Dating Is New & Was Considered Worse than Wh****g

Historically, what we now call dating was treated as lower-status than prostitution. The word “date” itself once meant visiting a prostitute. Then working-class “charity girls” undercut professional sex workers by trading companionship and intimacy for dinners, tickets, clothes, and nights out — a practice contemporaries called treating.

In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins walk through the late-19th / early-20th century shift: cheap urban leisure (nickelodeons, dance halls, Coney Island), taxi dancers as proto-host clubs, shop girls hunting rich bosses, the rebrand of face-painting into “makeup,” the invention of “personality” and the It Girl, and 1920s petting parties...