Ancient Roots: From the Ancient World to Cleopatra

There's a point in history where everything begins: when pleasure isn't yet guilt, when the body is a prayer and desire a sacred language. It's from there that the ancient history of sex work takes shape: a journey that spans Babylon, the Egypt of the Pharaohs, the Greece of philosophers, and Imperial Rome, all the way to the most immortal myth of all... Cleopatra .

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The Sacred Origins of Pleasure – Babylon and Ishtar

Long before the world knew the concept of "sin," in Mesopotamia, desire was a blessing. In the temples of Ishtar, goddess of love and war, hierodules welcomed the faithful as guardians of a millennia-old mystery. Their bodies were temples, their skin an altar. Every gesture had a precise meaning: a touch to honor, a breath to purify, an embrace to connect the human and the divine.
There was no talk yet of prostitution, but of a sacred sexual rite : an encounter that celebrated fertility and renewed the bond with the gods.

When night fell over Babylon, the flickering torchlight revealed figures adorned with translucent fabrics and scented oils. The hierodules were respected, not feared. Men came there not to acquire a body, but to be spiritually reborn. The entire city thrived on this energy, believing that eros was a bridge to prosperity.

Pleasure, here, is not a luxury but a sacred duty.
The union of two bodies is not transgression, it is cosmic balance.
Thus was born the first archetype of the sex worker : not the marginal figure, but the intermediary between desire and divinity.
The ancient history of sex work therefore begins with a gesture of respect, not condemnation.

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Egypt: Sensuality as an Art of Power

From the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, history flows gently along the Nile.
In Egypt, pleasure is dressed in fine linen and smells of myrrh. Egyptian courtesans were often musicians, dancers, or poets, making them cultured and sought-after figures.
Sensuality, here, is aesthetic. It's not enough to simply indulge: you have to know how to do it with grace, with art, with sensual intelligence .

Egyptian "women of pleasure" did not belong to a single class. Some served in temples, others in noble palaces, still others at popular festivals. But they all shared a talent: they knew how to transform encounters into experiences.
The atmosphere was everything: the lights of alabaster lamps, date wine, skins anointed with sweet oil. Pleasure became conversation, dance, confession.

Many of them left traces on papyrus: love letters, poems, sometimes contracts. It is here that sexuality begins to dialogue with economics and power, becoming a profession, a form of survival and freedom.
Egypt recognizes sensuality as part of the cosmic order, not as a moral disorder.
And in this context the greatest legend was born: Cleopatra.

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Cleopatra: Politics, Body, and Myth

Queen, strategist, lover, legend. Cleopatra is not just a name, but a symbol of how desire can become power.
Her figure intertwines two opposing visions: on the one hand, the woman who "seduces to dominate"; on the other, the sovereign who uses her body as an instrument of diplomacy and survival.
She was queen in a man's world, and to survive she had to learn the art of making pleasure a form of political language.

Roman propaganda turned her into an icon of “Cleopatra and prostitution,” but the truth is more subtle.
Cleopatra didn't sell her body: she used it as an extension of her power. She knew that eros can govern more armies than a sword.
First with Caesar, then with Antony, he built alliances based not only on passion, but on respect and intelligence.
In Egyptian chronicles, his charm is described as hypnotic: “when he spoke, the world was silent.”

Cleopatra is the face of female awareness in an era that did not yet know how to define it.
It belongs to no one, because it belongs to itself.
In her myth we find the first embryo of what we today call sexual empowerment : the use of the body as a language of identity and personal choice.
Not a harlot, but a queen of perception.

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Greece: Hetaerae and the Philosophy of Desire

If Cleopatra embodied seduction as power, Greece made it a school of thought.
In the elegant houses of Athens, among columns and statues, lived the hetaerae : free, educated, independent women.
Unlike slaves or concubines, hetaerae chose their own lovers and were celebrated for their culture.
Aspasia, Pericles' companion, was its most famous symbol.
With her, pleasure became conversation, philosophy, the art of presence.

Sex work in Greece wasn't hidden: it was part of public life.
Symposia , banquets where men and women discussed politics and beauty, often concluded in a slow erotic ritual.
There was no shame, but curiosity.
The idea was that knowing the body meant knowing the truth.
Plato, in his dialogues, compares love to the path towards the divine: an ascent that begins in the flesh and culminates in the spirit.

The hetaerae were priestesses of conversation and skin, guardians of the mystery of human relationships.
They wore light veils, carried rare perfumes, and knew the art of time: they knew how to wait, to make people desire, to make them think.
Sensuality, for them, was not a profession but a discipline.

Yet, even in Greece, two worlds coexisted: the refined world of the courtesans and the humble world of common prostitutes, often slaves in the brothels of Piraeus.
Two sides of the same truth: freedom and necessity.
Sex work, once again, reflected social inequalities, but also the strength of those who knew how to transform their bodies into tools of survival.

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Rome: Morality, Brothels, and Double Standards

In Rome, pleasure takes to the streets.
Brothels multiply, sex becomes an institution.
Prostitutes are registered and taxed by the state: they pay the pleasure tax, receive licenses and even protection.
There were also the delicatae , luxury courtesans who frequented senators and patricians.
Sex work is not clandestine, but an integral part of Roman society.

Yet, beneath the surface, a contradiction lurks.
While the Empire tolerates and regulates the profession, public morality condemns it.
Men can enjoy themselves, but women must keep quiet.
Empress Messalina becomes the butt of every legend: it is said that at night she frequented brothels in disguise, only to humiliate the powerful.
In reality, his figure is yet another male fear disguised as scandal.

Rome codifies, but does not understand.
Pleasure becomes a male right and a female crime.
And yet, among the shadows of the brothels, stories of unexpected freedom are intertwined.
Many women manage to redeem themselves, buy their freedom, open shops or travel.
Sex, once again, becomes a currency of survival and autonomy.

When the Empire begins to decline, even pleasure is put on trial.
New Christianity transforms desire into guilt, and what was once ritual becomes sin.
But the flame does not go out.
Beneath the rubble of temples and brothels, sex work remains silent, awaiting its next rebirth.

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The Middle Ages and the guilt of the body

There comes a moment, in the long history of human desire, when the light goes out.
A time in which the body, celebrated for centuries as a temple, an instrument, a language, is suddenly veiled by a sense of shame.

It is the Middle Ages, the era in which eros hides behind the rosary, and pleasure becomes a matter of guilt.
But precisely in this darkness, in the folds of a society that preaches penance and control, a new form of survival is born: sex work in the Middle Ages , tolerated and condemned at the same time.

From blessing to sin

During the centuries of the Roman Empire, sexuality was an accepted part of public life.
With the arrival of Christianity, everything changes.
The body, once a means of knowing and celebrating, becomes a territory to be protected, monitored, and mortified.
The flesh is no longer a gift, but a test.
Pleasure is no longer language, but temptation.

The sermons of the Church Fathers resound in the squares, in the abbeys, in the convents: the body is the vehicle of sin, the woman its instrument.
The words of Augustine and Gregory the Great define the ideology of a millennium: chastity is virtue, desire is weakness.
Yet, reality is more complex than theology.
People continue to desire, to love, to seek each other.
And the civil authorities are faced with a dilemma: how to contain a force that no sermon can erase?

Thus was born the concept of “necessary evil”: better to control sin than to pretend to eliminate it.
Better to confine the meat to dedicated places, rather than risk it invading the homes of nobles and clerics.
It is the birth of an organized and regulated form of sex work.
The Church condemns, but the municipalities administer.
Spiritual power preaches, political power collects.

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Cities and the need for regulated pleasure

Between the 13th and 15th centuries, so-called public brothels arose throughout Europe.
They are not places of romantic pleasure, but spaces of social management.
Municipalities establish rules, rates, hours, and even the areas of the city where prostitution is permitted.
In Paris, archives tell of entire streets reserved for "femmes amoureuses"; in Florence, it was required that "brothel women" reside near the Arno, far from the shops of honest merchants.
In Venice, an amphibious and libertine city, the Serenissima requires prostitutes to wear a yellow handkerchief, a visible sign of distinction and shame.

Sex work in the Middle Ages is not freedom, but public order.
Authorities see it as a safety valve for men, a way to prevent rape, scandals or “worse sins”.
Prostitutes thus become instruments of moral control, not of freedom.
They are tolerated because they are useful, despised because they are necessary.
A paradox that will last for centuries.

Inside the brothels, life is hard but codified.
There are strict rules: no work on Sundays or religious holidays; women must go to confession regularly; they cannot go out after sunset without permission.
In exchange, they get a semblance of protection: a room, a bed, a “matron” who acts as guarantor and supervisor.
They often pay taxes to municipalities, becoming, paradoxically, taxpayers of sin.

