Free The Sexual History of London by Catharine Arnold Page B

on Newsnight arguing that the new Policing and Crime Bill was necessary to prevent trafficking, fellow guest Niki Adams, of the English Collective of Prostitutes, challenged MacShane to produce one shred of evidence that women from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Far East were being brought into the United Kingdom to work as prostitutes. Adams’s scepticism at MacShane’s claims prompted an investigation by the Guardian newspaper which concluded that not one single trafficker had been arrested during a six-month investigation into the sex trade and that trafficking had been overstated as one of the reasons women entered prostitution. Campaigners such as Niki Adams responded that the investigations into sex trafficking served no purpose and merely added to the demonization of young women, many of whom were mothers, and who had gone into prostitution because they had no other means of earning a living. 1 For these women, prostitution was business as usual, ‘the oldest business in the world’, in the words of Megan from Shepherd Market.
    And then there are the rest of us, the amateurs, seeking affirmation in the form of fast love, cruising, cottaging, passionate sex with a complete stranger, longing for the love of women, the love of men, searching for similarity and comfort and the satisfaction of physical and emotional needs. Sexual desire is the most basic of human impulses, the desire for the ‘little death’ (‘ la petite mort ’, or orgasm) which will distract us from the inevitable event, the hour of death that lies in store for every one of us. In the words of Andrew Marvell in his ‘Ode to His Coy Mistress’, it is our way of defying the tomb:
    Had we but world enough, and time,
    This coyness, lady, were no crime…
    But at my back I always hear
    Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
    And yonder all before us lie
    Deserts of vast eternity.
    Thy beauty shall no more be found,
    Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
    My echoing song; then worms shall try
    That long preserv’d virginity,
    And your quaint honour turn to dust,
    And into ashes all my lust.
    The grave’s a fine and private place,
    But none I think do there embrace.
    Now therefore, while the youthful hue
    Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
    And while thy willing soul transpires
    At every pore with instant fires,
    Now let us sport us while we may;
    And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
    Rather at once our time devour,
    Than languish in his slow-chapp’d power.
    Let us roll all our strength, and all
    Our sweetness, up into one ball;
    And tear our pleasures with rough strife
    Thorough the iron gates of life.

Bibliography
    Acton, William, Prostitution, Considered in Its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects (2nd edn), 1870
    Aubrey, John, Aubrey’s Brief Lives , edited from the original manuscripts and with an introduction by Oliver Lawson Dick, Penguin, London, 1949
    Bailey, Paul (ed.), The Oxford Book of London , Oxford University Press, New York, 1995
    Barnfield, Richard, The Complete Poems , ed. George Klawitter, Susquehanna University Press, Selinsgrove, 1990
    Borris, Kenneth, Same-sex Desire in the English Renaissance: Sixteenth to Mid-Seventeenth Century Texts , Routledge, London, 2003
    Burford, E. J., Bawds and Lodgings , Peter Owen, London, 1976
    â€” The Orrible Synne , Calder and Boyars, London, 1973
    â€”and Wotton, Joy, Private Vices – Public Virtues: Bawdrey in London from Elizabethan Times to the Regency , Hale, London, 1995
    Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Poetical Works , ed. F. N. Robinson, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1933
    Cleland, John, Fanny Hill, or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure , ed. Peter Wagner, Penguin, London, 1985
    Crawford, Katherine, European Sexualities 1400–1800 , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007
    Cruikshank, Dan, The Secret History of Georgian London , Random House, London, 2009
    Davenport-Hines, Richard, Sex , Death and Punishment, Attitudes to Sex