At the moment I’m writing a piece in which one of the protagonists works for a venture capital company. Several crabwise steps in the name of ‘research’ (that’s what I call it anyway) took me into an investigation of sexual customs, which led me to a description of prostitution in Ancient Greece. Don't worry, it's just the way my mind works. There were, apparently, three classes of prostitutes of which the lowest were the pornai: slaves or abandoned girls working for pimps, possibly in brothels. The etymology of the term pornai appears to be from the verb meaning ‘to sell’, thus designating them as items available for sale and purchase.
For the mildly interested, a discussion of prostitution in ancient Greece and Rome appears in Wikipedia.
Which leads me to the unsurprising speculation that if you wanted to describe capitalism as an ‘industrial system of porn’, you might be more accurate and more strictly correct linguistically than you’d think.
I’d be interested in comments from those of you who know Ancient Greek!
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