GODSTITUTION - THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF SEX WORK

Brothel by Joachim Beuckelaer

Most people who refer to prostitution as the “oldest profession” probably do so with their tongue firmly in cheek. But you might be shocked to learn just how plausible that moniker truly is. There’s a fair chance that sex was one of the very first things human beings did in exchange for money. The evidence for this starts in the usual place: a bunch of scientists messing around with monkeys.

In 2005, a behavioral economist at Yale named Keith Chen embarked on a unique experiment: He taught a bunch of capuchin monkeys how to use money. He and his fellow researchers began by handing out small silver disks with holes in the middle and repeatedly demonstrating that the coins could be exchanged for fruit or Jell-O cubes. Once the capuchins got the basic concept, Chen started dispensing a dozen coins per day to each monkey.

Over time, the capuchins came to understand some of the basics of economic life. When the price of Jell-O cubes dropped, the monkeys loaded up on Jell-O. When Chen introduced them to a form of gambling that gave the capuchins an opportunity to double their wealth or lose it all, some of the monkeys took to gambling. Their behavior was so eerily reminiscent of our own that it didn’t take long before the first monkey planned the first monkey heist.

All of Chen’s testing with money was done in a small subcage closed off from the larger monkey chamber. One day, before the door separating that subcage from the larger enclosure could be closed, the first capuchin outlaw grabbed a tray of coins and tossed them into the chamber for his cage-mates to grab up. In the resulting chaos Dr. Chen observed one capuchin handing over his ill-gotten gains to a female. They fucked, and then the simian sex worker proceeded to buy herself some fruit.

Now, capuchins aren’t prehistoric humans. But Dr. Chen’s research does suggest that the concept of exchanging money for sex is one that might have cropped up very early in the history of economics. And there’s some hard archaeological evidence to support that theory.

One of, if not the oldest piece of currency still in existence is a Sumerian shekel, minted in bronze around 3000 BCE. One side of this shekel is stamped with the image of a piece of wheat, and the other side carries the likeness of Ishtar, the goddess of love. According to Bernard Lietaer’s “Beyond Scarcity and Toward a Sustainable Capitalism,” the coin was originally meant to pay for state-sanctioned prostitutes. See, Ishtar was also the goddess of paying for love. In one Babylonian religious text she proudly says, “A prostitute compassionate, am I!”

Ishtar was a divine courtesan; she took many celestial lovers and acted as sort of an escort to the gods. Consequently, some of her followers are believed to have raised funds for the church by acting as holy hookers. Some of these women were high-ranking priestesses, devout and eager to serve their goddess via boning. The divine sex work of ancient Sumer wasn’t always carried out by willing participants, though. One 3,300-year-old document outlines the arrangement between a father seeking a loan and the church of Ishtar. He gave up his daughter as collateral.

The Greek historian Herodotus (484–425 BCE) provides us with our first written history of Ishtar’s divine sex workers. According to him, the female citizens of Babylon were required to let the church pimp them out exactly one time:

"Every woman born in the country must once in her life go and sit down in the precinct of Venus, and there consort with a stranger".

Women volunteering their time and genitals would sit on display in the temple precinct and wait for a customer. They weren’t allowed to return home until “one of the strangers [threw] a silver coin into her lap, and [took] her with him beyond the holy ground.” According to Herodotus, any payment offered to the women had to be accepted: “The woman goes with the first man who throws her money, and rejects no one.”

Some modern researchers dispute Herodotus’s claim, and it isn’t exactly out of character for the “father of history” to tell florid lies about a people he considered foreign and weird. Whether or not that particular story is true, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the church of Ishtar did use prostitution as one method of raising funds. It’s unlikely the actual deed ever happened on church property, though. Ishtar herself claimed to be the sort of sex worker who preferred to ply her trade at the local bar:

"When I sit in the entrance of a tavern, I, Ishtar, am a loving harimtu".

Harimtu is often translated to mean “prostitute.”

Ishtar worship eventually spread west, to Greece, where she took up the name Aphrodite, and to Rome, where she became Venus. There are references to so-called temple prostitution across the ancient world for thousands of years. And if the early Christian historian Eusebius can be trusted, it kept right on going until the reign of Constantine in 300 CE.

That’s more than three thousand years of faith-approved sex work! And if that seems strange to you, it’s because of our current legal prohibitions against prostitution. They are actually the exception, rather than the rule, in most of human history.

