Word of the day: timosexuality

I have always had a tendency to move not a single finger toward solving a problem until I have grasped its nature, and—above all—until I am certain I understood the mechanism I was about to meddle with. For this reason I regard the idea of “move fast, break things” with deep suspicion: it is not a matter of taste, but the fact that, in most cases, it sounds like a winking version of sloppiness.

I apply that same attitude to what is called the “social debate” that flares up around certain news stories—like the recurrent ones involving footballers and escorts. In such cases I prefer to stop short and suspend judgment until I have clear definitions. What exactly is meant by “escort”? What, in concrete terms, is a “privé”—that is, a small, semi‑private club or lounge, often associated with eroticised entertainment, where the ordinary rules of the public dancefloor are softened, or simply ignored? And what of “privee” and “superprivée”—terms that, in Italy, designate increasingly upmarket private rooms or ultra‑exclusive lounges where the promise of discretion and a more intimate atmosphere is sold as much as the drinks themselves?

All these labels, not by chance, abound in neologisms and anglicisms precisely because—and it is worth repeating—they allow one to elude contours too sharply drawn. In Italy, they are spaces where the line between socialising, flirting, and paying for attention is left deliberately blurred, wrapped in a vocabulary borrowed from English high‑end hospitality and glamour.

If one wishes to tackle the issue with even a modicum of seriousness, one must start here: with the words, and with their meanings. Or, at the very least, with a concrete understanding of the practices those words purport to describe. As for the “privé”—and its more emphatic variants, such as “privé esclusivo” or “superprivée”—I can say I have a certain familiarity, because I watched the phenomenon come into being. These are the sort of places where the clientele pays extra not merely for better seats, but for the illusion—or sometimes the reality—of a more exclusive, less scrutinised world.

We are talking about the years when I worked as a bouncer—more politely, “security”—in the clubs along the Romagna Riviera, the stretch of Adriatic coastline from Ravenna down to Rimini, famous for its long beaches, endless summer nights, and a nightlife that has long blurred the line between music, tourism, and adult entertainment. I did this while I was still at university, taking the job to finance my studies, or more precisely, my stay in Bologna during studies. At a certain point those I would call enriched playboys began showing up at the door: men who had heard everywhere that clubs were places to have fun and pick up young girls, and who, after having burned their youth in work, found themselves well past forty with an urgency—almost physical—that they needed to make up for the time they felt they had lost.

It was a winter in the early nineties, I believe, and I was working in the clubs around Modena. The fauna of the “vitelloni”—a term, in Italy, for boastful, newly‑rich men—was made up of people who had become rich mostly by raising pigs; they arrived in Mercedes, dressed to kill, jackets and ties, always men and almost always obese.

The thing that became clear very quickly was that, under those conditions, they had not a single hope of competing. The only way to “show off” their wealth was through their clothes, yet those clothes were utterly out of place in the atmosphere of the disco, first and foremost for reasons of age: however branded, a two‑ or three‑piece Armani suit made little sense in that context. Nor did the display of Rolex watches or other trinkets amount to anything, except occasionally making them easier targets for theft.

The girls, in many cases, really were after wealth, true enough; but they struggled to remain dazzled by those crude, newly‑rich men who, despite their money, had nothing remotely comparable to the wealth of the truly rich—people who frequented different clubs where those vitelloni would not even have been admitted. You could see their rural origins not only in the calluses on their hands, but also in a level of ignorance and vulgarity that sometimes left you genuinely horrified. The girls, by contrast, were often out‑of‑town university students, drawn in by PRs and free tickets, and they did not mix at all well with that kind of customer.

In short, they were not rich enough to get into the truly fashionable clubs, or rather, the places genuinely dedicated to the wealthy; so they tried to play‑act being rich in venues aimed at kids, let’s say, in the working‑class bracket. They chased recognition for a wealth they did not really possess, not in relative terms. They could have tried going to more “in” clubs where the real bourgeoisie of Modena or Bologna went, but in those places they would not have been let in at all.

That is why they became our problem, in the sense that they grew too insistent and arrogant with the girls, following the logic of “I pay, I demand.” As a security matter they were not always easy to handle: used to hard work, they were physically strong, so much so that in many clubs we had a security baseball bat on hand. Or we would put up the plastic sign “attention, slippery staircase” and then take advantage of the moment to push them down. None of it was pleasant, least of all because these men, being newly enriched, often managed to “talk to the owner” and get special treatment.

The tension had been building for some time; the more savvy colleagues had mentioned it to me from the start, until finally a solution appeared. First came the reserved tables, conspicuous markers of wealth that the average student could not afford; then, eventually, the “privé” emerged. These in origin sprang up for parties, frequently—for we are in the Modena area—for the “debut” (the eighteenth‑birthday celebration) of the daughters of rich locals who were not quite “in” enough to join the real debut at the Cadets Academy of Modena. So they organised their own very expensive local copy by renting a “privee”—a semi‑private lounge room—inside a club.

How could one satisfy the demands of the newly enriched men, who expected to walk into a disco and “sleep with” young girls merely because they had booked a table? In those days the streets were teeming with girls from Eastern Europe who adapted very well to that kind of gloss; and more often than not these men would bring them along after having met them as escorts. Even so, the chill between them and the “non‑paying” girls on the dancefloor was obvious, and it was beginning to be socially awkward for a local girl to be seen inside a club filled with Hungarian “working girls” lounging in the corners.

