On Harlots, the Hulu series that just premiered its third season, sex workers run, plot, fuck, scheme, love, stab, and congregate on the streets, pubs, and parlors of 18th-century London.
Whip-smart and faster than a back-alley assignation, the series darts between squalid brothels and high-class Soho parlor rooms where women strike poses from antiquity in revealing togas and powerful clients sample pastel sweets.
With its sheer sensory overload, Harlots’ aesthetic instantly recalls Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. But while Marie Antoinette relished in its anachronisms, Harlots co-creator and writer Moira Buffini is on a mission to do lost and forgotten histories justice, rejecting the staid perspectives of scholars and monarchs to examine life on the societal margins.
“I can sort of tell you who the king was and who the prime minister was, but I’m not really interested,” Buffini told The Daily Beast. “The usual stuff of history just doesn’t interest us. It’s the marginalized people, and the herstory, actually, that does interest us.”
More specifically, Harlots engages with whorestory; Buffini cites Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, an 18th-century guide to the women whose work powered London’s booming sex trade, as an early inspiration for the series. “I read it and thought, this is amazing,” Buffini recalled. “What were these women’s lives like? Here they are, all written about by men. What if we told their stories from their point of view?”
Research led Buffini and co-creator Alison Newman to the discovery that one in every five women was working in the sex industry at that time. Harlots viewers might also be surprised to learn that, contrary to other representations of old-timey England, 18th-century London wasn’t all white.
“That’s such a myth!” Buffini exclaimed. “And that’s one of the parts of London that we particularly loved exploring: multicultural 18th-century London. It was one of the biggest cities in the world at the time. It was the capital of the world, so naturally people came from all over. And we found stories to tell. Not just the stories that you’d expect about the slave trade—we found all sorts of different stories about people of color working as librarians and fencing tutors and all manner of interesting and extraordinary lives that people led.”
Considering how rarely these kinds of stories are given the big-budget treatment, it’s no wonder that Harlots’ protagonists sear themselves onscreen so vividly, with towering coiffures, tumbling silks, and gallows humor. Throughout the series, sex workers fight for every last advantage and coin in a world that runs on their labor but precludes their survival. Season three expands its purview into the world of male sex workers. When asked how much he charges, one new character responds, “It’s a hanging offense, so double.” With every card stacked against them, these characters’ insistence on living defiantly and without shame is a middle finger to the systems that mark them as criminal or immoral—not to mention the rapists, thieves, abusers and pimps that are in constant pursuit.
The show runs at an almost impossibly fast clip precisely because there are so many stories to tell. In the foreground we have the Wells family: Margaret Wells (Samantha Morton), the upstart madam who was trafficked at a young age by the cruel Lydia Quigley (Lesley Manville), and her daughters Charlotte Wells (Jessica Brown Findlay) and Lucy Wells (Eloise Smyth). In just the first two seasons, the Wells fight a secret, high-class ring of murderous rapists, plot to take down Quigley once and for all, up their own body count and barely escape execution. This season, the show branches out from the streets into the mental institution, where Quigley has been committed by her dissolute son. It’s a natural evolution for the series, which portrays the institution as yet another arm of the punitive patriarchy—a place where unwanted and disobedient women are tortured and assaulted under the thin guise of “treatment” and medical advancement. To “cure” her sexual deviance, one young woman at the institution is physically restrained and sexually assaulted by her physician.
“The things done to people—women especially—in the name of medical science kind of beggars belief,” Buffini told The Daily Beast. “The rotational chair existed, as did the theory that a woman who liked sex too much had a ‘uterine fury,’ which had to be brutally tamed.” Quigley’s confinement speaks to a central, dark truth of the series: that even the most powerful woman is ultimately living in a man’s world. “It only took the word of one male relative to have you ‘nutted off’ for good,” Buffini explained.
The men of Harlots are at once totally ridiculous and outrageously powerful. The show seems to relish in catching judges and constables with their pants down, momentarily at the mercy of the sex workers that they publicly decry and police. “We base a lot of our toffs on government ministers and business tycoons,” Buffini explained. “Not a lot changes when you have bad hair and too much power.” Hypocritical politicians are just one example of the innumerable parallels between the world of Harlots and the modern day.
Referring again to the “one in every five women” statistic, Buffini continued, “It occurred to us that there are many cities in the world which are still like that, where the best way for a woman to achieve financial independence is through the sex industry. And then suddenly it became not just a historical drama but a very current drama. Which is what we always wanted it to be.” That logic applies to the “Molly house” plot line as well. “The plight of gay men in a society where ‘assault with sodomitical intent’ would see you jailed and possibly hanged is very moving,” Buffini explained. “There are many cities in the world where this is still the case and Harlots feels less and less like a period drama with every season we write.”
The battles that fictionalized sex workers fight onscreen in Harlots are still being fought by sex workers’ rights activists and community members today. It’s rare to see a sex worker portrayed in mainstream media as more than just a side character or a punchline, let alone a series that acknowledges that sex work is work from the very start. In Harlots, it’s not the job that oppresses workers in the sex industry—it’s hypocritical politicians, violent constables, and punitive laws. Sex work criminalization and stigmatization still kill, making the issues and injustices that Harlots explores more relevant now than ever. Buffini told The Daily Beast that current activism around sex workers’ rights and recent pushes for decriminalization are “much discussed in the writer’s room,” reiterating, “this is a current show disguised as a costume drama.” She continued, “We were extremely glad to discover that sex workers watched our show and liked it. The stigma around sex work is frankly Victorian and weird. Why is it so hard to respect someone for doing this difficult job with such precarious rights?”
“We haven’t received any criticism from sex workers—but if we did, we’d listen.”
Liv Tyler stars in Season 3 of Harlots.
HuluThe series portrays a wide range of sexual activity with refreshing candor. As rare as it is to see genuine portrayals of female pleasure in a sex scene, it’s even rarer to see realistic female apathy, female mild amusement, female just getting on with it. “I mean we’ve all been there, it’s part of life, isn’t it?” Buffini laughed. On Harlots, women have sex for a wide variety of reasons, including but not limited to payment. Sex scenes range from perfunctory to hilarious, deeply un-sexy to profoundly intimate. “We write the story of each shag,” Buffini explained. “What is it—is it a skirmish? A deepening of someone’s relationship? To whom is it distasteful? Who has the power?” A prime example is the sexual relationship between protagonist Charlotte Wells and the high class Lady Isabella (Liv Tyler). While this isn’t Harlots’ first foray into queer sex, Buffini noted that the reaction to their relationship has been particularly “positive and strong.” Still, she added, “this is no romance,” positing that, “The inequalities of a relationship where one party pays the other for sex are even more nuanced and interesting here.”
When filming sex scenes, Buffini said, “We didn’t use an intimacy coordinator as the writers, directors, producers (and even one of our cinematographers this time) were female. We take every concern on board, and I hate the thought of anyone feeling uncomfortable on set.” She added that, “The Georgians rarely took off their clothes—so often both parties are fully dressed. We never want to ‘show everything’ and we never have the camera linger on anyone's body for an aesthetic.”
“I would hope that our scenes involving sex are always character-driven and about something else,” Buffini concluded. “In this workplace drama, sex is the work.”
