Philosophy and sex work: how courtesans in Ancient Greece crossed the mind/body divide

From The Conversation:

Sex workers in Ancient Greece divided into two somewhat overlapping types. The most common were those who lived in brothels, often enslaved sex workers providing a sanctioned service to the men of the ancient Greek city. The word for this role was porne, from where we get the English word pornography.

Not only did these women lack freedom, but their profession could also be dangerous. Women consigned to this life had no leisure and no expectation of education.

But there was another kind of sex worker who gripped the imagination of writers in the ancient world. These women did not live in brothels, but in their own homes. They granted favours, rather than being bought for a fee, and participated in the language of aristocratic exchange of goods.

They were called “friends”, hetairai in Greek, or, as they came to be known in English, courtesans.

These women were seen as having captivating minds, not just captivating bodies. They could be conversation partners and were allowed unprecedented freedom in the ancient world.

read more here @ The Conversation

read about Greek Courtesan Phryne

Queen Victoria's Bad Boy Bertie

From Mail Online:

Perhaps no Prince of Wales in history has been less trusted — or more spied upon — than the boy everyone knew as Bertie. 

When he attended a military summer camp, at age 19, the future King Edward VII was surrounded by minders: two stern Grenadier officers, a colonel and a general. He even had to share a general’s quarters.

Happily, however, they had not thought to lock Bertie’s bedroom window. So, one night, the heir to the throne wriggled out, made a beeline for the camp prostitute — one Nellie Clifden — and triumphantly lost his virginity.

Nor did it help that the birth of her son and heir was difficult: the baby was exceptionally large, and Victoria — at 4ft 11in — exceptionally small. Afterwards, she was dogged by post-natal depression for nearly a year.

Bertie, named after his father, was tossed to a wet-nurse — a woman called Mrs Brough, who later murdered her own six children in a fit of madness. 

So needy was Victoria for Albert’s love that she had little affection to spare for her second child. In any case, she thought Bertie was ugly — ‘too frightful’ and also ‘sadly backward’.

A royal wedding, she decided, presented the perfect solution: it would not only remove the presence of her irksome son but also stop him lusting after loose women. Bertie must wed the unprepossessing Alexandra.

Desperate to please her, he did precisely as he was told. But as I will reveal on Monday, far from taming him, marriage would turn Bertie into a world class womaniser, who justly deserved his nickname ‘the Prince of Pleasure’.

Excerpts from "Bertie: A life of Edward VII" by Jane Ridley

Book: The Origins of Sex

From the Guardian:

We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities' affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.

Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too. In the 1600s people were still being executed for adultery in England, Scotland and north America, and across Europe. Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly? Where does our current outlook come from? The answers lie in one of the great untold stories about the creation of our modern condition.

Sexual History of London

From Pop Matters:

When it comes to sex, London has always had a bit of a reputation. One scrap of manuscript, dating from 1058, shows a young woman of Southwark, seated on a clapped-out mule, her hair falling over her shoulders. She is exciting the attention of travellers on the highways by means of her indiscreet clothing, and holding a little gilt rod in her hand, to indicate her profession. This is the first picture of a prostitute actively soliciting on the streets of London, and it gives some indication of the state of affairs even then. Of course, this early version of the permissive society had its critics.

Book: The Virgin Cure

From The Star Phoenix:

The Virgin Cure is set in Manhattan in 1871, when 30,000 children lived in the streets of the city. It is the story of 12-year-old Moth, a poor girl but a survivor if there ever was one. Moth's mother sells her to a wealthy woman who abuses her, so Moth escapes to the Bowery, a place of beggars, thieves, prostitutes and freakshows. There, she is taken in by brothel-owner Miss Everett, who sells girls' virginity to the highest bidder. It's there that Moth befriends a woman doctor, Dr. Sadie, and learns about the virgin cure - the belief that having sex with a virgin girl will cure a man's syphilis.

Elizabeth I - Virgin Queen? She was a right royal minx!

From Mail Online:

The England that the first Queen Elizabeth reigned over so gloriously for 45 years was obsessed with sex and awash with promiscuity. This unrestrained bawdiness was surprising for a nation that worshipped its head of state as an unblemished virgin.

By the standards of later ages — and even today — society then was especially open in its use of sexual language. Shakespeare’s plays are full of nudge-nudge references to rutting, scrambling, sluicing, ravening and lock-picking.

The playwright’s work mirrored and fed the erotic obsessions of the age. This was a land where prostitutes were known as Winchester geese because the Bishop of Winchester owned much of the property that housed London’s dens of vice.

Monogamy, chastity and celibacy must have been practised by some Elizabethans, but they were hardly the norm. And yet, at the helm of this vibrant and exciting nation — growing, getting richer, reaching out to new worlds — was a woman who suppressed her own desires.

She would not marry or have children, and remained for the 45 years of her reign the unassailable Virgin Queen.

Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman

From the Telegraph:

The role of the mistress is as old as love and matrimony, but harder to define than either. Elizabeth Abbott, a Canadian academic whose previous books include a history of celibacy, has taken up the challenge in Mistresses: a History of the Other Woman.

Abbott writes that it was while researching her book on celibacy that “I came to realise that mistressdom is, in fact, an institution parallel and complementary to marriage. Though many people assume that adultery undermines marriage,” she notes, “many others believe that, paradoxically, it shores marriage up.” The material, in short, could hardly be richer or more complex.

In 13 chapters, beginning with illicit love in the ancient world and concluding with the changing role of the mistress after the sexual revolution of the Sixties, Abbott considers the careers of mistresses in a variety of different eras and cultures.

Victorian Sex Trade Workers

From Victoria News:

An article on the history of sexuality and Victorian sex trade workers has netted a national award for retired Vancouver Island University history professor Patrick Dunae.

Now an honorary research associate at VIU, Dunae received the 2010 best article prize from the Canadian Historical Association for his article entitled Geographies of Sexual Commerce and the Production of Prostitutional Space: Victoria, British Columbia, 1860 to 1914.

The article, which looks at prostitution in Victoria, was published in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association.

A Return To Virginity

From BBC News:

Young Arab women wait in an upmarket medical clinic for an operation that will not only change their lives, but quite possibly save it. Yet the operation is a matter of choice and not necessity. It costs about 2,000 euros (£1,700) and carries very little risk.

The clinic is not in Dubai or Cairo, but in Paris. And the surgery they are waiting for is to restore their virginity.

Whether in Asia or the Arab world, an unknown number of women face an agonising problem having broken a deep taboo. They've had sex outside marriage and if found out, risk being ostracised by their communities, or even murdered.

Now more and more of them are undergoing surgery to re-connect their hymens and hide the any sign of past sexual activity. They want to ensure that blood is spilled on their wedding night sheets.

The social pressure is so great that some women have even taken their own lives.

Women Prefer Chocolate to Sex

From the Times of India:

A third of women dream about chocolate during the day, compared with only 18 per cent who think about sex, says a new British survey.

Around 2.3 million British women admitted that they have the sweet treat at least three times a day, reports The Daily Express.

On the other hand, six in 10 men have sex on their minds for most of the day and 11 per cent think about chocolate, the study found.

According to the study of 2,000 women, which was carried out by cereal bar firm Fibre Plus, more than one in five women say they would kiss goodbye to their sex lives before chocolate.

What’s more, a quarter would rather give up chardonnay and Chanel.