82 Queen Ann’s Street East, who frequently attracted lovers of a ‘diminutive size’ who loved ‘surmounting such a fine, tall woman.’

The guidebook wasn’t all slap and tickle, though. Hidden within these pages were warnings about the dangers of sleeping with diseased prostitutes.  Military men were cautioned against Matilda Johnson, since ‘it is thought by some experienced officers, that her citadel is in danger, on account of a quantity of fiery combustible matter which is lodged in the covered way.’ Some warnings were not so subtle (or hilarious). The guidebook alerts its readers to Miss Young, who had ‘very lately had the folly and wickedness to leave a certain hospital, before the cure for a certain distemper which she had was completed.’ The book ominously adds that she has ‘thrown her contaminated carcass on the town again.’

 Yes, syphilis was ubiquitous in 18th-century London. Aside from abstaining or entering into a monogamous relationship with a healthy partner, there was very little one could do to protect oneself from the pox. Condoms, though available during this period, were rarely employed. When used, they were frequently reused multiple times, defeating their purpose as safeguards against contamination.

 That said, the telltale signs of the disease could often be seen on those suffering from the pox, allowing the astute observer to steer clear of infected persons. In this wax moulage  by the talented artist, Nicole Antebi, you can see the effects of the disease on the face and mouth. Blemishes such as these came to be associated with prostitution. Georgian women went to great lengths to cover these marks with ‘beauty spots’ made of fine black velvet, or mouse skin.

 Those who suffered from the pox often turned to surgeons for help. Before the discovery of penicillin, syphilis was an incurable (and ultimately fatal) disease. The longer it went on, the worse the symptoms became. In addition to unsightly skin ulcers like the ones mentioned above, sufferers could experience paralysis, blindness, dementia and ‘saddle nose‘, a grotesque deformity which occurs when the bridge of the nose caves into the face.

 Many treatments involved the use of mercury, which could be administered in the form of calomel (mercury chloride), an ointment, a steam bath or pill. Unfortunately, the side effects could be as painful and terrifying as the disease itself (see illustration, right, of patient suffering from over-exposure to mercury). Many patients who underwent such treatments suffered from extensive tooth loss, ulcerations and neurological damage. In many cases, people died from mercury poisoning. Indeed, it’s hard to fault Miss Young for throwing her ‘contaminated carcass on the town again’ after refusing to continue treatment that most likely included mercury.

 Prostitutes bore the brunt of it when it came to syphilis in Georgian London. Yet despite the dangers, women entered into the profession at an astonishing rate. An estimated 1 in 5 women were ‘Ladies of the Night’ during this period. Some entered the sex trade as young as 12 years of age; and many could expect to make as much as £400 per year.

 Still, the financial advantages of prostitution meant little if one contracted the deadly disease. The two syphilitic women mentioned above did not appear in later editions of Harris’s List. Their fates were sealed once their secrets had been exposed. No doubt countless other women suffered the same future after they became infected, losing not only their livelihoods, but also their lives to this dreadful epidemic.

 Am I obsessed with syphilis? Yes. But for good reason!.  

The Syphilitic Whores of Georgian London. By Lindsey Fitzharris.  Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris , March 3, 2014. 

In the late 18th century, one in five Londoners contracted syphilis by their mid-30s, according to a fascinating (if you enjoy reading about the history of medicine, as I do) paper published online this week in the journal Economic History Review.

 Using data painstakingly collected from the archived admission records of London’s hospitals and workhouse infirmaries, the paper’s authors — historians Simon Szreter of Cambridge University in the U.K. and Kevin Seina of Trent University in Canada — estimate that 2,807 Londoners were being treated annually for syphilis in the “foul” (venereal disease) wards of those facilities in the 1770s.

 That’s twice as many people as were being treated for syphilis in the much smaller English city of Chester during that period and about 25 times more than as were being treated in rural areas of England and Wales.