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The Invisible Women

Who were these women?
Often widows, orphans, peasants fleeing hunger.
Others came from abandoned convents or from families who had repudiated them.
Few actually chose.
Many ended up in the profession out of necessity, others for lack of alternatives.
Yet, beneath their vulnerability lay a primitive form of autonomy: they earned money, decided who to sleep with, and in some cases even managed to move cities and reinvent themselves.
In a world that wanted women to be silent and obedient, they spoke with their bodies, and their bodies became their only voice.

Medieval sources speak of them with both contempt and fascination.
They call them “public women”, “femmes folles”, “necessary sinners”.
Yet, no sermon can erase its presence.
Their homes, their laughter, their scents, are an integral part of the urban landscape.
Next to the cathedral, there is always a brothel.
Next to the cross, a red lantern.

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Religion and the female body

The Middle Ages were dominated by a double image of women: saint or sinner, virgin or temptress.
There are no nuances.
On the one hand, the Virgin Mary: model of purity and obedience.
On the other, Eve, symbol of disobedience and the fall.
All the others move between these two figures, trapped in a game of mirrors.

Religion turns sexuality into danger and redemption into the sole goal.
Many prostitutes are invited or forced to enter convents to “purify” themselves.
This is how the houses of the converted were born, institutions where the “redeemed sinners” lived in isolation, dedicated to work and prayer.
But behind the pity lies a system of ferocious control: hair cuts, names changed, silences imposed.
Women cease to be people and become symbols: instruments of moral propaganda.

Yet, medieval faith is also full of contradictions.
Mary Magdalene, the redeemed prostitute par excellence, becomes a cult figure.
His sensual and spiritual image together invades churches and paintings.
It is the paradox of medieval Christianity: it condemns the flesh, but cannot stop celebrating it.
In monasteries, prayers are made to saints who were once “sinners of the body”.
It is as if the Church, while preaching detachment, cannot renounce the allure of sin.

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Brothels as a social microcosm

In municipal registers, brothels are described with almost administrative attention.
Every city has at least one, often more than one.
There are the municipal houses , where the profits are divided between the workers and the administration; and there are the private houses , managed by merchants or widows.
In some cases, such as in Florence, laws were even passed to regulate hygiene and conduct.
Fights, blasphemies, and the entry of clerics are prohibited.
But everyone knows that clerics, men of the clergy and guardians of morality, are often the most assiduous customers: the most human face of the desire they sought to redeem.

In the urban fabric, brothels fulfill a dual function: economic and symbolic.
Economic, because they generate revenue; symbolic, because they represent the boundary between what is permitted and what is not.
Pleasure, like sin, becomes a measurable good.
Sex, from a human act, becomes a statistic.

Many women, forced to end up there, learn the art of survival.
They know when to speak, when to remain silent, how to avoid fights or jealousy.
Some become true "masters" of the trade: they manage the others, negotiate with customers, maintain contact with local authorities.
It is they who, in some way, pave the way for a future idea of ​​female agency by having the ability to make decisions for themselves, even in a world that doesn't allow it.

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The birth of the myth of the redeemed sinner

In the Middle Ages the prostitute became a living image of guilt and redemption.
The “Magdalenes”, sinners saved by repentance, transform shame into devotion and desire into prayer.
It tells of their fall, their desperation, their salvation.
Every tear is a warning, every gesture of repentance a public ritual.
Society looks to these stories to reconcile desire with morality.

In reality, behind devotion lies the need for control.
To redeem a woman means to domesticate her.
Yet, precisely in the cult of Mary Magdalene, a form of tenderness is preserved: the idea that even the sinner has a soul worthy of compassion.
It is a small gap in the moral rigidity of the time.
A prelude to the humanist sensibility to come.

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The everyday life of pleasure

Outside of sermons and official documents, the reality was simpler.
In villages and ports, people met, touched, loved.
Pleasure doesn't disappear, it simply changes language.
It becomes a whisper, a promise, an exchange of glances.
In the taverns people drink and dance, in the markets they bargain, in the alleys they meet those who seek and those who offer.
Chronicles tell of sailors leaving a ring or a silver coin “to thank fate”.
The body once again becomes currency, a gift, a pact.

And within the folds of this forbidden daily life, the figure of the prostitute becomes the guardian of an ancient knowledge: that of listening, of care, of illusion.
Many of them know herbs, prepare ointments, and treat small wounds.
Some are accused of witchcraft for this very reason.
But perhaps there is no difference between the witch and the prostitute: both handle the mystery of the body, both live on the margins, both frighten.

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In the Middle Ages, sex work was neither freedom nor sin, but a fragile balance between survival and condemnation.
Society tolerates it out of necessity, religion demonizes it out of principle.
Yet, in those dimly lit rooms, behind closed windows, human gestures are born that no law can erase.
Medieval prostitutes are not just victims or sinners: they are witnesses to the resilience of the body, to the strength of those who live despite everything.

Their silence fills an entire era.
And when history prepares to change, when humanism returns to placing the human being and its complexity at the center, those women will already be there, ready to re-emerge, ready to become, in the Renaissance, courtesans, muses, poets, masters of the word and of pleasure.

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Chastity Belts and Imprisoned Desire

Before the lights of the Renaissance once again illuminated the body, the Middle Ages had tried to enclose it.
Literally.

The so-called chastity belts , today a controversial and almost legendary symbol, perfectly represent the obsession of that era with the control of desire.
They arise or perhaps are invented as a response to fear: fear of temptation, of infidelity, of unsupervised female pleasure.

Were they really used?
Modern historians doubt that they were widespread, but their myth says much more than their reality.
In the collective imagination, women are closed off, protected, controlled.
The female body becomes both prison and relic: a territory to be sealed to guarantee male honor.
Yet, precisely in that idea of ​​containment, the fuse of a future paradox is lit: pleasure as power, constraint as a prelude to desire.

There is a thin, invisible but recognizable thread that links those iron belts to future games of control and submission.
The difference is all in the consensus.
In the Middle Ages, the body was imprisoned out of fear; centuries later, it was bound by choice.
And this passage contains a universal truth: desire is not extinguished by repression, it simply changes language.

Perhaps the myth of belts was not born to prohibit, but to represent the allure of the forbidden.
The untouchable body becomes even more desirable; denied pleasure transforms into imagination, fantasy, and dream.
And precisely in this play of distances, medieval sensuality unconsciously anticipates the aesthetics of conscious domination, of the chosen bond, of shared control.
It is the dawn of a mental eroticism, not yet declared but already alive: the pleasure that arises from the tension between wanting and not being able to.

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The Renaissance and the return of sensuality

When the darkness of the Middle Ages begins to dissolve, Europe reopens its eyes to the body.
After centuries of penance, the light returns: that of Venetian palaces reflected in the water, of Florentine velvets, of Roman marbles.
It is the light of the Renaissance , an age of art and thought, in which beauty is no longer a sin but a manifestation of the divine.
And with beauty, pleasure also returns.
Prostitution in the Renaissance changed face: from a necessary vice to a sophisticated form of social art.
It's no longer just about survival, but about language, relationships, a game of intelligence and seduction, and Italy's great cities are at the heart of this rebirth.

In Venice, Florence, Rome, and Ferrara, the courts sparkle with music and conversation, and women who once lived in the shadows become protagonists.
They are no longer “sinners,” but “courtesans”: custodians of refined knowledge, capable of enchanting not only with their bodies but with their words.
They know how to recite verses, discuss philosophy, play instruments, and dress elegantly.
Pleasure sublimates into an art of relationship: a subtle theater in which every gesture is calculated, every glance is an invitation, every silence is a message.

The Renaissance restores desire to its dignity.
After centuries of guilt, sensuality returns to being intelligence.
It's as if Europe suddenly remembered that it has a body.
And inside that body, a mind capable of choosing, playing, seducing.

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Cultured Courtesans: Veronica Franco, Tullia d'Aragona, and Gaspara Stampa

Among the most luminous figures of the Renaissance, three names emerge that embody the perfect fusion between sensuality and intellect: Veronica Franco, Tullia d'Aragona and Gaspara Stampa .
Three very different women, but united by the same courage: that of writing, loving, speaking.

Veronica Franco , from Venice, is the most famous.
Daughter of a courtesan, she grew up surrounded by poets and artists.
In 1575 he published Terze Rime , a collection of poems in which he speaks of the body with a frankness that still surprises today.
It doesn't just tell the story of love: it interprets it as knowledge, as an exchange of power.
He writes: “He who defends himself, loves.”
His words are caresses and challenges, confessions and duels.
He receives ambassadors, philosophers and princes, but always retains the right to choose.
For her, seduction is not submission: it is direction.

When accused of witchcraft, Veronica will defend herself before the Inquisition with clarity and dignity.
He will be saved, not because he asks for forgiveness, but because he knows how to speak.
She is the first woman to use the word as a weapon against shame.

