{"id":1096600,"date":"2025-12-16T14:12:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T11:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1096600"},"modified":"2025-12-16T14:12:00","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T11:12:00","slug":"from-ancient-rome-to-304tok-a-brief-history-of-scent-and-sex-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1096600","title":{"rendered":"From Ancient Rome to 304Tok: A brief history of scent and sex work"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A post on X asking for perfume recommendations to \u201csmell like a French whore\u201d recently went viral, garnering 50,000 likes and a flood of replies suggesting perfumes heavy with animalic notes and overpowering florals. While provocative, the idea isn\u2019t new.\u00a0<\/span>The link between scent and sex work runs deep. In <\/span>A Natural History of the Senses<\/span><\/em>, Diane Ackerman notes how many slang terms for sex worker \u2013 like the French <\/span>putain<\/span><\/em> and Italian <\/span>puttana \u2013 <\/span><\/em>derive from the root <\/span>pu<\/span><\/em>, meaning \u201cto rot\u201d or \u201cdecay\u201d (as in <\/span>putrid<\/span><\/em>), reflecting a long history of associating sex workers\u2019 bodies with foul odours.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In Ancient Rome, brothels, or <\/span>lupanaria<\/span><\/em> (\u201cwolf dens\u201d) were sensorially overwhelming: cramped, poorly ventilated, the air thick with smoke from oil lamps, mingling with sweat and naked bodies. The Roman writer Juvenal remarked how the brothel\u2019s soot and stench clung to a woman, implying a dirtying of both body and reputation. Courtesans were reportedly gifted perfumes as part payment, and heavy scents and pungent cosmetics came to signal promiscuity: Juvenal<\/span> claimed women bought perfumes with adultery in mind.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These moralistic (and misogynistic) tropes follow a pattern we see throughout history. Sex workers are portrayed as \u201creeking,\u201d either through foulness \u2013 sweaty, diseased, animalistic \u2013 or excessive perfume. The former disgusts, the latter deceives. Perfume is read as a tool of seductive trickery, a weapon, implying the sex worker is \u201cmasking\u201d her supposed immorality, which \u201crespectable\u201d society prides itself on sniffing out. Class shapes this too: upper-class women are often described through metaphors of light, fresh, florals; while working-class women, like market sellers, laundresses and sex workers, remain tied to the earthy, corporeal scents of labour and urban life. A similar logic played out in colonial contexts: people of colour were often branded inherently \u2018odorous,\u2019 and primitive, <\/span>even as the aromatic oils, spices and resins of their homelands were fetishised as exotic luxuries. Both representations contributed to the eroticisation of the \u2018other\u2019 in the colonial imagination. Odour marks \u2013 and enforces \u2013 hierarchies of class, gender and race.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Much of this obsession with assigning morality to smell can be traced back to miasma theory. Before germs were understood, diseases like the plague were thought to spread through foul vapours rising from rot and filth. Certain scents were seen not just as unpleasant, but as direct threats to health and social order. For protection, people turned to pleasant smells: scented waters, ornate pomanders and posies of herbs. When syphilis swept into Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, anxieties about bodily contamination intensified. Brothels were seen as hotbeds of infection, and sex workers were judged not only as carriers of disease but as symbols of moral decay: their odours contrasted with the saintly sweetness of virtuous women, their bodies conflated with sewers and waste, vessels for society\u2019s sins.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the 19th century, industrial cities swelled with people, their streets heavy with the stench of leaking drains, stagnant waste and overburdened sewers. Sex workers, increasingly visible in these streets, had their bodies entwined in symbolic associations of urban filth and moral corruption in literature, reform writing and police discourse. These anxieties were codified in hygiene regulations, which subjected suspected sex workers (but not their clients) to invasive medical examinations. Even after germ theory displaced miasma theory, cultural associations among smell, danger and female sexuality endured.<\/span><\/p>\n

