Ghost of Paris

"Johns" are not some monolithic hive mind. Polling consistently shows that somewhere between 15% - 25% of men have paid for sex. It's a cross-section of very normal people in society. A customer base that diverse isn't controlling any industry.

Dame Emma Hamilton was a courtesan, dancer and model in Georgian London. She married the Ambassador to Naples (uncle of a client), and became immensely influential at the Neapolitan court-and all that was before her celebrated affair with Admiral Nelson, the great hero of the age

Your personality sparkles even through the internet's imperfect medium, and you're really quite startling pretty.

"Sex workers are called 'meretrix' because they earn ['mereatur'] the price of pleasure...likewise soldiers, because they accept pay, are called 'mereri'"

Isidore, Etymologiae 10.182 (c. 600 AD)

No one:

Absolutely no one:

Buffalo: "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo."

Grace Elliot was a Scottish courtesan in Paris during the Reign of Terror. She spied for the British, hid fleeing aristocrats, and was imprisoned but escaped the guillotine. Her memoir, Journal of My Life During the French Revolution, is the leading English account of the Terror.

I knew a courtesan of Rome named Isabella de Luna who took up this sort of friendship another courtesan named Pandora. Now Isabella kept her, and I have oft heard her say that she caused her to give her husbands more horns than all the wild fellows she ever had

Brantôme, c. 1600

Sirens have been interpreted both as "meretrices" (sex workers) (Isidore 11.30) and as goddesses "charming in poetry and prose" (Pausanias 1.21) Elements of both can, perhaps, be seen in this painting - and in the Goethe poem that inspired it

Fisherman and the Syren, F. Leighton

Check out the works of Veronica Franco, a prominent Venetian courtesan and poet of the late sixteenth century. Her Terza Rime and Lettere Familiare contain remarkably assertive defenses of both sex workers and intellectual women, a group that had considerable overlap at the time

"Without realizing it, you give me praise
for qualities based upon goodness and virtue.
And though you call me 'prostitute'...
As much goodness prostitutes may have
as much grace and nobility of soul
the sound of your word assigns to me."

Veronica Franco, courtesan & poet (1575)

"da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum..."

"Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more,
another thousand, and another hundred..."

Catullus 5 (1st century BC)

While the popular image of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute lacks biblical foundation, it has greatly affected her portrayal in art. Medieval paintings often depicted her reading, as courtesans were among the few literate women in that era.

Maria Magdalena, Piero di Cosimo (1510)