Love For Sale: A World History of Prostitution [Paperback]

Nils Johan Ringdal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 18, 2005

From the Whore of Babylon to Pretty Woman, the exchange of sex for money is often cited as the oldest profession. Now, eminent historian Nils Johan Ringdal delivers a magisterial, extremely readable world history of this most maligned—and most persistent—form of human commerce. Beginning with the epic of Gilgamesh, the Old Testament, and ancient cultures from Greece to India and beyond, Love for Sale takes the reader on a tour through the entire recorded history of prostitution up to the modern red-light district. It shows how different societies have dealt with prostitutes: ancient Greece, Rome, and India incorporated them into several social echelons, including the priestess class; their close relations with artists in 19th-century Europe made them muses to the modern sensibility; and the Victorians campaigned against them. Love for Sale closes with Sydney Biddle Barrows, the rise of the sex-workers' rights movement and contemporary "sex-positive" feminism, and a realistic look at the true risks and rewards of prostitution in the present day.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Norwegian historian Ringdal argues that prostitution is, in many cultures, a borrowed tradition, but his evidence suggests that prostitution emerged of its own accord in most cultures although in wide-ranging forms. Under European influence, for example, an Asian tradition of contracted temporary marriage evolved to direct pay for individual encounters. In Africa, according to Ringdal, European missionary campaigns against polygamy actually resulted in greater numbers of women entering prostitution. Ringdal considers varying perceptions of promiscuity and prostitution as well as economic, cultural and moral analyses of why women, and to a lesser extent men, enter the business. Given the book's scope, it goes almost without saying that some eras are treated in greater depth than others. Some chapters are based on very few sources, and while we might want greater analysis of ancient temple prostitution or greater care in identifying biblical figures, we get rather too much detail on how the Mayflower madam ran her business. Ringdal wrestles with but does not bring into clear focus the issue of choice in modern prostitution. In early chapters, he sets up a straw-man "feminist" argument, but not until the final chapters does he directly engage some of the researchers and activists with whom he differs. On the whole, however, this study provides both a fascinating range of evidence across world cultures and the opportunity to see broad patterns in attitudes toward sex for hire and the relation between these attitudes and women's freedoms. 32 pages of color and b&w illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Historian Ringdal assembles a wealth of fascinating facts to render a panoramic view of the complex global history of prostitution. Writing with respect, candor, and wit, he begins by describing the women who worked in the temples of Ishtar as both "nurses and sacred sex therapists." He continues to develop his key theme--that for intelligent, savvy, and fortunate women, prostitution has provided a liberated and lucrative life--when he writes that in ancient Greece "the best paid Greek prostitutes were in many ways the world's first free women." Then there's the Roman empress Theodora, a former prostitute who enacted reforms to protect women and children, and Yu Hsuan-chi, a gifted and intrepid Tang Dynasty Chinese poet-prostitute. He offers a fresh interpretation of the life of Mary Magdalene, chronicles the horrific fate of "comfort women," and tracks ever-evolving societal attitudes toward sex workers. Ringdal's admiration for successful prostitutes is tempered by his tacit recognition that most prostitutes' lives are wretched at best, and his at times gratingly upbeat survey does conclude before AIDS changed everything. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (January 18, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802141846
• ISBN-13: 978-0802141842
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #692,318 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Illustrates an old catastrophe in a very modern way, July 24, 2004

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Love for Sale: A World History of Prostitution (Hardcover)

This is a very recent look at an old topic. The author, Nils Johan Ringdal, has written about Germans and the Norwegian police in World War II, but has been collecting information about prostitution for so long that the final 30 pages of the books are references, ending with a page of movies. People who have hoped that condoms might be useful to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases will wonder what the Los Angeles police were thinking in 1990 when Gloria Lockett, now an activist, bought twelve dozen condoms in a drugstore, walked outside, and the police "grabbed her purse and shook it upside down. Then they punctured every single condom, one by one, pushing the knife down into the latex membrane, slowly and with great enjoyment. Gloria got her purse back, along with a pile of useless rubber." (p. 401). This book does not have an index, but the short "Quotes and References" for each chapter at the end of the book includes the King James English Bible verses used in Chapters 2, Patriarchs and Priestesses, and 7, Repentant Sinners, with a few references from the Qu'ran for Chapter 9, Muhammad's Women. There is no Table of Contents for finding anything at the beginning of the book, but pictures appear between pages 150 and 151, just before Chapter 11, Celestial Whores, and between pages 310 and 311. The page facing 311 shows most of the world for two maps, "The origin and early spread of prostitution 3000 B.C. - 1000 B.C." and "Migration of Prostitutes 1914" (European women and Japanese women, loosely taken from Ronald Hyam). The second map shows four arrows pointing directly at Shanghai, one of which is from San Francisco, but the arrow in the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco is labeled "To Hong Kong from Shanghai." Page 311 itself is interesting for the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire by the Young Turks. "When the grand harem of Constantinople closed down in 1909, 370 wives and attendants and 127 eunuchs became homeless. The deposed sultan was allowed to take a few favorites into exile in Salonica. The others were set free."

