On October 17, 1981, the purple-clad, pompadoured pimp Velvet Jones [2] (Eddie Murphy) appeared in a Saturday Night Live skit [3], 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 [4], and on August 23, 2009, Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys [5], 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.

With the rise of this gendered public/private divide, Bernstein writes:

a new class of specially demarcated ‘public women’ [came] under increasing scrutiny and control. … Large numbers of women now found themselves sequestered in a space which was physically and socially separate, and affixed with the permanently stigmatizing identity of ‘prostitute’ (24).

In the urban U.S., prostitutes were confined in a tightly organized system of red-light districts, until a series of Red-Light Abatement Acts from 1909 to 1917 shut down these zones and thrust tens of thousands of women onto the streets. Following this exodus, prostitution was relegated to the streets of poor neighborhoods and controlled by male pimps and organized crime.

But Bernstein claims that this is changing: streetwalking is waning and new forms of indoor sex work are gaining ground. She attributes this shift to the increasing transience of intimate life and other cultural and economic shifts of the last 30 years. During the modern-industrial age, people generally sought sexual and emotional satisfaction in non-commodified, private-sphere relationships. This hinged on a stable family structure with a male breadwinner working full-time in a long-term job that hindered geographic and class mobility. But private life has become much less secure with the decline of industry-based urban economy, the growth of the service economy, part-time and temp work, and dual career households. The last three decades have seen a fall in marriage rates, a doubling of divorce rates, and a 60 percent rise in the number of single-person households in the U.S.

Bernstein draws on the work of feminist sociologist Arlie Hochschild, who examines how the transience of private life leads people to seek emotional meaning in services they can buy, such as psychotherapy and childcare, rather than in non-commercial relations at home. In other words, while modern-industrial capitalism established the public sphere of work, commerce and industry separate from private domestic life, the postindustrial service economy breaks down these divisions. “Public-sphere market logics … become intricately intertwined with private-sphere emotional needs,” writes Bernstein. One might spend “Taylorized, efficiently managed ‘quality time’” with one’s kids, for instance (5).

In her interviews with indoor sex workers and clients, Bernstein found similar interpenetrations of public and private spheres—indicating that people increasingly look to the marketplace to satisfy sexual as well as emotional wants:

sex workers advertise themselves as ‘girlfriends for hire’ and describe the ways in which they offer not merely eroticism but authentic intimate connection for sale in the marketplace, … overworked high-tech professionals discuss their pursuit of emotional authenticity within the context of paid sexual transactions. (7)

Bernstein’s fieldwork consisted largely of “participatory observation”: she talked to streetwalkers on their strolls, accompanied vice squads on prostitution patrols, and sat with sex workers in the back of paddy wagons. She also conducted a number of in-depth, face-to-face interviews with sex workers and clients from a variety of markets, including the streets, brothels, massage parlors, escort agencies, strip clubs, and self-employed workers advertising online. Bernstein confined her research to San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Stockholm because this allowed her to compare three “well-touristed, postindustrial” cities that are known as socially progressive and similar in size and economic infrastructure.

Her main fieldwork site, San Francisco, offered a prime location for her research. In the mid-to-late 1990s, as more than one-third of the nation’s venture capital poured into the Bay Area, San Francisco suffered an accelerated version of the gentrification process that has impacted many advanced capitalist urban centers since the 1970s: it quickly converted into a white urban playground. Services and consumption displaced industry and productive labor, while the white middle classes reclaimed the inner city—shunting the industrial working class and other underprivileged groups to the city’s margins.

The effects on the sex trade were rapid and palpable. When Bernstein began her research in 1994, San Francisco had a thriving streetwalking scene. But during the dot-com boom, heavy police sweeps drove prostitutes off the streets. Many former streetwalkers bought cell phones, took out ads and moved into indoor venues scattered throughout the city. (Bernstein chronicles the shift from the public street life of prostitutes clustering on corners and waving to lone men in cars, to private “one-on-one, technologically mediated encounters with clients through cell phones and the Internet”—leading to indoor trysts (69).) Moreover, as the cost of living soared, growing numbers of college-educated women tried various forms of sex work because they couldn’t find other high-paid employment, and they felt entitled to more than a McJob. While thousands of men drifted easily into the high-tech industry, women made up only 28 percent of this sector and occupied the lowest rungs. Bay Area locals dubbed this gender divide the “digital cleavage.”

The class-privileged indoor prostitutes tended to treat sex commerce as one of many professions in the burgeoning service economy. They drew a white-collar clientele, who often saw the same “provider” repeatedly, as one might visit a favorite massage therapist. To appeal to this client, the workers offered a particular commodity—an individually designed, no-strings-attached “girlfriend experience,” including companionship, pampering, and sometimes bodywork or other healing arts. Boomtown San Francisco was brimming with men who had cash to spare and no time to date—a plight particularly conducive to patronizing sex workers.

Based on her interviews, Bernstein highlights how the shift from street to indoor, class-privileged prostitution changed the forms and meanings of the work. She found that streetwalkers and indoor workers practice and experience their labor differently. Female streetwalkers tend to discuss their bodies, sexual practices, and personalities in terms of the modern-industrial dichotomy between public and private, work and home. Some aspects of themselves are “off-limits” to clients. One woman spoke of “leaving my private me at home so I can go to work” (50). In contrast, the predominantly white, middle-class members of the prostitutes’ rights group COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) [6] claimed that they “aspired to a ‘single self’ with no steadfast divisions between ‘front stage’ and ‘back stage’ or between public and private erotic realms” (106). Other privileged indoor workers made similar comments. One said she made her work meaningful to herself by offering only the erotic services she enjoyed.