The Strange History of State-Sponsored Hooking

Ancient Greece and Rome aren’t particularly well known for their enlightened attitudes toward women. Many in the Greek upper class considered the “fairer sex” fit for nothing besides baby making. Rome was a bit better; it wasn’t unheard of for women to own businesses, and some ladies managed to achieve significant financial success. But in both civilizations, prostitution was a single woman’s fastest road to wealth and power.

The Greeks divided their sex workers into three categories: slave prostitutes (an incredibly sad job with a hilarious name, pornai), free but poor street prostitutes (I could not find the ancient Greek name for these ladies), and hetaera, essentially high-class courtesans for the wealthy. The story of one of these women, Aspasia, illustrates the best-case scenario of ancient Greek whoredom.

Aspasia wasn’t a native of Athens, and, as a foreigner, she was considered by most Athenians about as welcome as an elevator fart. But she’d come from wealth and privilege in her homeland, and she had the education and aristocratic bearing necessary to make it as a hetaera. She developed a sterling reputation in the party scene in Athens, eventually hooking up with the head of state, Pericles.

According to Socrates himself, Aspasia was a lot more than just a politician’s eye candy. He claims that Aspasia wrote the great funeral oration that Pericles delivered at the onset of the Peloponnesian War. Socrates, often considered the father of philosophy, even credited Aspasia with teaching him the “art of eloquence.” When Pericles died, Aspasia went out and found herself another man, Lysicles, and turned him into a respected politician.

Aspasia was a controversial figure in her own time (Plutarch later blamed her for inciting the Peloponnesian War). But prostitution itself wasn’t controversial or illegal in the world’s first democracy. Athenian law allowed for both male and female sex workers, although boys were allowed to work only until they reached adolescence, which is, admittedly, super fucked-up.

Solon was the first Athenian leader to officially recognize prostitution, in 594 BCE. It was a backhanded kind of recognition at first, stating that men caught using prostitutes couldn’t be considered guilty of adultery. But Solon went on to create a series of state-run brothels aimed at giving the common man an opportunity to get his rocks off for a reasonable price. Here’s how the ancient writer Philemon described it in his book Adelphoi (“Brothers”):

"[Solon], seeing Athens full of young men, with both an instinctual compulsion and a habit of straying in an inappropriate direction, bought women and established them in various places, equipped and common to all.
“The women stand naked that you not be deceived.
“Look at everything.
“Maybe you are not feeling well. You have some sort of pain. Why? The door is open. One obol. Hop in. There is no coyness, no idle talk, nor does she snatch herself away. But straight away, as you wish, in whatever way you wish.
“You come out. Tell her to go to hell. She is a stranger to you.”

State-sponsored prostitution continued on well past the days of old Athens. In the fifth century CE, a former sex worker even succeeded in working her way up to the title of empress. Her name was Theodora, and before her marriage to the Roman emperor Justinian she worked the streets of Constantinople and, apparently, really, really enjoyed her job. The historian Procopius provides us with this lurid account:

"Often she would go picnicking with 10 young men or more, in the flower of their strength and virility, and dallied with them all, the whole night through. When they wearied of the sport, she would approach their servants, perhaps 30 in number, and fight a duel with each of these; and even thus found no allayment of her craving. Once, visiting the house of an illustrious gentleman, they say she mounted the projecting corner of her dining couch, pulled up the front of her dress, without a blush, and thus carelessly showed her wantonness".

In other words, she regularly fucked dozens of men under the table and sometimes finished herself off with furniture. That’s either evidence of severe sexual addiction . . . or a damning indictment of the lovemaking abilities of Byzantine nobility. (Probably a little of both.)

Now, in fairness to Theodora, Procopius had a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the empress and shouldn’t be relied on for his absolute honesty. What we know for sure is that Theodora worked as a whore and felt no shame in that. Once she gained power, one of her first acts was to do a major solid for her former coworkers. Theodora introduced some of the first legal protections for sex workers in history. She also made rape punishable by death, cracked down on forced prostitution, and expanded property rights for all women across the empire.

