About

Kaytlin Bailey offers a new angle on the world’s oldest profession, reframing the story of western civilization. She weaves history, stand-up comedy, and lived experience through a fast-paced and profoundly moving hour-long solo show—covering 10,000 years from the perspective of the sex worker, with an accompanying art history slideshow.

Alternating between her own family history, lived experience, and contemporary observations, we meet many canonized characters from history, and trace the evolution of the sacred whore: from deified, to demonized, to diseased. ​

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A crackling solo show. … Like a TEDTalk spun through a poppers cloud.

Playbill
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MORE REVIEWS

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Bestselling Author of Permanent Midnight and I, Fatty

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Audiences spend time with foundational texts, revisiting the Epic of Gilgamesh and the story of Genesis. They meet historic figures including Phryne, Veronica Franco, and Victoria Woodhull, and they learn the origins of the emergent sex worker rights movement; complicating figures like Gloria Steinem, while lifting up names like Margo St. James and Carol Leigh.

Practical, humanizing insight is drawn by the comparison between Kaytlin’s own experiences as a sex worker and her father’s experiences as a soldier. The epoch covered in The Oldest Profession is deeply informed by the relationship and divergent narratives between warriors and whores, a juxtaposition that can be traced back to some of our oldest myths.

This show is for adolescents and adult audiences who want to laugh as they learn about a stigmatized community in a funny, approachable, and safe way. The show appeals to academics, comedy fans, history nerds, and sex workers alike, but also speaks on the concerns of conservative dads, informed moms, libertarians, progressives, feminists, and folks in the LGBTQ+ community.

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The show is part stand-up set, part crash course in 10,000 years of sex-work history, part civic intervention. Picture a one-woman grad seminar held at a comedy club, delivered with the righteous intellectual swagger of someone who has read the archives, paid the bills, and lived the stakes.

Brian K. Mahoney
Chronogram

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Bestselling Author of Permanent Midnight and I, Fatty

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