What to do? The “privee” lent itself perfectly to the scene. It was private enough to feel exclusive, and so a ghetto of rich, newly‑rich farmers could pass itself off as an “exclusive” environment, while they could pretend to be envied rather than despised. In Italy a “privee” is a semi‑private room within a club, discreet and often more expensive, where the ordinary rules of the main floor are softened and the atmosphere is tailored to the comfort of paying clients.

The problem with an escort, however, is that she wants to be paid; and if one considers the cost of champagne—the only drink they would admit, because they were convinced that only “champagne” counted as the beverage of the rich in the West—alongside the price of entry to the VIP area, the evenings started to get rather expensive. But there was a catch: cocaine was spreading like wildfire, and there were huge numbers of girls dependent on it. Cocaine addiction in those circles was not like dependence on other drugs: it did not reduce them to the state of a classic street junkie begging for a euro per dose, but it created an overwhelming, almost animal impetus. These girls became the rich men’s favourite prey in the privé: young women who sold themselves just to pay for their next sniff, and who were aesthetically well‑suited to play the role of “we are the rich” that those vitelloni wanted to stage in front of others—especially, one must note, in front of their neighbours back home.

In the end, then, the privé was born as a stage for newly‑rich men who could pretend to be attractive simply because they were rich, without realising that this very performance of wealth ultimately pinned them more or less to the social layer they came from. True, from the outside there was a certain nominal envy for those who popped champagne bottles and lingered with girls on their arms; yet the “respectable” girls would not have wanted to take their place, not even for a single evening.

From that milieu the privé could then establish itself as the place “for the rich and the models,” because it was the only alternative to the blunt term “prostitute, good‑looking and drug‑dependent.” And often, even in the jet‑set, the difference between the two was minimal. In Italy, a “privee” is, above all, a semi‑private room within a club, ostentatiously reserved for clients who pay extra to feel exclusive, to distance themselves from the common crowd, and to stage a particular version of themselves.

The proper definition of “privee,” then, is that of a place—primarily ostentatious—where men of modest origins and recent wealth gather to perform the comedy of success, surrounded by drug‑dependent prostitutes who prefer to think of themselves as “models.”

And this, let it be clear, follows a distinctly proletarian aesthetic: the “model” is what a working‑class person imagines a model to be, and she behaves as the working‑class imagines a model should behave, based on what they read in gossip magazines. Just as the “rich man” or the “entrepreneur” is, once again, only what readers of those same gossip rags think a rich man or an entrepreneur should be—that is, a figure who speaks, dresses, and presents himself more or less as they suppose real rich men and entrepreneurs must speak, dress, and present themselves.

This is not just a portrait of Trump or Berlusconi but also of Briatore: a character built on a media image that does not strive to be believable, only recognisable, and that plays a caricature of itself before an audience which has already learned the script from the same glossy weeklies.

Having defined the “privee,” one must now attempt a definition of “prostitute” or “escort,” and this is the most dangerous step. It is dangerous because, logically, the only coherent definition that holds ends up being too broad—so broad, indeed, that it runs afoul of socially acceptable canons. It is rejected as if the definition of “dog” were refused because it includes both purebred pedigree animals and stray street dogs, mixing blue‑blood and mongrel in the same category.

A prostitute, or escort, or “model,” is a woman who grants sexual, erotic, sentimental, aesthetic, or even marital favours to a man in exchange for the advantages that derive from his wealth.

In this definition, the difference lies only in the packaging, not in the substance: what changes is the social wrapping, the language, the context in which the transaction is presented, but not the nature of the transaction itself.

And I say “transaction” quite deliberately: every transactional relationship that includes erotic, sexual, sentimental, or marital favours is, in the final analysis, prostitution. The trouble with this definition is precisely that it is precise, and therefore socially unacceptable. It is as though one supplied a biologically rigorous definition of “dog,” and certain owners took offence because they are lumped together with the man who keeps a scruffy mongrel from the neighbourhood. In the same way, many women and many husbands protest, because the word “prostitution” ends up including—at least in principle—also their own partners or even themselves.

And this hypocrisy is rarely, if ever, exposed by the so‑called “feminist” world, which often entrenches itself behind semantic and rhetorical distinctions, careful not to confront the ruthless logic of what lies beneath the surface.

Once a correct definition is given, however, one can notice a simple thing: this phenomenon is not merely “prostitutive,” but a genuine social necessity. It is an organised performance whose aim is to convince the audience of the high‑status condition of the participants, flavoured with a strong dose of sexuality.

For this reason I would like to propose a definition: “timosexuality,” that is, a sexuality that presupposes erotic attraction toward the rich, among the rich, and through wealth itself. In this scheme, sex serves less to satisfy a raw desire than to confirm a status, to make the social script of privilege seem credible. In other words, timosexuality is the mechanism by which wealth becomes not only an accessory, but a true object of sexual desire, and the sexual relationship an act of social legitimation more than one of intimacy.

The term “timosexuality” blends the Greek idea of τιμή (timé)—meaning “value,” “esteem,” and “wealth” in the social sense—with the semantic field of sexuality. In this sense, timosexuality indicates that kind of attraction in which sexual desire is less tied to the person as such than to his or her status, to their position of privilege, and to their capacity to display a wealth—real or perceived—as the seal of social rank.

Timosexuality, of course, demands a space in which to express itself, and an entire set of security mechanisms—of the kind I described in the previous post—but so long as we fail to grasp the underlying mechanism, it will not be possible to speak about all of this with genuine rationality.

I mean: without someone bristling, feeling that they have accidentally (or perhaps not so accidentally) been lumped into the “escort” category.

Or, if you prefer, the “timosexual” category.