Tullia d'Aragona , in Florence, represents the philosophical face of sensuality.
Educated, refined, a friend of men of letters and cardinals, she wrote The Dialogue on the Infinity of Love , a text that combines eroticism and metaphysics.
He argues that pleasure is not only physical, but a form of spiritual elevation: a way to know oneself through others.
For Tullia, love is infinite because it belongs to no law, no morality.
It is a continuous tension, an experience that transcends conventions.
With her, the courtesan becomes a philosopher, and philosophy becomes flesh.

Gaspara Stampa , finally, is the poetic voice of passion.
A Paduan singer and writer, she experiences tumultuous love affairs and transforms them into verses of heartbreaking beauty.
His collection Rime is considered one of the most intense of the sixteenth century.
He doesn't hide his jealousy, his loss, his nostalgia: he sublimates them into words that still resonate with truth today.
He writes: “If so much love and so much pain cost me, the more beautiful the fire, the sweeter the pain.”
His poetry is flesh that thinks, desire that writes.

Three women, three languages, three revolutions.
Each of them teaches that sensuality is not just a gesture, but a form of thought.

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Pleasure as an aesthetic language

In the Renaissance, sensuality was no longer a sin to be eradicated but an art to be perfected.
Love, sex, and beauty become aesthetic languages, instruments of knowledge.
Art itself becomes erotic in the highest sense: a way of speaking about the body without naming it, of touching it without desecrating it.
In Botticelli's paintings, Venus's skin is light; in Leonardo, Lisa's smile is restrained desire; in Titian, the reclining woman is not a sinner but a subject of gaze and power.

The female body, for the first time in centuries, returns to the center of the artistic scene.
Not as an object of guilt, but as a symbol of harmony and knowledge.
And with it, the oldest profession in the world takes on a new nobility.
Prostitution in the Renaissance was not just survival: it was a social role, an art of presence, a form of diplomacy.
The courtesans become intermediaries between different worlds, between the sacred and the profane, between power and poetry.
They are the first free women in a society that still doesn't know how to define them.

In their way of speaking, walking, dressing, there is an aesthetic wisdom that becomes culture.
The body is narration, pleasure is language.
And everything, in the new Italy of the courts, revolves around a revolutionary concept: the freedom to choose.

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The legacy of the Renaissance

When the lights of the courts go out, the echo of their splendor remains.
The Renaissance made pleasure a language and sensuality an art form.
He taught that the body is not just flesh, but culture; not just desire, but story.
And that behind every female gaze there is a universe that asks to be heard, not judged.

Cultured courtesans paved the way for modernity.
They made visible what had been silenced for centuries: the right to choose, to love, to be.
And so, between the lines of their letters and in the paintings of the great masters, pleasure becomes philosophy.
No longer a sin to atone for, but a form of knowledge.

In their world of velvet, verses, and silence, sensuality becomes a universal language.
A language that has spanned the centuries and that even today, in a world that believes it has overcome taboos, teaches us a simple and luminous truth:
that freedom begins with the body, and that the body—when chosen and respected—is the first temple of the mind.

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The European roots of the modern model

There comes a moment in European history when pleasure ceases to hide and begins to become architecture.
Windows are no longer used to close, but to show.
It is the seventeenth century: the century in which Europe discovers that bodily freedom can be not only a sin, but a profession, an identity, an urban space.
This is where sex work in Europe as we know it today was born: not as a transgression, but as a visible, organized, and sometimes even respected profession.

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Amsterdam and the birth of tolerance

In 17th-century Amsterdam, boats carry spices, silks, money.
But in the heart of the city, among the brick streets and canals, another commodity is exchanged, as ancient as salt: pleasure.
The Dutch, merchants and pragmatists, quickly understood that the flesh cannot be governed by sermons.
Better to manage it, tax it, regulate it.
This is how the first “official” pleasure houses were born, the hoerenhuizen , where everything was written down, clean, tidy.
There is no shame, there are rules.
Prostitution becomes a recognized part of city life, protected by darkness and illuminated by red lanterns.

Amsterdam becomes the moral laboratory of Europe.
Here the Calvinist religion, severe but realistic, accepts the existence of desire as a human fact, not as a divine fault.
It is better to live with the vice than to pretend to eliminate it.
It is the first time that a modern city has transformed pleasure into an urban phenomenon: visible, regulated, taxed.
The illuminated windows along the canals are the first manifestation of a silent freedom, made of glass and choice.
Behind every window, a woman who works, who bargains, who lives off her own body but also off her own time.
A form of dignity that is still fragile, but real.

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The Dutch model as a precursor to legalization

Dutch pragmatism has endured over the centuries.
As early as 1700, the city authorities drew up documents regulating the hygiene of brothels and municipal taxes.
In the 1800s, when other European countries closed their brothels, Amsterdam continued to operate them as businesses.
This model has survived to this day, becoming the reference for every modern debate on the regulation of sex work in Europe.

The philosophy is simple: if something exists, it better be secure.
No hypocrisy, no demonization: just rules.
An almost scientific approach that, although criticized, will become the basis for future legalization systems in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.
While the rest of the continent is divided between repression and romanticism, the North chooses concreteness.

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“Regulated sin” in Germany, Switzerland and France

Germany soon adopted the same logic.
In the 19th century, large German cities opened kontrollhäuser , state-controlled houses where sex workers were required to register and undergo periodic medical examinations.
We are not yet talking about rights, but about order.
The female body is recognized as part of society, not of sin.

Switzerland is following a similar path: less morality, more hygiene.
In Zurich, as early as 1870, there was discussion of “tolerated professions” and health safety.

France, on the other hand, has a dual soul.
On one side the maison close , the kingdom of bourgeois pleasure, on the other public condemnation.
Paris is the capital of desire and shame.
Brothels become secret temples, where sensuality mixes with politics and art.
It was in the French salons that the figure of the modern courtesan was born: free, elegant, influential, but always on the brink of scandal.

Yet, in this dualism, Europe discovers a new concept: pleasure as a civil right, not as a criminal offense.

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North and South: two Europes, two bodies

While the North regulates and studies, the South prays and hides.
In Italy and Spain, Catholic morality maintains strict control over the body.
Brothels exist, but they pretend to be invisible.
Prostitutes become “women of sin,” isolated, condemned, but tolerated at night.
The double standard reaches its peak: publicly one denies, privately one seeks.

In the North, the woman who works with her body is seen as part of the economy.
In the South, as a threat to the soul.
The cultural divide creates a two-tiered perception of sex work in Europe.
In Holland and Germany they discuss contracts, in the Mediterranean they discuss forgiveness.
But beneath the surface, everywhere, the body continues to speak the same language: that of need and desire.

The history of European prostitution is therefore also the story of two moralities that observe each other from afar, judge each other, and imitate each other.
And in this silent dialogue, the female body becomes the mirror of a society that never ceases to oscillate between fear and fascination.

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A Europe of Moral Contrasts: Between Freedom and Hypocrisy

Each era believes itself freer than the previous one, yet Europe remains a prisoner of an ancient contradiction.
On the one hand, the push towards modernity, science, philosophy, the nascent Enlightenment, and on the other, the need to maintain an appearance of purity.
While Amsterdam shows its illuminated windows, London darkens them.
The same Victorian England that preached virtue secretly built an empire of brothels.
France publishes hygiene manuals for maisons closes , while Spain burns them in the streets.

This double register makes sex work in Europe a perfect lens through which to observe the hypocrisies of power.
The more moral a society wants to appear, the more its desires move into the shadows.
This is how secret neighborhoods, codes, and symbols hidden in fans or jewels are born.
Sensuality becomes a coded language, a clandestine art that unites women of pleasure and men of power in a game of silent recognition.

But beneath the surface, something is really changing.
The Enlightenment introduced a revolutionary thought: pleasure as a natural right.
No longer a sin, but part of the human experience.
Philosophers speak of the freedom of the body as an extension of the freedom of the soul.
And even if the practice remains regulated or hidden, the concept ignites: the body begins to reclaim its own voice.

In this fragile balance between shop windows and confessionals, between rules and desire, Europe is preparing—perhaps unknowingly—for its greatest transformation: one that, in the centuries to come, will bring pleasure from the margins to the center of social discourse.

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Hygiene, health and dignity

With the birth of modern medicine, the debate changed tone.
In the 19th century, doctors and legislators began to talk about “public health.”
The prostitute's body is no longer just a sin or necessity, but a health risk.
The first campaigns for hygiene regulation are born: inspections, certificates, registers.
Behind the coldness of the documents, however, a new principle can be glimpsed: protection.
The State, in wanting to control, also begins to recognize.

It is at this moment that dignity timidly enters the discussion.
The woman who works for pleasure is no longer seen only as a source of danger, but as a social subject.
We talk about assistance, protection, even education.
Europe is beginning to understand that the body is not just the body, but citizenship.
An idea that would only find full expression centuries later, but which was born here, among doctors with notebooks and women who signed with an ink imprint.

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The body as a thermometer of freedom

From Dutch tolerance to German rule, from French maisons closes to Italian alleys, Europe has built its moral identity through the way it has viewed pleasure.
Every law on the body is, ultimately, a law on freedom.
The more a society can fearlessly name desire, the more advanced it is; the more it censors it, the more it is trapped by its own dogmas.

Sex work in Europe has been, and still is, a thermometer of civilization:
measures the degree of maturity with which a culture knows how to coexist with its own instincts.
From the 17th century to today, the lights of Amsterdam have remained on not only on the canals, but on the conscience of an entire continent.
And while other countries turn a blind eye, those windows continue to shine as a reminder:
that freedom, like desire, is not preached — it is practiced.

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Global Evolution: From the Twentieth Century to the Rights Revolution

The 20th century is a luminous crack in the history of pleasure.
A century of contrasts, in which the female body went from being an object of exchange to a symbol of freedom, amid wars, revolutions, and changing perspectives.
The evolution of sex work around the world begins right here: where survival meets dignity, where desire is not extinguished, but transformed.
It is an age in which everything is overturned, even the skin of sin.

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The fracture of the 20th century

The two world wars shattered the world and, with it, morality.
The cities are in ruins, the husbands are distant or dead, the houses are empty.
The women remain, and with them hunger, necessity, and strength.
In France, Germany, and Italy, prostitutes become mothers, widows, shelters, and support.
Many sell themselves for a piece of bread, others to save their children.
Prostitution returns to being, as in the time of Ishtar, a gesture of survival, but also a silent cry: I exist .
In the post-war period, brothels fill up with uniforms and wounds, and society once again learns to use and judge the same body.

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Paris, Berlin, New York: the modernity of desire

Then comes the light. The 1920s.
Paris shines like an impure diamond.
The Moulin Rouge , the dance halls, the artistic brothels where the muses wear perfumes and lace like armor.
Josephine Baker dances half-naked among feathers and freedom: the body returns to being language, spectacle, revolution.

In Berlin , however, modernity has the face of chaos.
In the Weimar Republic, the city is teeming with cabarets, transvestites, and androgynous bodies.
The artists immortalize a humanity that strips bare to tell its story.
There, for the first time, sex work isn't just a job: it's identity, rebellion, social theater.

And in New York , during Prohibition, women worked behind the scenes in underground clubs.
No red neon, just smoke, whiskey and pent-up desire.
Pleasure becomes a refined commodity, almost a shared secret.

The century of machines and psychoanalysis transforms pleasure into self-analysis.
And everywhere, from Paris to Manhattan, the shadow of brothels continues to breathe, waiting for a new name.

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From clandestinity to rebellion

The 50s and 60s open a new chapter.
In Italy, the Merlin Law of 1958 closed brothels, promising freedom but leaving only silence.
Prostitutes disappear from the legal streets to appear on the clandestine ones.
The state forgets them, society judges them, but desire cannot be erased by a decree.

Meanwhile, something is changing in the world.
Women talk about feminism, the right to pleasure, and sexual freedom.
Sex workers are starting to look in the mirror and tell themselves that they no longer want to be just “objects” or “victims”.
A new language is born, a collective awareness:

“Our body is ours. And it doesn't ask for forgiveness.”

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The “Révolte des prostituées” – 1975

France, June 1975.
In Lyon , hundreds of women occupy the church of Saint-Nizier.
They don't pray, they protest.
They are not asking for salvation, but respect.
Among the benches and the lit candles, they shout:

“Nous sommes des femmes, pas des criminalelles.”
“Nous voulons travailler en paix.”

It is the Révolte des prostituées , the first political cry of modern sex work.
For a week, the streets fill with journalists, onlookers, priests and policemen.
The women show up with their faces uncovered, holding signs and wearing lipstick.
It's a huge gesture: the beginning of sexual self-determination.
The evolution of sex work around the world begins here, amid the dust of a church and the pride of those who no longer want to hide.

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The birth of global movements

After France, the flame crosses the ocean.
SWOP – Sex Workers Outreach Project , the first organization in the world to speak openly about sex work rights, was founded in the United States in 1979.
From there, networks, alliances, and conferences are born.
Women and men, trans people and migrants, find a common ground where the word sex work becomes synonymous with dignity.

In the 90s, with the advent of the Internet , the profession changed face again.
Brothels go virtual, shop windows digital.
Pleasure enters the screens: ads, chats, webcams, freedom and control merge.
For the first time in history, sex workers can speak directly to their clients, without intermediaries.
It's a new silent revolution—technological, erotic, economic.

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The Netherlands and the revolution of 2000

The new millennium opens with an act of courage.
In 2000 , the Netherlands officially legalized sex work .

Amsterdam, the city of red lights, becomes a social laboratory and a mirror of a civilization that is not afraid to look desire in the eye.
Shop windows don't hide, they show.
Behind the frosted glass, women and men work safely, protected by laws, insurance, and health checks.
Pleasure enters public administration, and becomes a profession.

There is no shortage of controversy: many accuse the system of being cold, bureaucratic, even dehumanizing.
But one fact remains: for the first time, a state treats pleasure as work, not as guilt.

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The contradictions of progress

Every step forward has its price.
In Northern European countries, regulation protects but controls.
In Sweden and Norway, the client is punished rather than the worker, but the stigma remains.
In the United States, sex work remains largely criminalized; in Asia, it is often confused with exploitation and trafficking.
In the middle, hypocrisy: everyone consumes it, few defend it.

Yet, even in contradiction, history moves forward.
Rights campaigns, sex-positive festivals, and international conferences are giving rise to a new language: that of conscious pleasure.
The body becomes an instrument of freedom, not of condemnation.
And behind every illuminated shop window or protest poster, there is the same idea:
Sexual freedom is part of human freedom.

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The Legacy of the 20th Century

At the end of the century, the world looks back and finds itself changed.
The prostitutes of Lyon, the dancers of Berlin, the American activists, the girls of Amsterdam: each has left a mark.
The twentieth century gave a voice to those who had none, but it did not erase prejudice.
It has transformed pleasure into a right, but it has not yet healed the wound of stigma.

The evolution of sex work around the world is still an ongoing journey.
It is not just a story of bodies and laws, but of languages, of humanity, of courage.
Every battle won — in Paris, Amsterdam, or New York — is a fragment of freedom won for all.

And perhaps this is the true lesson of the century:
that one cannot talk about civilization without talking about how a country treats pleasure.
The body, in its nakedness and in its choice, remains the most sincere thermometer of freedom.
And the world, even when it pretends not to look, continues to learn from those who dare to show themselves.

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The digital age and the new invisible revolution

The quietest revolution is the one that happens in the cold light of a screen.
In the space of a few years, the world has changed—and with it, desire.
Digital sex work hasn't erased sensuality, it's displaced it.

No longer in the alleys or brothels, but in chats, in feeds, in virtual rooms where the body becomes light and code.

Pleasure, today, is written in golden pixels.
And behind every image, there is a story of freedom that begins anew.

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From the physical body to the virtual body

It all began in the 90s, with the arrival of the first slow and noisy connections.
The Internet opens a gap in the way we communicate, desire, and show ourselves.
The first erotic chats and forums become clandestine places of freedom: there, the body is no longer flesh, but language.
Words are stripped before people.
Pleasure becomes connection, exchange, performance.

For many women (and men), digital sex work arises as a form of emancipation: the ability to choose how, when, and how much to show themselves.
The body returns to being private property, managed personally.
No middlemen, no roads, no pimps.
Just a screen, a connection and the will to exist.

In the 2000s, the phenomenon exploded:
Cam work sites are born, spaces where nudity becomes interactive art, and presence becomes a gift calibrated to the second.
It's a new grammar of desire, in which intimacy comes at a price, but the feeling of authenticity remains intact.
The public doesn't just buy a body, but the chance to feel seen.

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The first platforms: from cam work to identity

Unlike physical brothels, the digital world is liquid.
It changes shape, adapts, mutates with every update.
Cam work was born as an artisanal gesture, then transformed into an industry.
LED lights replace street lamps, nicknames take the place of proper names.
But behind every username there remains a real soul, one that tries to reconcile desire and dignity.

Many digital sex workers say they have found a space of control on the web:
they decide the limits, the times, the prices.
They manage their image like a business, with an awareness that was previously denied.
Pleasure becomes a business, but also a political manifesto:
the body as a startup, desire as a brand.

From here a new way of working is born: no longer victims of the system, but protagonists of their own narrative.
In this new dimension, shame transforms into aesthetics, taboo into language.
And eroticism returns to being visual intelligence.

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OnlyFans and the democratization of sensuality

In 2016, OnlyFans arrived and changed everything.
For the first time in history, anyone can create their own sensual, elegant, explicit, or artistic space to monetize directly with the public.
No agency, no filter.
Digital sex work enters mainstream culture.

Models, performers, couples, but also artists and photographers use the platform as an extension of themselves.
The line between creator and sex worker is blurring.
The body returns to being personal territory, but also a collective language.

