by Kate Lister
[Accessed 7 August 2018].
10 Irving L. Finkel and Markham Judah Geller, Sumerian Gods and their Representations (Groningen: STYX Publications, 1997), p. 65.
11 Martha T. Roth, ‘Marriage, Divorce and the Prostitute in Ancient Mesopotamia’, in Christopher A. Faraone and Laura McClure, Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), Kindle edition, location 427.
12 Patrick Olivelle, King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 158–60.
13 Mary Beard and John Henderson, ‘With This Body I Thee Worship: Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity’, Gender and History, 9.3 (1997), 480–503, p. 486.
14 Andrew R. George, The Epic of Gilgamesh (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 6–8.
15 Herodotus, Delphi Complete Works of Herodotus, trans. by A. D. Godley (Hastings: Delphi Classics, 2013), Kindle edition, location 1718.
16 Strabo of Amaseia, Delphi Complete Works of Strabo, trans. by H. C. Hamilton (Hastings: Delphi Classics, 2016), Kindle edition, location 20295.
17 Lucian, The Syrian Goddess: Being a Translation of Lucian’s De Dea Syria, with a Life of Lucian (London: Dodo, 2010), pp. 40–2.
18 Pompeius Trogus, ‘Justin, Epitome of Pompeius Trogus (1886) pp. 90–171 Books 11–20’, Tertullian.Org, 2018
19 Leslie Kurke, ‘Pindar and the Prostitutes, or Reading Ancient “Pornography”’, Arion, 4, 1996, p. 52.
20 Stephanie Budin, ‘Sacred Prostitution in the First Person’, in Christopher A. Faraone and Laura McClure, Prostitutes and Courtesans In the Ancient World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), Kindle edition, location 1166.
21 ‘Bible Gateway Passage: 2 Kings 23:7 – New International Version’, Bible Gateway, 2018
22 E. B. Aryendra Sharma and E. V. Vira Raghavacharya, ‘Gems from Sanskrit Literature. (Sūktimālā)’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 81.4 (1961), 461
23 Samantha Chattora, ‘The Devadasi System – Genesis & Growth’, Iml.Jou.Ufl.Edu, 2002
24 K. Jamanadas, Devadasis (Delhi: Kalpaz Publications, 2007), p. 300.
Public Relations
A History of the Tart Card
The sex trade is as old as civilisation itself, and as long as people have bought and sold sexual services, the authorities have been trying to regulate it – usually through criminalisation and punitive measures. Over the centuries, sex workers have been punished with fines, imprisonment, excommunication, exile, mutilation and even the death penalty. Most punishments have involved public humiliation, intended to shame people into better behaviour. For example, ‘Cockatrices’ (1508) in fourteenth-century Augsburg had their noses cut off if they were found soliciting on holy days.1 Whereas, in 1713, on the Isle of Man, Kath Kinred, ‘a notorious strumpet’ who had ‘brought forth three illegitimate children’, was sentenced to be ‘dragged after a boat in the sea at Peele Town … at the height of market’, as an ‘example to others’.2 Despite such punishments, no measure has been successful in abolishing sex work. Criminalisation has only succeeded in forcing the trade underground, and creating dangerous working conditions. The dilemma faced by every ‘wagtail’ (1553) operating under criminalisation throughout history is how to stay safe and attract clients, but without also attracting the attention of the law. One of the most effective ways to do this is to advertise, and one of the most iconic and recognisable forms of sex-work advertisement is the humble ‘tart card’ – the brightly coloured calling cards that once covered telephone boxes the length and breadth of Britain.
The 1953 Post Office Act made it illegal to advertise in or ‘in any way disfigure’ telephone boxes in the UK.3 When this Act was repealed in 1984, business-savvy ‘flossies’ (1900) saw an opportunity to advertise. Although tart cards are still found in the telephone boxes of cities all around the world, they garnered something of a cult following in Britain, and are most immediately associated with London (they are known as ‘slag tags’ in the North).4 The 1990s were the heyday of the tart card, and every telephone box from Soho to King’s Cross was festooned with a patchwork of porn. The need to keep production costs down in terms of wording and materials, while still standing out, resulted in a truly unique art form.
London tart cards, c.1995.
The early cards were printed on cheap paper and feature simple block designs in black ink against brightly coloured (often neon) backgrounds. Kitsch silhouettes of nude women, stilettos, suspenders or sex toys directly communicate the type of service on offer. Technological advancements influenced the design of the later cards, which feature fancy type-sets and glossy photos of erotic fantasy figures puckering up, bending over or staring seductively down the camera. To the disappointment of many clients, these photos were rarely of the providers, who were far too canny to out themselves to the authorities in a phone box.
