Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry (Paperback)

~ Ronald Weitzer (Author) "The sex industry has grown dramatically in the past several years..." (more)
Key Phrases: phone sex work, curb crawlers, brothel industry, United States, San Francisco, Old West (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

[A] fine collection....The wide ranging studies included make Sex for Sale an important work for sociology....This book would be an excellent supplementary text for sociology courses in deviance or sexuality or for courses within a women's studies curriculum.
–Gender and Society, February 2001

[A] fine collection....The wide ranging studies included make Sex for Sale an important work for sociology....This book would be an excellent supplementary text for sociology courses in deviance or sexuality or for courses within a womens studies curriculum.
–Gender and Society, February 2001

Product Description

Money, Sex, Danger and Power, it's all in a day's work for the typical sex worker. Sex for Sale provides a window into the world of sex workers, their customers, and the growing sex industry--in America and abroad.

A major contribution to our understanding of the sex industry, Sex for Sale is a collection of original essays on sex work, its risks, and its political implications. Covering areas not commonly researched, the book includes studies on telephone sex workers, gay pornography, Nevada's legal brothels, prostitute's customers, police vice squads, actors in the porn industry, lap dancing in strip clubs, and street prostitution. It includes discussion of violence, HIV infection, and drug addiction, as well as legalization, commercialization and criminalization. A unique addition to the literature, Sex for Sale examones all sides of the sex industry--both positive and negative--and will change the way we understand the sex industry.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (December 7, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 041592295X
• ISBN-13: 978-0415922951
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #842,868 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nice selection, September 24, 2002

By	cactus writer (Arizona, USA) - See all my reviews

Weitzer's collection spans a wide range of issues from the need to do more research in this area, to legal debates, to international support services. Contributors include Wendy Chapkis and Jacqueline Lewis. Weitzer is careful to include a variety of perspectives concerning sex work, from those who celebrate paid sexuality to those who believe receiving money is recognition of being someone else's property. He also has a nice list of recommended readings, although it's only two pages.

21 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some useful information, some less..., January 25, 2002

By	Timothy P. Scanlon (Hyattsville, MDUSA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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When I first saw this volume, I thought, "It's about time." While we talk behind closed doors of the sex industry, we seldom discuss it openly except as a joke. At the same time, it appears to be growing! And we pretend that those involved in it are not really human beings, people, in fact, who are trying to make a living. As if they were prisoners, we sequester them and ignore them, pretend they don't exist, except when we need what they offer.

Of course, I had some cynical suspicions. Was this the excuse that some sociologist came up with when his wife caught him? At least that suspicion was quickly abated.

One cannot help but be fascinated by some people in the "sex industry." Who are the people who answer the phones on the sex calls? Why do people get involved in making porn movies? The book covered some of that, how, for example, some of the women who do sex calls aren't as stupid as we'd like to think, how they even get some of their ideological points across while on their calls.

Some of the text, however, I found to be silly. There was some that amounted to fairly boring and pretty meaningless statistics. Some of the rest of the text I found valuable. How many of the street prostitutes are crack or heroin addicts? How many are physically abused by their johns? And others I found offensive. There was an entire essay on a group in Oregon who ostensibly trains street prostitutes to get out of the business. That in itself is commendable. But they use "radical feminist ideology" that offends me. While, for example, the word "victim" has been shunned--replaced with more acceptable terms like "survivor"-- what the women are taught is still no less than their roles as victims. It's the Catherine McKinnon school of fem-rhetoric, that women who have sex are inherently victims--err, "survivors"--of the prevalent, powerful patriarchy, and on and on. And men are NOT victims of some of the same workplace politics? It leads me to believe that many of the feminists who proclaim this stuff have never really gone out and gotten a job.

What's more, the author of that essay praised the project, despite its weaknesses, for its phenomenal success rate, which I read as somewhere substantially beneath 20 percent. That to me is far from success. Further, if it is success, the women who partake of it believe in the man vs. woman theology that keeps such "radical feminist" organizations in business. And that's at least sad.

The chapter dealing with the brothel industry in Nevada is fascinating. Granted, there's a little feminist speculation (something of which I may be over-wary because I know the institution at which the editor teaches has a women's studies program--some graduates of which I know all too well--of dubious scholarly merit.) But one fact the chapter ignores has been obvious to me for years: among the reasons prostitution AND gambling are legal in Nevada is that the state is a desert! What else would they do there if you didn't have "industries" traditionally shunned elsewhere! Anyway, there were worthwhile observations and insights in the chapter, and I can't allow a few ideological squabbles to overshadow that.

The final chapter went to United Kingdom for reasons I didn't understand. The writers were able to discuss with various English police departments their views toward prostitution. And many of them felt--as do lots of people, I suspect--that legalization of the practice should be seriously considered. It's "the world's oldest profession," and despite regulations and the like, it ain't going away.

Anyway, much of the book is a bit dry, rather statistical, a bit too pedantic. The subject matter is important, something we really should think about. I wish it had been just a smidgen more titillating, though to have been less serious would have invited the allegation that the writers weren't taking the subject seriously, were perhaps covering up their embarrassment over discussing it.

So, despite its weaknesses, I'm glad it was written. Next step: get decision-and law-makers to read it and institute some changes.