Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (46 page)

THE TRIUMPHANT WHORE

Sade’s Juliette was a prostitute—a good girl who went very bad, eventually having sex with heads of state and the pope himself. While anything coming from Sade’s pen must be taken on its own terms (one of Juliette’s lovers fantasized about starting a famine that would wipe out half of France), the author’s love of prostitutes well fit the eighteenth-century mold. The whore ruled the age. She was worshipped, pampered, adored, and hated. More than ever before or since, prostitutes were objects of popular fascination, limitless tableaux on which men painted their most intense aspirations. Fanny Hill was a male fantasy of a personal sex servant, but her flesh-and-blood doppelganger was available just down the block.

The whore was everywhere, especially after Reformation-era laws were relaxed in the late 1600s. The mass brothel closings that were the keystone of Protestant and later Catholic governance failed; prostitution simply went underground. By the early 1700s, the demand for quality whorehouses and the opportunity for large graft payoffs led to a mass resurgence of commercial sex establishments. In Paris, prostitution was prohibited, enabling police authorities to command larger and more selective bribes. In fact, in some instances regulation technically became stricter. Laws were passed prohibiting unmarried people from rooming together in a hotel, which had the effect of protecting brothels against competition from streetwalkers.

Parisian bordellos reached mythical proportions. In one, patrons were greeted in a central seraglio area where fifty girls awaited, each bearing ribbons denoting their talents. Another brothel could be accessed by a secret tunnel system and featured peep rooms and a dungeon for flogging. Others specialized in black prostitutes, the special needs of clergymen, and the sale of “virgins.” To keep the supply of girls up, parents sold their daughters to brothel-keepers, signing formal written contracts by which they abandoned all claims to the girls or their offspring. Neither the brothels nor the fifteen hundred or so streetwalkers around the Palais-Royal could have operated without the sanction of the police.

Similar conditions prevailed in Boston, where Puritans complained bitterly about the prevalence of prostitutes, and also in London, where the efforts of the Society for the Reformation of Manners and other such groups were ultimately a bust. Prostitutes advertised in newspapers and magazines, using ads that might be blunt (one declared that the woman it touted had “noble elasticity in her loins”) or rather clever in their use of double entendres, such as the following:

Miss Rattletrap, from Pall Mall, London, is calculated for first rates; the rider must be very careful of her, as she starts at full speed. Price 15s.

Always more numerous than the glamorous girls of the finer brothels were the poor wretches, past their prime, ill with venereal and other diseases and begging passersby for business. The high-end courtesan, moreover, could turn into a tragic figure at any moment. Over the years, the image of the prostitute was imbued with the somber hues of a fallen woman, often portrayed as a middle-class girl driven down by bad luck into the hands of predatory men. Starting in the 1740s, several hospitals for “penitent prostitutes” were founded in London, built on the assumption that whores led immoral lives not because they were inherently evil or lusty, but because they had been debauched and abandoned. They needed only to be “reclaimed” to lead productive lives.

The life offered by the hospitals made prostitution look easy by comparison. Morals were drilled into their inmates through strict work regimens, quick punishment for insubordination, and endless prayer. The first month of confinement in an English institution of this sort was spent in complete isolation. Life in the reforming hospital of Montpellier, France, was even more spartan. Its inmates had their heads shaven and their possessions confiscated upon entry. For the first two weeks they were kept in dungeons, during which their only human contact was with the nuns who brought them food and chastised them with whips. Throughout their stay, inmates were mentally isolated from each other through a strict rule of silence; even whispering was punished.

Whether any of these measures had a lasting social impact is doubtful. In Montpellier, it was agreed by all that the reform movement had failed to stem prostitution or sexual license generally. Even the city’s mayor conceded that it was “the most dissolute city in the world.” Many of the tens of thousands of women who entered the London hospitals made shows of penitence just to secure care for their children. Throughout this period, prostitution itself was still not illegal in England, even if brothel-keeping and disorderly behavior were. Where the line lay between these two rules is anyone’s guess.

