Ladies of Pleasure & The Escorting Overton Window
It’s the 1630s. Charles is on the throne. The English have arrived in Connecticut. The Restoration is about to happen; which has something to do with there being a king and then not and then a king again.+ And its the period of the Caroline era comedy, a form of theatre so-named because of the popularity of the great Caroline, Charles 1st’s wife. Or his daughter? Or his femme boy… or maybe his crossdressing alter-ego? I don’t know. I don’t know if she was ‘great’ either, or ever thought to be, I just added the descriptor for effect++. In any case, it was the 1630s. Pretty dogs were being named. English law was being constructed. Colonies taken. Civil wars bubbled. Wigs worn. And I bring you this profound, yet incisive, illumination of the period…because it was the setting of the popular comedy of manners, The Lady of Pleasure by James Shirley. I won’t lie, I’ve never read it. Its sits low on the long-list of sexy satires that I plan to get through before I croak.
Casanova’s memoirs are higher. Delta of Venus higher still. And highest perhaps Fanny Hill. I’ve done the Story of O; a predictably elegant Parisian bit of filth once presumed to be written by a man, but actually penned by the enigmatic Pauline Reage. And bits of Sade - a little 100 days of Sodom and The Philosophy of the Bedroom - troubling, scatological, deeply unsexy, with occasional flecks of culturally revealing brilliance, spliced into bloated, indulgent prose ++++ And yes… I’ve read some of 50 Shades of Grey. I found a copy on the seat of the top deck of a bus; that totem of pulpish literary promiscuity - half consumed and wholly discarded - tea stains fingered into its pages and perfumed with spit and chicken grease. Lusty, stupid and neither as bad, nor as interesting or deserving of its former infamy. Like, Madonna. Or Lembit Öpik.
But I’ll get to reading it; the Shirley story. I bring it up because I’ve had two brief conversations of late about the title of the story. The other afternoon, I got into a marketing-themed dialogue with a deviant plaything who did himself the disservice of getting tangled up in my bedsheets. Inadvisably he had allowed his extremities to be cuffed and given me free rein to trample and smother. He yearned and lamented, yearned and lamented, and then got out of puff. So I straddled his chest and took some tea in a green Wedgewood cup and saucer, like a snarky teenager astride a brick wall on her fag break. “Let’s have a bit of chat,” he recommended. Bad weather, unremarkable Christmases, good wine, dispiriting relationships, what will happen in America? why are we so fucking perverted? et cetera and so forth and…
“It’s Fanny Hill Right? The tagline, on your website..?”
“Oh! Maybe? I was thinking of the James Shirley play…”
“Its Fanny Hill also I think…”
And I left him in repose and went in quick search of my charity shop battered, sepia copy… and he was right, Fanny Hill, The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. The story of a rural girl lured into the colourful life of the city brothel. It’s more ‘on the nose’ seemingly than the Shirley novel, but encompassing some similar themes. In the older book, the Lady of Pleasure the primary protagonist is Aretina (a feminised play on the name Aretino, the censored Renaissance pornographer) who troubles her marriage with her sexual escapades. Whether woman or lady, the phrase, all the same, is synonymous with courtesans, mistresses and whores and is not to be confused with the more modernly popular term the lady of leisure, who has married richly and can work little, chat passive aggressively and lunch often (though gingerly).
They sound similar, but in the erotic canon they are each other’s inverse. The former… her world is assumed to be one of urbanity, sensuality, jeopardy, and adventure… and the latter holds associations with the bourgeoisie, conventionality, stability and status. Equally for the former, her life is troubled by marginality, liminality and risk, and for the latter, repression, suburban competition and existential doubt. Sometimes they are assumed to satirically ape each other; pleasure speaks in refined tones and has an internal GPS to the nearest Carluccio’s. Leisure dons fishnet hold ups and a leatherette balconnette and puts on a porno; a special treat, the infamous birthday fuck.
