Life 1 Comment 0 Rae Story discusses the effect of the digital age on sex work and the seductive cultural appeal of prostitution becoming a middle class occupation Prostitutes have historically been perceived as belonging in some fashion to a mythic bohemian underclass.
They are differentiated from more easily delineated social rungs working, middle, upper as romanticised degenerates; the children of the working class who reject the conservative values of the oppressive bourgeoisie. Unlike the upper classes, they have no socioeconomic foundation to protect them from the instability or impulsivity of their occupations, akin to the poets and inebriates of their imagined acquaintance. Subversive, aberrant and darkly romantic, they are outside of general norms and obscured through middle class sentiment.
Cora in particular inspires fascination. A poor British girl who runs away to Paris and obtains gargantuan wealth due to her almost otherworldly attractiveness to noblemen. Never acceptable in society to noble women, the stories of her serving herself on a gold platter, covered in exotic fruits, at a dinner party and drenching herself in silks are fettered by her fall from grace due to controversy and gambling and her dying in humble surrounds; the paragonic tale of bohemian prostitution.
Indeed, remnants of this approach remain: a recent documentary by Rupert Everett, Love for Sale , remonstrated heavily on his romantic view of prostitution as something bohemian, both glamorous and grotesque. The middle classing of the sex industry relates to a phenomenon that views most people as now essentially liberated and comfortable, as a direct result of capitalism Prostitution has undergone something of a re-conceptualisation in the political sphere.
Arguably, there is a new unwillingness to discuss socioeconomic inequities within prostitution from a socialist perspective, or gendered inequalities within prostitution from a more traditionally feminist perspective, in order to fulfil the aim of its civilising gentrification. This is because the middle classing of the sex industry relates to a phenomenon that views most people as now essentially liberated and comfortable, as a direct result of capitalism.