The mixed messages about both prostitutes and prostitution continued as they had for many centuries. No number of laws, speeches, or sermons from the pulpit could change the reality that the sale of women’s bodies remained a viable choice for them to earn money, and for men as a common way to spend it. For law enforcement, the skin trade remained a source of income and, sometimes, pleasure. (The Parisian inspector M. Berryer found it necessary to patronize brothels himself in order to ensure that he knew what was going on in them.)
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BY THE CLOSE of the eighteenth century, people at all levels of society were demanding liberties previously allowed only to the ruling classes. The world was becoming more crowded, less religious, and, by several orders of magnitude, more sexually permissive. In the coming decades social classes would mix unprecedentedly, both in the streets and in bed. However, new legal issues would arise, by which the upper classes would be forced, for the first time, to pay a steep price for sexually abusing their inferiors. A wealthy man’s age-old prerogatives of taking liberties with his servant girls or male laborers would come under scrutiny as never before.

Everywhere there were trials, gleefully covered by the penny press, in which one snob or another would be called to task for sexual indiscretions with the lower orders. The notion was starting to take hold, ever so slowly, that a young girl could refuse sex to an older man—even her employer—and that a handsome young man was not easy prey for any gentleman. Of course, the process was untidy, and old habits would die hard, but by the beginning of the twentieth century the popular idea of liberty began to encompass freedom from sexual predation.

8

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: HUMAN NATURE ON TRIAL

I
N SEPTEMBER 2009, the acclaimed film director Roman Polanski was arrested at Zurich airport. The seventy-six-year-old, Polish-born French citizen was on his way to collect a lifetime achievement award at a film festival, but U.S. police authorities—who had been chasing Polanski for decades, and who urged Swiss police to detain him—viewed his accomplishments differently. Polanski had fled the United States in 1978, just hours before a Los Angeles judge would likely have sentenced him to prison for having “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a thirteen-year-old girl.

Polanski’s flight from American justice caused a big stir at the time, but the story calmed down after he settled in Paris and continued to make films. His arrest in Switzerland, however, rekindled the old controversy with a vengeance—now, just a few years after he had won the Academy Award for Best Director for
The Pianist
(at a ceremony he did not attend, as doing so would have meant certain arrest), Polanski was again reviled as a sexual monster so dangerous that no jail sentence was long enough to contain him. Any arguments to the contrary were attacked with equal fury. When the actress Whoopi Goldberg said on U.S. television that Polanski was not as bad as a man who commits “rape rape”—meaning that Polanski had not physically forced himself on the girl—she suffered a furious public-relations backlash. The message was clear: To have sex with a girl that young was perverted under any circumstances, and to think otherwise was wrong in itself.

Omitted from the brouhaha was one salient fact: Polanski’s crime was an accident of history. It was only recently that encounters between men and girls that age became illegal at all. Had he been caught less than a century earlier, the law would have looked the other way. California’s legal age of consent during the nineteenth century was ten, as in most other states in the Union (in Delaware, it was seven). The state raised it to fourteen in 1889 after a tussle between Christian pressure groups and male legislators, whose main concern was avoiding blackmailing schemes by cagey young girls and their families.

Given that Polanski’s victim was not a virgin when they had sex, there is every reason to believe that, in the not-too-distant past, he would not have been given jail time, much less become an international fugitive. Even after the age of consent was raised, most white California men were sentenced to probation for sex with minors, even when they were caught dead to rights. (Black men, on the other hand, were usually incarcerated.) Girls with any kind of sexual history were routinely branded as temptresses and aggressors. In one California case, the judge observed that “it would be a pretty strong man” who could “escape” the temptation of the teenage girl in his apartment with whom he had had sex, even though she had refused his advances. In another prosecution, a man’s violent rape of a fourteen-year-old female cannery worker got him only probation. The judge observed: “Her willingness to accompany [the defendant] into the office alone placed him under special temptation.”
¹