The luxury brothels of late 19th-century<\/span>\u00a0Paris \u2013 <\/span>maisons tol\u00e9r\u00e9es \u2013 <\/span><\/em>were often portrayed as decadent theatres of the senses: their allure shadowed by the threat such excesses might seep into the streets and corrupt public life. Accounts recall the gilded opulence of famed houses like Le Sphinx and Le Chabanais \u2013 each chamber themed to a different fantasy \u2013 heavy with the smell of incense, tobacco, Turkish rose, opium smoke, hair oil, soap and Arabian spices. Whether fact or fantasy, these portrayals conjured a sensual, exoticised mythology of the Belle \u00c9poque brothel that lingered in the artistic imagination, inspiring artists from Toulouse Lautrec to the Surrealists. Decades later, perfumers such as Jean Carles would echo these fantasies in fragrances like <\/span>Tabu<\/span><\/em> (1931), a dense blend of patchouli, musk and spices rumoured to be designed to \u201csmell like a whore,\u201d and later Schiaparelli\u2019s <\/span>Shocking<\/span><\/em> (1937), a voluptuous, spicy amber-floral with civet notes, since compared to the intimate scent of a woman\u2019s knickers. The sex workers at the brothels, meanwhile, were often described far less romantically; routinely subject to strict bathing regimes and inspections. When reformers eventually called for the closure of the brothels, they drew on the same language of hygiene and sensory excess to justify their intervention.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nearly a century later, these contradictory tropes persist, even as sex work increasingly moves online. On TikTok, recommendations range from \u201cperfumes to smell like the most adored courtesan in Paris\u201d (think powdery iris and violet), to \u201cperfumes to attract a sugar daddy\u201d (predictably youthful, candy-sweet, milky gourmands). On a practical level, on \u201c304Tok\u201d, former sex workers share elaborate hygiene routines to smell \u2018cleaner\u2019, from yoni steaming to portable bidets and prebiotic intimate sprays. There\u2019s an undercurrent of respectability politics at play \u2013 an effort to prove one\u2019s cleanliness in a society that so often calls it into question.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet the policing of women\u2019s bodies through odour-based insults also continues. On X, comments under OnlyFans models sneer, \u201cimagine the smell,\u201d while the taunt \u201cBBL stink\u201d elicits disgust through evoking the sharp tang of post-surgical infection. Fragrantica reviews may dismiss certain perfumes as smelling like \u201ca whore\u2019s drawers\u201d, but elsewhere, niche perfume houses play on this tension, bottling up the scented fantasy of sex work that continues to fascinate civilian audiences. <\/span>Putain de Palaces<\/span><\/em> by \u00c9tat Libre d\u2019Orange evokes the high-class temptress lingering in a hotel bar; <\/span>WH*<\/span><\/em>RE<\/em> by Marissa Zappas draws on Liara Roux\u2019s memoir of escorting in New York. The association between sex work and heavy fragrance has not only endured but been reimagined and commodified.<\/span><\/p>\n

The sex worker\u2019s body occupies a contradictory space in today\u2019s culture, caught between the \u201cfoul\u201d and the \u201cfragrant,\u201d and constantly dragged back to an imagined \u201ctruth\u201d of her body. Focusing on scent allows moral discomfort about sex work to masquerade as a physical reaction, turning her body into a target for socially acceptable disgust. Reducing a woman to smell alone dehumanises her, rendering her a mere object of bodily function. She is framed as an abject body \u2013 porous, leaking, contaminating \u2013 yet her scent is also a site of fantasy, one that is persistently met with suspicion. Media and brands exploit this tension, sensationalising and profiting from the fantasy of \u201csmelling like a whore\u201d while rarely challenging the stigma. By continually marking sex workers as \u201cother,\u201d society enforces a prejudice with real consequences for their lives. In the end, it is not sex work, but society\u2019s attitude toward it that truly stinks.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the author\u2019s request, a portion of the fees for this article was donated to National Ugly Mugs, a charity that supports sex workers\u2019 safety and works to end violence against them<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source URL: https:\/\/www.dazeddigital.com\/beauty\/article\/69280\/1\/ancient-rome-to-304tok-sex-work-fragrance-scent-perfume<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A post on X asking for perfume recommendations to \u201csmell like a French whore\u201d recently went viral, garnering 50,000 likes and a flood of replies suggesting perfumes heavy with animalic notes and overpowering florals. While provocative, the idea isn\u2019t new.\u00a0The link between scent and sex work runs deep. In A Natural History of the Senses, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1096602,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[76],"class_list":["post-1096600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-dazeddigital-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1096600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1096602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1096600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1096600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1096600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}