OnlyFans marks the democratization of sensuality.
Anyone can express themselves, as long as they know how to tell their story.
And in its most authentic version, the platform is not pornography, but erotic self-narration: the freedom to manage one's image without intermediaries.

It is an aesthetic and sociological revolution.
Because behind every profile there is not just a body, but a mind that decides how to show itself.
It is sensuality that comes back to speak for itself.

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Sex work as self-entrepreneurship

In the new millennium, the evolution of digital sex work takes on an economic dimension.
No longer direct exchange, but micro-economies of desire.
Each creator manages subscriptions, marketing, and community.
A new figure is born: the sexpreneur , the entrepreneur of pleasure.

Platforms like Fansly, ManyVids, or Patreon are becoming ecosystems where the body is just one element of the personal brand.
The real commodity is identity: authentic, curated, communicated with precision.
Desire turns into storytelling.

For many women, this is the first time they have earned more than their employers.
They manage finances, plan content, and maintain aesthetics and reputation.
Sensuality becomes a digital profession.
And freedom, this time, comes in the form of a dashboard.

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Digital consent and new freedoms

With freedom comes new rules.
In the virtual world, consent becomes contract, boundaries are redrawn.
Every photo, every video, every word shared online is a conscious choice, but also a risk.
Pleasure opens up to the world, but it can be recorded, copied, stolen.

Thus the concept of digital ethics of desire was born.
Consent is not just a “yes,” but a shared language.
We talk about digital aftercare , about mutual respect between those who create and those who watch.
It's a fine balance between exposure and vulnerability, between freedom and responsibility.

Pleasure, today, also means knowing where your own skin ends and that of others begins.

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New frontiers of intimacy

Digital sex work is no longer just about selling the body, but about managing intimacy.
In a world where everything is visible, what remains invisible becomes precious.
Privacy turns into luxury, mystery into desire.

Sociologists and anthropologists speak of a “new media intimacy”: a form of connection where pleasure is not only physical, but narrative.
Users aren't just looking for bodies, they're looking for stories.
They want authenticity, connection, looks that seem real.

It is the birth of pleasure as contemporary freedom : a conscious desire, which combines eroticism and respect.
Sensuality returns to having an aesthetic: less exposure, more suggestion.
A return to elegance, to slowness, to the thoughtful gesture.

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The Return of the Aesthetic Body: Pleasure as Contemporary Art

In an age of algorithms and filters, true luxury is naturalness.
The imperfect body returns to the forefront, as a unique and unrepeatable work of art.

New digital photographers and performers—from Berlin to Tokyo—reinterpret desire as an aesthetic form: skin as canvas, light as language.
Pleasure as contemporary freedom is expressed in golden tones, minimal spaces, silk details and shadow.
It is a slow, cultured, spiritual eroticism.

Elegance replaces pornography, awareness replaces provocation.
It is soft luxury that becomes philosophy: a sensuality that thinks, respects, and inspires.

In this new imaginary, digital sex work is not a taboo: it is an art form.
And like all art, it speaks of beauty, vulnerability and freedom.

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From the Temple of Ishtar to the digital

From the ancient Temple of Ishtar to the digital lights of the 21st century, the history of sex work around the world is the history of freedom itself.
The priestesses, the courtesans, the activists, the creators: all daughters of the same line of fire.
Each era has changed the tools, but not the meaning.

Pleasure remains a universal language, and the body its alphabet.
Today, the skin is virtual, but the struggle is the same:
to be seen, understood, respected.

Digital sex work is the new frontier of the modern sacred: an invisible temple, built of light and choice.
And perhaps, right there, lies the most ancient truth of Eros:
that freedom is not a gift, but an act of courage, even when done in front of a screen.

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Focus Italy — From Unification to the Merlin Law: Control, Morality, and Pleasure Up to ATECO Code 96.99.92

Italy was born in 1861 amidst the ringing of bells and the rustling of corsets.
It is a young country, eager to show itself modern, but still chained to its own ghosts.
The streets of Turin, Florence, Naples—the first capitals—smell of coal, cologne, and repressed desire.
Behind the closed windows of bourgeois buildings, one can glimpse the shadows of women who belong to no one, but who everyone seeks.
They are the “public women”, registered, monitored, necessary and condemned.

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The Cavour Regulation and the birth of control

Immediately after Unification, the State decided that prostitution could not be eliminated, but only regulated.
The Cavour Regulation (1860-1868) was born: every woman who worked in the profession had to be registered, examined by a doctor, and registered with the police.
The female body becomes a file, a number, an administrative act.
It is the birth of health and moral control as an instrument of government.

Houses of tolerance were only authorized in certain areas, far from schools but close to military quarters and ports.
We talk about “public hygiene,” but what we really want is to keep desire under surveillance.
Male freedom disguises itself as civil order.

The double standards of the new Italy

In the heart of the cities, bourgeois respectability is based on a lie: an honest man is such only because someone else gets dirty for him.
Prostitutes are the necessary shadow of virtue.
The newspapers call them “infected,” but their clients are judges, lawyers, officials, priests.

The diaries of health inspectors tell of women who show up for checks wearing white gloves and with their eyes downcast, knowing that their freedom is worth a doctor's stamp.
Every week, the visit is mandatory.
Anyone who refuses is admitted to hospital.
The state measures morality as it measures fever.

Sacred and sin: Italy that preaches and condemns

No other European country combines faith and guilt so intensely.
The Catholic Church, while not governing, exercises an invisible power.
The “fallen” women must atone, the “redeemed” must serve.
Refuge-convents are born, where charity is a form of silence.

Sunday sermons speak of virginity, but in the trattorias the soldiers recount their nights with the "regulars", those who pay taxes like any shopkeeper.
United Italy is a country that confuses morality with fear.
And sex work becomes the boundary on which the distance between hypocrisy and truth is measured.

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The cities of desire

Turin is cold, industrial, rational.
Brothels for army officers and factory workers spring up on its avenues.
Naples , on the other hand, is popular and vibrant: the “women of Via Toledo” sing, negotiate, survive.
Rome , with its palaces and convents, becomes the symbol of paradox: a holy and profane city at the same time.

In every place, prostitution reflects the character of the city.
In Turin it is discipline, in Naples it is theatre, in Rome it is contradiction.
All of Italy is reflected in those rooms.

Literature and Seduction: The Body in Art

The twentieth century was born in the scent of ink and musk.
Writers like D'Annunzio transform pleasure into aesthetics: the courtesan becomes a muse, transgression becomes elegance.
But even the verists, such as Verga and De Roberto , describe the female body as a commodity and a condemnation.
The prostitute becomes a symbol of Italy itself: poor, beautiful, desired, exploited.

In the bourgeois living room as in the trattoria, pleasure is everywhere, but always hidden.
The brothels have gentle names: “The Golden Waterfall,” “The Blue Rose.”
Behind those doors, Italy searches for itself: its own fragility, its own hunger, its lost innocence.

The bureaucracy of pleasure

As the decades passed, the Cavour Regulation was refined.
Each city has its own register of “women in public service”.
Enrollments are increasing, visits are becoming more stringent, and timetables are becoming more stringent.
It is the mechanization of desire: the body reduced to a category.

Local authorities are starting to talk about “urban decorum”.
The brothels are moved to the margins, hidden under neutral signs: “Pensione Italia”, “Casa di riposo Luce Serena”.
But the light is never clear for those who live in the shadow of the law.

First voices of rebellion

At the end of the 19th century, women's and socialist movements began to talk about dignity.
The first female journalists and activists denounce the condition of “registered women”.
They demand that morality not only be imposed on the poor.
We talk about education, rights, health.
It is the beginning of a silent revolution, which will only find its voice decades later.

Between freedom and shame

As the country industrialises, cities grow and pleasure changes shape.
Women move from private rooms to cafes, theaters, cabarets.
The figure of the cocotte was born, sophisticated and independent.
Prostitution approaches art and fashion.

Yet the shame remains.
No law protects sex workers, no one recognizes their voice.
They are tolerated as necessities, but erased as people.

Italy, which boasts of having united the country, fails to unite body and spirit, desire and respect.
Sex work remains invisible, but indispensable.
And in this invisibility, women learn to talk to each other, to recognize each other, to resist.

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Towards modernity

On the eve of the twentieth century, the moral question transforms into a social question.
Doctors discuss illnesses, politicians discuss decency, but women continue to work.
Houses of tolerance become part of the urban economy: taxed, controlled, exploited.

In some cities, “model homes” are being built, with hygiene rules, elegant furnishings, and strict timetables.
They are showcase brothels for a country that wants to appear modern without actually being so.
France talks about freedom, the Netherlands about rights, but Italy prefers modesty as a mask.

Behind the frosted glass, the women listen to the sounds of the new world:
the machines, the factories, the first automobiles.
They know something is changing, but they don't know what yet.

