← New Books Network
New Books Network
Elwin Hofman et al. eds., "The Business of Pleasure: A History of Paid Sex in the Heart of Europe" (Leuven UP, 2022)
00:50:18
Loading summary
Transcript79 lines
- [00:01]
A
It's okay not to be perfect with finances. Experian is your big financial friend and here to help. Did you know you can get matched with credit cards on the app? Some cards are labeled no Ding decline, which means if you're not approved, they won't hurt your credit scores. Download the Experian app for free today. Applying for no Ding decline cards won't hurt your credit scores. If you aren't initially approved, initial approval will result in a hard inquiry which may impact your credit scores.
- [00:28]
B
Experian. Hello, everybody.
- [00:31]
A
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we. We at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the new New Books Network.
- [01:37]
C
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to New Books in History, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host, and I'm here today with Elwyn Hoffman, assistant professor of cultural history, to talk about his collection, the Business of Pleasure, A History of Paid Sex in the Heart of Europe, out in 2022 with Leuven University Press. And welcome to the program.
- [02:01]
B
Hi. Thanks for having me.
- [02:03]
C
Hi. How are you today?
- [02:05]
B
Great, thank you.
- [02:07]
C
Yeah, wonderful. So before we get to your volume, let's just start talking about sex work, shall we?
- [02:14]
B
Sure.
- [02:15]
C
Always a good topic.
- [02:17]
B
Yeah.
- [02:18]
C
And I just. I want to start with this phrase, the world's oldest profession. How do you feel about this phrase?
- [02:26]
B
Yeah, terrible. So I think that that's sort of the. The worst. The the world's oldest myth or something. People have been saying this for ages, but I mean, there's really nothing to it that there are some. Yeah, people have studied. Where does this come from? Right. And it, it's said to come from a mistranslation from some ancient clay tablet where, where it was about a woman working in a bar or something. And so then some priest translated this and thought of a woman working in a bar. This must be a prostitute. And so then, then that became the idea that prostitution was the world's oldest profession. But no, that's certainly not true. I mean, people who, who are profess. Are working in medicine, for instance, or cooks. They are much older than the first known instances of something that we would recognize as sex work or prostitution. So it's a, it's a terrible myth that we should definitely end now, do our best.
- [03:28]
C
It makes me insane. First of all, farming. Let's go with that. But you know, and it's this idea that like, it's, it's a reaffirmation of this idea that women have no agency and no place in the workforce. And of course, you know, the, and, and so of course it's been a bunch of men who've repeated this over and over again as part of like an ongoing attempt to keep women out of the public space sphere across time and space, or the idea that it's completely unchanging, that something that happened in ancient Babylon would look a lot like, you know, the, the playground nearest the train station or something. Like. It's so maddening.
- [04:09]
B
Exactly. And it's indeed the terrible thing about this myth is indeed that it gives the idea that, oh, there is actually no history to sex work, to, to the sex trade. It's something that has always been there and it's always the same. And one of the things we want to show with the book we wrote is. Well, that's not true. There is a history to it. Much has changed. And the people who work in the sex trade have also changed a lot. So. So yeah, it's a very interesting thing. Much more interesting than the idea that it's always been here.
- [04:44]
C
Yeah, right. And it's been this, this neat transaction. Da, da, da. Yeah, it's really frustrating. Well, I think now that you and I have said this out loud, it'll go away though, I think. Probably.
- [04:54]
B
Let's hope so.
- [04:55]
C
We've done it so well done us. We've. We've done our job. Okay, so when, like what? I don't even know. Like, how do we, how do we quantify or quality like commercial sex? How do we even define, like, what that looks like?
- [05:13]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's. It's very difficult to come to sort of strict definitions, particularly because it has changed so much over the past centuries. We took a sort of vague approach or a very undefined approach. We see that people have bartered sexual services for money or gifts, and that started to get a sort of recognizable form as something that we would recognize as prostitution. From the late medieval period onwards, as cities and states started to regulate this practice, and that is really when we can start to speak about something like the sex trade or prostitution. It is because states, governments, cities said, oh, this is a thing, and we need to start regulating it, we need to start taxing it. We need to start making rules for what they can do and what they can't do. And that's what makes it recognizable. And also for the people involved, they had to relate to that. So that is what makes a particular practice, particular exchange into sex work or prostitution or many different terms that have been used throughout the ages.
