Love for Sale: A World History of Prostitution

The exchange of sex for money is often cited as the first profession, and it is certainly the most controversial - from Eve and Lilith to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, the prostitute has been a lightning rod for changing notions of love, sexual identity, morality, and gender. 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 around the globe up to the modern red-light district. It shows how different societies have viewed and dealt with prostitutes and uncovers the first manuals of sex and seduction. It closes with the rise of the sex-workers' rights movement and "sex-positive" feminism, and a realistic look at the true risks and rewards of prostitution in the present day. Love for Sale spans a wide historical swath armed with illustrations, a lively wit and no-nonsense grasp of sex that recalls Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae.