Whores of Babylon

A New History of Sex Work
Across time, around the world, people have exchanged sex for resources and money. They have been called many things: sex worker, prostitute, hooker, harlot, slut. Whore.

Across time, around the world, people have exchanged sex for resources and money. They have been called many things: sex worker, prostitute, hooker, harlot, slut. A mythology has grown around their labour; an archetype created whose resonance is so powerful it has endured across millennia.

Here is the Whore.

In Whores of Babylon, Frankie Miren traces the image of the Whore across epochs, following her mythology as it shifts and morphs. This is a story of an imaged being powerful enough to shape the world. But no archetype can ever subsume the real people who sell sex.

Find yourself in ancient Babylon, where a woman worships the sex-steeped goddess who will one day be called a whore. Pause in a Greek cemetery as a woman hides the coins she has earned and mutters a prayer to Aphrodite. Witness the moment the biblical Whore thunders into being and a sex worker gasps at the scene of punishment. Meet the Renaissance poet and courtesan whose critique and sharp analysis turned her enemies to dust. Find the Haitian sex worker who helped bring about an uprising, the aftershocks of which haunted every enslaving empire in the Americas. Spend time with a freedom fighter and sex worker in India who, with a pistol at her hip, rode out into the First War of Independence. Stop for a moment in a brothel in China, in the late 1800s, as a group of women summon a fox spirit. And meet the trans sex worker who, in early 1900s New York, told a researcher with glee of the multiple clients she satisfied, as she refused to bow to his expectation of shame.

Sex work has existed for almost as long as we have written records of humanity, but our archives are unreliable: full of moral pronouncements, often written by clients. By peeling back layers of the archive, Frankie finds glimpses of the people who loved, lived, survived and existed beyond the lens of their condemners. Whores of Babylon is an investigation into the mythology of the Whore, of her lore. It is also a love letter to sex workers and a celebration of their own reshaping of the Whore.

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