Why modern women want to embrace their inner harlot
I’m always intrigued that so many people are opposed to modern sex work yet riveted by history’s great courtesans. As if to prove my point, the new ITV drama Harlots thrust its heaving embonpoint onto our screens last night.
Described as a “family drama” in one preview (which I suppose it is, when you consider it’s about a family of prostitutes), it stars
Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay as crumpetstrumpet Charlotte Wells.
You can’t fault the TV bosses’ thinking here. Harlot is a delightfully antiquated word to most modern ears, and all the more so when compared to the mean, hand-grenade impact of “slut”. I have long churned out an anecdote about how my old headmistress, a former missionary, used to scold girls caught wearing make-up with the words, “Painted Jezebel!” How innocent that all seems now.
The fact remains that we’re fascinated by the sex business, so long as the women reside somewhere in the distant past. There are good reasons for this. We assume today’s women have some choice (although some would argue otherwise), whereas the 18th-century girl of humble origins could only forge ahead by lying back.
The glass ceiling was thigh-high then and the role model for any woman on the make was Nelson’s mistress Emma Hamilton – born to a blacksmith but remembered as one of the most feted, painted and mythologised women of any age. Women flocked to the capital to sell their bodies while they still had currency and historians estimate one in five females in Georgian London were working as prostitutes.
I can’t be the only woman who wonders if she would have ended up in a brothel had she been born 250 years previously. My parents ran a small country pub so, in Georgian terms, my likely fate was a farmhand spouse
and death in childbirth. I might rather have taken the gamble of risking syphilis and destitution to have one defiant flounce in silk through Soho. I think most women can imagine a time and circumstance in which they may have felt the path that best ensured their survival was exploiting their bodies. Just as most men can imagine circumstances under which they would have been called up for military service – or press-ganged. We are fascinated by the Duke of Wellington’s soldiers and 18th-century whores precisely because we suspect those paths might once have been ours.
The trend is all around us. The National Maritime Museum has just ended its successful exhibition on Lady Hamilton and her milieu, Seduction and Celebrity. Wray Delaney’s
brilliant new novel, An Almond for a Parrot, reimagines Moll Flanders for a 21st-century readership and allows that a rags-toriches sex romp provides joyful escapism for many.
Our romance with the underbelly of Georgian society is surely a reaction to a relatively safe world in which people routinely announce themselves as brand consultants, data managers and customer liaison officers – where the boldest thing we do of a day is dispute a parking fine, while our inner fantasist ponders what it might have been like to fire a musket in combat or deploy nearoccult levels of erotic expertise on the rich and powerful.
No wonder dramatists conclude that for every man who loves Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe, there’s a woman who will embrace her inner harlot.