While streetwalkers sell quick sexual release, Bernstein found that many indoor workers offer a limited, but genuine emotional connection. In a world where virtually every part of social life is market-mediated and “artificial,” people pine for authentic interpersonal relations, and some sex workers strive to answer these longings by providing an oasis of heartfelt connection within the all-pervasive market. Many of the middle-class interviewees describe their work as deeply moving. One 37-year-old male escort calls it “a sacred, wonderful, beautiful thing to do for other people and to get money for. … With a good whore, you’re getting a lot more than sex” (104). Others claim they are more able to “be themselves” as sex workers than at their prior jobs. Bernstein dubs the commodity bought and sold in such transactions “bounded authenticity,” because most sex workers circumscribe the time, location, and personal information they share with their clients. (For instance, a client might schedule weekly hour-long sessions with a sex worker. During those appointments, the sex worker offers himself to the client as a lover and a friend, but they don’t contact each other outside the sessions, unless they need to reschedule.) Many clients prefer this “no strings attached” encounter to an affair, because the sex worker won’t phone them at home and spark their partners’ suspicions.

The fact that many of Bernstein’s interviewees claim to like their work will surprise some readers, since most prostitutes have sex with lots of people they neither love nor desire. At a conference Bernstein attended, a woman from the audience leapt up from her seat to ask a former prostitute, “How could you enjoy sleeping with hundreds of men? Sex is supposed to be intimate and private with one person you love” (167). This common assumption—that everyone views romantic love as essential for sex, and therefore, no one would sell sex unless they were coerced—often lurks behind the claim that all sex work is exploitative.

Enjoyment is rarely anyone’s sole reason for doing sex work. (The middle-class prostitutes cite other incentives, such as the steep cost of living, heavy student loan debt, and scarcity of high-paying jobs.) But Bernstein theorizes that they like their work because they embrace a “recreational” sex ethic, in which they seek meaning and fulfillment through erotic pleasure with limited emotional attachment (6). According to sociologist Edward Laumann and his colleagues, this new recreational sex ethic is emerging alongside the traditional “procreative” model, in which marriage serves to bind families and property, and the modern “companionate” or “amative” model, in which one weds for romantic love.

In the companionate ethic, is largely a product of the modern-industrial age, which relegates sex (and especially, of women’s sexuality) to the private sphere. But recreational sexuality, writes Bernstein, “bears no antagonism to the sphere of public commerce. It is available for sale and purchase as readily as any other form of commercially packaged leisure activity” (7).

Bernstein’s argument—that the transformations in sex work stem from sweeping changes in the global economy—is ultimately a wake-up call to activists. The majority of sex workers’ rights advocates concentrate their efforts on changing local laws and policies to decriminalize prostitution. But in her final chapters, Bernstein makes a powerful case that global economics has a far greater impact on commercial sex than legal reform. San Francisco, Amsterdam and Stockholm have vastly different laws and policies regarding prostitution. In San Francisco, prostitution is illegal, but since the late 1990s municipal authorities have cracked down on streetwalkers while allowing indoor prostitution to flourish. In 1998, Sweden criminalized the purchase (but not the sale) of sex as part of the Violence Against Women Act. The Netherlands took a different route in 2000—legalizing prostitution and imposing health and safety regulations.

Given these disparate legal approaches, one might expect different developments in these cities’ sex trades. But Bernstein found remarkably similar trends in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Stockholm: law enforcement is eliminating poor and nonwhite streetwalkers and johns from gentrifying urban centers, tolerating an upscale and mostly white cadre of indoor workers and clients, and driving illegal migrant sex workers further underground and often into worse working conditions. In short, widely divergent laws and policies can facilitate the same shifts on the ground.

While the class-privileged sex workers Bernstein interviews have relatively good working conditions, migrant sex workers are plainly suffering most from recent global economic shifts. This is hardly surprising: immigrants and migrant workers, especially women from poor nations, are more often treated as commodities, no matter what kind of work they do.

While the Netherlands and Sweden are often admired as models of state intervention in regard to prostitution, both nations “make a show of policing illegal migrants, attempting to eliminate the most visible migrant sex workers from public view” (165). The Dutch law that legalized prostitution also prohibited illegal migrants from working in indoor venues and thus made them dependent on criminal networks for false identification papers. The Swedish law that criminalized clients had similar results: the johns were too scared to contact sex workers directly, so prostitutes who had previously worked independently had to rely on illegal and often exploitative pimps to arrange meetings with johns. Tanya, a self-defined “trafficker” whom Bernstein interviewed, described how she brought Estonian women into Sweden, provided them with housing and clients, but retained their passports while they worked for her and paid them considerably less than what Swedish prostitutes earned.

As the examples of Sweden and the Netherlands show, laws and policies that help some sex workers can harm others—usually the most marginalized and vulnerable. Decriminalization and criminalization are both compatible with anti-migrant policies, urban cleanup, and gentrification. Similarly, in the U.S., anti-trafficking efforts to “rescue” migrant sex workers often result in the arrest and deportation of women who face far worse conditions in their countries of origin.

The Estonian prostitutes represent only the tip of the iceberg compared to the extreme forms of exploitation that vast numbers of women in the sex trade suffer. Since global economic developments play a larger role than local laws in shaping the sex trade, Bernstein urges activists to abandon their single-minded focus on legal reform and to target neoliberal globalization policies—such as the practices of encouraging indebted nations to develop tourist industries, including sex tourism, and to bring cash into the country through migrant workers’, including sex workers’, remittances. While decriminalization may lessen the stigma of prostitution, activists must ultimately address the global inequalities that drive women into sexual labor.