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A History of Sex as a Business 04 | Courtesans, Kings, and the Politics of Pleasure
Description
What does it mean to have enormous cultural influence, genuine artistic accomplishment, and significant social presence — while still being ultimately defined by your availability to men of means?
That is the central question of this episode, and it is one that I find genuinely troubling in the most productive sense — the kind of troubling that forces you to think more carefully rather than less.
We are moving into a period that tends to get considerably more romanticized than what came before, which is itself worth examining. The Renaissance courtesan has been the subject of novels, films, operas, and biographies that celebrate her intelligence and charm. The geisha has been covered in a Hollywood film that made about half a billion dollars. The Ottoman harem has generated an entire subgenre of fantasy that says more about European anxieties than it does about Ottoman reality. In all three cases, the romanticization does something specific and somewhat dishonest: it takes the most exceptional individuals in these systems and uses them to obscure the structural reality of everyone else.
We're going to look at all three — and we're going to look at both the exceptional individuals and the structural reality.