During Theodora’s time, the hookers of Byzantium were quite lucky. But the history of state-endorsed prostitution doesn’t begin and end with the Western world. Some states in ancient India held competitions in which all the local women vied for the title of “most beautiful.” The winner was declared nagarvadhu. Winning this honor meant a life of wealth and respect, and also sex with any nobles wealthy enough to pay for it. In an era in which the average person was usually either starving, infected with rickets, or both, it wasn’t a terrible deal.

Not all state-sponsored sex work involved women. According to David Greenberg’s The Construction of Homosexuality, the Yauyo people of the Inca Empire had “public houses filled with men who dressed as women and painted their faces.” And, on a much darker note, some Incan religious orders would “adopt” young boys, dress them as girls, and put them to a very specific kind of work. Their priests weren’t allowed to have sex with women, but apparently the gods were cool with child rape.

Prostitution’s history as an illegal enterprise is much shorter. In Europe, we can trace the first laws against whorin’ back to Reccared I of Spain. He officially converted to Christianity in 589 CE, and attempted to curry favor with the Catholic Church by clamping down on the brothels his people had enjoyed in their carefree pagan days. (Female) sex workers caught plying their trade would be punished with three hundred lashes and exile.

It’s unclear how strictly Reccared’s new law was followed among his recently Christianized people. What is clear is that, up to that point, prostitution had a very long history of working in support of the state, and the state’s religion. And, like any institution that’s existed in human society for thousands and thousands of years, it served a valuable purpose.

The Safety Valve Theory

In 1358, the Great Council of the city-state of Venice declared sex work “absolutely indispensable to the world.” Over the next century, government-run brothels sprouted up in cities all across Italy, France, and Britain. Almost seven hundred years ago, the government of Venice knew what sociologists have only recently elucidated: prostitution, legal or otherwise, plays a critical role in civilized society.

Medieval Europeans operated under what Ruth Karras of Temple University calls a “hydraulic model” of masculinity, according to her 1996 book Common Women:

"People believed that pressure builds up, and has to be released through a “safety valve” . . . or eventually the dam will burst and men will commit seduction, rape, adultery and sodomy".

Saint Augustine embodied this mind-set perfectly when he said, “If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.” The idea that men go crazy if they can’t blow off some steam via orgasm is a simultaneously offensive and unnervingly plausible theory. The Hydraulic Model of male sexuality IS bullshit, but it’s convincing bullshit.

But you can believe prostitution acts as a sort of safety valve without believing that men turn into rape monsters if they go too long without orgasm. Émile Durkheim, one of the founding thinkers of sociology, proposed what we know today as the safety valve theory of deviance. In the book Deviance, Nancy Herman summed up the two purposes Durkheim felt illicit behavior served in society: defining the difference between right and wrong for a culture, and “acting as a safety valve to drain off excess energy generated by the pressures of institutional routines.”

Prostitution doesn’t necessarily need to save us from the unchecked build-up of raw sexual frustration to fulfill a purpose. It provides a literal and figurative release, giving generations of stressed-out people something a little (or a lot) naughty to help distract them from the fact that life is nasty, brutish, and short. Prostitution is woven into the very fabric of society; wherever there are people working their butts off and chafing under the yoke of a repressive culture, there’ll be sex workers to help take the edge off. A huge amount of human culture has been forged in the crucible where vice and stress collide. Or, as this drinking song from Gold Rush–era California puts it:

"The miners came in forty-nine,
The whores in fifty-one;
And when they got together
They produced the native son".

In my day job for Cracked I’ve interviewed several dozen sex workers from across the world: legal brothel workers in Nevada and Australia as well as illegal streetwalkers and high-priced escorts from across the United States and Canada. They’ve all led different lives, served different clientele, and charged very different prices for their time. But one thing all of my sources had in common was that they had had Johns (and Janes) who paid them for sessions that included no sex whatsoever.

Sometimes people need companionship. Not just someone to fuck, but someone to talk to and be held by. Physical connection is a powerful thing, critical to our mental health. There are lonely people all around this world, lacking a romantic partner, trapped by societal convention or a demanding job, or who are just painfully awkward. For folks in these situations, sex work provides a kind of therapy.

