Dating Is New & Was Considered Worse than Wh****g

Historically, what we now call dating was treated as lower-status than prostitution. The word “date” itself once meant visiting a prostitute. Then working-class “charity girls” undercut professional sex workers by trading companionship and intimacy for dinners, tickets, clothes, and nights out — a practice contemporaries called treating.

In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins walk through the late-19th / early-20th century shift: cheap urban leisure (nickelodeons, dance halls, Coney Island), taxi dancers as proto-host clubs, shop girls hunting rich bosses, the rebrand of face-painting into “makeup,” the invention of “personality” and the It Girl, and 1920s petting parties. They argue modern dating is not an ancient institution that suddenly broke. It is a recent, low-commitment market that was controversial when it appeared — and that older courtship systems (family-supervised seasons, explicit marriage-seeking) may be more honest than ambiguous long-term dating.

Also discussed: why they treat dating as wife-hunting rather than “seeing where it goes,” why they want paying-for-dates destigmatized as traditional, and how RFAB can generate period-accurate 1920s stories.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am right off learning a historical fact that blew my mind, which is that historically what we today call dating was seen as lower than prostitution-

[00:00:16] Simone Collins: Wait ...

[00:00:16] Malcolm Collins: until incredibly recently, up until the 1920s. Even our word date Historically meant visiting a prostitute.

[00:00:30] Simone Collins: I thought it was like an, an assignation or a something else.

That’s great. An

[00:00:35] Malcolm Collins: assignation?

[00:00:36] Simone Collins: Like, a rendezvous.

[00:00:38] Malcolm Collins: No, it did mean that. But you would never use it for a romantic rendezvous. You used it for business rendezvous. And then it began to be used to mean seeing a prostitute, and then it began to become applied way later during this period where dating had this bad reputation, to seeing what was called a charity woman.

[00:00:59] Simone Collins: A charity- So, and- A cha- what’s a charity woman?

[00:01:02] Malcolm Collins: W- it’s what today we would call a woman. Okay. So,

[00:01:06] Simone Collins: What, what... Oh, okay. Okay. Just, yeah. Okay. I’ll, I’ll say the main thing- What, spell this out for me.

[00:01:09] Malcolm Collins: This,

[00:01:09] Simone Collins: I’m

[00:01:10] Malcolm Collins: so confused ... differentiated a charity woman, okay?

[00:01:12] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:01:12] Malcolm Collins: So a charity woman would expect a man to pay for food or an activity.

[00:01:20] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:01:20] Malcolm Collins: And she would often court multiple men before getting married. Now, today this sounds like a woman. So we’re gonna go- Yes ... into what alerted me to this. We’re gonna go into the Wikipedia article on this. And even though, the the reason I cite this is even something as lefty as Wikipedia was like, “Oh yeah, this was considered a super, a bad thing to do.”

We’re gonna go into the campaigns- Oh ... to arrest these women. We’ll go into what prostitutes were saying about these women, ‘cause they absolutely hated these women. They completely disrupted the way prostitution worked. And we’ll go into why this transformation happened. And I think it’s important to keep this in mind when we live in a world today and people say dating markets are no longer functioning, and they act like something that has existed since the beginning of time just collapsed all of a sudden.

Instead of something that’s existed for less than a century collapsed, and what we should do is go back to older mechanisms of dating, like arranged marriage and dating markets like the season, which we are attempting to rebuild. So fun stuff here. Let’s go right into it. So what alerted me to this is the RFab dev, like the only other human who works on it other than Simone and I Bruno reached out with this concept where he wanted us to go into the history of dating.

Specifically the claim that dating came from prostitution or was even frowned on by prostitutes. Specifically because it took business from them And it goes on. The term dating did emerge from prostitution and so did the general practice in the early 20th century. Charity girls were deemed competitors who undercut the wages of prostitutes.

Basically, easy girls who weren’t formal prostitutes figured out that they could blur the lines by getting dinners or so on paid for. Now, what’s really fascinating is the invention of dating as we understand it and think of it as like this wholesome 1950s practice today would have in its time been seen as extremely or eerily parallel to OnlyFansing today E.g.,

getting m- multiple men to pay for stuff for you while being an informal sex worker. I- i- in just a new way using new technologies.

[00:03:48] Simone Collins: I guess that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. People sort of, like, being angry because someone’s coming in and undercutting them professionally. When they’re like, “What? I work for this,” and then there’s a bunch of tourists who [00:04:00] don’t actually need the money but just want a free dinner.

[00:04:02] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay And who are like, “Well, I didn’t know I could just put nudes of myself online and people-” “... would give me money. Let’s, let’s do this.”

[00:04:08] Simone Collins: Oh, no.

[00:04:10] Malcolm Collins: I hear this one theory that OnlyFans was, like, predominantly paid for by dads to see their daughter’s friends. And I was like, “That is telling on yourself, buddy.”

[00:04:23] Simone Collins: That... Mm. Mm.

[00:04:25] Malcolm Collins: But maybe. I mean, I’ve, I’ve seen the movie, You still haven’t seen it. What, what’s it called? Beauty, beauty something. Oh.

[00:04:31] Simone Collins: American Beauty?

[00:04:32] Malcolm Collins: American Beauty, yeah.

[00:04:34] Simone Collins: Seems depressing. I don’t like depressing movies.

[00:04:36] Malcolm Collins: It’s not that depressing-

[00:04:39] Simone Collins: Mm ...

[00:04:40] Malcolm Collins: if I’m gonna be honest. Mostly because all of the characters are so pathetic and unlikable- Girl,

[00:04:45] Simone Collins: that sounds-

that you

[00:04:45] Malcolm Collins: don’t really feel bad for them.

[00:04:47] Simone Collins: I don’t wanna watch something about pathetic, unlikel- I’m, I’m really struggling- It’s, it’s a movie about- ... with TV and movies right now ... the birth of the urban

[00:04:52] Malcolm Collins: monoculture, if you, if you wanna call it anything.

[00:04:55] Simone Collins: Why would I want to watch that?

[00:04:56] Malcolm Collins: And how it destroys people’s lives.

[00:04:58] Simone Collins: I wanna watch attractive, competent people who are good at their jobs. Is this so hard to do? Is this so difficult?

[00:05:05] Malcolm Collins: But to continue here. Modern people don’t fully realize, but paying for a date isn’t providing, it’s confirmation that you can provide. Mm. It isn’t