The year is 1763. One woman in five makes a living selling sex. This is the premise of ITV’s Harlots. I immediately want to quibble with the data analysis: is that 20% of all women, or 20% of women who work? Since female workforce participation was pretty low at the start of the 18th century, this distinction is key, and don’t even get me started on the age-weighting of the sample, since presumably they mean one woman in five under 30.
I have fallen into that famous viewer-trap: distracted by shoddy statistics, I failed to notice all the luscious flesh bursting out of satin. The year is 1763, remember! That means the moral majority has to just shut up. All those boring questions – “Why is that character taking a shower when she hasn’t got dirty? Why does she have to be naked when she’s just opening her post?” – those belong to contemporary drama. Go back a century or two, and nudity is the core business. If you go back enough centuries, nudity is all they know how to do and you don’t even need a script.
You can tell Harlots is the thinking-person’s shag fest because the sex isn’t sexy. That doesn’t make it politically correct, as such – there’s a lot of fat-shaming, both of men and women, in which a sex act featuring anyone plus size is shot as though inherently ridiculous. Otherwise, there’s a fair amount of fop sex. (Artistos can’t get it up, unless they are evil, in which case they are also sadists: someone should do a PhD on cultural representations of posh congress. The millennial noble, who perhaps doesn’t remember Jilly Cooper’s oeuvre, must wonder how the family lines survived at all.)
There is domination – the living definition of the cheap laugh, for prudish reasons. And there’s a fair amount of clash-of-creed nudity, in which foul-tempered puritans raid brothels and for some reason all the prostitutes have to get their tops off before they can be arrested. (Perhaps there was a proto for the fingerprint: the nippleprint.) The women who are gorgeous are empty-eyed, or buried beneath unworthy men, or mean. The men who are worthy are … no, there aren’t any, unless you count Samantha Morton’s fella, whose character is underdeveloped, the kind of decorative, supportive sidekick female actors get at a certain point in their career, in recognition of their heavyweight services to the industry, right before their lifetime-achievement Bafta.
I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong – maybe some combination of porn and vitamin D deficiency has changed the view on what’s titillating and what isn’t – but I do not think Harlots sets out to thrill in any straightforward, sexual way, any more than Ripper Street (Victorian cop gets to see a lot of dead girls), Black Sails (pirates be pirates, and their impulse control is woeful) or Moll Flanders … well, maybe a bit. But I don’t think it’s sleight of hand; dramas harking back to a historical period in order to show more sex – they could, after all, have done more Austen, and no one would do anything to anyone except breathe at them.
Rather, there is a political contest around contemporary sexual environments that TV can’t really – this is a technical term, I’m afraid there’s really no alternative – be arsed with. What’s the deal with the modern brothel? Where is feminism on sex work? The characters who worked there, would they have to be desperately unhappy by definition, or are we in new territory, where sex work can be a choice? Are threesomes always exploitative? Are orgies degrading and, if so, to both genders or only one?
It’s a bit like the way adverts almost never feature same-sex couples: they know it’s legal to be gay. They even know it’s culturally OK. But, you know, is it OK with everyone? And if not, wouldn’t it be easier just to not? You can do what you like in the past, without having to answer for yourself politically at all; not just lasciviousness, but women doing improbable, intoxicating things, like pulling each other’s hair.
The problem, if there is one, is that it’s hard to stay authentic in a dramatic precinct whose main appeal is that it’s a foreign country. Modern sensibilities always intrude, just to make the characters relatable: so our Harlots heroine, delicately played by Eloise Smyth, starts crying in public the night her virginity is auctioned off, while if that were really your life, having been raised in an 18th-century whorehouse, your sense of abasement would probably be expressed very differently, if at all.
I have no problem with any of these shows at the level of explicitness. But it’s culturally infantilising, cleaving to a complicated prissiness where any sex act in which the woman doesn’t end up dead has to be ventriloquised on to another century. Or perhaps I’m being picky.
• Harlots is on ITV Encore every Monday at 10pm in the UK, and on Hulu from 29 March in the US.