Tart cards in a British phone box in 2004. It was illegal to advertise there by 2004, but they were still very common.
From the ‘strict mistress seeking human toilet’, to ‘naughty nannies’ who will ‘rub it better’, and ‘schoolgirls’ seeking some ‘hanky spanky’, there was something for everyone. Although men were certainly selling sex, most tart cards are from female providers (cis and transgender) advertising to male clients. The cards offered sex workers a basic form of client screening. The only contact information provided was a phone number, which the client would call to discuss what they wanted, as well as arranging a time and a place to meet. The address would only be given out once the provider established that this was someone they wanted to see.
By 2001, tart cards had become such a nuisance in the UK that the Criminal Justice and Police Act made placing them in phone boxes punishable by six months in prison, or a fine of up to £5,000.5 You can still find the odd card here and there, but as the mobile phone has rendered the phone box redundant, and the internet has created a far safer way for sex workers to advertise to clients, the tart card has had its day.
We might think of advertising as a very modern phenomenon, but sex workers have always understood the value of marketing. The eighteenth-century literary blockbuster Harris’s List (1757–1795) was an annual almanac of London sex workers, and a masterclass in self-promotion. A forerunner to the modern tart card and TripAdvisor, the list detailed the appearance, skills and prices of up to two hundred women selling sex in the capital. The list was a collaboration between Sam Derrick, an Irish Grub Street hack and poet, and a London pimp, Jack Harris. Only nine known volumes of the list survive 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’s List (2005) that the list was dusted off and shown to the public anew.
Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies: or, Man of pleasure’s kalender, 1773.
As you may well imagine, Harris’s List was a hugely popular work, functioning as both a practical guide to the sex industry and softcore pornography for those not brave enough to actually arrange a meeting. The list itself straddled the boundaries of fact and fiction, and we will never be able to attest to its accuracy. Was Mrs Howard’s ‘grove’ truly ‘ample enough in size to take in any guest?’ Did Emma at Mother Grey’s really drink whiskey for breakfast and possess a ‘magic ring … as much sought after as the philosopher’s stone’? Were Miss Simms’s ‘low countries’ like ‘a well-made boot’?6
We will never know.
Harris’s List could make or break the fortune of London’s ‘horizontal workers’ (1870). 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.7
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, and 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. Harris described Murray as ‘a fine Brown Girl rising nineteen years next Season … Fit for High Keeping with a Jew Merchant’.8 The favourable review allowed Fanny to command higher prices and court a better class of clientele. But she 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 to give Harris a fifth of the money she earned and sign a contract that stipulated she must forfeit £20 to Harris if she was found to have lied about her health during the examination.9
A Harlot’s Progress is a series of six engravings by the English artist William Hogarth. The series shows the story Moll Hackabout, who arrives in London from the country and becomes a sex worker. Although Moll starts her career as a high-flying courtesan, the series ends with her dying in poverty and racked with syphilis. This image shows Moll being lured into the sex trade by the notorious bawd, Mother Needham, 1732.
Expensive this may have been, but it could be a worthwhile investment. Harris’s List helped to launch the careers of several of London’s top courtesans, such as Lucy Cooper and 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.10
Charlotte clawed her way up from desperate poverty to become one of 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.
Lucy Cooper’s life is detailed alongside Charlotte’s in Nocturnal Revels (1779), and a description of Lucy is also found in the 1761 edition of Harris’s List.11 Both women achieved fame and fortune, but Lucy did not have the business acumen Charlotte had and failed to save for the inevitable rainy day. Lucy 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, she 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.
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 her do lye
Whilst I have scarce a cull?12
Just over one hundred years after the last copy of Harris’s List was published, the city of New Orleans started advertising the services of its sex workers. On 29 January 1897 an ordinance to restrict all ‘working girls’ (1928) in the city of New Orleans to one area was passed into law. As the ordinance was prepared and sponsored by Alderman Sidney Story the area came to be known as ‘Storyville’. It was the first legal red-light district in the history of the United States and operated until 1917, when the USA entered the First World War and the federal government made it illegal to sell sex anywhere within a five-mile radius of any military base.13 Storyville had its own press, which produced guides to the area, known as the ‘Blue Books’; the earliest surviving copies date to 1900. ‘Blue’ referred to the content rather than the colour of the book. Like Harris’s List, the ‘Blue Books’ were widely sold throughout the city. They were available at the railway station, in bars, hotels, and in barber shops. The preface to each edition introduces the reader to the area and explains why the ‘Blue Books’ are necessary:
Because it is the only district of its kind in the States set aside for the fast women by law.
