The Guide to Getting It On (152 page)

From the Belle of the Ball to Pussy Non Grata—Dating Does the Whore In

While talking about prostitution’s decline in America is more academic than erotic, it helps us understand about the birth of dating and sex as we know it today. By the time the 1800s are over, prostitution is in decline and sex in America is starting to assume its current shape.

You would think that in the history of sexual relations in America, dating would have come before prostitution. But in reality, it happened the other way around. Prostitution was a mighty force in America from the 1830s until the end of the century, when dating started to take its place. While dating by no means boarded up the brothel door, it was one of the things that helped drive a stake through the heart of the harlot as a central figure of sex in America.

By the 1900s, the “new” American woman was becoming the standard bearer of sexual release, and she didn’t work in a brothel or bear the stigma of women who did. Women now had the option of more jobs and better wages, including white collar jobs in sales and in the service sector. They were also gaining more sexual freedom.

The winds of favor that had made prostitution the centerpiece of popular culture started changing direction. Young men and women started expecting sexual enjoyment to be the reward of relationships rather than the result of pulling a dollar from a wallet. Dating and “stepping out” became the new darlings of our market economy, helping to ease prostitution into the shadows.

For instance, in the 1890s, the average age of a New York City prostitute was as young as fifteen years. By 1915, the average whore was twenty-five with some being as old as thirty or forty. Prostitution was no longer an entry-level position for young girls in America.

There were many reasons for prostitution’s decline, few having to do with reformers, anti-vice crusaders, or sexual repression. As New Orleans Mayor Martin Behrman lamented shortly before World War I when the Secretary of War forced him to shut down Storyville, “You can make it illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular.”

One of the reasons for prostitution’s decline was the failure of prostitutes to put the satisfaction of the customer ahead of their own greed. Prostitutes also refused to operate within socially acceptable boundaries. Prostitution in America had become like a neighbor who never turned his stereo down.

Downtowns started to grow and become centers for shopping and commerce. Good taste dictated that they needed to be protected from the antics of whores who couldn’t keep from lifting their skirts in the faces of men on the street. Whores in the nineteenth century knew no subtlety, not that those in the current day are models of modesty and good taste. Changes in real estate, jobs and technology were making the in-your-face type of prostitution of the 1800s a liability instead of an economic plus.

During the 1800s, brothels were the most lucrative tenants for real-estate owners. However, in the 1900s, this was starting to drastically change. Land was badly needed for skyscrapers and high-rise apartments. Factories and office buildings needed space to expand, with nowhere to go but the land occupied by brothels.

Many city governments in the 1800s would have gone bankrupt without the fees they collected from their whores. However, with the start of the twentieth century, the revenue base of America’s cities grew stronger, and politicians had their fingers in more pies than just the prostitute’s. Close ties to prostitution were no longer worth the political repercussions, and politicians were finding cleaner ways to get dirty money. Due to citizen demands for reform, corruption in police forces was decreasing. Policeman could no longer collect large stashes of cash from prostitutes, and so the incentive to protect them was evaporating. All of these factors helped make the climate for whoring less favorable.

By the 1900s, telephones were widely available. A man could phone a prostitute and arrange a meeting for sex rather than needing public spaces for the transaction to occur. The telephone also helped make gambling and numbers-running more profitable than prostitution.

There had always been a close association between alcohol and prostitution. What made the throat wet also helped to quiet the protests from the mind. Also, it was easier for a prostitute to relieve a drunken trick of his money than a sober one. But with the start of Prohibition, the availability of alcohol in social settings became limited to speakeasies. Whores followed the shot glass, and speakeasies became America’s new brothel. While speakeasy sex could be notoriously brazen, it was also hidden, allowing the rest of society to turn a blind eye.

A major source of demand for prostitution in the 1800s had been the huge waves of immigrants, led by younger males who left the old world to find their fortunes in America. However, by 1933, the number of immigrants to America had fallen to 23,000, down from nearly a million a year during parts of the 1800s. Male-to-female ratios no longer favored the prostitute.

While settling the West had often been the job of male pioneers and gold prospectors, America’s railroads were making travel safer and more sensible for women. During the covered-wagon days of the 1800s, small towns often had ratios of one woman to every 10 to 100 men. These numbers started to even out by the 1900s. The long lines in front of the whore’s tent were becoming a thing of the past.

With the invention of photography and leaps in printing technology, pornography was becoming a lucrative business. Resources that had gone into prostitution during the 1800s started shifting into pornography during the 1900s—to the point where adult films, magazines and X-rated Websites would one day rival the market domination that prostitution once held. The porn starlet of today may have well been the parlor girl of the 1800s.

Brothels and concert saloons were the command centers of prostitution after the Civil War. But by the 1900s, movie theaters were becoming the hubs of entertainment. The new movie theaters offered social legitimacy and dark balconies—providing a new set of sexual possibilities. Rather than being haunts for beer, burlesque and whores, the movie theaters were a place to take a date, find entertainment, eat popcorn, enjoy fine confections, make out and cop a feel. They provided places where a respectable girl could go with the approval of her parents and be sexual but not scandalized.

While the whereabouts of the sporting man’s penis in the 1800s was controlled by the number of bills in his wallet, after the 1900s it became fashionable for him to surrender control of his sperm wagon to his sweetheart. The single man’s sexual expectations were changing. He and his partner were exploring sexually while keeping the head of his penis on his side of her hymen. Since intercourse was increasingly tied to serious relationships, men and women started marrying at a younger age than they had in the 1800s.

