by Robert Evans
What’s this about the ox being too thin to bother eating? Are you out of your mind?
And the !Kung responded with gales and gales of laughter. Lee was baffled, until one of his friends among the !Kung explained that they were simply responding to the pride he took in the size of his gift. “When a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief, or a big man.” The !Kung worry about any proud young man, “for someday his pride will make him kill somebody.”
Pride and arrogance are still big problems today, but there are enough of us now that they threaten the existence of the species only every few decades. The “shaming of the meat” is what anthropologists call a leveling mechanism. That’s just what it sounds like: a way for societies to gently pull down individuals who rise too high above their fellows. The !Kung use sarcasm as a way to keep their best and brightest humble. Sarcasm translates poorly into the written word, and today it’s become one of the many banes of online communication. Like everything else in this chapter, sarcasm really reached Peak Irritating with the advent of the World Wide Web.
Narcissism, sarcasm, and shit talking have always been irritating, but once upon a time our species needed them to ensure its survival. Overconfidence pushed many of our ancestors to take the sort of dangerous chances that helped Homo sapiens spread across the globe. Filthy insults and aggressive boasts let generations of young men avoid physical altercations and get laid. Sarcasm reined in millennia’s worth of dangerous egos at a time when there weren’t enough of us to risk that kind of bullshit. The modern era has allowed millions of us to take these behaviors to their most irritating extent. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t acknowledge the impact they’ve had on our development.
A douchebag lives in all of us, coded into our very genes. And we all owe that fuck-wind a great debt.
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.”
She wasn’t allowed inside. Her talons would’ve ruined the floor.
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 stre
etwalkers 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:
