In 1444 King Charles VII named Agnès Sorel his royal mistress, the first woman officially designated as such in France. In exchange for sexual favors, she received enormous rewards, her title an acknowledgment of her sexual prowess. The king’s generosity toward her, however, contrasted sharply with his repressive policies toward the sex trade in general. While he was cavorting with Agnès, “girls and women of ill repute” were rounded up and forced to work in state-run brothels, with the government taking a large cut of the profits.
In other words, the king’s policy toward prostitution was riddled with hypocrisy. That’s nothing new. Granted, Sorel was not strictly speaking a prostitute, but sex was her commodity. As Kate Lister argues: “What is meant by a ‘prostitute’ can vary considerably but however [the word] is deployed it is tangled in assumptions about a woman’s morality and worth.” The higher up the social scale, the less shame is attached to the woman who sells her body. The nomenclature reflects this hierarchy: mistress, courtesan, concubine, harlot, whore. The “prostitute” is judged according to the wealth and power of her patron.