Stanley Siegel, an author and practicing psychotherapist for nearly forty years, interviewed a number of his clients on their use of prostitutes and came to that same conclusion. In his article “Sex Worker or Therapist?” (Psychology Today censored it in 2012, but you can still find it on Stanley’s website) he relates the story of a sixty-two-year-old gay man from southern Vietnam. This man had worked his entire life as a rural doctor, sacrificing his sexuality on the altar of career. When he retired, his friends decided enough was enough, and hired him an escort. It was a transformative experience:

"Since then, I’ve seen Peter weekly. It’s been the most amazing experience. I am learning to appreciate my body as old as it is and I’m also learning the mechanics of sex which I had only occasionally seen in porn movies. My whole attitude has changed. I feel much more confident about myself and I’ve started to date".

Of course, we’re talking about a very good sex worker here. Most transactions in the sex trade are less about healing and more about blowing off . . . steam. But there is a distinct, legal, and growing branch of therapy that also includes boning. It’s called sexual surrogacy or, as I prefer to call it:

The Medicinal Sex-Work Industry

Our friend Durkheim, the sociologist who first elucidated the safety valve theory of deviance, actually posited a third societal function for illicit behavior: It helps instigate social change.

"Where crime exists, collective sentiments are sufficiently flexible to take on a new form, and crime sometimes helps to determine the form they will take. How many times, indeed, it is only an anticipation of future morality—a step toward what will be".

This is most clearly demonstrated by marijuana’s recent history. For decades it was—and in many places remains—a thing that can send you to prison for years of your life. But people kept doing it, and once its use spread across a wide enough underground, the users started agitating to change the laws. Now state after state, and a few whole countries, have decriminalized or legalized pot’s sale and use. Medical marijuana is now one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States.

Oddly enough, prostitution may be on a similar path. In 1970, the famed sexologists William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson introduced the practice of sexual surrogacy in their depressingly named book Human Sexual Inadequacy. Sex surrogacy became the therapy method du jour among the hip and hurting throughout the seventies and eighties, but it died down significantly in the nineties.

It was legalized nationwide in 2003, and over the last decade and change, surrogacy has slowly grown in both professional and social acceptability. But while “medical marijuana” in many states is just a sly excuse for people to get a recreational high, medicinal sex work is a different legal matter altogether. Surrogates don’t work alone; they provide treatment in tandem with a licensed therapist. Sexual surrogates spend only, on average, 13 percent of their time having sex with a patient.

And therein lies the key-est of differences between sexual surrogacy and prostitution. Clients don’t always wind up having sex, but if that’s what they want to pay for, that’s what they get. With a surrogate, you’re paying for therapy that may—or may not—include sex and certainly won’t start with it. The sex itself is actually the “climax” of a long process of therapy. Shai Rotem, a male sexual surrogate, gave me a broad outline of the process:

"Basically the heart of the work is the mini relationship that has been created between the surrogate partner and the client. Every client has different difficulties, and by creating a mini relationship with a surrogate partner we’re able to see where she’s strugglin".

So basically, the patient-surrogate relationship mimics an actual romantic relationship, allowing the surrogate and therapist to pinpoint the patient’s problems and work on building solutions.

"It’s about having an experience with a person [that the client] is comfortable and safe with, and by doing that, she has a model now in her mind and heart of how to create a relationship".

I also spoke with Shemena Johnson, a Los Angeles–based therapist who has worked with Shai Rotem for the last two years. Sometimes Shemena refers patients to Shai, but, more frequently, women reach out to him directly and he then refers them to Shemena. Both Shai and Shemena conduct sessions with their patients separately, and then confer together over their notes and plans for treatment. As Shemena says:

"The client is fully aware of our engagement; we update each other on the progress; and there may be issues that come up with the surrogate-partner therapy process [such] that [Shai] may reach out to me and say, “We might need to work this through.”

The most common issue that crops up is that patients take their “mini relationship” a little too seriously and start developing feelings for Shai.

"Usually it’s a fantasy. “I want a friend, I’m lonely, I wish I had someone in my life who was similar to Shai.”

In those cases, Shemena’s job is to help her patients “grieve for the loss of that relationship” while still moving forward in their search for a healthier romantic life. And for many clients, dealing with the issue of growing too close to their surrogate is actually a valuable part of the therapy. As Shai explained to me:

"Most of the clients that I see were referred because of either late virginity or an inability to create relationships".

Many of the people who require sexual surrogate therapy have never really had a healthy sexual relationship in their life. Learning how to make a clean break with a “lover” without losing their self-worth or -confidence is a skill they desperately need to cultivate. Shai describes this breakup process, at its best, as a sort of graduation:

"All relationships will end at some point. Either the other person will die, or there will be a breakup or divorce, and most relationships end with pain and anger, people fighting. In surrogate relationships we give our client the ability to end the relationship with a form of graduation. I like to think of my clients as little birds. . . . When they’re ready, I want to help them take off and fly on their own".