 Based on those 2,807 cases, Szreter and Seina estimate (conservatively) that 20 percent of Londoners during the Georgian era could expect to have at least one bout of syphilis by their 35th birthday.

 Yet syphilis was just part of the considerable venereal disease problem in 18th-century London. “A far greater number would have contracted gonorrhea or chlamydia than contracted syphilis in this period,” the historians point out.

 No one who has read the surviving diaries of James Boswell (1740-1795), the biographer of the great English writer and wit Samuel Johnson, will be surprised by the findings in this paper. In his diaries, Boswell recounts no less than 19 episodes of venereal disease between 1760 (when he was 20) and 1786.

 “Our findings suggest that Boswell’s London fully deserves its historical reputation,” says Szreter in a released statement. “The city had an astonishingly high incidence of STIs at that time. It no longer seems unreasonable to suggest that a majority of those living in London while young adults in this period contracted an STI at some point in their lives.”

 “In an age before prophylaxis or effective treatments, here was a fast-growing city with a continuous influx of young adults, many struggling financially,” he adds. “Georgian London was extremely vulnerable to epidemic STI infections rates on this scale.”

 Georgians called syphilis “the pox,” while gonorrhea was known as “the clap.” Both tended to be lumped together as a single disease: “venereal distemper.” The first effective treatment for syphilis was not discovered until 1910, so Georgians who developed the disease had no real hope of recovery, although they didn’t know that at the time, as Szreter and Siena explain:

 ‘’On experiencing initial signs of discomfort, such as a rash or pain in urination, most hoped it was just ‘the clap’ and would have begun by self-medicating for many weeks with various pills and potions — there was certainly a large market for these.

 However, a substantial proportion would find that this failed to alleviate symptoms, which worsened, because the delayed secondary stage of syphilitic infection, when it arrives, typically produces debilitating pain and fevers lasting weeks and even months, which could not be ignored. Although they cursed their luck for getting the pox, most contemporaries believed that there was available to them a reliable, permanent cure. This was to submit to the rigours of mercury salivation treatment.’’

 The idea behind the mercury treatment was to get the patient to excessively salivate, which was thought to help get rid of the impurities causing the disease. The initial administration of the mercury often occurred in a hospital, where patients typically stayed for a minimum of five weeks. Mercury, however, is a poison, so the treatment led to severe side effects, including painful mouth ulcers, loss of teeth, kidney failure and often death.

 Despite doing more harm than healing, mercury treatments were administered for weeks, months and years, a factor reflected in a well-known Georgian saying: “A night with Venus, and a lifetime with mercury.”

 As Szreter and Seina emphasize, the incidence of syphilis and other STIs in 18th-century London was particularly high among “young, impoverished, mostly unmarried women, either using commercial sex to support themselves financially or in situations that rendered them vulnerable to sexual predation and assault like domestic service.”

 Indeed, Boswell’s STIs were the result of frequent encounters with London’s sex workers.

 It’s not surprising, therefore, that financially established men like Boswell also had a high incidence of STIs. The other group of men with a high incident rate were young, unmarried laborers who had migrated to London from other areas of Britain and who lived on the margins of the city’s economy.

 Both men and women who could not afford treatments could usually get them for free at London’s specialist hospitals and infirmaries, Szreter and Siena point out.

 This look at syphilis in the 18th century has ramifications beyond simple historical curiosity.

 “Syphilis and other STIs can have a very significant effect on morbidity and mortality and also on fertility,” says Szreter. “So infection rates represent a serious gap in our historical knowledge, with significant implications for health, for demography and therefore for economic history.”

 “Understanding infection rates is also a crucial way to access one of the most private, and therefore historically hidden, of human activities, sexual practices and behaviours,” he adds.

 One in five Londoners had syphilis by age 35 in the late 18th century, historians estimate. By Susan Perry.  Minnpost , July 8, 2020.

 

Further reading :  One in five Georgian Londoners had syphilis by their mid-30s. Science Daily, July 6, 2020.