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.