One issue that frequently leads clients to surrogates is vaginismus, an involuntary spasming of the vagina that can render any form of penetration—even just a finger—painful or impossible. The best scientific evidence for the efficacy of sexual surrogate therapy actually comes from a 2007 study on vaginismus treatment. In the article “Surrogate Versus Couple Therapy in Vaginismus,” the researchers Itzhak Ben-Zion, Shelly Rothschild, Bella Chudakov, and Ronit Aloni studied sixteen patients receiving therapy for their vaginismus with a trained surrogate, versus sixteen patients undergoing the same therapy with their actual romantic partner instead.

The results were quite conclusive: 100 percent of the women undergoing surrogate therapy successfully treated their vaginismus. Only 69 percent of the women who underwent couples therapy were “fully successful” in the same time frame.

Becoming a trained surrogate isn’t a quick and easy process. The International Professional Surrogates Association (IPSA) offers a “100-hour didactic and experiential course of study in human sexuality” as the first stage of training to become a certified professional surrogate. The second stage is a two-year internship, in which, according to Shai:

"[Students] work with actual clients in a very close internship with their mentor. So let’s compare a working practicing surrogate to an intern: a practicing surrogate reports to the therapist after every session. When it comes to interns, they report to the therapist as well as reporting to their mentor and having a once-a-week meeting with their mentor or supervisor".

Of course, not all people who call themselves sexual surrogates become certified through the IPSA. While I was working on this book I also interviewed an anonymous woman in the Saint Louis area who has worked as a surrogate for the last five years without an IPSA certification. She’s open about her career, and doesn’t hide from the law, but “Sarah” acknowledges that the legality of what she does is something of a gray area. While the legitimacy of her practice is certainly questionable, Sarah’s work with disabled patients struck me as incredibly valid, and valuable.

She told me about one of her regular patients, a man with muscular dystrophy who was initially told he wouldn’t live past the age of twenty. At age twenty-one the doctors realized his case was less severe than they’d feared, and suddenly this young man realized he might have a chance to enjoy some of the experiences he’d assumed were closed to him forever. As Sarah told me:

"So when he was twenty-five he decided he wanted to know what sex was like. His therapist connected us. I’ve been seeing him for months—I started by helping him explore how to finger me. He’s got limited mobility but we’ve had intercourse, and he’s able to ask me really intimate questions. We’ve experimented with different toys. He asks me questions about female ejaculation, etc.; every time we get together it’s a different topic. He’s not gone off and gotten married, but it’s expanded his horizons .

Sarah’s not the only sex worker in the world helping physically disabled people experience the wonders of intercourse. Over in Australia, where prostitution is decriminalized or outright legal in every state, a woman named Rachel Wotton has made a name for herself working with disabled clients. The 2011 documentary Scarlet Road tells her story.

Rachel doesn’t bill herself as a sexual surrogate, though. And while Shai was very adamant about stating that surrogates aren’t prostitutes, the line between those two jobs is not always so clear. While researching an article in 2015, I spoke with a young male prostitute in Australia. He reported having several clients with vaginismus sent to him by therapists who felt some “hands-in” experience would benefit their patients.

Sexual surrogates find themselves in much the same conundrum as the legitimate medical professionals studying and working with marijuana today. Their treatments have proven value, but the potential future legality of their recreational cousin risks delegitimizing the medical side of things. Sexual surrogacy is currently legal, but it’s still considered a rather fringe treatment. As Shemena told me:

"Shai has been doing this for two decades—I consider him very legitimate, but he doesn’t have the paper behind it that I do".

It’s hard to say if a change in “paper” is really what’s needed here. Perhaps what we need is a change in attitude. Shai Rotem and his colleagues are certainly pushing the boundaries of what sex work can be. But you can make a strong argument that they’re simply pursuing in an organized, clinical fashion the kind of goals sex workers have been achieving (often by accident) for centuries.

Written by Robert Evans in "A (Brief) History of Vice - How Bad Behavior Built Civilization), Plume (An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC), New York, USA, 2016, excerpts chapter 6. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.