This book is highly aware that "Sex and reproduction, happiness and security, have, to an almost absurd degree, become themes of public debate in Europe and the U.S., though the discourse is political and not moral. Hypocrisy and ambiguous argument rule the day." (p. 3). Trying to find a frame of reference that recognizes any individual's rights is far less clear than opting for personal viewpoints: "Nobody has the right to sex, either unpaid or in exchange for payment: If nobody wants to sell sex, it is a crime to force anyone to do so. But when men or women do want to sell their bodies, they should have that full right without encountering punishment or discrimination. If the client behaves decently, the relationship between the sex buyer and the sex seller must be considered a purely private transaction." (pp. 3-4). Striving to find limits that satisfy political economy and the ethical interests of people who avoid such activity as a matter of principle make this a tough issue in the field of philosophy, and Chapter 4, Greek Liberalism, begins with the philosopher Socrates drinking hemlock "surrounded by his young male admirers, such as the young Phaedon of Elis, who had just purchased his freedom from a brothel." (p. 52). Possibly Socrates was not the greatest Greek, since "Solon founded Western democracy." (p. 54). "But Solon is also the father of the sex industry, and his sexual reforms were closely linked to his other reforms." (p. 55). "The sex industry quickly became a lucrative supplemental income for Athens and stole an important section of the market from the previously very popular Ephesus in Asia Minor, where a more old-fashioned, temple-related prostitution was still practiced." (p. 55). The emphasis, "Men dominated Greek urban society," (p. 55) is in contrast with the earlier period studied by Johann Jacob Bachofen, Lewis Morgan, and the Communist Friedrich Engels. "Bachofen argued that humankind had shifted away from the promiscuous freedom of the horde, through matriarchy, to patriarchy, a form of society that he considered to have developed in Mesopotamia, with Jewish, Egyptian, Roman, Indian, and Chinese variants." (p. 5). The mixture of cultures is particularly noticeable in the field of prostitution. "Many feel that foreign and racially different prostitutes are tangible symbols of a world that is becoming a moral cesspool." (p. 385). This kind of history is likely to promote the belief that law itself is an intellectual cesspool when it attempts to deal with such situations by locking people up to stifle economic activity in a world where guys make most of the money, but supporting women and children is a low priority, as Socrates was partly condemned for not spending his time at work making money. The quality of Socrates' questions might be considered a higher intellectual level than the modern economic observation, "As the demand for cheap prostitutes grew and recruitment failed, the vacancies had to be filled with imported foreign labor." (p. 384). This is now a very large field for the number of people employed, and transportation is one of the conveniences of a global economy. This book reflects all that perfectly.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Really a world historical survey of prostitution, April 20, 2004

By 

César González Rouco (Madrid, Madrid Spain) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Love for Sale: A World History of Prostitution (Hardcover)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Could be so much better, March 16, 2009

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jvv227 (Martinez, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love For Sale: A World History of Prostitution (Paperback)

This is a subject crying out for a well-written and moderately scholarly history, or at least an excellent popular history. This book is unfortunately neither of these. The translation is very poor (I assume that it is accurate - it is only the English prose that is poor.) There is virtually no documentation. And the book does not address the history of prostitution per se, only episodes, some of which are more convincing than others.

I can only assume most historians are squeamish about this subject, so all credit to Mr. Ringdal for trying.

I recommend that readers seeking to learn about the impact of or reaction to prostitution look to more defined histories. A good book along those lines is "Sin in the Second City".