Around the time of the Civil War, sex between whites and blacks was a gray area. While people certainly noticed, their protests were often limited to searing stares and mumbled expletives. In many of the commercial sex venues throughout the country, interracial sex was not uncommon. However, by 1900, segregation was becoming the law of the land. The new segregation laws were impacting commercial sex districts, like the nation’s number-one address for vice, Storyville in New Orleans. (Storyville had originally been set up as two separate, segregated vice districts, one for white whores and one for black whores, but this was ignored until its final years.)

A fascinating motivator for the move to close the brothels was not so much the feminist or religious outcry, but the growing sentiment that sperm was a bad thing to waste. For instance, camp whores had been seen as an important way of providing Civil War soldiers with a much-needed sexual release. But by World War I, Americans felt that prostitutes posed a great danger to our soldiers—both with venereal disease and physical depletion.

With America’s approaching involvement in World War I, we believed that the best way to protect our boys was to keep their khakis on. Harsh new laws were enacted to protect our troops from the dangers they might encounter when their private parts were in a whore’s hands—as if mustard gas and the trenches of Western Front could not compare. Cities that didn’t aggressively hide their red-light districts faced losing their war-related expenditures. In the case of Storyville, the Secretary of War told the City of New Orleans that if it didn’t shut down its famous vice district, they would send in soldiers to do it. Where prostitution used to be a financial lifeline, it now threatened the wartime gravy train.

Ransacked Hymens & Myths about the American Woman

During the first half of the 1800s, people believed that sexual enjoyment was just as important for women as for men. But as the latter part of the century ticked away, some very bizarre theories emerged about women’s sexuality and about women in general.

For instance, in 1881, the
New York Times
claimed that the reason for the falling birth rate among the better classes was because women were addicted to the “purse-destroying vice” of shopping. According to the
Times,
promiscuous and unrestrained shopping was destroying the fabric of American life. Even the head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union cried out against “the love of finery,” which she said was one of woman’s greatest temptations.

A popular public-health manual warned about the physical cost to women of higher education: “Great mental exertion is injurious to the reproductive power” and “college produces women with monstrous brains and puny bodies.” Not to be outdone, some of America’s best-selling books in the latter part of the 1800s claimed the place of a Christian woman was in the home, where she could excel at cleaning, cooking, mending and having children. An editorial in America’s leading medical journal in 1911 lamented the new trend of women choosing careers over marriage. America’s physicians, it said, should always encourage marriage.

As for getting down’n’dirty in a sexual way, so-called medical experts began to claim that women were pure and free from sexual desire or excess. Women were starting to be described as innocent of the faintest ray of sexual pleasure, and it was said that they never experienced feelings of physical pleasure or yearning.

Of course, America’s streets were lined with prostitutes, and our newspapers were overflowing with ads for birth control, so the people who concocted the new propaganda about women’s natural state of purity added the caveat that if a woman was exposed to wanton sexuality, she could easily be lost to sin and hopeless vice. Vice was apparently more robust than purity, considering the scores of ransacked hymens it had left in its wake.

It is likely that these bizarre theories emerged as a backlash to the social and economic advances that women in America were beginning to make by the end of the 1800s. For instance, more teenage girls from the middle class were going to school, and they often outnumbered boys in high school. Instead of going straight home after school, the new breed of American girls socialized with each other and with boys. Instead of cooking, sewing, and caring for younger children, they were reading books and thinking thoughts that were previously restricted to men. By the end of the 1800s, a more independent, modern American woman was being born, and this was disturbing to both women and men from prior generations.

Worse yet, between 1870 and 1920, the divorce rate in America increased 1500%. The size of the middle-class American family had plummeted, and an increasing number of women were choosing careers over marriage. More and more, women were being seen as assassins of the white, middle-class family.

As for notions of women being pure and avoiding sex, the new invention of the moving picture begged to differ. The most popular titles shortly after the turn of the century showed American women as being sassy, seductive, and very much in control.

Technology Gives America a New Nightlife

Technology can change a culture in many ways. For instance, think of how the television changed America. And what about the car, radio, tele-phone, record player and iPod?

The influence of technology was particularly profound after the 1870s, when Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb may have done more to liberate American women than the day’s feminists and social activists.

Before Edison brought us the light bulb in 1879, America’s downtowns after dark were dangerous and scary places. They were lit by gas lights which cast dark, ominous shadows. However, the electric street light helped transform America’s downtowns into places that were bright and inviting. America’s women no longer needed to stay behind closed doors after dark, and our modern concept of the nightlife was being born. The scene was set for America’s women and men to start going out and “steppin’ out.”

When we think about how the electric light helped change the way that Americans socialized, the invention of the telephone had an even greater impact. For instance, in 1848, it took upwards of a month to get a letter from coast to coast. Good luck casually checking in on a friend who lived only five miles away. Fifty years later, Americans were talking to each other on nearly a million telephones. The new telephone industry not only created thousands of jobs for women as telephone operators, but the young women who now had good jobs were able to call each other and say, “Let’s go to the movie” or “Meet me at the soda shop.” And what would modern dating be without the first generation of young men who called young women at the start of the 1900s to say, “Would you like to go out dancing with me?”

Technology not only changed how we spoke to each other, but how we could meet each other. For instance, in April of 1846, the Donner party began their famous journey west. If you wanted to go west, the covered wagon was the only game in town. But that drastically changed in May of 1869, when the final spike was hammered into the first of five transcontinental railroads that would connect East and West. What used to be a perilous journey in covered wagons now took less than five days by rail. By 1880, railroads crisscrossed the entire country. Not only did they provide a safe and convenient way for men, women and their families to populate new parts of the country and to visit each other, but the railroads allowed goods produced in one part of the country to be sold in another. Completing the railroads was no less of an engineering feat than putting a man on the moon—which occurred exactly 100 years after the completion of America’s first intercontinental railroad.