Kira Córdova
If you have an 18th-century British military kink, I beg you, don’t tell me. Especially don’t when I’m wearing a 1774 British redcoat. It’s a work uniform, and they don’t pay me enough for that.
I work in living history, and visitors to the fort that employs me make more comments about my apparel and body than when I performed contortion with my identical twin in high school. For instance, picture this: mid-august, as I was preparing to start participating in our musket demonstrations, my boss let me out of giving a tour and sent me with a colleague to practice firing rounds of black powder in the woods, like the way reenactors train horses to put up with cannon and musket fire by exposing them to loud noises and giving them little treats. After, my colleague sent me to the fort’s parade grounds to practice the musket drill we use in the demonstration. It was there, over-ripening on the gravel looking, and smelling, like a putrid tomato in my yellow-trimmed redcoat and matching fatigue cap, that a man approached me.
“You’re adorable. I would fight for whatever side you’re on, even the British.” He gave me a once over to drive the point home and walked away, throwing his chin over his shoulder a couple of times to see if I was watching. I was, and I was also holding a gun. I remember thinking that I probably wouldn’t solicit someone with a firearm, but the musket might have been part of the appeal. Who knows? I definitely don’t want to.
I wear men’s clothing, but one of my colleagues in the maritime trades program dresses in women’s kit. I’ve never asked her why she does, but her stays (the 18th century equivalent of a corset) catapult her to the front lines of unwanted attention. Picture this: on a routine Saturday, I overheard a man ask to take a photo with her. It started innocuously enough.
“I can’t wait to show this to my friends!” He handed his buddy his cellphone, and then it devolved; he slid his arm around her waist and murmured, “because you’re so beautiful…”
Minors are not exempt; most of the fife and drum corps here are highschoolers, and they give tours in the summer. Picture this: at the beginning of August, our sixteen-year-old fifer put on her full dress coat and bear-skin cap to give a tour of the fort. During the tour, the guide must move the group from the flagpole outside the fort past the cannon collection into the fort’s parade grounds. During that transition, an older man stepped in front of our fifer and told her she’s “pretty for a grenadier” and winked at her. She deflected, continuing into the fort—where he repeatedly photographed her as she was talking. That’s common. Visitors rarely ask permission to take our pictures.
And the comments and photos are just the introduction. If I had a dollar for every middle-aged mom I’ve seen grab my colleague’s waist in maritime trades and comment on how small it is, I could quit my job and start writing historical erotica. When I told my roommate about the guy who thinks I’m cute holding a musket, he said people frequently grope his butt when they take photos with him.
As employees in New York state, everyone at the fort completed mandatory sexual harassment training their first week on the job. We took a quiz to prove we listened to the video. Officially, no sexual harassment of any kind will be tolerated, but we would need a designated full-time staff member just to reprimand visitors for potentially inappropriate interactions, and, the truth is, the mansplaining feels more annoying on a day-to-day basis. This weekend, at a reenactment, I overheard a reenactor who wants to work at the fort ask our demolition expert what happens when a visitor is rude to staff. In his South Carolina accent, our demo guy summed it up: “Son, you can’t tell them anything.”
I hope no one explicitly thinks for $29, I better get to touch a butt in breeches, but the undertone is there. It’s expensive to visit the fort, and people feel like we owe them their money’s worth. To some extent, we do. The fort is a private non-profit, so without visitors, we would not get paid. But if any wages justify disregard for our bodily boundaries, ours definitely don’t. As a seasonal employee, I make $17 an hour. I do not have benefits. If I had the sewing skills of some of my colleagues, I would start a historical OnlyFans and make a way better living. Then again, I’d also be scared of people from OnlyFans finding me at the fort and trying to follow me home after work. We live in a wacky world, and there are only so many living history sites. Plus, I have too many modern tattoos.
The point is, people who work at the fort do so because they love history. They love their historic trades and sharing them with the public. No one makes millions interpreting. And while I don’t know if any of my colleagues create historical OnlyFans content, I do know they all have Instagram accounts. Maybe, instead of taking their photos without permission, find them on social media, follow them, and help them monetize their love for the 18th century. I understand not everyone has social media, but if you aren’t interested in staying up to date with someone’s work or art, maybe ask yourself why you want a photo of them in the first place.
Because fulfilling fantasies is at the bottom of our to-do lists. All historical interpreters at the fort actually do historic trades. I build boats and sew sailcloth tents and bags, which is one of the lower consequence trades because I’m not clothing anyone. Our cobblers actually make our shoes. Our tailors sew all our clothes. Without them, we might be walking around the fort wearing a lot less—which might be a draw for some people, but I prefer not to speculate about that. At the end of the day, while we are there to give kickass tours and demos and answer questions and make history exciting and entertaining for visitors, we also have projects to complete, and that’s before we even get to reenactments and special programming and our additional educational programs for school and scout groups, some of which last overnight.
I know that sexualizing people portraying characters and historic figures is common. I remember similar instances when I worked on tall ships, and we dressed up as pirates for festivals. I recall a cluster of festival attendees on the dock at the end of the day, waiting to see if any real-life pirates might be available for a date, or at least a fun night. It’s not the first time I’ve been fetishized. I’m sure Disneyland princesses get the same treatment.
But normalizing something doesn’t make it right, and touching cute reenactors at a museum is a slippery slope to crossing less benign boundaries. My best friend’s sister works as a law clerk in the Denver area, and, last month, a disgruntled man who came to complain about a traffic ticket waited for her in the parking lot until she got off work to plead and threaten her into helping him. When my best friend told me, I felt sad that not much has changed in the last twenty years: My dad was a reference librarian when I was little, and some visitors to the law library where he worked discovered the hard way he was a black belt stick and knife martial arts instructor and army interrogator before I was born. And it’s not just creepy comments and harassment; I trained as an EMT during the pandemic, and almost all of my paramedic instructors said their patients have assaulted them.
And if making others’ workplaces unsafe isn’t enough, if you can’t respect people’s boundaries in public, what do you do at home? What do you do to the people you’re intimate with? What do you teach your children about other people’s bodies and safety? What do you teach them about their own?
At the very least, please respect our boundaries out of self-preservation. To my knowledge, no interpreter has ever hurt a visitor who touched them inappropriately, but I can’t guarantee I wouldn’t. I’ve been sexually assaulted from behind. If you touch my back, I will instinctively do my best to break whatever appendage you use. If I’m holding a musket, you’re probably getting the stock somewhere you don’t want it, and I’ll hazard a guess that’s not the butt you were originally hoping to feel.
Maybe people think it’s okay to sexualize us because we don’t seem real. Wearing authentic 18th-century British military uniforms does not humanize us; visitors often say they assumed we were animatronics from afar, like a sexy, sweaty version of It’s a Small World. But we are human. This is not Westworld. We are public history professionals and history educators, and if history turns you on, I love that for you, but please go home, watch some Outlander, and touch yourself, not us.
Kira Córdova is an emerging writer and sometimes tall ship sailor from the great seafaring state of Colorado, working on an MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University. Their essays and poems appear in Chicana/Latina Studies, Cutthroat Journal, and Anger is a Gift from Flowersong Press.
Instagram: @kirarambles
Website: www.kirarambles.com
Featured photo by Rahul Narasimhan (Pexels)