- [06:29]
C
Yeah, I mean, so right, when we're talking, like, when we're. When we want to define sex work, we have to almost. Sex work is its own problematic phrase, but then we've got to define it kind of externally.
- [06:42]
B
Right.
- [06:42]
C
What people are paying attention to as opposed to the act or the idea of the people who are participating.
- [06:50]
B
Yeah, exactly. It's very much sex work has been. Or prostitution or the sex trade has been defined through the stigma that has been attached to it by various instances. And I mean, that has been inescapable. And for us to trace it back through history, we have to take that into account.
- [07:12]
C
Yeah. So just when can we start to see the traces of this. When do we start to see this response that allows us to recognize the.
- [07:20]
B
Phenomenon in a mostly recognizable way from the late medieval period, so from the 13th, 14th century. Because then this is a time when cities started to form, when city administration started to form and they started sort of bureaucracy registering buildings and what was happening in these buildings and what people were gaining money with. Taxes, regulations, justice. And that's when we start finding the traces of people selling sex and the practices associated with that. And so that's also when we start the book, because there it becomes clear that this is. There is something happening. Governments are regulating it, and women who are selling sex or men who are selling sex, they have to deal with those regulations and these bureaucracies that are forming around them.
- [08:20]
C
So you said women who are selling sex and Then you amended, men who are selling sex. Tell me about this. Are men selling sex?
- [08:30]
B
Definitely. The. And then this is. There are more women selling sex or there are more visible, at least in the historical record. But from late Middle ages, there are also traces of men selling sex now. And the reason why they are less visible is because they were often treated differently or put in different categories than women who were selling sex. So up to the 19th century, the main thing that worried governments about men who were selling sex was usually their homosexuality or their perceived homosexuality. And they were classified in frameworks that problematized that homosexuality. So sodomy or pederasty, that was the problem. And so the fact that they asked money for that or gained money for that, that was of a secondary nature. And so they ended up in a different category than the women who were selling sex, who are primarily categorized within that problem. Prostitution or sex work or commercial sex. And so they are put in different categories. But men selling sex definitely exist, and they become more visible in the more recent period when we have more source material. Right. We have much more material about the 20th century than about the 16th century. And so from the material in the 20th century, definitely becomes clear that men were selling sex, are selling sex also heterosexual prostitution, Heterosexual male prostitution existed in the 20th century, existed probably before, even though it was less visible in the historical record, but they were definitely there, even though we have much more material historically about women selling sex.
- [10:11]
C
Yeah. And we're getting at two things that make studying sex and sex like the history of sexuality at all difficult, is where it shows up in the record and kind of what you even think about it. And then when we're talking about prostitution, does being supported by a wealthy woman count as prostitution?
- [10:31]
B
Yeah, exactly. There are all these gray areas. Right. And again, as I say, we have to rely a bit on what governments do classify the records they create, also the reactions of people at the time, how do they write about it, and what has been left from what they wrote about it. So that makes it all very difficult. But it's definitely the case that there are also sexual practices that can be seen as commercial to some extent that men were involved in.
- [11:04]
C
Sure, yeah. While we're talking about it, let's. What are. What are the sources that you're going to use that like, and. And your contributors are going to use, or any of us who want to study the history of commercial sex? What are we going to use?
