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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates > Prostitution
Can a prostitute be raped? Are pregnancy and STIs an Occupational
Health and Safety issue? What sort of society buys and sells women
and children for sex? Does legalisation solve the dangers of sex
work? Sex worker advocates have argued for many years that
legalising prostitution is the way to make the industry safer both
for workers and clients. In 1984, the State of Victoria did just
that, and Western Australia is currently considering following
suit. In this book, Mary Lucille Sullivan looks at the evidence of
Victorias experience, and asks whether the concept of sex work as
'a job like any other' matches the reality. Discussing the
practicalities of brothels as regular businesses, the author
unearths astounding facts about both the legal and illegal sectors.
Covering issues such as violence, organised crime, womens health,
and mainstream businesses involvement in the sex trade, "Making Sex
Work" is a compelling read. This book gives an insight into the sex
industry, and into a society where women and children have become
just another consumer item. If you've ever thought of prostitution
as simply a choice some women make, read this book and then ask
yourself: Could you do this job? How would you feel if your friend,
sister, or daughter chose this career?
What have different ideas about sex and gender meant for people
throughout the history of the Middle East and North Africa? This
book traces sex and desire in Muslim cultures through a collection
of chapters that span the 9th to 21st centuries. Looking at spaces
and periods where sexual norms and the categories underpinning them
emerge out of multiple subjectivities, the book shows how people
constantly negotiate the formulation of norms, their boundaries and
their subversion. It demonstrates that the cultural and political
meanings of sexualities in Muslim cultures - as elsewhere - emerge
from very specific social and historical contexts. The first part
of the book examines how people constructed, discussed and
challenged sexual norms from the Abbasid to the Ottoman period. The
second part looks at literary and cinematic Arab cultural
production as a site for the construction and transgression of
gender norms. The third part builds on feminist historiography and
social anthropology to question simplistic dichotomies and
binaries. Each of the contributions shows how understanding of
sexualities and the subjectivities that evolve from them are rooted
in the mutually-constitutive relationships between gender and
political power. In identifying the plurality of discourses on
desires, the book goes beyond the dichotomy of norm and
transgression to glimpse what different sexual norms have meant at
different times across the Middle East.
This volume explores the sex trade in America from 1850 to 1920
through the perspectives of archaeologists and historians,
expanding the geographic and thematic scope of research on the
subject. Historical Sex Work builds on the work of previous studies
in helping create an inclusive and nuanced view of social relations
in United States history. Many of these essays focus on
lesser-known cities and tell the stories of people often excluded
from history, including African American madams Ida Dorsey and
Melvina Massey and the children of prostitutes. Contributors
discuss how sex workers navigated spatial and legal landscapes,
examining evidence such as the location of Hooker's Division in
Washington, D.C., and court records of prostitution-related crimes
in Fargo, North Dakota. Broadening the discussion to include the
roles of men in sex work, contributors write about the proprietor
Tom Savage, the ways prostitution connected with ideas of
masculinity, and alternative reasons men may have visited brothels,
such as for treatment of venereal disease and impotence. Focusing
on the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration and including
rarely investigated topics such as race, motherhood, and men, this
volume deepens our understanding of the experiences of
practitioners and consumers of the sex trade and shows how
intersectionality affected the agency of many involved in the
nation's historical vice districts.
In Erotic Exchanges, Nina Kushner reveals the complex world of
elite prostitution in eighteenth-century Paris by focusing on the
professional mistresses who dominated it. In this demimonde, these
dames entretenues exchanged sex, company, and sometimes even love
for being "kept." Most of these women entered the profession
unwillingly, either because they were desperate and could find no
other means of support or because they were sold by family members
to brothels or to particular men. A small but significant
percentage of kept women, however, came from a theater subculture
that actively supported elite prostitution. Kushner shows that in
its business conventions, its moral codes, and even its sexual
practices, the demimonde was an integral part of contemporary
Parisian culture.Kushner's primary sources include thousands of
folio pages of dossiers and other documents generated by the Paris
police as they tracked the lives and careers of professional
mistresses, reporting in meticulous, often lascivious, detail what
these women and their clients did. Rather than reduce the history
of sex work to the history of its regulation, Kushner interprets
these materials in a way that unlocks these women's own
experiences. Kushner analyzes prostitution as a form of work,
examines the contracts that governed relationships among patrons,
mistresses, and madams, and explores the roles played by money,
gifts, and, on occasion, love in making and breaking the bonds
between women and men. This vivid and engaging book explores elite
prostitution not only as a form of labor and as a kind of business
but also as a chapter in the history of emotions, marriage, and the
family.
This book traces the social history of early modern Japan's sex
trade, from its beginnings in seventeenth-century cities to its
apotheosis in the nineteenth-century countryside. Drawing on legal
codes, diaries, town registers, petitions, and criminal records, it
describes how the work of "selling women" transformed communities
across the archipelago. By focusing on the social implications of
prostitutes' economic behavior, this study offers a new
understanding of how and why women who work in the sex trade are
marginalized. It also demonstrates how the patriarchal order of the
early modern state was undermined by the emergence of the market
economy, which changed the places of women in their households and
the realm at large.
Lyn Madden worked as a prostitute for 20 years. This is her story
of life 'on the game' in Dublin.
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