Global Sex, Local Sex: Morality Tales for the Ages

Long a logical way to earn a living in difficult circumstances, the sex industry has spawned a mini-publishing empire of its own with countless books, scholarly and popular, in favor and oppositional, appearing constantly from academic and nonacademic publishers alike. Publishers live in the hope that sex, and perhaps especially commercial sex, will continue to sell books as vigorously as it does bodies. The five books under review here demonstrate the range of such publications. They run the gamut in their methodology and approach, as well as in their sophistication. The only characteristic they all share is a palpable lack of moral outrage over sex for sale.

In these works we see businesswomen, independent contractors, roust-abouts, victims, folk heroes, and ingénues. This diverse cast of characters alerts us to some of the problems that surround discussions and definitions of prostitution. For Laura Marìa Augustín in particular, the term prostitution itself is problematic, and she chooses to think about prostitution in the context of female migration for the most part. In many ways her work, then, is heir to a very considerable body of literature (and one with which Ashwini Tambe takes issue) which sees paid sex as a legitimate and rational form of labor—less about sexuality than about work and commodity. Sarah Soh likewise brings to her analysis a labor perspective, placing the Korean “comfort women” of the 1940s within the larger phenomenon of the labor conscription of Koreans by the Japanese in the Second World War. Augustín and Soh, like Tambe, locate their work within contemporary feminist theory. By contrast, Judith Schafer and Jan MacKell raise no questions about the term prostitution nor offer any theoretical frame to situate their work. For them prostitution is a purely descriptive, and indeed self-evident term, and their books reflect that simpler approach. As a result, the two groups of books here, the two “popular” and the three “academic” works, talk past and indeed across one another, rather than to one another. They share little beyond a focus on women who sell sex for gain.

Schafer’s Brothels, Depravity, and Abandoned Women is perhaps the most disappointing of the quintet in its failure to find either a convincing popular or academic voice. The research Schafer has conducted is truly breathtaking but the conclusions are both predictable and pedestrian. The author has looked exhaustively at trial transcripts as well as newspapers and court records in New Orleans, the site of her study, but does little more than narrate lives and episodes culled from this wonderful wealth of materials. Her analysis barely rises above the mundane as in the opening sentence of the final paragraph of her chapter on interracial, commercial sex. “Although,” she writes, “sex across the color line was viewed with disapproval and even disgust in antebellum New Orleans, it happened frequently” (46). Scholars of race, of urban life, of sexuality will hardly be surprised to hear this. Interracial sex, whether commercial, consensual, or coerced, is a much-researched topic in U.S. history, and the best of...