Based on leading empirical psychological research from around the world, this book offers valuable insights on women who sell sex. It synthesizes the extensive body of scholarly work on the topic of women selling sex from a psychological perspective in order to understand why women choose to do so. In turn, the book highlights a range of important sociocultural contexts surrounding the sale of sex that are major sources of stress, and examines how women cope with these circumstances. Illustrating the multi-faceted nature of selling sex, the book will contribute to debates on individual and societal responses to this major sociopolitical—and at the same time, deeply personal—issue. Including original case material and outlining future directions for researchers, it offers an informative and engaging resource for academics, researchers, students and professionals around the globe.

Feminist scholars have long been concerned with how women and sexuality are perceived and treated by the American legal system. Feminists have put forth a variety of arguments seeking the causes and solutions to the class-based and sex-biased characteristics of the legal system that contribute to the victimization of women in contemporary society. No consensus within the women's movement has been achieved on a number of legal issues, such as pornography or prostitution, since approaches are often divided by political, economic, moral, or sexual ideology.Women, Sex, and the Law is a comprehensive survey and analysis of the legal and sexual issues important to women. Rosemarie Tong introduces the reader to the different feminist and legal perspectives on the causes and solutions for the problems of pornography, sexual harassment, prostitution, rape, and woman-battering. Tong clearly and concisely details and assesses the legal theory and practice for each issue, describs and critiques the various feminist debates surrounding these concerns, and offers her own thoughtful proposals for ameliorating the discriminatory tendencies and improving the effectiveness of our present legal system.

Drawing on empirical data from women who pay for sexual services and those who provide services to women, this ground-breaking study is the first of its kind in the UK, detailing the experiences of women who pay for sex in an explicit, direct, prearranged way. Unlike previous research on clients, which has predominantly focused on men who buy sex or women who engage in romance tourism in places such as the Caribbean, this innovative research offers new and original insights into the demand side of commercial sex. Too often, it is assumed that only men pay for sex from women or other men. Women are assumed to be service providers and are unimaginable as clients. This book therefore offers a radical departure from existing scholarship on commercial sex. In addition, the book examines the experiences of couples who pay for commercial sex, a client group that has received scant investigation. The book explores women’s reasons for their engagement in commercial sex services, their backgrounds and characteristics, their strategies for remaining safe and managing potential risks, as well as their sexual health strategies. The nature of sexual service bookings with women clients is also examined, exploring the types of services women seek, the places where bookings occur and the fess they pay. Finally, the experiences of men, women and trans sex workers who provide sexual services to women are examined. By drawing on our unique data and comparing it to the literature on men clients, we present our theory ‘Converging Sexualities’. We argue that commercial sex is a site of behavioural convergence and that women clients are behaving in ways that could be described as masculine or feminine. Our study therefore offers new ways to understand sexuality. This book will be of interest to researchers in the field of sexuality, sex work and women’s behaviour.

Selling French Sex is an illuminating account of the cultural, social, and economic history of the sale of 'French sex'. It explores the discourses and experiences surrounding the early twentieth century debate on sex trafficking, which mobilized various international reform movements to combat the coerced prostitution of young women abroad. According to popular legend and empirical studies, French women were present in brothels all over the world, where they were the most desired and best paid in the business. But were they trafficking victims or willing migrants? In this timely book, Elisa Camiscioli reconstructs the networks and mechanisms of cross-border migrations for sexual labor; elucidates women's motives for leaving and staying; and explains why French migrant sexual labor occupied such a prominent place in the underworld of prostitution, as well as in the imaginaries of anti-trafficking campaigners, immigration officials, and ordinary consumers of vice.

Passet shows that the majority of correspondents who participated in the sex radical movement resided in the Midwest and the Great Plains states, where ideas of individual freedom and sovereignty resonated particularly strongly.".

Prostitution is strongly embedded in local cultural practices in Cambodia. Based on extensive original research, this book explores the nature of prostitution in Cambodia, providing explanations of why the phenomenon is so widely tolerated. It outlines the background of the French colonial period, with its filles malades, considers the contemporary legal framework, and analyses the motivations for sex work, examining in particular how women become locked into debt bondage. Overall the book provides significant contributions to wider debates about sex work, sex trafficking and the constrained nature of women’s choices.

American women novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries registered a call for a new sexual freedom, Dale Bauer contends. By creating a lexicon of "sex expression," many authors explored sexuality as part of a discourse about women's needs rather than confining it to the realm of sentiments, where it had been relegated (if broached at all) by earlier writers. This new rhetoric of sexuality enabled critical conversations about who had sex, when in life they had it, and how it signified. Whether liberating or repressive, sexuality became a potential force for female agency in these women's novels, Bauer explains, insofar as these novelists seized the power of rhetoric to establish their intellectual authority. Thus, Bauer argues, they helped transform the traditional ideal of sexual purity into a new goal of sexual pleasure, defining in their fiction what intimacy between equals might become. Analyzing the work of canonical as well as popular writers_including Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Julia Peterkin, and Fannie Hurst, among others_Bauer demonstrates that the new sexualization of American culture was both material and rhetorical.

Interrogating supply/demand from an inter- and multi-disciplinary perspective, this collection broadens engagement beyond the routine analysis of the locus of violence in prostitution and the validity of the prostitute's consent. A focus on the supply/demand dynamic brings into play a range of other societal, economic and psychological factors such as the social construction of sexuality, the viability of alternative choices for prostitutes and clients, and the impact of regulatory regimes on the provision of sexual services. The factors which underlie each component of the supply/demand dyad are also studied and an examination is made of their dynamic interrelation. The collection emphasizes the importance of rendering policy makers alert to the evidence emerging from empirical studies conducted in different fields of enquiry, in the hope of moving beyond polarity and politics at the local, national and international level.

An unparalleled exploration of the mysteries underlying women's sexuality that rivals the culture-shifting Kinsey Report, from two of America's leading research psychologists Do women have sex simply to reproduce or display their affection? When University of Texas at Austin clinical psychologist Cindy M. Meston and evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss joined forces to investigate the underlying sexual motivations of women, what they found astonished them. Through the voices of real women, Meston and Buss reveal the motivations that guide women's sexual decisions and explain the deep-seated psychology and biology that often unwittingly drive women's desires—sometimes in pursuit of health or pleasure, or sometimes for darker, disturbing reasons that a woman may not fully recognize. Drawing on more than a thousand intensive interviews conducted solely for the book, as well as their pioneering research on physiological response and evolutionary emotions, Why Women Have Sex uncovers an amazingly complex and nuanced portrait of female sexuality. They delve into the use of sex as a defensive tactic against a mate's infidelity (protection), as a ploy to boost self-confidence (status), as a barter for gifts or household chores (resource acquisition), or as a cure for a migraine headache (medication). Why Women Have Sex stands as the richest and deepest psychological understanding of female sexuality yet achieved and promises to inform every woman's (and her partner's) awareness of her relationship to sex and her sexuality.