- [11:18]
B
Yeah, well, it varies of a bit, of course, through the ages. So we start in the late Middle ages and Then we have, well, so the. The city records, right? So the, on the one hand, the bureaucratic records that say, oh, this woman is making so much money, has to pay so many taxes, and sometimes it becomes explicitly clear that sex work was involved in the gains of a particular person. Then we have the legal records. So when the government thought things were not proper, then they prosecuted people, or regulations were not respected, then they gave them fines, etc. So these records are very important records. The fines, legal records, injunctions, etc. And then some archaeological records. So we do have some remnants of late medieval or early modern brothels that archaeologists have investigated. So we know some stuff about what they looked like, some images in literary representations, for instance. And so this expands in the early modern era as regulations expanded too, right? They created ever more rules and laws about prostitution. So we have these laws and then all the policing that happened, well, that left a lot of records. And so much of what we learn, certainly up to the late 19th century, is a result of the policing activity of the state of the local government. But these are very detailed, right? Certainly from the 18th century onwards, they will start interviewing witnesses who will say all sorts of stuff. And sometimes they also wrote down the stuff that was not legally relevant. But we learn a lot about what these witnesses were saying. They will interrogate suspects, brothel keepers, women who are working in prostitution. And so we get some sense, even though it is of course shaped by the interrogator, you get some sense of what these people themselves were saying, and especially also in the 19th century. Then you have the hyper regulationism, as it is called. And so then we have police booklets, women had to carry if they wanted to engage in prostitution, social services who were involved. And that continues into the 20th century. And then we also have more, especially in the late 20th century, things like autobiographies, memoirs, interviews with women, mostly some men working in the sex trade. So these kind of sources. But overall, if we have to characterize the whole 700 years or so, it's mostly sources created by the antagonist, right, by the government, by trying to police women and men who work in prostitution.
- [14:15]
C
What does that do to the story? I mean, how do. What are we missing if we can only get kind of hostile legal record?
- [14:23]
B
Yeah, well, to a large extent, the voices of the people who were active in the sex trade. Right. And so we get a bit of it, as I said, but we have to read them very critically, the things that we have. We read them against the grain, as they call it. So we try to. So this is what the official wrote down. What does this tell us about what this woman might really have said? We can read a bit through the practices some women entered up in the archives several times. And so then through these different encounters with the law, we can sort of reconstruct their life courses. We can combine these records with other records about particular people, like where were they born, did they get married, and at what point? So we can reconstruct a bit about their lives, about what they did, a bit about what they said. But, yeah, this is a limited history. Right. We can say only so much about what these women themselves thought or wanted. And there is some stuff. Right. Sometimes we find a letter, but it's really. Yeah. The stuff about or from the women themselves engaged in prostitution and even more so the men involved in prostitution. Yeah, that's. That's. That is very minimal compared to what we get from the side of the government.
- [15:46]
C
Yeah. I am your host, Stassi Schroeder. Welcome to Tell Me Lies, the official podcast. What's the most unhinged thing of season three? Steven.
- [15:56]
B
Because he's so evil, I do think he is misunderstood.
- [15:59]
C
You see everyone face consequences. It's intoxicating. The writers just know how to trick you. There's always a twist in this show, so nothing you would expect. Tell Me Lies, the official podcast now streaming and stream the new season of Tell Me Lies on Hulu and Hulu on Disney. And I. I want to make it clear that obviously this doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing the work, like, just for you, in case you aren't picking up exactly what I'm putting down here, to use a very dated phrase, but also for our listeners, I want to make this clear. There's no such thing as a perfect source. There is no source that doesn't. That can't. That should be read just. And taken at face value, that does not exist. Also, if you don't use problematic sources, you don't write the history. So worse. Right. Like, yeah.
- [16:51]
B
And I mean, these women had to deal with these instances themselves. Right. That is also part of their history. Right. They had to deal with these police officers who were asking them questions with these regulations that were applied to them. So this is part of their history. They did not like it, but yeah, it is part of that history.
- [17:13]
C
So let's step back a little bit and talk about our job as historians approaching sex work. So, as we noted, though not the oldest profession, we can definitely see. We can definitely see signs of this. We understand that this is a phenomenon this is an historical situation that's been going on at least, you know, noticeably since the. The Middle Ages. And so, you know, obviously historians have been writing about it forever, Right?
- [17:45]
B
Yeah. I mean, since the 19th century at least, they have been writing histories of prostitution, as they called it then. Yeah, yeah.
- [17:51]
C
Like Institute, when I read something was called the History of Prostitution from the Ancient Times until yesterday in all the world. You know, in all the world or something like.
- [18:03]
B
Yeah.
- [18:03]
C
I mean, since the 19th century, people have been writing about it. What would we consider, like, modern historical treatment of. Of prostitution? It's been happening since when?
- [18:15]
B
I think the 1970s have been an important breakthrough and allied to the women's history movement. Right. So there was allied to the feminist movement as well. There was a move. We need to make women visible in history again. Right. Too much history has focused on men. We need to make women visible. And on the one hand, you had great women history, the women everyone could be proud of. But then some people said, now we need to also study women who were not necessarily morally superior to all of us. We need to study women who were. Yes, making do, were working in the sex trade, for instance. And so from the 1970s onwards, particularly in France and Great Britain, great strides were made into. Let's write this history of the sex trade. Let's look at women who work in prostitution in the early modern era. The 19th century were the most popular periods to study. Often in this moment, a quite institutional history very much started from looking at what were the rules that were made about these women, how often were they prosecuted. And then, of course, the movement, like Josephine Butler, abolitionism, against the regulations about prostitution. This was very central. But gradually, especially 1980s, 1990s, there was ever more attention for the women themselves and how they experienced prostitution, trying to read against the grain of the sources that were available. And so I think that's really the blossoming of the history of the sex trade from 1970s, 80s, 90s.
- [20:09]
C
Yeah. So the late 19th century works do a very different job than the stuff we're going to start to see with the rise of the doing women's history, social history, cultural history. Right. There's also from the 70s, a fairly thriving prostitutes rights movement.
- [20:28]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's also aligned with this. Right. The sex workers movement, as they called it themselves, from the late 1970s, which was this sort of move against the stigmatization of prostitution. And the term sex work was invented in 1979, I think, by Carol Lee at the feminist conference. She said, so we should. No, we should abandon this term prostitution, which sort of highlights the victimhood and all that is negative about women who gain money by selling sexual services and says, no, it's a form of work. Women in prostitution are sex workers. And that term became really a sort of rallying cry that has been adopted all over the world since by people who want to say, so the problem is not what we do. The problem is the stigma that is attached to it. And because of the stigma, we cannot claim our rights, we have to deal with violent clients and we cannot call on the police to help us because the police will not treat us well. So the problem is how society treats us. We need to be treated as workers and we need to get rights as workers. And this also indeed stimulated historical research on the matter as sex workers became more visible, claimed new rights and wanted to make clear that they were a valid part of society.
- [22:04]
C
Right on. All right, so let's talk about your volume. So you have two co editors who aren't with us today and I'm curious how you know them and how the three of you decided to do this book.
- [22:18]
B
Yeah, yeah, there were, the book came because there was a great opportunity at a few years ago. So at one point, I think around 2020, well, there were three of us working at the same university at Leuven University at the time, working about the history of the sex trade, but about different periods. So I was mostly working about the 18th century. Then my colleague Peter Van Heis was working about 19th century and Magaly Rodriguez Garcia was mostly working about 20th century History of sex work. And he thought, well, I mean, this is, this is great, right? We have these different periods. Wouldn't it be wonderful to use this opportunity to make a volume that can discuss the long term history of the sex trade? And so yeah, we thought this is a great idea. Let's, let's, let's find some more people, right? We need someone to do the earlier period, we need someone to do the most recent period. And we found those people. Right. And so we had this very nice club that could really cover the whole period from the late medieval period to the present day, basically. And we found also a former sex worker who was prepared to reflect on her own work since 1970s in the sex trade. So that was really. We could bring all these people together to try and look at. Yes. What has changed in the long term in the history of commercial sex in Belgium. So that was the region we're all working about. And yeah, that's how the book came about. And so yeah, after a Few years. Then we came finally to the book, first in Dutch and now also in English.
- [24:05]
C
Yeah, it's the serendipitous moment of all of you working together. And it's interesting, it's notable amongst edited volumes, to be able to be this temporally varied right from this far, but also to be able to focus on a geographically very central place. Makes for an interesting and unique volume.
- [24:29]
B
Absolutely, yeah. Belgium. Well, Belgium didn't exist, of course, before the 19th century, but the region that is Belgium today, I mean, it's very central in Europe, but it's a relatively small region. So it makes it sort of manageable, but makes it also manageable to look at the transnational exchanges that are happening all the time. Because there are interactions always with travelers from France, from the uk, from the Netherlands, from Germany and from farther afield. Women working in prostitution, traveling between these regions, clients coming from outside, or people being angry in the UK because, well, British women were working in prostitution in Brussels. And that sort of stuff makes it very interesting that it's not just limited to the very strict history of Belgium, but also says something about what is transnationally happening in Europe and outside Europe, because I didn't mention that yet, but we also included a chapter about the colonial history of the Belgian Congo and how, well, this Belgian government suddenly got territory way larger than its own European country and started to regulate prostitution there, or started to try to regulate what they thought was prostitution there. And so we take these colonial encounters and imperial mechanism also into account and try to see what's happening there. What does the transplantation of European ideas about what prostitution is and how it should be managed to Africa, central Africa, what. What did this entail and. And how did people respond to that? What were the consequences of that? And so that makes it, I think, a very interesting approach.
- [26:23]
C
Yeah, it really is. It really works. And it's fun to get to kind of born out into this area that is incredibly international, like, for considering, like, what a small piece of geography we're talking about. It's this crossroads for a very long time, for good or ill, you know.
- [26:43]
B
Absolutely. Travels from everywhere, but also, I mean, at the heart of what become the. Became the European project in the 20th century as well. Right. And also internationally active in bodies like the League of Nations when they tried to regulate prostitution in the 1920s. So it's really a very. Yeah, I think our subtitles is in the heart of Europe, and I think that we really show that it was at the heart of Europe for much of this history.
- [27:12]
C
Yeah. Gallant Little Belgium. All right, so the volume starts with a very lively study of medieval brothels and continues through the present. Tell me about your piece. Wanton's on the Scaffold.
- [27:26]
B
Yeah, so I wrote the chapter about the early modern period, so from around 1550 to around 1830. And so I think that it's a very interesting period within this history because we move from the late medieval period where, well, there was a sort of positive attitude towards commercial sex. Well, positive is perhaps too strong, but a sort of tolerant attitude also within the Church. Right. The Church said, yes, we should actually, we shouldn't do sex work, but it's understandable. And we, it's okay, right? And the government gets some taxes from it and there are fines which are actually sort of hidden taxes. So it's mostly accepted. And after the early modern period, we get the sort of hyper regulation of the 19th century when it is again a sort of idea that, okay, prostitution, we cannot end it, this is impossible, we need to regulate it instead. But in the early modern period there's this sort of much more negative view of what commercial sex was. And so from the 16th century onwards, sort of instigated by the Reformation, so Luther very negative about commercial sex. In some cities they used to have state run brothels. They all were to be abolished. Very negative attitude to sex in general. And then the Catholics thought, oh, well, we also need to be more strict with prostitution. And so, so by the 17th century everyone basically says, no, we need to end commercial sex, we need to forbid this. And they invented all these kinds of terrible punishments for women who were active in prostitution. They put them on the scaffold. They also had these intricate ideas about we need to have a rotating cage in which they have to be exposed for eight hours naked, or they have to sit upside down on a wooden horse and carry through the city. So all these sort of exotic punishments were thought up but rarely put into practice. They were also not very practical. So there's this discourse that prostitution is terrible, must be abolished at any cost. In practice, not that much happens. So we see in many cities, every 10 years or so, they close a brothel or they arrest a woman who was selling sex. But usually there's another problem involved, usually Jules also stealing something or so. So in practice we see that the climate of toleration mostly continues, but combined with a discourse that is terrible and combined with, well, a lot of hypocrisy, right, There was a lot of bribery involved. So that's what we see going on. And ever up to the 18th century as an increasingly negative discourse about prostitution and the sort of hypocritical toleration in practice. And I think that's sort of the main move that is going on throughout this early modern period.
