Alex Carson
Most of what modern society knows about the Wild West we’ve learned from movies and television, and not all of the tropes presented to us in those forms are true. While it’s true that prostitution was rampant in the Wild West, the technicalities of it were not always as plain as they appear in the movies. Besides the increased amount of prostitution, making love, in general, was a bit different for most during the days of the Wild West, both due to the fundamentally different atmosphere of traditional households and the more primal methods of birth control. While not a whole lot has been documented about sexuality in the Wild West, we do have some photographs to go off of! Join Facts Verse as we take a peek at rare photos that reveal what it was really like to make love in the Wild West.
When people nowadays think of the Wild West, they are likely thinking of tropes that have been ingrained into their psyches by movies and television shows. While some of the things that these tropes have conveyed over time are true, other facts about the Wild West have been misrepresented or entirely left out. One thing about the way the Wild West is portrayed in movies that was certainly true is the fact that it was a time and place filled with prostitution.
Despite the fact that prostitution was very commonplace in the Wild West, sex was actually less openly talked about back then than it is now. Because of this, it’s hard to get a firm grip on exactly how most denizens of the Wild West handled sexuality. However, there are some clues we can go off of to figure out just what sex was like for the average man and woman in the historical time and place. The nature of sex in the Wild West differed for numerous reasons other than the abundance of prostitution. Other things that drastically altered the nature of sex in the Wild West included general hygiene practices and the privacy of familial households.
Although the Wild West was a time and place largely dominated by anarchic chaos, it was also ironically a time of increased puritanical values. Perhaps in response to the degradation and chaos occurring in some parts of the country, a great deal of citizens turned a blind eye to sexual practices and acted as if prostitution didn’t exist. Sex certainly wasn’t talked about as much back in the Wild West, but it appears as if it may have been practiced more openly.
Prostitutes were available in most populated areas throughout the Wild West, both in small towns or larger cities. Some of these prostitutes congregated at local saloons, while others had entire buildings dedicated to their practice. Despite the rampant nature of prostitution throughout this historical time and place, it remained largely illegal. However, there was little that the disparate and uncoordinated authorities of the time could do to keep prostitution out of most places. Instead, most were forced to view prostitution as a necessary evil that one was simply required to turn a blind eye to if they wanted to remain pure.
Prostitution was profitable, and it didn’t require much of an education. Because of this, many of the women turning to prostitution in the Wild West were lower-class citizens that felt as if they didn’t have many other options. Many prostitutes became pregnant and gave birth to future prostitutes, while others chose to use the exceptionally primal birth control methods of the time. Many prostitutes were immigrants, though having any skin color besides white tended to fetch you a poorer price on the open market.
Another odd fact about sex in the Wild West is that men seemed to take it wherever and whenverer they could get it. The largely puritanical values of the time were not only derided by unbridled prostitution but also by rampant homosexuality in mining camps and populations with similarly few female denizens. There was a fewer number of women than men in general, and this is a big part of the reason that prostitution proved so profitable in the historical time and place.
It seems that homosexuality was far more common in the Wild West than many may think and that there wasn’t much of a stigma surrounding the practice. A man turning to another man for company was an incredibly common practice, though it didn’t necessarily mean that all of the men that did it preferred males to females. Instead, it simply meant that many men of the Wild West considered their sexualities as ungovernable as every other aspect of their daily lives!
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Given that there seemed to be a massive preponderance of free love during the Wild West, one might wonder how the population didn’t grow out of control! While people may have been having sex more often and more freely back in the Wild West, sexual encounters often didn’t result in birth for a variety of factors. Although birth control wasn’t nearly as advanced as it is nowadays, there were still some methods available to both women and men at the time to prevent birth. Condoms had been made available in the Wild West, but they weren’t easy to come by. Because of this, more primal methods of birth control often had to be used. Such crude methods included toxic tonics that women could buy at local apothecaries. These tonics would serve the same function as a morning-after pill would nowadays.
Prostitutes were some of the most frequent purchasers of such birth control tonics, given both the fact that they were often having sexual encounters quite frequently and the fact that having a baby could destroy their careers. There were other reasons that women might not want to have babies in the Wild West, and those included the fact that the lack of medical knowledge at the time made childbirth more dangerous than it is nowadays. A woman might not survive through the process, and that wasn’t a risk that most women wanted to take wantonly, whether they were women of the night or not.
Another odd fact about sex in the Wild West that people don’t often think about is that many times sexual encounters occurred without the proper amount of privacy for all parties involved. This occurred not only in places of prostitution but also in proper familial households. Most households in the Wild West consisted of merely one room, and there weren’t many methods for men and women at the time to hide their lovemaking from their children. Because of this, it was common to find households where parents would get intimate in front of their children, which was something that puritans at the time eventually managed to put a stop to.
Despite the fact that sex seems to have been practiced more freely in the Wild West than it is nowadays, there are some sexual practices that are ubiquitous today but were considered too taboo at the time for most to even consider. One such practice was oral sex, which was a largely foreign notion to most citizens in this historical time and place.
Besides prostitutes, there were also other types of female companions in the Wild West that didn’t go all the way. If a city or town was too good for prostitution, it’s saloons might have featured “saloon girls” instead. Saloon girls were women that were hired to sit around the saloon and socialize with the drinkers. Although they never went all the way with guests, they often used their sexuality to entice the men to drink and hang around at the saloon more.
Saloon girls were a little bit classier than prostitutes, though they were still viewed with fear and uncertainty by female puritans. Besides saloon girls, the biggest cities in the Wild West also had dancehalls that featured dancehall girls. Dancehall girls served a similar function to saloon girls but with more of a focus on the dancing aspect. Clients would pay for a dance that would generally last around 10 or 20 minutes before joining the dancer for a drink at the bar. The more the client drank, the more of a commission the dancehall girl would earn in addition to her standard fee.
Men of the Wild West often found themselves turning to the companionship of these various workers due to their hazardous lives on the road, whether they were seeking full-blown intercourse or just a little dancehall companionship! While there were plenty of traditional families scattered throughout the Wild West, there were just as many men and women that eschewed the notion of a traditional family for one reason or another. Some of the lowest denizens of the Wild West could never afford to start a family, while others simply preferred a life of freedom on the open frontier.
Even the smallest puritanical communities had a dark side in the Wild West, and the rampant puritanism of some communities only led to the debauchery of the historical time and place becoming that much more dark and wild elsewhere. While many tropes that movies and television shows have conveyed about the Wild West over the years have been slightly exaggerated, it appears as if the sexuality of the historical time and place was actually a good deal wilder than most historical works tend to let on!
Although less is known about the sexuality of people in the Wild West than is known about the sexual practices of people today, historians have still been able to piece together a pretty good idea of some of the things that made lovemaking different in the historical time and place. Now it’s time to hear from you: did you know that homosexuality was rampant during the Wild West, or did you assume that the puritanical values of the historical time and place had prevented most people from indulging in such practices? As always, like this video to show your support, and subscribe and hit the notification bell if you’d like to be among the first to know when more Facts Verse videos are on their way!
