CarnalNation

Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex
By Elizabeth Bernstein
University of Chicago Press
$24.00, 288pp

On October 17, 1981, the purple-clad, pompadoured pimp Velvet Jones (Eddie Murphy) appeared in a Saturday Night Live skit, promoting his faux self-help book, I Wanna Be a Ho. Addressing viewers in Ebonics, Jones invoked a notion of prostitution that has long dominated the popular imagination: "Are you a female high-school dropout between the ages of 16 and 25? Are you tired of doors being slammed in your face when you apply for a job?"

Twenty-eight years after I Wanna Be a Ho, the media still portrays prostitutes as stiletto-heeled, underprivileged, largely non-white streetwalkers, flagging down cars and fleeing cops, but now college-educated white women are penning candid self-help guides like The Internet Escort's Handbook, and on August 23, 2009, Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys, an anthology of writings by sex workers—many non-drug-addled, middle-class, and white—made the front-page of the New York Times Book Review.

Despite a 15-year glut of memoirs, academic texts, and how-to manuals on commercial sex, relatively few books have considered the sex trade in the context of large-scale economic and cultural shifts. Even fewer have asked why rising numbers of privileged first-world people are choosing sex work as a lucrative career.

A notable exception is Elizabeth Bernstein's Temporarily Yours—one of the most original and informative studies of sex work in recent years. Bernstein, a sociologist at Barnard, argues that since the 1970s, a series of global economic, cultural and political shifts have radically changed the character of commercial sex in the industrialized West. Vice squads have swept poor, non-white streetwalkers out of the inner city, while tolerating a new cadre of predominantly white, class-privileged, indoor sex workers, who catered to an upscale clientele and offered emotional intimacy as well as sexual release.

According to Bernstein, these transformations stem from myriad societal changes, predicated on the transition from "modern industrial" to "postindustrial" capitalism—the shift from an economy based on industry and the production of goods to an economy centered on services and consumption.

As necessary background to her analysis, Bernstein provides a history of prostitution that will surprise readers who aren't familiar with scholarship on this topic. The "oldest profession" is a misnomer. However tempting it is to trace a direct line from the ancient Mesopotamian temples of Ishtar to the erotic healers of today, prostitution is not a timeless set of practices, but varied and ever-mutating, depending on historical and cultural contexts and material conditions. What most of us mean by "prostitution"—the large-scale organization of sexual labor for profit—only emerged in the mid-nineteenth century with modern-industrial capitalism. Before this time, sexual labor largely involved barter: women occasionally traded sexual favors in their homes and communities during times of hardship, but regulated brothels were rare and small in scale.

In the nineteenth century, capitalism, urbanization, and the expansion of wage labor produced unprecedented gender and class divisions: men worked in the public sphere, while married, white, bourgeois women served as caretakers in the private, domestic sphere. It was deemed normal for men to patronize prostitutes, but unwed women were expected to practice abstinence. Nonetheless, many working-class and nonwhite women joined men in the public sphere as wage laborers or prostitutes.