Friday May 16 2008
All times are London time
Readers of the Eliot Spitzer coverage on this blog may be interested to know that Ava Xi’an, one of my most prolific commenters, was interviewed by the New York Times this weekend about her life as an escort. It is illuminating.
About this blog
I am the FT's chief business commentator and this blog is about business, finance, media, technology and related matters. I live in New York so there is a bias towards US topics but I range more widely. Comments and criticism, which hopefully are at least as interesting as anything I write, are welcome. There is more about me on my columnist page.
The Business of Sex
In re: When sex is your business, FT, March 17th, 2008, John Gapper’s Blog:
In 18th century England, the smart prostitutes were not the streetwalkers; the smart prostitutes operated at a much higher level and were called courtesans. Parallels can be drawn between these women and the women operating out of ventures such as the exclusive and pricey Emperors Club today. These women are not the desperate creatures supporting a drug or alcohol habit by walking the streets and ending up nowhere and quite possibly dead, victims of brutal, low-end pimps; the smartest have brains are looking at sex as a business and banking their cash for the future, for a comfortable old age or perhaps another kind of business venture.
Beauty goes only so far, and it was not the most important attribute a successful 18th century courtesan had to offer. What was on offer was more akin to the Japanese geisha: the art of conversation, of wit, of talents other than sexual, though sexual attractiveness was the entrée tantalizing the wealthy, jaded, bored men who vied among themselves for the latest, most talked-about courtesan. They competed for these women: it was a mark of distinction to have the woman other men lusted after.
A smart woman could then – as now — do very well in the sex trade. The most successful British courtesans of the 18th century lived full and rich lives – emphasis on “rich” – if they were clever enough to pay a visit to the lawyer’s office before being bedded down by their johns – called, in those days, “protectors”. They had annuities drawn up that guaranteed them annual incomes for life, no matter if the affair lasted a mere week or many years. It was a kind of perpetual alimony payment. Imagine this payment multiplied many times by a clever woman with a run of wealthy protectors!
One of the smartest (and therefore wealthiest) of the 18th century British courtesans, Mrs. Elizabeth Armistead (not her real name), had arrangements with so many wealthy aristocrats that she was able to support the man she finally married, the brilliant Whig orator Charles James Fox, into a comfortable old age.
The woman I wrote about in My Lady Scandalous (Simon & Schuster, 2005), Grace Dalrymple Elliott, seduced royalty – she claimed to have had a child with the Prince of Wales (later King George IV) – in London and Paris. She was the longtime mistress of the Marquess of Cholmondeley, one of the Prince’s best friends. She became one of the mistresses of the wealthiest men in France, the Duc d’Orleans, and, if the trifling matter of the French Revolution had not intervened, she would have achieved wealth beyond her wildest dreams when she was merely the motherless child of a profligate Scottish lawyer. As it was, her glory days were indeed glorious, as far as they went. She was a long-legged blond – her looks not unlike the late Diana, Princess of Wales – and men noticed. (You can see one of her portraits by Gainsborough at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the other is at the Frick Collection, both in Manhattan.)
A noble profession? Perhaps not, but bear in mind that some of these women did so well they not only seduced the nobility, they married into it if they cared to do so. In one of Preston Sturges’ films, Palm Beach Story, the character played by Claudette Colbert said, “You have no idea what a long-legged gal can do without doing anything…” Imagine that same “long-legged gal” doing something, that is, offering her beauty, wit, grace, conversation, and her knowledge of the sexual arts to wealthy, jaded businessmen and aristocrats, and you then begin to get the idea of how powerful a smart woman who understands that sex is a business can be.
Posted by: Jo Manning | March 17th, 2008 at 3:11 pm | Report this comment