The Oldest Profession
154 W 29th St, Manhattan, NYC
January 4 and February 8, 2025
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| Kaytlin Bailey at Unicorn Bar, Kingston, NY. Photo by Sam Liebert |
At one point in Kaytlin Bailey's solo show
The Oldest Profession, she asserts the importance of changing the story of and around sex work to enacting meaningful change for sex workers, whose contemporary stigmatization and persecution continues a shameful, millennia-long tradition in Western heteropatriarchal cultures. Storytelling is itself an extremely old profession, and scholar Kirsten Pullen has pointed out both that the "trope of the actress/whore pervades histories" of sex work (
Actresses and Whores, 2005, p. 2) and that some women have used the "dual tradition of [the 'prostitute' as] victim and radical to carve a space for female agency" (p. 1).
The Oldest Profession could be seen as taking a place in these histories, with Bailey–a former sex worker and current comedian, writer, host of
The Oldest Profession podcast, founder of the nonprofit
Old Pros, and sex worker rights advocate–guiding the audience through a whirlwind recounting of the shift from the veneration to the marginalization of the "whore" and the long, modulating history of oppression that followed. Having sold out its one-night-only January performance at the PIT (at which Brooklyn-based
Sally Ann Hall performed a brief opening stand-up set including some very funny jokes about canine consent and her husband's unique choice of masturbatory material), this hilarious yet trenchant show will return to the venue for an encore performance in February.
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| Kaytlin Bailey at Unicorn Bar, Kingston, NY. Photo by Sam Liebert |
During the show's opening, Bailey says that it will cover "10,000 years of history from a sex worker's perspective" (while acknowledging, as the storyteller, the influence of her personal social identity markers on chosen examples). However,
The Oldest Profession is more than an entertaining history lesson; it also effectively and sometimes poignantly interweaves a thread about Bailey's relationship with her career-military father. Even as this thread sketches a vivid personal narrative, the juxtaposition between contrasting Western attitudes to pleasure and war and to the "selling" of one's body in either context also buttresses the show's urgent argument for rethinking basic, deep-rooted dominant culture perspectives.
In pursuit of deconstructing such perspectives, Bailey anchors the audience in the present before turning to the ancient past, taking aim at a 2018 bill presented as an attempt to reduce sex trafficking that instead "absolutely wrecked" the sex worker community, pushing sex work further underground and making it more difficult and dangerous–the first in a number of examples of how harm to sex workers has so often been presented as efforts to protect women, including from themselves, rather than, say, the church/state/empire looking out for its own interests (that sex workers that the production focuses on are female or/and queer also says something about dominant power structures across Western history). Over the course of the performance, Bailey touches on the exalted status of ancient fertility goddesses, the dual nature (and early mythological slut shaming) of Ishtar, Mesopotamian goddess of war and sexual love; the banishment of Eve's more liberated predecessor, Lillith, from Eden; the contributions of classical Rome to contemporary misogyny, a role then taken up by the Catholic Church; the (violently) repressive construction and uses of the category of "witch" (explored in detail by Sylvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch [2004] and Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell's How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy's Guide to Silencing Women [2024], among other studies); the later shift from accusations of witchcraft to medicalized pathologization; and more–including the telling fact that the medical establishment didn't bother to learn the actual size of the clitoris until (drumroll) 1998.
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| Kaytlin Bailey at Unicorn Bar, Kingston, NY. Photo by Sam Liebert |
Supplemented by a well-curated slideshow of images–some straightforwardly illustrative, some themselves part of the show's jokes–Bailey is a charismatic and nimble performer, delivering the production's potent blend of insight and critique, anger and humor, mourning and hope with wry authority.
The Oldest Profession underscores the hypocrisy that naturalizes unthinking acceptance of people selling their labor to mass murder in the military, compulsory patriarchal monogamy in marriage, or even wealth-consolidating celibacy in the Catholic Church while demonizing consensual sex work. Bailey says at one point that the dangerous or disrespectful sexual encounters in her life have overwhelmingly come from men who were not paying–it seems, then, that if only society at large could be more like the average sex worker client, everyone might be safer, happier, and better off.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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