The 19th Century British Prime minister was somewhat eccentric-he would troll the back alleys of London, picking up prostitutes. He would then bring them home, and pray for their reform.He would distribute bibles to them, and hold prayer servies in which he exhorted them to reject their sinful lives. Was this considered eccentric? How did Gladstone’s ploitical rivals deal with this?
Well, he wasn’t a “perv”. He was a really religious moralist who, among other things, tried to reform prostitutes, and gave of both his time and his money for the cause. There’s no evidence he did anything improper with them.
He was well aware that his enemies would misrepresent his motives (his wife helped him in his work) and there was at least one attempt to blackmail him (unsuccessful). Possibly on a subconscious level he was sublimating desire. We’ll leave that one to psychologists.
Well, that all depends on how you define ‘proper’ when talking about a prostitute.
Of course it really depends on how you define “perv” when talking about someone in a very different time and place.
http://www.thecore.nus.edu.sg/victorian/history/pms/gladwom.html
Victorian Web may not be the most rigorously scholarly source, but other references to Galdstone’s use of the scourge are abundant if anyone wants to Google them.
So it seems like the Victorian Gladstone may have considered his arousal by pornography and prostitutes, and scourging as the remedy, whereas many of us would in the 21st century would find it perfectly natural and normal to be excited by porno and prose and find the idea of self-flagellation more than a little odd.
Anyone who’s excessively interested in the “scourge of prostitution” is a good bet to be just as magnetically attracted to the idea of getting it on with a prostitute. I wrote something similar last month in a thread on “white slavery” – as I read the book that started the panic, it became painfully obvious that the author was anything but repelled by the almost-certainly-bogus softcore subjugation porn he was proffering as social critique.
I’ll also note that it’s a common pattern for a public official, etc., who gets caught soliciting to claim he was “investigating the problem of prostitution.” Maybe for some of them that rationalization really works.
Since it appears from what’s been posted already that Gladstone kind of realized/admitted that his interest in prostitutes went well beyond altruistic concern for their well-being, the question of whether he was a perv seems to me to turn on (of course) how you define perv, and also how we interpret his motives.
If he was just generically really interested in sex and wasn’t getting what he needed at home, it’s possible that in Victorian times, the seamy underbelly of the prostitute’s world was the only place where sex was openly on display – on this theory, he’d have been just as happy to look at naked ladies on Cinemax or hook up with a hot young intern from the office, except those options weren’t very practical back then – the world was somewhat more rigidly divided into good girls and bad girls, and the bad girls were the only easy way to have access to sexual titillation. Not so pervy.
If on the other hand it was the seamy nature of their lives that drew him to prostitutes – if he was revelling in the fact of their degradation and the unspeakable acts they were willing to commit for money – then yeah, that’s a little pervier.