Love for Sale : A World History of Prostitution

Rating:
Summary: Really a world historical survey of prostitution
Review: Norwegian historian Nils Johan Ringdal traces the history of what is, if not the oldest profession, at least the most notorious, and covers just about everything: he begins with world literature's first lady of the night, found in the 4,000-year-old epic of Gilgamesh, includes a chapter on the nature of the relationship between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene) shows how ancient Greece and Rome incorporated prostitutes into several social echelons, and how the rise of the courtesan in nineteenth-century Europe shaped literature (e.g Zola's Nana), fashion, arts, and modern sensibility. It tells the stories of the British Empire's campaigns against prostitution in India, and of the "comfort women" who served the armies in the Pacific theater of World War II. It closes with the rise of the sex-workers' rights movement and "sex-positive" feminism, and a look at risks and rewards of prostitution in the present day. Nevertheless, Ringdal's tone is so matter-of-fact that at times it seems more like a recital than a narration.

Ringdal illustrates prostitution's pragmatic benefits, which have dwindled only recently with the sexual revolution (with the advent of birth control and the women's movement, prostitution has lost its basic functions as a pastime and a training ground for young men; even so, women willing to have sex for money continued to fill pragmatic roles up to the present).

In fact, he assures us, the prostitute was regarded as nothing less than "a guarantor and stabilizer of morality and matrimony" until Victorian times; it was only during the Victorian era, with its emphasis on individual morality, that prostitution took on the cloak of sin. In his opinion, no one is entitled to sex -- paid or unpaid. But, if both parties agree that one will sell sex to the other and if both parties behave decently, then prostitution should be considered a private transaction.