Courtesans & Concubines: Why We Need Them Back

In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins explore the controversial idea of bringing back the concept of the “concubine” (or courtesan) in modern relationships. They contrast two distinct relationship models: the true wife/housewife — a full business and life partner who advances the family’s interests — versus the courtesan/tradwife/trophy wife model, where the woman’s primary role is pleasure, aesthetics, and appearance rather than deep partnership.

Drawing on history, labor statistics, and cultural critique, they discuss how women historically contributed far more to subsistence and family businesses than modern narratives suggest. They examine why many people today unconsciously seek unpaid courtesans, the problems with “ornamental” relationships, and how clear terminology can lead to better-aligned marriages. Topics include trophy wives as a profession, Real Housewives culture, objective-function alignment in relationships, and practical advice for high-achieving men and women.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] what I like about the term courtesan is it helps separate between a true housewife and the more modern tradwife, which I think is closer to a - courtesan.

If you look at the tradwife, right, the tradwife makes everything look pretty, right? She, , does up the house. , She does the baking from scratch and everything. And she’s doing all that for appearance. She’s doing all that to, to sell, , that he has a certain type of wife.

But, like, she’s not actually managing the family budget, right? Like, she’s not actually managing the deeper parts of the family. And many people who society at large would confuse, they would say, “Well, this woman stays at home and educates the kids , as part of her duties, therefore she’s the same type of thing as this trad woman.”

Speaker: Specifically, we will be delineating two categories of relationships. One, the courtesan relationship, where the woman believes that their core job vis-a-vis their partner is just their [00:01:00] partner’s pleasure and reproducing. Whereas the other, the true wife or housewife, sees their job as being fully integrated with their husband’s life and advancing the interests of their family.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be expanding on a concept that a fan came up with in response to a previous video, and it is that we should bring back the concept of concubine. And when I first heard this I was like, well, we don’t wanna normalize sort of, you know, promiscuous behavior in this regards.

There’s a lot of negative social externalities for doing it. But after they laid it out for me, I’m like, actually we, we need to start having a conversation about this. We need to normalize this concept. This is a good concept So let me explain. We had a video where we basically go over the history of male [00:02:00] and female labor.

And what we pointed out using a lot of statistics, a lot of historical examples, is the modern idea that throughout history men mostly did all the labor and women mostly stayed at home and did education and child-rearing, is just completely historically anachronistic. Women actually did the majority and I, and I mean the majority of b- like grueling labor, like, repetitive

Simone Collins: tasks.

But y- y- subsistence, subsistence labor. So sort of your baseline food and, and everything else was more or less

Malcolm Collins: handled by the- Yeah, yeah. If, if you’re talking about, like, the majority of, of, of human history was during the hunter-gatherer period, that’s 95% of human history women were doing 60 to 70% of the calories in those societies.

And then you transition to an agricultural society, and in most agricultural societies women do the farming until the plow was invented. And then somebody else was like, “And this is men.” Men plow for, like, 200 years and go, “F it, I’m [00:03:00] making a tractor.” Women do hoe-based farming for literally thousands of years, and continue to do it exactly the way they’ve always done it.

By the way, hoe-based farming, the fact that Simone loved from that episode that she just cannot get enough of, is we pointed out that the idea of women staying at home and not really doing much except for child-rearing and education came from the, the, like, sort of middle class wealthy whites in America during a, a short window of, like, the 1910s to the 1970s.

And it was like, well, what about poorer people during that period? And this is where the word hoe comes from, is it was because specifically Black women, but though I suspect that this is like, you know, it- nowadays they try to racialize a lot of things that weren’t racialized. It probably just meant poorer women in general were hoes because they worked the farm.

And that’s what made them hoes. So it didn’t mean a, a promiscuous woman. It meant a poor, uneducated woman. But we, we start talking about all this. And by the way, if you’re wondering, like, what were the types of work that men did historically, they typically did [00:04:00] things tied to war or things tied to artisanship.

So if you needed a cobbler or a woodcutter or a builder or an architect or a sailor, like, if it required a huge amount of skill outside of textiles, it was typically men doing it. And, and don’t underestimate how much work textiles were. Or how much work- Yeah ... other things that people dismiss, like weeding.

Weeding your garden is one thing. Weeding a field that’s feeding a family is significantly more work than plowing it for anyone who’s ever weeded. Weeding is, is difficult, backbreaking, and recurring labor. But which was typically a woman’s job, by the way. But when in the sort of fallout from this episode, people were going through it and they said, “You know what?”

Because we were talking about the way that women historically actually structured their relationship with men, right? Like, if the man was doing some sort of artisanal job like say a butcher or a cobbler or a blacksmith the wife would typically manage the book, manage the finances, manage the [00:05:00] storefront, manage the marketing, manage the y- the, the sourcing of goods.

And we put this out there, and we put it out with the concept of, like, a sword-and-shield relationship in a modern context, which is, like, the wife is in charge of the more stable part of the income and the man is in charge of, like, entrepreneurship, like big fish, like moving the family forwards. And a lot of people who are actually, and I think what we would consider more trad relationships, still really related to this concept.

They were like, “Well,” like while I or ... Because we have a lot of housewife listeners. So, “While I or my wife,” this was actually more rare “take on what society would call a housewife job, that is not actually what I’m doing. I actually manage our investments, I manage our finances, I manage our taxes, I manage you know, the, the sort of procuring and stocking the, the, the home with supplies, getting things fixed.

I manage like a huge variety of stuff.” And we then began to talk about [00:06:00] how there’s a new type of woman that has come to exist that isn’t this type of woman. So this type of woman is engaging in what the married wife has always done, right? Which is to say, they join ... And, like, historically, if you went to a blacksmith historically, right?

And you sat him and his wife down, and you’re like, “Look, lady, I know you manage the storefront and the money and the taxes and all that, but you shouldn’t,” right? Like, “Your husband should manage all that.” And what she would of course say is, “But then he’s gonna have less time to make stuff.”

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