- [30:47]
C
Yeah, yeah. It was funny to read some of these punishments to think about, like, you know, or this. This really extreme discourse, you know, when, of course, nothing has happened for a moment in Venice, the city wanted. They forced all the sex workers to go to church, which worked not at all. It was absolutely even, you know, first of all, most of the women didn't go. But then when they did, everyone was like, well, now we're in church, but now we're in church with prostitutes who are not paying attention.
- [31:17]
B
This is.
- [31:17]
C
This is not holy, you know, so that. That stopped. But there's a lot of, like, big talk and very little kind of action, which makes me wonder what the management of prostitution is about. Like, is it really meant to get rid of sex work?
- [31:37]
B
No, I mean, it. It can't have been. They. They would have done more if that was really the goal. Right. It is some sort of image control, I think, to a large extent. Right. This, this, this. Yeah, sort of battle for morality between the Catholics and the Protestants, and both want to seem the best at morality. And so they have this very strong discourse. I do think there's also. There were sometimes complaints, bottom up. Right. People were complaining, the upcoming bourgeoisie. And there are these women in our street. They sent their complaints. And then the mayor would usually, yes, we will react strongly with this new punishment. And then they would arrest one or a few women. But mostly they say, no, I mean, we'll just leave this. As long as they are not too visible. Right. As long as it remains relatively discreet, we won't intervene. And I mean, you were talking about the ineffective punishments. This was also very much the case in the 18th century when a woman selling sex would be arrested, she would be condemned, and they would say, oh, you are banished from this city. You know, we put you out of the gate. And then this was a recurring complaint. Yeah. They are led out of one gate and then through another gate. They just come right back in and continue doing what they were doing before. And this continues. Sometimes they would banish them forever. Longer periods, but, I mean, this could continue for over decades sometimes. So these were very ineffective punishments. Everyone knew it. Nothing. Nobody did anything about it except sometimes some stern words. Sure.
- [33:25]
C
And, you know, like, this time for real, stay out of the city. Yeah, Right. Well, and as you mentioned, I think it's also Important to note, it becomes if someone's doing something else, right. If they're bothering their neighbors, if they're stealing, if, if there's something going on that's problematic, then we might mention that also she helps pays, pay her rent.
- [33:47]
B
With sex work, right? Yeah, yeah. It's more of an aggravating circumstance than, than an offense in its own right.
- [33:55]
C
And what, what's happening then after 1830, which is really late to say, the early modern period, but that's a discussion we can have off this later. But like, what's happening after? What do we see? What kind of, what kind of trend can you tell us about in the 19th and 20th centuries?
- [34:11]
B
Yeah, so in the 18th century, something interesting is happening because we are at, I mean, discourse wise, the worst period. Right. It's even before you could still have comedies in which there were whores, figuring in the 18th century this was taboo. But instead we see that while discourse is very negative about commercial sex, we do see that as a new view about women doing or working in prostitution, namely that they are victims and they are very poor women is the idea. The only reason why they would do this is because they are destitute and they are usually forced by these terrible pimps or brothel keepers to engage in prostitution. So they are really victims. And perhaps we should not punish them, but we should try to help them to find a different place to learn a proper trade and get a better job instead of working in prostitution. And so there's this discourse going on. There's also another discourse going on, and that is that the real problem is venereal disease. So in the Middle Ages, you didn't have syphilis. This was great for the people in the Middle Ages, but from the 16th century onwards, syphilis was a real problem. And there was no cure for syphilis. So eventually everyone died, though it could last 10 to 20 years. And in the 18th century, this was increasingly seen as a major problem, especially in the military. So many soldiers would pay for commercial sex. And so the army leaders would find it a problem that many of them would catch venereal disease and then not be able to fight on the battlefield. And so the idea is we need to change something about prostitution. So let's stop with saying we need to abolish it and these strong punishments for women working in prostitution. Instead we will regulate it. And this will be better in two respects. First and foremost, we will make sure that women working in prostitution undergo regular medical visits. And regular was very regular of multiple times a week. They had to submit to medical visits. And also they will have better working conditions, they will not be left to the will of the pimp. No, there are these regulations that are also good for them. So that was the idea. It's mainly good for society in general, but the discourse was also that it would be good for them, that they could not be kept if they did not want it, etc. And so that's what happens in the 19th century. The regulationary system becomes dominant, especially Belgium becomes a sort of beacon for regulation. Very detailed regulations about what a woman working in prostitution had to do with what was allowed and most particularly the frequent medical visit. And they received a card and then they had to get a signature every time they went for the medical visit. And if they did not go regularly enough, then, well, they would get a fine or they would be arrested if they were found to be ill, they would be detained in a hospital for a certain period. And so that's, that's really the system in the 19th century also dust system. Belgium became famous for this hyper regulationism in which prostitution really becomes something that is a matter for the government to regulate.
