Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: Venal Bodies – Prostitutes and Eighteenth-Century Culture
- Part I (Auto)Biographical and Classificatory Fictions: Madams, Courtesans, Whores
- Part II Visibility and Theatricality: Fiction, Image and Performance
- Part III The Magdalen House: Marriage, Motherhood, Social Reintegration
- Part IV Wider Perspectives: Constructing the Prostitute in Social History
- 12 Making a Living by ‘Indecency’: Life Stories of Prostitutes in Christiania, Norway
- 13 Male Prostitution and the Emergence of the Modern Sexual System: Eighteenth-Century London
- Notes
- Index
13 - Male Prostitution and the Emergence of the Modern Sexual System: Eighteenth-Century London
from Part IV - Wider Perspectives: Constructing the Prostitute in Social History
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- List of Figures and Tables
- Introduction: Venal Bodies – Prostitutes and Eighteenth-Century Culture
- Part I (Auto)Biographical and Classificatory Fictions: Madams, Courtesans, Whores
- Part II Visibility and Theatricality: Fiction, Image and Performance
- Part III The Magdalen House: Marriage, Motherhood, Social Reintegration
- Part IV Wider Perspectives: Constructing the Prostitute in Social History
- 12 Making a Living by ‘Indecency’: Life Stories of Prostitutes in Christiania, Norway
- 13 Male Prostitution and the Emergence of the Modern Sexual System: Eighteenth-Century London
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Most historians of prostitution have concentrated on the lives of female prostitutes. Alain Corbin's Women for Hire (1978; trans. 1990) and my own Sex and the Gender Revolution, vol. 1 (1998) are exceptional in attempting to study the male clients as well as the women themselves. The history of male prostitution before the twentieth century has similarly gone unstudied. There are two pioneering books on the Cleveland Street male brothel in the late nineteenth century and an essay by Jeffrey Weeks; more recently Rafael Carrasco published an exceptional study of boy prostitutes drawn from the records of the Inquisition; and in 2010 Barry Reay published a book on twentieth-century hustlers in New York City. The present article argues that the forms and changes in the organization of male prostitution provide one of the most revealing guides as to whether a particular society has moved from a traditional to a modern sexual system. This essay therefore contrasts male prostitution in eighteenth-century London with what had preceded it before 1700. The essay argues that in the traditional sexual system, all adult males were attracted both to women and to adolescent males. But in a modern sexual system adult males were divided into a heterosexual majority attracted only to women, and a homosexual minority attracted only to males, either adults or adolescents. That is, at any rate, the theory.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century CultureSex, Commerce and Morality, pp. 185 - 202Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014