The history of Italian sex work enters the twentieth century with a veil of powder and sadness: beautiful, aware, but not yet free.

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From Fascism to the Merlin Law: The Closure of Brothels

Italy in the 1930s shines with parades, uniforms, and illusions of order.
The female body is transformed into a political instrument: mother, wife, symbol of the Fatherland.
But behind the illuminated balconies of Rome, another body lives in the shadows—that of women who belong to no one but their own destiny.
They are the “tolerated”, registered, controlled, invisible.
While the Duce preaches morality, in the suburbs and provincial cities, brothels operate in silence.

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The body under the regime

Houses of tolerance were regulated, hygienic, and orderly spaces. Each woman had a health record and a registration number. They paid taxes, lived under surveillance, yet were denied all rights. They were considered "necessary to morality," as officials of the time wrote, but unworthy of existing.

Brothels become a cog in the road to public order:

– they separate virtue from vice,

– they guarantee the peace of husbands,

– offer soldiers a controlled diversion.

In the name of morality, a system is being built that legitimizes the nation's double life:

In the square, chastity is celebrated, but at night, sins are paid for.

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The hypocrisy of “regulated pleasure”

Fascist brothels are closed microcosms, with strict rules.
Doors open at six in the afternoon and close at midnight.
The curtains remain ajar, music comes from old gramophones, and each room has a distinct smell of soap, tobacco, and cologne.

Customers enter silently, often in uniform.
Outside, a neutral sign: “Housing House”.
Inside, a world suspended between pain and dignity.
Many women come from the South, attracted by promises of work or fleeing poverty.
Others are single mothers, widows, forgotten wives.

The law calls them “servants of pleasure,” but society considers them guilty.
The body, once again, becomes a duty, never a choice.
Yet, within the walls of those rooms, a form of silent sisterhood survives:
women protect each other, share the little they have, tell each other about the lives they would have liked.

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War and hunger

With the Second World War, everything falls apart.
The bombed cities, the hunger, the men at the front.
The soldier's ladies become everyday figures: women who offer their bodies in exchange for bread, cigarettes, protection.
There is no morality anymore, only survival.

Foreign troops leave behind children, disease, and collective shame.
The authorities try to restore order, but the line between necessity and desire dissolves.
The female body, once again, becomes a battlefield.

After the war, the brothels reopened more alive than ever.
Poverty drives many women to seek refuge there: at least, within those walls, there is a bed, a hot meal and some safe banknotes.
Pleasure becomes a parallel economy for a country that rebuilds itself with its hands and skin.

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Lina Merlin: the woman who dared to say enough

In 1948, in an Italy that declared itself republican and democratic, a socialist senator raised her voice: Lina Merlin .
A Venetian teacher, a survivor of fascist prison, decides to tackle the ultimate taboo.
She proposes the definitive closure of brothels and the end of the system that registered and branded women.

The debates in Parliament are fierce.
Many men accuse her of wanting to “destroy morality,” others mock her.
She answers calmly and lucidly:

“A just society cannot be founded on the humiliation of a part of it.”

In 1958, after ten years of battles, the Merlin Law was approved.
Brothels close, license plates disappear, women are free.
But freedom has a price.

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Liberation and Stigma

Former prostitutes are left alone.
No financial support, no legal protection.
Many return to their countries of origin, others end up on the streets.
Sex work isn't disappearing: it's moving into the shadows.

Italy in the 1960s presents itself as modern, but continues to judge.
The same women who were registered yesterday are now invisible.
Nobody talks about them anymore, as if they never existed.
It is “liberation without recognition”: the law liberates bodies, but does not redeem them in the eyes of society.

The press speaks of “order restored”, but new forms of clandestine prostitution are appearing in the suburbs.
Health rules disappear and risks increase.
Pleasure, once again, is dressed in shame.

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The body in cinema and memory

In the 1950s and 1960s, cinema became the mirror of this contradiction.

Fellini , with Nights of Cabiria , tells the tenderness and loneliness of a Roman prostitute who dreams of love.

In his films, Pasolini portrays the women of the suburbs as sacred and profane figures, victims and mothers of the people.

The body returns to being a narrative, a poem, a denunciation. Italian culture can no longer pretend that desire doesn't exist.
Every scene, every novel, every newspaper article speaks, even indirectly, of those forgotten women.
Sex work enters the collective memory as a sweet and necessary wound: impossible to erase, too intimate to be denied.

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Imperfect freedom

The Merlin Law remains, even today, one of the most debated in Italian history.
For many, it was an act of civility; for others, a mistake that only shifted the problem.
But no one can deny its symbolic value:
For the first time, the State recognized that female dignity cannot be regulated by a price list.

Behind every locked room, behind every name erased from the records, remain the stories of thousands of women who crossed the Italian night to reach freedom.
A fragile, imperfect, but real freedom.

And if today we talk about "recognition of sex work", it is also because Lina Merlin dared to challenge an entire country with a simple and luminous phrase:

“A woman is not an instrument. She is a person.”

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The Years of Silence: Street Prostitution and New Marginalization

When brothels were closed down by the Merlin Law in 1958, it was naively thought that prostitution would disappear.
In reality, it moved only a few meters: from the rooms to the sidewalks. In the 1960s, along the city avenues and in industrial zones, new female figures appeared—young mothers, widows, women who had migrated from the South—seeking a way to survive in an Italy undergoing reconstruction.
The body returned to the streets, but this time without protection, without rules, without walls. Where once there had been velvet curtains and closed doors, now there were headlights, cold, and fear.

In the 1970s, while Italian society was slowly emancipating itself, sex workers remained on the margins.
There was talk of sexual freedom, but not theirs. Magazines dared, actresses stripped on the big screen, but those who sold sex in real life became invisible.
Yet, behind that invisibility, something new was born: awareness. Some began to define themselves as sex workers , rejecting words like "prostitute" or "whore." No longer an object, but a subject. No longer shame, but a profession.

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Woodstock, hippies and the body revolution

In 1969, at Woodstock, hundreds of thousands of kids danced naked in the rain, singing that love was freedom.
That symbolic moment, amplified by the media and music, became the beating heart of the global sexual revolution .
The hippie movement preached free love, nudity as a natural language, the rejection of possessions and moral hypocrisy.

Italy, more traditional and Catholic, viewed that world with curiosity and fear. But something changed here too: young people began to talk about sex without shame, to experience intimacy as exploration, not as sin.
Libertine culture became contagious: from magazine covers to “scandalous” films, eros entered everyday life.

We cannot say that the hippie movement “embraced sex workers” because its ideal was free and spiritual love, but the new mentality it brought into the world opened the doors to a more uninhibited society .
Those who sought pleasure no longer did so in the shadow of guilt, and sex work became, at least culturally, more tolerated.
Italy was learning to desire without asking for forgiveness.

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The 1990s–2000s: Italy and the Face of Globalization

With the end of the Cold War and the opening of the borders, Italian cities changed face.
Women from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America appeared on the streets. They brought different accents, difficult stories, but the same hope: to build a freedom that their countries didn't offer.
Sex work thus became a transnational phenomenon, intertwined with migration, poverty, and illegal trafficking. The media spoke of a "prostitution emergency," but the real emergency was the lack of rights.

The state remained immobile. No reform of the Merlin Law, no legal recognition, only municipal ordinances for "urban decorum."
He repressed himself, but he did not protect himself.
Yet, amidst the noise of traffic and general indifference, networks of solidarity were beginning to form.
Italian and foreign women helped each other, sharing spaces, fears, and dreams.
The first street associations and listening centers were born, and for many it was the first time that someone called them by name.

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Pia Covre and Carla Corso: When Voice Becomes Political

In the mid-1980s, two women decided to break the silence. Pia Covre and Carla Corso , former sex workers, founded the Committee for Prostitutes' Rights .
It was an act of courage and truth. They spoke in the squares, at conferences, in the courts.
They denounced the violence, but also the double standards: the one that forgives the client and condemns the woman.
Their message was clear: we don't ask for pity, we ask for respect. We don't ask to disappear, but to be recognized.

The debate heated up. Radical feminism accused prostitution of perpetuating patriarchy; secular feminism responded that true freedom lies in choosing, even to sell pleasure.
From that comparison a new language was born: sex work as a space for self-determination .
For the first time in Italy, the female body was no longer just a place of sin or redemption, but of rights and identity .

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The Internet and the revolution of desire

Then came the Internet, and with it an earthquake.
In the 2000s, the first classifieds sites offered sex workers the opportunity to work independently. No middlemen, no exploiters. Just a computer, a room, and the freedom to choose.
With social media and platforms like OnlyFans , sex work entered a new era: one of visibility and autonomy .

For the first time, digital prostitution offered a platform for independence and creativity.
The workers chose how to show themselves, how much to show, how to tell their story.
Pleasure became aesthetics and language , a way to reclaim the body and restore its dignity.
But the web also brought new forms of censorship: shadowbans, account closures, banking discrimination.
Freedom, once again, had to be won every day.

