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  • Introduction
  • Timothy J. Gilfoyle (bio)

More than ever before, commercial sexual behavior has gone global. Officials of the International Labor Organization estimate that between 700,000 and 2,000,000 women and children cross international borders annually for purposes of commercial sex. Much of this migration is forced and designated as “trafficking.” A variety of factors explain this ever-growing phenomenon: the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the opening of nation-state borders in the European Union, the inability of many Western nations to successfully police their borders, the rise of sex tourism, and historic hierarchies that privilege patriarchy, wealth, and ideas supporting racial or ethnic superiority.1

Critics of trafficking argue that the practice represents a new kind of slavery. Most women engaged in sex work, they argue, are coerced; few choose such forms of labor voluntarily. Even those who claim to willingly select such work often “endured situations of enslavement as children,” [End Page 359] according to one report, and thus raise serious questions about the “voluntary” status of such labor. Some studies conclude that in Western nations approximately 70 percent of adults involved in the sex industry were sexually abused as children. Critics further complain that even the term “sex work” serves as a vehicle to legitimate socially ingrained forms of sexual abuse, economic inequality, and social discrimination. The notion that prostitution is a freely chosen occupation, argues Dorchen Leidholdt, ignores “all of the social conditions that force women and girls into conditions of sexual exploitation.”2

Others challenge such arguments that define all sex work as a form of exploitation. Laura María Agustín, for example, points out that examinations of commercial sexuality are “usually disqualified from cultural research and treated only as a moral issue.” The result is that media and other studies of commercial sex infantilize and further marginalize female participants. While acknowledging that many involved in sex work and other forms of commercial sex are victims of male, economic, cultural, and other forms of exploitation, some studies emphasize the agency such women display. Various kinds of sex work—pornographic acting, striptease performances, escorting tourists, prostitution itself—represent “occupations considered to be rewarding, to open doors and to facilitate self-realization, community and social mobility.”3 Many women who work selling sexual services earn large amounts of income and defend their right to engage in such labor.4

This debate echoes a not-so-distant past. Much of the recent literature on global prostitution evokes themes and concerns associated with the “white slavery” controversies in the Western world during the early [End Page 360] twentieth century. Publications such as Clifford Roe’s The Great War on White Slavery (1911) and Maude Miner’s Slavery of Prostitution (1916) injected commercial sex into American national debates regarding immigration, women’s suffrage, and changing standards of sexual behavior.5 Social historians remain somewhat divided on this phenomenon. Some recognize that coercive prostitution was a reality for some women; but most acknowledge that the white slavery controversies and “antivice” movements suffered from sensational and exaggerated claims.6

Recent scholarship avoids examining commercial sex through the prism of abolitionist reform or moral condemnation. Rigid dichotomies between commercial and noncommercial forms of sexual behavior that typified much of the literature on prostitution before 1970 (and have reappeared in some of the recent abolitionist arguments cited above) have been replaced with interpretations emphasizing cultural fluidity and social integration.7 Historians Kathy Peiss and Elizabeth Clement, for example, argue that behaviors associated with prostitution and the working classes in the nineteenth century were legitimated in the first half of the twentieth [End Page 361] century. Heterosexual traditions and rituals of courtship gradually moved out of the community and neighborhood and into the “marketplace” of “dating.” Many middle-class heterosexual women grew ever more tolerant of “treating,” a behavior previously associated with prostitution. Treating represented a sanitized version of sexual exchange, often associated with dating. Further complicating matters was that new forms of sex work—taxi dancing, stripping, erotic dancing—emerged, blurring the lines separating prostitution, commercial sex, and “legitimate” forms of sexual behavior. In a short time a liminal middle ground emerged between prostitution and the new sexual codes of...

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