No vote. No property rights. No bank account. Full house every night.

The oldest profession isn’t a punchline. It’s a history lesson.

And like most history lessons involving women, it has been sanitized, shamed, legislated against, and wildly misunderstood.

Let’s fix that.

It Didn’t Start in the Wild West

Sumerian records dating to around 2400 BCE describe a temple brothel operated by priests in the city of Uruk, dedicated to the goddess Ishtar. Sacred prostitution. Literally god’s work.

In Athens, the legendary lawmaker Solon recognized the economic benefits of the oldest profession and democratized access by establishing brothels at a fixed price of one obol per session. One obol was one-sixth of a drachma. A day’s wage for a laborer. With his profits, he built a temple to Aphrodite. The Greeks were nothing if not on brand.

The word pornography comes directly from the Greek “porne,” meaning to sell. The word fornication comes from the Latin “fornix,” meaning arches, because Roman prostitutes worked under the arches of public buildings. The language we use to shame women today was literally built from the architecture of their workplaces.

Emperor Caligula was the first Roman emperor to impose a formal tax on prostitution. That tax lasted over 450 years. The government has always known where the money was.

Here’s how the business model evolved:

The Wild West: She Ran the Town

While cowboys gambled away their wages and sheriffs looked the other way, women like Mattie Silks and Pearl de Vere were building empires.

Mattie opened her first parlor house at 19. She placed a sign on the door that read “Men taken in and done for.” From there, she expanded to Dodge City and Denver, where her three-story brick mansion had 27 rooms. She claimed 40% of every transaction for herself and put the rest into real estate. A three-month operation in Dawson City, Alaska, netted her the equivalent of $1 million in today’s money.  She used it to feed Denver’s poor.

Pearl de Vere ran the Old Homestead in Cripple Creek. It had two bathrooms, fine furniture, extravagant decor, and gaming tables for the full trifecta of sin. When Pearl died in 1897, her sister traveled from Chicago only to discover she had not been a milliner as the family believed. Horrified, she left town immediately. The miners paid for the funeral.

These women donated to charities, hospitals, churches, and schools. They helped fund cities’ initial infrastructure of gas, telephone, and electric lines. They owned mining claims, stocks, and municipal bonds. And they were never once invited to a commercial club meeting.

History calls them prostitutes. The more accurate word is founders.

1963: Let’s Address the Bunny in the Room

It’s Easter week. So….

Hugh Hefner built his empire on the premise that the Playboy Bunny represented liberated female aspiration. Glamorous. Desired. Sophisticated. Modern.

Gloria Steinem spent two weeks working undercover to find out what was actually happening behind the cottontail.

What she found: a corset requiring structural engineering. Mandatory weigh-ins. A “Bunny Mother” conducting daily inspections. Tips routed through a house accounting system that made them effectively disappear. Customers treating the no-touching rule as an opening bid.

She published “A Bunny’s Tale” in 1963. Hefner was furious. Steinem became an icon. The Bunnies went back to work on Monday morning.

The fantasy was female liberation. The reality was female labor, dressed in satin ears and marked down considerably.

The 1990s: Cam Girls Build the Internet Nobody Talks About

Before OnlyFans. Before influencers. Before ring lights and content strategies, women with webcams and dial-up connections figured something out.

They built their own websites. Learned HTML. Created subscription models before Substack existed. Handled billing, moderation, community management, and customer service entirely alone.

They were mocked. Prosecuted in some cases. Written off as curiosities.

They were also running some of the most innovative direct-to-consumer businesses on the early internet. They invented the creator economy. They just never got credit for it.

The Sugar Bowl: Oldest Profession, New Vocabulary

In 2006, an MIT graduate named Brandon Wade founded SeekingArrangement, now rebranded simply as Seeking. His pitch: companionship and financial support, openly negotiated, no pretense of romance required.

The site now operates in 130 countries and is available in eight languages.  It has 10 million active users in the United States alone, with three sugar babies for every one sugar daddy. Eight percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 are currently active in sugaring. The average sugar baby is 28. The average benefactor is 48. Over a third of sugar babies report a history of other transactional sex work, including stripping, cam work, or escorting.

The site’s own lawyer once defined prostitution as “sex for money without the involvement of emotions,” the implication being that sugar dating, which involves emotions, is categorically different.

Make of that what you will.

One more data point worth savoring: when the 2012 Republican National Convention came to Tampa, Seeking saw a 25.9% spike in new users from that geographic area.

The oldest profession has always had its most reliable customers in the most respectable rooms.

Today: The Numbers Are Enormous. The Math Still Doesn’t Work.

The global adult entertainment industry is valued at $287 billion and projected to reach $706 billion by 2034.  Adult content accounts for roughly 30% of all internet traffic.  Approximately 40 million people globally are engaged in sex work, the majority of them women.

OnlyFans generated $7.2 billion in fan spending last year across 4 million creators. The average creator takes home $150 to $180 a month, roughly $2,000 a year,  while the top 0.1% capture 76% of all platform revenue.

Same economics as every gold rush in history. A few people strike it rich. Everyone else gets a ring light and a content calendar with an expiration date.

By the way, my 2025 OnlyFans April Fools prank was a huge hit, I upcycled it for 2026!

(It did, however, almost give my family heart attacks!)

The Question Worth Sitting With

Would you be comfortable if your daughter chose to become a sex worker, sugar baby, exotic dancer, dominatrix, or high-end escort? Your niece? Your college roommate? The woman you most respect professionally?

Somewhere between “I would never” and “Who am I to judge?” lives a more honest conversation. About women and money. About power and who gets to have it. About what we’ve always had to offer in a world that wasn’t designed to compensate us for anything else.

We’ve had the vote for over a hundred years. We run companies. We’ve held every office short of the presidency.

And we’re still debating whether a woman’s body is her business.

Mattie Silks figured that out in 1865. She was 19 years old.

The economics of what comes next, AI, automation, and how women build lasting financial power in a world changing faster than any brothel, bunny club, or webcam ever did, is exactly what we dig into every week at Bodies & Bots on Substack.

Come get the rest of the story.

Written with my AI collaborator. The fire is entirely my own.

Sources (because fact-checking is also among the oldest professions and more important now than ever before!)

• World History Encyclopedia: Prostitution in the Ancient Mediterranean
• Wikipedia: History of Prostitution
• Haaretz/Archaeology: A Brief History of Prostitution in Ancient Greece and Rome
• Ancient Origins: Prostitution, One of History’s Oldest Professions
• History Hit: The World’s Oldest Profession: Prostitution in Ancient Rome
• Cowgirl Magazine: Wild Women Wednesday: Mattie Silks
• Wikipedia: Mattie Silks
• Wikipedia: Pearl de Vere
• History and Women: Those Not-So Wicked Sporting Ladies of the Wicked West
• History Collection: Nine Soiled Doves Who Changed the Face of the Old West
• Wikipedia: Seeking.com
• Knowledge for Men: I Became an Undercover Sugar Daddy and Couldn’t Believe What I Found
• YouGov: Do You Know What a Sugar Baby Is?
• PsyPost: The Psychology of Sugar Dating
• Khe-Yo: The Rise of Sugar Daddy Dating in 2026
• OnlyMonster: OnlyFans Income Statistics
• Karta Huja: Hidden OnlyFans Statistics 2025
• Transparency Market Research: Adult Entertainment Market Size and Forecast
• ZipDo: Adult Industry Statistics 2025
• Gitnux: Sex Work Statistics Market Data Report 2026