But if emulation needs a starting point, it may well be that whores pre-date wives, contrary to popular belief. Prostitution (albeit in very particular conditions) has even been witnessed in monkeys - females exchanging sexual favours for food - in a way that donning a white dress and declaring fealty to each other for life never has. To be clear, no primate has ever took it upon themselves to marry, not even in captivity, though they may well have been forced in to sham marriages for YouTube clips by the morally misguided.
In any case…the class drag on both sides risks the petulant accusation of pretension… whores pretending to be something ‘more than’ by dint of having a personality - shock and convolution! - and wives (and, indeed, husbands) pretending to be interesting by dint of wanting to get off. I am perhaps a little defensive here, because in the criticisms I’ve encountered over my chunk of years being an escort, its the the burn+++++ I’ve most commonly encountered; an experience I assume (well, know) to be common to any ‘professional’ for having the temerity to behave professionally or indeed, refusing to act insidiously ashamedly.
You know, for having professional photos, taking deposits and pre-bookings, running websites, managing social media accounts, forming friendly associations with clients, writing blogs, putting our personality into our business, not just our bosoms. What’s the preferable alternative? A grainy photo card in a telephone box with a picture of a vulva (anyone’s) and a scribbled postcode flanked by a few angry red arrows? If only the animosity towards ‘professionalisation’ of the industry was a nostalgic yearn for the halcyon time of Soho-esque whorish bohemianism that the ‘get it quick and easy down a red-lit, rain stained alleyway’ style of erotic transactionality might invoke, but it isn’t. It’s a stigma towards whores, which postures that women who are promiscuous are of low value and can’t make ‘demands’ (which is another way of saying having boundaries and working preferences), which unfortunately some whores internalise and some ‘punters’ anxiously perpetuate.
I was of a mind to briefly anatomise on this after a strange interchange (the second and more trying of the conversations) I had with an old acquaintance from the industry who had a little chew on my website and generously offered her opinion, thinking it silly for escorts to pass themselves of as ‘like wives’, or words to that effect, misconstruing the tagline in the aforementioned fashion. At first I was confused by the opacity of the concepts involved in such a sentiment…but after brief consideration I understood that it was really a watery way of claiming that being a ‘wife’ was of higher value than being a whore and thus if that latter is seen to ape the former, she is offending the moral order. I suppose more generally, the contention was that using euphemistic language was unnecessarily pretentious for escorts.
But Ladies of pleasure is an anachronistic euphemism for prostitution no more or less pretentious than ‘call girl’ or ‘lady of the night’ or, ahem, escort! I have a rule - vis-a-vis the sex industry, but which could apply in many contexts - if you are the escort whose PR is anything more fruity than taking a photo in high light stood sternly like the Vitruvian man, and posting it online with the tagline ‘Prostitute Will Have Sex For Money’, then you share in my pretension. I assume it's ultimately about conformity to some unspoken standard, this idea that a certain amount of willingness to preen the table settings for the sex industry is ‘normal’ but too much is untoward, until critical mass is reached and reaches a new ‘normal.’ I imagine the first whores who called themselves escorts were called pretentious cows (the term is working girl you uppity so-and-so!) until enough ladies were using the more attractive term for it to become normalised enough for it not to agitate attention. I have been reliably informed that there have been times and places in the sex industry of yore, that using a surname was considered suspect++++++ and anyone who offered more than a oily rub (such as ‘girlfriend experiences or dinner dates’) was accused of upping the bar of client expectation too high and overselling.
Indeed, ultimately, if you use a cute nom de guerre, take flattering photos of yourself, and other marketing fripperies, you are engaging in a degree of performance and pretence designed to sell an expensive indulgence; sexual escapism. Similarly, if you are a client and you are sexually responsive to any of the ‘magic making’ that has long historically gone on in the erotic industries, if you book escorts to temporarily put pause on the practical obligations and restrictions of daily life and feel aroused by illicit encounters with a woman who job is erotic, then then you do too.
