Golden Era Nightclubs, Dating Apps & Let's Just Say it, Hooking Up

I looked around a bit and couldn't find quite the right thread to tuck this one into, so thought I'd start one (but bartenders, if I missed the obvious - which I do a lot - please just move this post to the appropriate thread).

And with that, below is a picture from and a link to an article on some crazy / fun between-the-wars Berlin nightclubs that had table side phones and pneumatic tubes installed for a Golden Era version of "dating" apps. Which shows, as we all know here, nothing is really new.



http://www.atlasobscura.com/article...-60136117&mc_cid=88ca1e3f55&mc_eid=cd91324efb

Well, at THOSE clubs the "dating" was generally a more, er, commercial transaction. In fact it was a very old trade operated on an almost industrial scale.

vitanola said:

Well, at THOSE clubs the "dating" was generally a more, er, commercial transaction. In fact it was a very old trade operated on an almost industrial scale.

Click to expand...

I thought, from reading the article (and, probably, being naive), that the "dating" at those clubs was mainly mutually consensual hooking-up not for-hire sex (all clubs like that have some of the for-hire stuff, but I thought the phones / tubes thing was a casual sex thing).

Well, in the Berlin of those days there was a shocking divide between the wealthy and the poor, many of whom had been solidly Middle Class before the great inflation. By 1930, a couple of years after the massive inflows of American 'hot money" had stopped, the (formerly booming) economy again collapsed. Pretty and cultured girls often found this sideline to be their only recourse. Much was couched in terms of casual dalliances, but most of these assignations were pecuniary in nature in one form or another, even though any talk of money was euphemistic in the extreme. The young ladies who sat at in the ringside seats with telephones and the lights trained upon them were most assuredly advertising. Now, even the men who pursued these ladies were allowed sufficient ambiguity so that they could assume that these dalliences were largely innocent, for "good girls" were ever so much more desirable. Nonetheless, the "Telefon Mädchen" were one of the sixteen varieties of professional women in Berlin in those days.

Of course this worked several ways. There was a subculture of attractive men who made themselves available to well-heeled women under similar terms, though contemporary accounts suggest that the specific negotiations were even more euphemistic than those involving girls, for both the gigilos and the women who kept time with them were usually quite concerned about maintaining their own self respect.

This sort of thing was viewed with utter horror out in the Völkisch countryside. These tales of depravity were blamed by the National Socilaists upon cosmopolitanism (in other words; Jews) and on capitalist greed (in other words: the Jews, the British and the Americans), and gained that party many votes from the steady (and sexually conservative) buhrgers. There was a tremendous resentment of the "Cosmopolitan Elites" in the big cities and university towns promoted by the party, along with diatribes against the so-called liberal "Lügenpresse".

^^^^^
The more things change ...

Almost all relationships with a sexual component (with the possible exception of the truly one-and-done hookups) have their pecuniary considerations.

As my wife's sister, who had a kid at 16 and was a grandma at 38, and who went through her sapphic phase followed by a gender-ambiguous period, and who maintained physical exclusively for only the briefest of periods, discovered only recently: there's a real economic benefit in a marriage or marriage-like arrangement. I do believe she has genuine affection for the fellow with whom she now resides, but I have little doubt that a large part of his appeal is the material stability he provides. She's in a Ph.D. program now, and that certainly wouldn't be feasible had he not lifted the burden of earning a living.

My wife and I would both be up a creek without the other. For my part, I had a long history of making my own way before we met, but I lived paycheck to paycheck.