- [37:58]
C
And the, and if I'm understanding the rhetoric here is this is about safety and the betterment of society. Safety for the public, safety for these women. Right, who are being saved from their own like circumstances.
- [38:14]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's mostly for. So I write then there is some discourse that it is good for the women, but mostly this is to protect the rest of society. And then these women can, can do and we need to save them and protect them a bit. And some people are stressing that more. But mostly this is about, yeah, we need to protect respectable society by containing this, having these strict rules and avoiding that people have attract some venereal disease.
- [38:47]
C
Sure. All right, and then what happens in the 20th century?
- [38:51]
B
Yeah, so. So the problem with hyper regulationism, especially by the late 19th century, was that women, the women involved, did not like this at all. So officially this was perfect, of course, but in practice people did not want to be registered as a prostitute. And so there was a huge black market. Most people engaging in prostitution did so illegally. And at the same time, especially first in Britain, this was the Josephine Butler movement, there was protest against this regulationism, especially since, uh, especially in Britain, any woman could be arrested if she was suspected to be a prostitute and had to subject medical inspection there. But this was, of course it's a very intimate inspection. This was experienced as very humiliating. But so the police could just. Basically any women, woman could be say, oh, you Think you're a prostitute now, you have to submit to a medical inspection of your genitals. And so there was huge protest against this or coalition was built. And this was a sort of strange coalition, right on the one hand, feminists, on the other one, conservatives, who were also against the regulation of prostitution, because they were against prostitution per se. And so they built first in England, but then they found an alliance with people on the continent as well. And so abolitionism, the goal to abolish the regulation of prostitution, really became the dominant movement within the or by the early 20th century, also in Belgium, this gained traction, though not yet with the government. So Belgium was one of the slowest pupils in the class here. And so regulationism was sustained until the Second World War, basically, and was also only after the Second World War, when international pressure was really becoming too big, that, well, regulationism was abolished. And so then there became this vague gray area. So prostitution itself was not made illegal, but everything supporting prostitution, well, so. So pimping or keeping a brothel or renting a room to a woman working in prostitution, that these were all crimes, but sex work itself was not. And so in this vague situation continued for much of the 20th century until the 1990s, basically, when you had these urban renewal movements which wanted to clean up the city. And so the idea was to clean up the city. We need to make prostitution less visible or sex work, as it was by then, cold. And so everything needed to look clean. So you had on the one hand, these big sex centers or so, where you could have. You could find sex workers in a very clean way. On the other hand, you had. The prostitution was banished to the outskirts of the cities and new forms of regulation were introduced. They could not be called regulation, but there were sort of new rules. And the idea was, if you keep by these rules, we will not bother you too much. And that's what eventually by 2022, well, the prostitution or sex work was entirely decriminalized. So hence it became legal to rent a room to a woman working in prostitution. And there was a new framework to allow women to work in prostitution, officially to engage in sex work as employees. And there was a whole new framework introduced which was very innovative in 2024, one of the only countries in which it is possible to work as an employee in sex work and get maternity leave and build up a pension, etc. And so that's where we are today. So it's still very new, this framework, and it's still to be seen a bit how successful it will be. But at least it's, it's definitely an innovative approach which was also made after consultation with sex workers movements. So it is to be hoped that this will help to improve the conditions which sex workers work.