With the spread of the internet, many sex workers chose to leave the streets to work in greater safety, in their own apartments.
Through ad and review platforms like Escort Advisor, they could independently manage their encounters, select clients, and set rules and limits.
For the first time in history, even desire had its reviews: stories, judgments, shared experiences that transformed intimacy into public language.

It was a new form of freedom, fragile but real, an independence that passed through a screen, between desire and security, visibility and risk.

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ATECO Code 96.99.92: the breach in the system

In 2024, after decades of waiting, something historic happens.
Italy introduces the ATECO Code 96.99.92 , which officially recognizes entertainment and accompaniment activities.
For the first time, sex workers can open a VAT number , pay contributions, and declare their earnings.
A seemingly bureaucratic gesture, but in reality revolutionary: the State admits that pleasure can also be work, and that those who practice it are not economic ghosts.

It's a silent revolution.

It means coming out of hiding, being able to seek healthcare, access services, and claim rights.
It means, above all, saying: “I exist.”
Gray areas remain, but tax recognition is a crack in the wall of prejudice.
After sixty years of shadows, Italy is taking a step towards reality: sex work is not a moral anomaly, but a human, economic and cultural dimension .

And while the State begins to recognize what has been denied for centuries, the Church remains the silent guardian of an ancient fear of the body, a spectator of a world that finally dares to name it.

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The Body as Language: Media, Art, and Freedom

In recent years, cinema, photography and literature have rediscovered the figure of the sex worker as a protagonist, no longer as an object of scandal but as an icon of resilience and identity .
From Tinto Brass's films to Letizia Battaglia's intimate photographs, from digital performers to contemporary queer artists, the body once again becomes word.
Sex work becomes an aesthetic narrative , a meeting ground between eros and culture, between pleasure and power.

In this new sensibility, Italian sensuality rediscovers its ancient heritage: the body as an art form, the caress as a language, freedom as destiny.
Today, talking about prostitution in Italy no longer means talking only about streets or exploitation, but about autonomy, expression and rights .

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From the sacred to the sensual, freedom as an Italian heritage

Perhaps the true story of sex work in Italy is the story of a country that has always lived in balance between desire and morality.
From Roman vestals to movie stars, from provincial brothels to digital profiles, every era has attempted to control pleasure, but has never been able to erase it.
Today, with legal recognition and social awareness, pleasure returns to being what it has always been: a form of knowledge and freedom .

And perhaps, in the golden glow of an Italian street at sunset, one can glimpse the true image of change:
a woman walking alone, with a confident step, wrapped in a golden light.
No more shadow, no more sin.
Only freedom.

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ATECO code 96.99.92: what's changing today?

There comes a time when even silent revolutions deserve to be put into writing.
For years, sex work remained suspended between what was known and what could not be said.
Today, however, a cold, numerical acronym 96.99.92 marks a small step forward on the long road to recognition.
It is the ATECO sex work code , and behind those numbers lies something deeper: the possibility of existing even in the eyes of the State, of being visible without having to justify oneself.

Who would have ever thought that pleasure would one day have its own economic code?

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What does having an ATECO code really mean?

First of all, let's clarify what it is.
The ATECO code is the classification used by the Revenue Agency to identify every economic activity in Italy.
It's used to say: "this is my profession, this is my job."
And when we talk about the ATECO sex work code , the definition is clear: “Activities providing services for adults, accompaniment and entertainment of an erotic or emotional nature”.

It's not a moral green light.
It is not a law that “authorizes prostitution”.
It's an administrative act, a form of tax recognition: it means you can open a VAT number , declare your earnings and pay contributions like any other freelancer.
In short, the State doesn't judge. It simply acknowledges that you exist, and that your work has economic value.

And if until recently this seemed impossible, today it is reality.
The bureaucracy that for years has been frightening suddenly becomes an open door.
Because yes, even pleasure deserves to be in order.

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Who is it for and who can use it?

Code 96.99.92 covers all activities related to erotic entertainment and adult companionship.
But you don't have to work on the street or in a club to fall within this category: the definition is broad, and also includes digital work.

Who can use it, practically?

– Anyone who offers escort or private entertainment services , independently and consensually.

– Someone who works online as a cam girl, performer, or model .

– Anyone who creates sensual content on digital platforms such as OnlyFans, Fansly, Patreon, or similar.

– Those who offer erotic massages or sensual wellness experiences , in compliance with local regulations.

In other words, it is an administrative framework within which many different forms of sex work fall.
Whether you experience sensuality as an art, communication, or profession, this code allows you to break out of the gray area and give your work a clear identity.

Digitalization has changed everything: today, sex work moves between the real and the virtual, between a monthly subscription and a private performance.
The 96.99.92 code recognizes just this: that pleasure, like any art form, evolves.

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Why we're talking about it today

Why now yes, and before no?
Because pleasure has emerged from the shadow of moralism and entered the light of digital transparency.
In recent years, Italy—like many European countries—has witnessed an exponential growth in online sex work.
Platforms have made visible people, bodies, and desires that previously lived hidden.
And when visibility grows, the state must adapt.

The recognition of sex work in Italy isn't the result of a sudden political gesture, but of an undeniable economic reality: those who work with sensuality generate income, pay taxes, and contribute to the system.
It was inevitable that sooner or later an official form would arrive to frame this activity.

Today, thanks to the ATECO code 96.99.92, a sex worker can declare her income, access social security rights, and live with greater peace of mind.
Of course, it's not yet total "legalization," but it's an acknowledgement: sex work exists , and the state can no longer pretend nothing is happening.

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A new form of transparency

For many, opening a VAT number is a huge step.
It means stopping hiding, choosing to come clean.
It's a gesture of trust in oneself, even before trusting the law.

When you declare your work, you also declare your identity: “Yes, this is me, and this is what I do.”
There's no more need to pretend, or find excuses or cover names.
The ATECO code 96.99.92 allows us to put down on paper a profession that, for too long, has been confined to silence.

And the most interesting thing?
That all this is not just about taxation.
It is also a symbolic revolution : for the first time, pleasure is treated as a legitimate dimension of the economy.
A sex worker is no longer a marginalized figure, but an autonomous professional with rights and duties.

Imagine the scene: a contract, an invoice, a golden signature on a document.
Behind those seemingly bureaucratic gestures lies a powerful truth, that of those who have decided to no longer feel guilty for their own freedom.

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The symbolic value of recognition

Every step towards the light has its weight.
This code is not just an economic acronym: it is a cultural message.
He says that the body is no longer a secret, but a possibility.
That desire can be lived, recounted, and even registered with the Revenue Agency without shame.

In a country where public and private morality have always clashed, the recognition of sex work in Italy represents a breakthrough.
It doesn't solve everything, but it opens up a new space.
A space where the words "freedom" and "professionalism" can finally coexist.

Being fiscally recognized does not mean losing sensuality or authenticity.
It simply means being able to say, “My work has value, and I have nothing to hide.”

And even if some continue to judge, the numbers speak for themselves: those who regularize their status contribute, grow, and build.
And above all, breathe.

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So far we have explained what the ATECO code 96.99.92 represents, where it comes from and what changes on a symbolic level.
But in practice, how does it work?
What do you need to open a VAT number?
How do you choose your tax regime, contributions, or earnings management?

Before getting into the heart of these aspects, a small clarification — important, and necessary.

“What you will read is not tax advice, but a journey of awareness.
The information we share comes from public and official sources, such as the Italian Revenue Agency, but every personal choice requires the support of a professional.
We don't give financial advice here: we give voice to freedom."

And now, we can move on to the more practical part, the one that answers the most frequently asked questions from those who, perhaps like you, are wondering how to truly regularize their situation.
Because freedom, sometimes, starts with a form.
And from a signature written with a firm hand and a light heart.

Freedom, limits and new opportunities

There comes a moment when freedom stops being just a dream and becomes a form to fill out.
It may seem unpoetic, but behind every signature there is an act of faith: in oneself, in one's work, in the possibility of existing without fear.
The ATECO sex work code is precisely this: a way to say "I'm here, and I choose to do it transparently."

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How it works in practice

Opening a VAT number as a sex worker is easier than it seems, even if the word "bureaucracy" can be scary.
In reality, the process is straightforward: a few steps, some documents, and the choice of putting your name on it or, if you prefer, your stage name.

1. Opening a VAT number

It can be done online through the Revenue Agency website, or with the help of an accountant.
The code to indicate is 96.99.92 , which identifies “adult service activities: accompaniment, entertainment”.
With that choice, the state knows that your business belongs to a specific, taxable category.
You don't need a physical location or a sign.
You can work from home, rent, or work on the go: what matters is autonomy, not location.

