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Alumni Reception 2008
2008 Alumni Reception
Professor Hijar discussed a series of three mid-nineteenth-century paintings that represent scenes in Baltimore brothels. Using these exceptionally unusual paintings, and considering them in the context of equally rare nineteenth-century urban brothel guides, Professor Hijar showed how high-end urban brothels in the nineteenth century were both imagined and marketed as sites in which men could find the same polite sociability that might be found in any respectable middle-class home. In these brothels, women acted out roles similar to those that mainstream middle-class women were expected to embody.
Prostitutes working in upscale establishments provided much more than sex: they also provided a temporary kind of domestic social intimacy, while fulfilling fantasies of male mastery. These women encouraged their male clients to imagine themselves as exemplars of nineteenth-century respectable manhood and masters of the scene. The evidence suggests that attending a brothel was as much about finding acceptance and emotional rejuvenation as it was about sex.
Brothel guides and paintings of brothel scenes reconciled the distance between the nineteenth-century mainstream ideal of virtuous 鈥渢rue womanhood,鈥 on one end of the spectrum, and the fact of sexual commerce, on the other. These pictorial and written images rendered prostitutes as nearly indistinguishable from the most desirable of 鈥渞espectable鈥 women, and in these sources, we find early precedents for the familiar figure of the sexualized 鈥済irl next door鈥 who was perfected in the pages of Playboy magazine beginning in 1953.
