Georgia Hardstark
speaker
4,112 appearances
38 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Georgia Hardstark’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And now on their new show, they'll be talking about the latest blockbusters, cult classics, and everything in between. They're going to have guests. They're going to play games. They're going to chop it up.
And after you listen to the trailer, head over to the Dear Movies I Love You feed and click follow so you don't miss the world premiere on January 28th.
I bet you are. Are? Question mark? Press play, I hope. Yeah. You know you started it. Yeah. You started it. Yeah. We're going to finish it.
I mean, not to immediately get in your face, listener, but we have spoiled you over the years of doing these 25 fucking minute intros just to entertain ourselves.
But most podcasts just start. But sometimes we need to do just a podcast. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's what we're going to do today. And I... We'll tell you right now a story that I think you're going to like. It's about a badass 18th century sex worker from Dublin, Ireland, who challenged both gender norms and social norms at a time when doing so was completely unheard of.
This is the story of Irish courtesan Peg Plunkett. Peg, yes. Get ready. Main sources used for today's story are an article published on a WordPress blog called F. Yeah History by a writer named Natasha Tidd. And the article is called The Brilliant and Ballsy Life of Ireland's Favorite Courtesan, Peg Plunkett.
And also another source is an article from the Women's Museum of Ireland website entitled Peg Plunkett, Brothel Madam. And that article was written by Karen Moynihan. And the rest of our sources are in our show notes. All right. So Margaret Plunkett, who goes by the nickname Peg, plays it close to the chest about the details of her life overall.
So basically, there's a real good ending that I won't spoil, but she is the reason we know so much about her life. But of course, she doesn't basically tell anybody her exact date of birth or exactly how old she is, anything like that. She controls the narrative. In a very empowering and mysterious way in terms of her age. So we don't know the exact year of her birth.
It's believed to be sometime between 1727 and 1742. But her memoirs do give some insight into her upbringing. She was born to a pair of first cousins. She's one of eight surviving children out of... 22. Holy shit. Yeah. That's how we like to do it, the Irish. Eight out of 22. And eight surviving, which is like the grief of losing more than half of your children is just like... Yeah.
How did people do it back then? So... Peg grows up as a witty, fun-loving girl in Westmeath in the Irish countryside. It's the time of famine, but her father is a wealthy landowner, so Peg actually gets to enjoy a nice life and gets a good education.
She is expected, of course, to find a suitable husband, was a stable job, move out of the family home, and then with her husband, raise some children and build a her own family. Not a particularly exciting plan to Peg. She's not necessarily all that into it, but she has watched her two older sisters follow this path. It doesn't seem that bad.
So she accepts the trajectory basically because she doesn't have any other choice. That's what it was for women. But all that changes after a fever infects her family. Peg manages to avoid infection, so her father sends her to live with an uncle until everyone hopefully recovers. But by the time she returns, the illness has taken both her mother and her older brother.
And her grief-stricken father is left in shambles. He is too emotionally and mentally unwell to care for his family, so he appoints his next oldest son, Christopher, to become the head of the household. But where Peg's father was a kind and respectable man, Christopher is a power-hungry monster.
So instead of using the family's money to take care of his siblings or for the dowries his unwed sisters need to find prospective husbands, he just spends it all on himself. He indulges in fancy clothing, food, drink, all of it. And then at home, he is a tyrant, especially to Peg and her sisters, who are now forced to do all the household work.
When any man tries to ask for one of their hands in marriages, Christopher shuts them down. He keeps the dowry money for himself. And also he wants to keep the sisters in his home basically to be his servants.
Yeah.
So one day, Peg goes to visit a friend, and when she comes home, she finds all the doors locked. And this is Christopher's way of punishing her for leaving. He leaves her outside, stranded in the cold and rain for an hour before letting her back in. So finally, one of Peg's sisters runs off to Dublin where she meets a man who's willing to marry her without a dowry.
And so teenage Peg is desperate to escape Christopher. So she runs off to join her sister in the city. She absolutely loves Dublin, spends all her time out and about flirting with the local lads. And soon the proposals start rolling in for Peg. Men are lining up to be with her, but she needs Christopher's permission. Fuck that fucking dick. And she needs the dowry money. He refuses.
He forces Peg to come home to Westmeath, and he's not happy that she left in the first place. He doesn't like that she started her own life. He begins to beat her. Mm-hmm. He whips her constantly, covering her in bruises, so she manages to escape again. She nearly elopes with a man behind her brother's back, even though that man is already engaged to another woman.
But before they can seal the deal, Christopher and two of his friends break into the inn where Peg and her fiancé are staying, and they're armed with guns. They scare off the fiancé, and they drag Peg back home to Westmeath. where Christopher gives her yet another terrible beating. Shit.
Showing 1101–1120 of 4,112 · page 56 of 206
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