Polanski’s case never actually went to trial, but had he been pushed to the wall he would have had much to say in support of the “special temptation” defense. Court and grand jury records show that the girl had met him with her mother’s consent; had let him photograph her nude, in a hot tub, in suggestive poses; and had drunk the champagne he had given her (although she did not know he had spiked it with drugs). The girl told prosecutors that while she did ask Polanski to stop, she did not fight back, scream, or try to flee.
²
The filmmaker claimed that he had had good reason to believe that the girl knew what she was doing sexually.

As infuriating as arguments in Polanski’s defense may strike us now, they still had some force in 1978. Polanski was guilty, but he was about to receive the leniency given to so many men before him. His lawyers and prosecutors had agreed to a plea-bargain deal by which he would be spared prison. Judges normally honored these arrangements and, for a time, there was no reason to believe that Polanski’s judge would stand in the way of the deal—but that was not to be. The judge reportedly decided to disregard the deal after he was shown recent pictures of Polanski partying in Munich with his arms around young girls. It was only after he signaled that he would impose jail time on Polanski or deport him that the director fled to France, where his citizenship protected him from extradition.

No one disputes that the legal climate has grown more intolerant since Polanski’s 1978 flight to France, but when did sex with girls become sinister at all? Is sex with a fourteen-year-old girl in Germany, which is still legal, any worse than sex with a girl of the same age in California? As with everything involving sex and power, the answer is unclear.

THE QUESTION OF what age should be considered “underage” for sex was one of the most explosive issues in nineteenth-century sex law. As moral reformers in Europe and the United States sought to raise the age of consent, they pressed a number of hot social buttons, including the double standards applied to people of different races and classes, the sexual prerogatives of men, and the public health threats of the prostitution trade. Had Polanski been caught having sex with a thirteen-year-old in London in 1878, he would have been well in the clear. The traditional English age of consent, twelve, had recently been changed to thirteen, and only after a bruising fight in Parliament during which proposals to raise the age further were repeatedly struck down.

For English legislators, the idea of jailing men who took young girls for pleasure made no sense. For centuries, young girls—especially maids and preadolescent prostitutes from the lower classes—had been theirs for the taking. To criminalize this kind of sexual encounter, as a growing coalition of Christian and proto-feminist activists advocated, would be to rob Parliament’s sons of their birthrights and open future generations to blackmail. As the House of Lords struggled in 1884 to decide whether or not to raise the age of consent to fourteen, one Lord appealed to his colleagues’ loyalty to their own kind: “Very few of their Lordships . . . had not, when young men, been guilty of immorality.” He went on to express the hope that they “would pause before passing a clause within the range of which their sons might come . . . the more they attempted to prevent the indulgence of natural passion, the more they would face unnatural crime.” Pause the Lords did; the bill died.

Nothing could have infuriated the morality lobby more. Early feminists such as the evangelical Josephine Butler argued that retaining such a low age of consent condemned “a large section of female society” to lives of “administering to the irregularities of the excusable men.” For Puritans such as the publisher Alfred Dyer, the purpose of law was to force everyone to do right, regardless of their rank or gender. Without laws requiring moral behavior, a just society was impossible. The failure of bill after bill to raise the age of consent and protect girls from exploitation revealed the entire country to be immoral at its core. Despite thousands of books, pamphlets, and petitions, and hundreds of public meetings calling for changes to the law, the social-purity lobby was unable to get Parliament to budge. For MPs, raising the age of consent to thirteen was bad enough. No amount of tiresome rabble-rousing could get them to legislate against their own sexual prerogatives, and by 1885 the English age of consent appeared to be stuck at that age (which was not significantly different than anywhere else in Europe). Unless something drastic happened, the chances of securing legislation to protect older girls from men’s “irregularities” were dim at best.