As the playwright and wit Oscar Wilde put it; “Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labour.” Anxious sex workers and clients preach the importance of sexual honesty, utility and mundanity in a world constitutionally constructed from risqué fantasies set amidst a landscape of smoke and mirrors. Modern psychology nerds would simply call this ‘projection’, the animosity towards habits in others that we ourselves engage in and which garners in us suppressed and unarticulated embarrassment and guilt. We attack the more overt display of ‘the bad thing’ we are uncomfortable with, precisely because it agitates that in us which we hope to suppress and leave undisturbed in the hope it’ll go unnoticed by everyone, including ourselves. In this case, ‘the bad thing’ is a desire for life to be more beautiful, adventurous, sexy, original and memorable than is often otherwise is.
Speaking of Wilde, I suppose thats the other beef folk sometimes with the ‘middle class’ social aspirant facet of sex industry; English culture has often been reliably dissonant about ‘perversions’ of the class order, and we have a quite impressive comedy canon telling madcap stories of lower middle class numpties who aspire to live a more comfortable life than is easily available to them; Basil Fawlty, Hyacinth Bucket, David Brent, Del Boy, Blackadder, Peep Show. It is our favourite joke. I love these comedies, they are impressively written and at times heartfelt, but they do expose something of the forelock tugger in us, the odd idea that is simply natural for some people to have a nicer life than others and anyone than obviously attempts to escape that is acting against the order. The way we get around this is by presenting the aspiration to social mobility and social improvement as a narcissistic vanity, a way of presenting oneself as better than the rest of the ‘proles’. And I am sure that is always true for some people who step out from the socially expected limits of their ‘role’, but I am a keen utiliser of Occam’s Razor; if we can’t be sure what motivates someone to their actions (or generally how to explain a phenomena) we should pick the simplest of the possible explanations until further information arises to wholly disprove it. Which is, if people try to improve their life, it’s because having a better life, is ahem, better. Having nice things is nice. Being valued and respected is nice. Having pride in your work is nice. It’s all so bloody nice.
Lots of people, want to engage in self improvement - in their work, their education, their bodies, their daily lifestyle - not because they are acting out some traumatised need to win over the opinions of people they unfathomably see as ‘beneath them’ - but simply because life is short, time is precious and no fucker is going to come and save you if you loiter in a constant state of quiet disappointment and repressed desire just because you are afraid that if you ask for the things you want, someone somewhere who is in no material way impacted by your aspirations - as predictably as a weather forecast - thinks you are taking the piss.
I often see escorts and sex workers on social media who have had successes I haven’t or whose marketing, photographs and other digital sundries are more creative and finessed than I would’ve thought to do. I don’t think, ‘wow who does she think she is’, I feel inspired, I admire them, I value them for being unashamed about spreading their wings as a sex worker in a world that is often hostile to us. Escorting is often viewed (including by some punters and sex workers) as junkyard sex, back alley, broken and shameful, and I am grateful to those workers who have not let that get in the way of them enjoying their job, their clients and the creative possibilities that have a self-marketing occupation can bring you. I think these escorts are trailblazers (even those that charge far more than I practically could because of location or other occupational factors, or who have made more money selling content or a lifestyle brand or whathaveyou) and are shifting the Overton window on what's considered the ‘norm’ for how escorts run their lives, attracting new clients to the ‘hobby’ who want a more egalitarian relationship with escorts and generally help to create more space. After all, however thrilled and gratified I am about making pleasure for others, it’s as much work as it is leisure, and I make a habit of taking pride in both.
KISSES, CORA LEIGH
UK INDEPENDENT ESCORT, DOMINATRIX & COMPANION
+Charles 2, Aragon son of Arathorn, Elvis… the holy troika.
++OK I just checked, Caroline is a Latin derivation of Charles. There was no Caroline, great or otherwise. So the crossdresser thing was the closest bet, in a fashion.
+++My special subject.
++++By burn I of course mean a little wee sizzle; like the oooch feeling I get when I pick up a too hot bit of grilled gammon. A quick suck of the finger and I’m all better.
+++++You could be Moira or Janet say, but not Moira Minge or Janet Jubblies or whatever.