Because it puts the stranger on a proper and safe path as to where he may go and be free from ‘Hold-ups,’ and other games usually practised upon the stranger.
It regulates the women so that they may live in one district to themselves instead of being scattered over the city and filling our thoroughfares with street walkers.
It also gives the names of women entertainers employed in the Dance Halls and Cabarets in the District.14
Blue Book, Tenderloin 400, 1901.
The ‘Blue Books’ contained details of the most prominent working girls, but more commonly advertised the madams at whose establishments they worked, such as Miss Bertha Golden of Iberville Street:
Bertha has always been a head-liner among those who keep first-class Octoroons. She also has the distinction of being the only classical Singer and Salome dancer in the Southern States. She has had offers after offers to leave her present vocation and take to the stage, but her vast business has kept her among her friends. Any person out for fun among a lot of pretty Octoroon damsels. Here is the place to have it. For rag-time singing and clever dancing, and fun generally, Bertha stands in a class all alone.15
‘Octoroon’ refers to race and means to be one-eighth black. One of the most famous ‘Octoroon Parlours’ in Storyville was Mahogany Hall, which belonged to Lulu White (c.1868–c.1931). Lulu made an enormous amount of money and was known for wearing ropes of diamonds and rings on every finger. Mahogany Hall housed up to forty ‘call girls’ (1913), five parlours, and each bedroom had an adjoining bathroom. It boasted mirrored rooms, expensive artwork and plush interiors.16 E. J. Bellocq (1873–1949) photographed many of the ‘wet hens’ (1886) of New Orleans and it is believed many of his subjects were shot inside Mahogany Hall.17
When Storyville was closed down in 1917 the ‘Blue Book’ press went with it and the ‘totties’ (1900) relocated to the French Quarter where they had to work illegally.
About the same time as Bellocq was immortalising the women of Storyville, French photographer Jean Agélou (1878–1921) was making his name with his nude and erotic works. One of Agélou’s favourite models was a sex worker known only as Miss Fernande, who became the world’s first pin-up girl. Not much is known about Miss Fernande, not even her full name.* In a 1911 edition of the magazine L’Étude Académique, Agélou featured four pictures of Miss Fernande and gave her age as eighteen, meaning she was born in 1893.18 We know her name as she would sign her postcards ‘Miss Fernande’ and provide an address where clients could reach her.19 Miss Fernande shrewdly marketed herself through her erotic postcards, and came to be known as the first lady of French erotica. Original postcards of Miss Fernande are now highly collectable and change hands for hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds.
A woman in striped stockings in New Orleans’s Storyville red-light district, 1912.
Original copies of Harris’s List and the ‘Blue Books’ are also now worth enormous amounts of money. The modern tart card has also acquired value as a form of ‘accidental’ art and there have even been several tart card exhibitions in recent years.20 Although these are beautiful and fascinating historical artefacts, it is worth remembering the sex workers who relied on them to advertise their services.
> Miss Fernande photographed by Jean Agélou, c.1910.
Like many industries, sex work has been revolutionised by the internet and the online sector is now the largest of the UK sex industry. But this is no bad thing. ‘Beyond the Gaze’ was a three-year research project that ran from 2015 to 2018 and looked at the effect of the internet on the UK sex industry. The study found that 89 per cent of UK sex workers felt online platforms had allowed them to work more independently, 85 per cent reported using the internet to screen and monitor their clients, and 78 per cent said that advertising online had improved their quality of life.21 Sex workers being able to use the internet to advertise has improved safety and working conditions.
The internet has taken most sex work off the street and certainly out of the phone box. It has made sex work safer for those who choose to do it, and largely reduced the need for calling cards. But this is under threat. In 2018, the US Senate passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). FOSTA makes posting or hosting online prostitution adverts a federal crime and SESTA makes websites directly responsible for third-party content, the theory being that victims of sexual exploitation can sue websites for any role they played in facilitating their abuse. The result is that multiple internet platforms and website providers have now prohibited sex workers from advertising on them. Without access to online advertising, sex workers are being forced back onto the street and advertising with cheaply produced cards.22 Sex workers have the right to work safely and to be respected. The tart card, calling card and sex-worker almanacs are relics and must be left in the past. As beautiful as they are, the best place for them is in a museum.
