Dating Is New & Was Considered Worse Than Wh****g (feminism Brainwashed You)

Historically, what we now call dating was treated as lower-status than prostitution. The word “date” itself once meant visiting a prostitute. Then working-class “charity girls” undercut professional s workers by trading companionship and intimacy for dinners, tickets, clothes, and nights out — a practice contemporaries called treating.
In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins walk through the late-19th / early-20th century shift: cheap urban leisure (nickelodeons, dance halls, Coney Island), taxi dancers as proto-host clubs, shop girls hunting rich bosses, the rebrand of face-painting into “makeup,” the invention of “personality” and the It Girl, and 1920s petting parties. They argue modern dating is not an ancient institution that suddenly broke. It is a recent, low-commitment market that was controversial when it appeared — and that older courtship systems (family-supervised seasons, explicit marriage-seeking) may be more honest than ambiguous long-term dating.
Also discussed: why they treat dating as wife-hunting rather than “seeing where it goes,” why they want paying-for-dates destigmatized as traditional, and how RFAB can generate period-accurate 1920s stories.

RFab: https://rfab.ai/

Substack: https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SimoneAndMalcolmCollins

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/EGFRjwwS92

Thematic timestamps
00:00 Dating used to rank below street walkers

00:59 Charity girls vs street walkers

03:48 Olny F as the modern treating parallel

05:05 Paying for dates is not “trad”

06:51 Wife-hunting vs dating

07:20 Wikipedia on treating

09:14 London Season vs private one-on-one dates

11:28 Urban monoculture, flappers, and the 80/20

13:01 Where the word “treating” came from

14:01 Why they want 50/50 (or free) dates

17:02 Leisure time, nickelodeons, dance halls, Coney Island

20:20 Wage labor and why working-class women needed treating

22:33 From innocent treats to bills, clothes, and jewelry

26:21 A working-class urban practice, not an elite one

27:28 Reformers, vice squads, and military patrols

28:12 Taxi dance halls

28:25 Taxi dancers: American proto-host clubs

34:20 Shop girls and “marry the boss”

37:41 Face painting becomes “makeup”

41:07 Personality, rizz, and the It Girl

45:59 Dating-advice books and moral panic

47:12 Petting parties, necking, and snuggle pupping

50:33 Dating was always degenerate — rebuild the Season

53:27 Recreate 1920s dating on RFAB.ai