- [43:31]
C
All right, yeah. And in a couple hundred years someone will have some comments, right?
- [43:37]
B
Definitely.
- [43:39]
C
All right, so that's the story and obviously you want to read the book. You're going to go into, read these in the essays in the book and get a much deeper story. Why are we. So what's the interest in prostitution? I mean, I know like what. I don't know if I'm asking even really like, why are historians interested in it, but why is this something that we, you know, that we need to regulate, that has been at the center of so much government attention and so much moralistic attention?
- [44:10]
B
Yeah, I think it's definitely the sex itself, which has been, I mean, this has been a thing in. Since early Christianity, so to say, sex has become a sort of taboo and at the same time something that is very desired because it is a taboo. And so within the Catholic Church or within Christianity, there have been regulations about sexuality for a long time. But sex work, commercial sex has been found so interesting or God of so much interest because it clearly has been there at least since the Middle Ages. Right. Even despite these discourses of the Church that only sex within marriage is appropriate. And I think this taboo nature is what makes it so interesting and also what makes this history interesting to show. How has this all changed and how have people dealt with that, despite the taboo, despite all the rules, what has been going on and it exists today? It existed in the late Middle Ages, but it was entirely different. And I think that's what make it, makes it a very interesting topic for many people.
- [45:24]
C
Yeah, it is certainly fascinating. All right, I have, we have. I've kept you so much longer than I meant to, but it's such a fascinating conversation. Thanks for talking to me. So I have just one more question for you. What's. What's next? What are you working on now?
- [45:40]
B
Well, I'm currently working mostly on a sort of different history, the history of criminal interrogation. So it's not entirely different. So it comes in part from my working with all these legal records in which women were interrogated about what they. Why they were engaging in commercial sex and what they did. I was intrigued by what sort of questions they were asked and how they dealt with these sort of questions. So now I am writing a sort of long term history of criminal interrogation from the late medieval period to today, looking at yeah. What were the ideas about how should you interrogate someone? How do you get them to confess the crime you are suspecting them of? And I think that. And this is why it's still somewhat related, what some of the clearest cases are cases that, again, involved sexuality, or some of the most interesting cases, because this was, again, sort of taboo. It was not easy to ask people questions about sex work or homosexuality or rape, for instance. And that's why interrogators had to think clearly, how do we get this person to tell us what we want to know, despite that he or she might not be willing to tell us what we want to know? And so that's. Now this whole history is what I'm currently trying to write about.
- [47:03]
C
That sounds fascinating. Really fun to work on.
- [47:08]
B
I mean, it is. It is. It's very interesting. It's also sometimes dark. Right. These interrogators were not nice people much of the time. I mean, this history also involves torture, etc. But it is fascinating to see how this has changed and how these ideas, psychological ideas about how can we motivate people, how do we get them to do something. Yeah, that's. It's definitely fascinating.
- [47:31]
C
Yeah. Criminal interrogation. I love criminal records, even though occasionally I've had to push back from the table and take a moment. They're so. It's just this, really. It's a point for people. Yeah. They've got a lot to say.
- [47:46]
B
Yeah. And the great thing about interrogation records is that they often tell us something about people that have not left many other records. Right. The people who did not write learned volumes or diaries, etc. But who were interrogated. And they say all sorts of strange things and that. That makes it fascinating.
- [48:06]
C
Sure. Things. And otherwise people who would leave no trace whatsoever. You'd have no idea that they lived or died. So very cool.
- [48:14]
B
All right.
- [48:14]
C
I'm really looking forward to checking that one out. We'll talk when it's done. All right. Ellen, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a delight.
- [48:22]
B
Yeah, thank you.