How long have there been prostitutes

In Japan, prostitution has technically been illegal since , but that hasn't stopped it from becoming an industry worth billions offering practically any kind of service you can imagine.

They had to know the right aphrodisiacs charred newts and lotus root , 48 sexual positions, how to fake an orgasm realistically, and the most enticing shapes for pubic hair. Marriage in 16th century Japan was not about love, it was something you did at the right age and with the appropriate person.

A wife's duty was to bear children and keep financial order, including drawing up a budget for their husband's sexual appetites. However, prostitution was far from a respectable profession. Originally, geisha were not allowed to sell their physical services, but time wore away at time-honoured tradition while the elegance and training required to entertain men remained. Sex wasn't the main attraction to licensed areas of cities as men came for the company and wit of the women who worked there.

The same can't be said in modern Europe. Legalisation and commercialisation of prostitution in Germany created a huge amount of variety for those looking to pay for sexual experiences. One of the most liberal types of brothels includes FKKs, where an "all you can eat" tariff applies. Brothels, usually whitewashed, were called "stews" because of their origins as steambath houses.

But prostitutes were active in the theatres. Celebrated theatrical impresarios and actors, such as Philip Henslowe and his son-in-law, Edward Alleyn, owned a profitable brothel. Henry VIII, in , tried to close the bawdy houses but without much success; some were moated and had high walls to repel attackers.

And again the Tudor whorehouse catered for both poor and rich - one account records that a young man might have to part with 40 shillings or more in a brothel for "a bottle or two of wine, the embracement of a painted strumpet and the French welcome [syphilis]". But in Paris, the French were, by the end of the 17th century, demanding a medical examination of prostitutes who also had to wear a distinct dress with a badge, and live in a licensed brothel. Many approved.

Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch doctor in London in wrote a defence of public stews, "for the encouraging of public whoring will not only prevent most of the mischievous effects of the vice," he said, "but even lessen the quantity of whoring in general and reduce it to the narrowest bounds which it can possibly be contained in".

But others disapproved. In Vienna in , the Empress Maria Theresa outlawed prostitution and imposed fines, imprisonment, whipping and torture for violations. She even banned female servants from taverns and forbade all women from wearing short dresses. Throughout the ages, there have been plenty of folk determined to outlaw the trade. In France in , Louis IX ordered all courtesans to be driven out of the country and deprived of their money, goods and - a bit dodgy this one - even their clothes.

When he set out for the Crusades, he destroyed all brothels, with the result that prostitutes mixed more freely than ever with the general population. In Russia, not long after Marie Therese's purge, the Czarina Elizaveta Petrovna ordered a "find and catch" of all prostitutes both Russian and foreign. Petersburg to be exiled to Siberia. In , the Mayor of Portsmouth tried the same thing, turning all the city's prostitutes on to the streets but, at the end of three days, the condition of the place was so bad that he allowed them to return to their former premises.

Practically the same episodes were repeated in Pittsburgh and New York in Originally legal in the United States, prostitution was outlawed in almost all states between and largely due to the influence of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union which was influential in the banning of drug use and was a major force in the prohibition of alcohol. But whoring survived just as boozing did, with brothels opening and closing with regularity, and women switching between prostitution and working as chorus girls in the brothels that lined West 39th and 40th streets in New York alone.

The intervening years have only told the same story, with many countries oscillating between phases in which the sex industry was tolerated or cracked down upon. In , Rotterdam, with regulation, had more prostitution and venereal disease than Amsterdam, a city without regulation. In , Denmark abandoned regulation.

Amsterdam adopted it in The brothels of Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy were banned in the s. In , Paris abandoned its brothels after two centuries. Neither the permissive nor the prohibitive approach is successful because the problems they try to address - protecting public morals, controlling sexually transmitted disease, improving health and working conditions for the prostitutes, reducing the exploitation of women and the sex-slave trade are not amenable to common solutions.

What assists the one, detracts from another. Yet still we try, changing policy here, shifting it there. Things came to a head when two officials from the city council in charge of monitoring the brothel paid a visit. They told the women that rumours of what had happened had reached senior members of the council and that an investigation was imminent. In a furious confrontation, Lienhart burst in on the women while they were eating and delivered a savage beating to Els, while she screamed defiantly back at him that he would have to hack off her arms and legs to keep her quiet.

Later, as it finally became clear to Barbara and Lienhart that their cover-up had failed, they approached Els secretly to offer her a bargain. In exchange for her silence, they would agree to drop the debt she owed them and she would slip away quietly the next day while the women were eating dinner. Els agreed and, when the time came to enact the plan, Barbara sent her into the kitchen to fetch a jug of milk.

As Els left the brothel and headed for the city gate, Barbara made a show of asking where she had gone and ordered the women to search the brothel for her. But, as one of the prostitutes, Margrette von Biberach, later testified, Els had already told them all about the secret plan. Its most distinguishing feature is the wholly intact medieval ring wall that encircles the town, a testament to its past significance in the region. In , the town would host Adolf Hitler, who gave a speech there several months after losing the presidential election to Paul von Hindenburg.

Like many other towns across western Europe, the provision of a public brothel was one part of this equation.

In an argument still used today, licensing prostitution and concentrating it where it could be seen and regulated was regarded as a lesser evil than allowing it to flourish unchecked. In some cities, most notably Florence, prostitution was also assumed to dissuade men from sodomy. Although there were some regional variations, most German towns that had licensed brothels followed a similar model.

The brothel was purchased by the town and leased back to a brothel-keeper in many places a man, though sometimes a woman , who was responsible for its day-to-day running. The keeper paid a tax to the authorities in return for the right to charge board and lodging to prostitutes living in the brothel and to take one third of the fee they charged to clients.

Further income might be generated by selling food and drink. After paying for room and board, prostitutes were able to keep what remained of their earnings, as well as any tips a customer might give them. Broad acceptance of the social utility of prostitution ensured that it was a highly visible part of late medieval urban life. The entourage of the Emperor Sigismund supposedly enjoyed the hospitality of brothels opened up by towns on his way to the Council of Constance in , while an anecdote attached to Frederick III saw him greeted at the gates of Nuremberg in by prostitutes who captured him with a golden chain, only freeing him after the payment of a one florin ransom.

Despite this recognition of their role in society, in comparison with respectable wives and daughters, prostitutes were considered dishonourable and sinful. Increasingly throughout the s, any woman suspected of illicit sex risked being equated to the whore of the brothel and might even find herself forcibly placed there by the authorities.

This was not necessarily a one-way journey, though. Like many of those in the Middle Ages who were not part of the social elite, the lives of prostitutes are known to us almost exclusively from accounts given by literate, mostly male observers. As the historian Ruth Mazo Karras has noted, although the concept of whoredom played a major role in policing the sexual behaviour of women at all levels of society, the voices of prostitutes themselves are virtually unknown.

And what parallels might be drawn between their experiences and those of women working in the sex trade today?