Across two thousand years of commercial sex work, heterosexual anal sex has carried its own price tag — sometimes lower, sometimes higher, almost never absent — and the history of that surcharge is the history of three different logics layered on top of each other: contraception, honor, and taboo.

In Pompeii's Lupanar, the wall graffiti record named workers and explicit acts. J.N. Adams and Sarah Levin-Richardson read the scratched Latin in situ — *pedicare*, *a niveau* — and recovered prices in *asses*, the bronze coin that bought a loaf of bread. Eutychis advertised at two. The act was priced, named, and routine.

The Mediterranean and the Atlantic carried that logic forward. Medieval European penitentials treated anal as a separate confession category. Renaissance Florence prosecuted it so consistently that Michael Rocke could reconstruct an entire commercial-and-social network from the records of the Office of the Night.

In nineteenth-century Paris, the maisons closes — Le Chabanais, Le Sphinx, One Two Two — sold *le jeu complet* as a tariffed upgrade. In American Storyville, Emma Johnson's "circus" houses staged anal as featured entertainment with documented admission pricing.

Today the market is global and documented. 93 for vaginal — a fifty-one percent premium. Berlin's Artemis FKK club lists €70 entry plus €100 for anal service. Bangkok and Pattaya bar fines carry a 2,000-baht "A-level" surcharge published on dozens of venue menus.

Rio's termas and Vila Mimosa price anal across a documented spread; Cartagena and Tijuana follow the same convention.

In parts of the honor-culture belt — Morocco, parts of Iran, rural Latin America — the price inverts: anal is the lower-priced act because it preserves the saleable currency of virginity for marriage. The same physical service, the same client, two different price logics depending on what virginity is worth in the local marriage market.

This episode reconstructs that economy: the Roman lupanar tariff, the medieval confessor's manual, the French *jeu complet*, the Berlin FKK menu, the Bangkok bar-fine board, and the Moroccan honor-economy inversion.

We follow the receipts — the actual prices, in the actual currencies, paid in the actual venues — and the academic literature that decoded them: Adams on Latin sexual vocabulary, Levin-Richardson on Pompeii, Rocke on Florence, Mernissi and Combs-Schilling on North African honor culture, Piscitelli on Brazilian sex tourism, the Poppy Project on London, CDC NSFG on American prevalence.

No erotica. No moralizing. Just the documentary record of a commercial act that has carried its own line item on every brothel menu from the *asses* of Pompeii to the euros of an FKK club hallway — and what changed, and what didn't, between them.

Investigative-journalism podcast about sex work, power, and money. Hosted by people who took the time to read the footnotes.

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