2. Choosing the tax regime

Most professionals opt for the flat-rate scheme , designed for those with earnings of up to 85,000 euros per year as of today, October 2025.
It's the simplest system: you pay a reduced tax, calculated on a percentage of your turnover (not the entire amount), and you pay contributions in a facilitated manner.
In practice, everything you earn is declared with a streamlined management system, suitable for those who work alone.

3. Taxation and contributions

In the flat-rate regime, taxation is based on a percentage established by the state, a way to avoid complicated calculations.
Contributions are paid to INPS and are used to build a pension and access healthcare services.
Yes, even those who work in the pleasure sector can pay contributions and have social security rights: because the body is work, and work is dignity.

4. No physical location requirement

You don't have to have a space, studio, or office.
You can work discreetly, privately, and within the law.
The ATECO code 96.99.92 recognizes individual autonomy, without imposing structural constraints.

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However, it is essential to remember one key point:
In Italy, this code applies only to legal activities.
It does not legalize prostitution in the full sense (which remains prohibited only if organized by third parties, according to art. 3 of the Merlin Law of 1958), but allows the tax regularization of individual and autonomous services , such as escorts or performers, provided that there is no exploitation, recruitment or coordination by others .

In other words, you can declare and manage your business if you work alone, independently, and in full compliance with the consent.
It's the fine line between personal freedom and criminal offense , and it's important to know it to move safely.

And if you're wondering, “Can I use a stage name?”
Yes, many do. You can register your business under a fictitious name, as long as it's clear who manages it for tax purposes.
“Can I remain confidential?”
Yes, you can maintain privacy and discretion by carefully managing your communications and public profile.
“Do I have to issue an invoice?”
Yes, but this too is simple: it's done online, in just a few clicks, and is often just a formality.

You don't need to be an accounting expert.
All that's needed is the will to stop hiding.
Because declaring your work, after all, is also a way to reclaim your freedom .

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The benefits of recognition

Being compliant isn't just a matter of numbers.
It's a matter of respect.

Those who work in pleasure have often had to struggle with the idea that their profession was not “real”.
But the ATECO code 96.99.92 changes this narrative: it allows you to proudly say that you are an independent professional, who produces value and contributes like anyone else.

Once you're in compliance, no one can tell you you're not a professional.
You can rent an apartment without fear, apply for a mortgage, join a pension fund, open a business account, and pay contributions.
In practice, you enter a circuit that recognizes you as a worker, not as a "special case".

And then there is a more subtle, but fundamental, benefit: credibility.
Those who work transparently gain trust, not only with the state, but also with themselves and their community.
Because yes, pleasure no longer takes away seriousness, now it adds to it.
Being professional doesn't extinguish desire: it gives it space, security, awareness.

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The limits and the grey areas

Of course, not everything is solved.
Recognition of sex work in Italy is still partial: the state acknowledges the economic reality, but does not fully regulate it.

The ATECO code 96.99.92 does not protect against discrimination, stigma, or exploitation.
It offers no guarantees in case of attacks, nor specific safety regulations.
Those who work for pleasure remain exposed to social judgements and legislative gaps.

However, it is a step forward.
A first step towards a possible normalization.
The difference between being invisible and having a voice, between suffering and choosing.
“The code does not change morality, but it changes the lives of those who work with the body.”

And if full recognition is still far off, what matters is the direction: the awareness that pleasure is not guilt, and that transparency is a form of freedom.

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Sex work and new digital platforms

Today, sex work isn't just happening between sheets or hotel rooms.
It also lives on screens, in private messages, in online subscriptions.
Platforms like OnlyFans, Fansly, and Patreon have transformed sensuality into a creative economy : a new way of expressing oneself and monetizing desire.

With the ATECO code 96.99.92, all of this finds a clear legal and fiscal form.
You can work from home, create content, receive tracked payments, and declare it like any other digital profession.
Not just bodies, but aesthetics, stories, emotions.
In a certain sense, sex work has become part of the world of creators: artists of pleasure, storytellers of intimacy, professionals of sensual language.

“Today you don’t just sell desire, but storytelling, aesthetics, connection .”
And perhaps this is the future: a conscious pleasure, which does not ask for forgiveness for existing, but which is told with dignity and golden light.

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A new form of tax freedom

Being in compliance is not obeying, it is choosing.
It's saying: “I'm here, and I'm not afraid of being seen.”
The ATECO code does not erase shadows, but illuminates them with a new light, that of awareness.

Behind a code, there is a woman who no longer hides,
but writes its own freedom in golden letters.

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The Future of Sex Work in Italy: From Guilt to Courage

For centuries, pleasure has had the face of guilt.
The women who embodied it were celebrated by night and condemned by day, loved in secret and judged in public.
Sex work has always been the most honest mirror of a society that preaches virtue but consumes desire.

Yet, behind that mask of shame, there has always been courage.
Courage to show yourself, to choose, to survive.
Courage to transform the body into an instrument of freedom, even when the world wanted to silence it.

Today, as we talk about the future of sex work in Italy , we cannot ignore how much the language has changed.
No longer sinners or redemptions, but women, men and people who choose to work with their sensuality, with respect and awareness.
Guilt has become choice, the secret has become word.
And perhaps it is precisely from this silent revolution that the new dignity of pleasure is born.

Courage has never been just a rebellious gesture, it is a form of truth.
And those who live by the truth have no need to hide.

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The body as a political space

Every age has a battlefield.
Ours, today, is the body.

In the body, desire and power, freedom and control, law and pleasure meet.
Working with the body means affirming that flesh is language, that intimacy can be a craft, and that self-determination does not ask for permission.

The future of sex work in Italy will also depend on this: on the ability to recognize that sexual freedom is part of civil liberty.
Every caress is a political statement, every consent is a revolutionary act.
And there is no contradiction in wanting to be both sensual and professional, vulnerable and strong, desirable and aware.

In this sense, sex work is not just about sex, but about power .
Who decides for whom.
Of those who take ownership of their own time and their own skin.
Of those who say: “This is my body, and only I can choose what to do with it.”

Perhaps, then, the real question is not whether sex work is right or wrong.
The question is another: can a society truly call itself free if it still fears pleasure?

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The Italy of the future

Talking about the future of sex work in Italy means looking ahead, but also accepting the complexity of the present.
Today, tax recognition exists, but full legal protection is still lacking.
There are digital platforms that have given a voice and income to thousands of female workers, but also risks related to privacy, abuse, and exploitation.

The future will be one of balance: between freedom and security, between autonomy and protection.
We need clearer rules, but also less judgment.
We will need a new language, capable of describing pleasure without sensationalism or moralism.

In other European countries the path has already been paved.
In the Netherlands, sex work is recognized as a full-fledged profession.
In Germany, there are health and social security benefits.
In Spain, contracts and rights are openly discussed.

And in Italy?
Perhaps the real revolution will not come from a law, but from a change of perspective.
From a generation that doesn't consider pleasure a sin, but a natural part of life.
From a school that teaches consent as education, not as defense.
From a cultural industry that stops ridiculing and starts representing.

The future of sex work in Italy will not only be a political issue, but a human one.
It will be about our ability to look at intimacy without fear, to call things by their name, to recognize dignity where once there was only shame.

Perhaps the next revolution will be one of transparency and tenderness.
Of bodies that don't hide, but communicate.
Of women and men who choose their freedom as they choose a perfume: with care, desire, and awareness.

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A final caress of words

At the end of this journey, a subtle sensation remains, like a perfume that never fades: the awareness that pleasure, before being a right, is a form of existence.

We have lived through centuries of judgments and silences, laws and passions.
We have seen pleasure taxed, regulated, erased.
We saw women transformed into numbers, and numbers that no one could tell anyone about anymore.

And yet here we are, in an age that finally seems willing to listen.
The body is no longer just an object, but a language.
Pleasure is no longer sin, but presence.
And the word “sex work” is no longer a whisper, but a declaration.

There is, however, a lesson that history reminds us with sweet severity:
Every conquest is fragile if it is not defended.
We've had taxes on prostitutes, regulations, brothels recognized and then closed, abolished, forgotten.
Times change, but the risk remains: that of returning to silence, of slipping once again into the unsaid.

In the story of the future of sex work in Italy , this awareness is fundamental.
Because freedom is never definitive, it is a daily act.
A gesture that must be chosen, cared for, defended.

There is a thrill in thinking that this time too we might advance only to then turn back.
But perhaps, and here is where hope arises, we have learned something from our shadows.
We have learned that recognition is not enough: we need culture, we need education, we need to listen.
What is needed is the will to protect, not to tolerate.

“And if, finally, this time the recognition lasted...

What are we willing to do today to defend it?”

We at Lingerie Harness Boutique want to open this conversation with you.
Tell us your thoughts in the comments: what do freedom, recognition, body, choice mean to you?
What direction do you think Italy should take to avoid returning to the shadows?

The future of sex work in Italy will not be written in law, but in the bodies of those who choose to be free.

And perhaps, right from here,
from the truth of those who dare to speak,
that light will be born which, this time, will never go out.