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Review
-"Gender and Society, February 2001
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
This groundbreaking collection of essays on the sex industry contains original studies on sex work, its risks and benefits, and its political implications. Sex for Sale covers areas not commonly researched, including gay and lesbian pornography, telephone sex workers, customers of prostitutes, male and female escorts who work independently, street prostitution, sex tourism, legal prostitution, and strip clubs that cater to women.
Sex for Sale also tracks various trends during the past decade, including the mainstreaming and growing acceptance of some types of sexual commerce and the growing criminalization of other types, such as sex trafficking. Sex for Sale offers a window into the lived experiences of sex workers as well as an analysis of the larger gender arrangements and political structures that shape the experiences of workers and their clients.
This book contributes greatly to a growing research literature that documents the rich variation, nuances, and complexities in the exchange of sexual services, performances, and products. This book will change the way we understand sex work.
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Of course, I had some cynical suspicions. Was this the excuse that some sociologist came up with when his wife caught him? At least that suspicion was quickly abated.
One cannot help but be fascinated by some people in the "sex industry." Who are the people who answer the phones on the sex calls? Why do people get involved in making porn movies? The book covered some of that, how, for example, some of the women who do sex calls aren't as stupid as we'd like to think, how they even get some of their ideological points across while on their calls.
Some of the text, however, I found to be silly. There was some that amounted to fairly boring and pretty meaningless statistics. Some of the rest of the text I found valuable. How many of the street prostitutes are crack or heroin addicts? How many are physically abused by their johns? And others I found offensive. There was an entire essay on a group in Oregon who ostensibly trains street prostitutes to get out of the business. That in itself is commendable. But they use "radical feminist ideology" that offends me. While, for example, the word "victim" has been shunned--replaced with more acceptable terms like "survivor"-- what the women are taught is still no less than their roles as victims. It's the Catherine McKinnon school of fem-rhetoric, that women who have sex are inherently victims--err, "survivors"--of the prevalent, powerful patriarchy, and on and on. And men are NOT victims of some of the same workplace politics? It leads me to believe that many of the feminists who proclaim this stuff have never really gone out and gotten a job.
What's more, the author of that essay praised the project, despite its weaknesses, for its phenomenal success rate, which I read as somewhere substantially beneath 20 percent. That to me is far from success. Further, if it is success, the women who partake of it believe in the man vs. woman theology that keeps such "radical feminist" organizations in business. And that's at least sad.
The chapter dealing with the brothel industry in Nevada is fascinating. Granted, there's a little feminist speculation (something of which I may be over-wary because I know the institution at which the editor teaches has a women's studies program--some graduates of which I know all too well--of dubious scholarly merit.) But one fact the chapter ignores has been obvious to me for years: among the reasons prostitution AND gambling are legal in Nevada is that the state is a desert! What else would they do there if you didn't have "industries" traditionally shunned elsewhere! Anyway, there were worthwhile observations and insights in the chapter, and I can't allow a few ideological squabbles to overshadow that.
The final chapter went to United Kingdom for reasons I didn't understand. The writers were able to discuss with various English police departments their views toward prostitution. And many of them felt--as do lots of people, I suspect--that legalization of the practice should be seriously considered. It's "the world's oldest profession," and despite regulations and the like, it ain't going away.
Anyway, much of the book is a bit dry, rather statistical, a bit too pedantic. The subject matter is important, something we really should think about. I wish it had been just a smidgen more titillating, though to have been less serious would have invited the allegation that the writers weren't taking the subject seriously, were perhaps covering up their embarrassment over discussing it.
So, despite its weaknesses, I'm glad it was written. Next step: get decision-and law-makers to read it and institute some changes.
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