A study of the sex industry from ancient China to New Orleans’s red light district is undermined by its own salaciousness
Consider Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Phryne Before the Areopagus, painted in 1861. It shows the ancient Greek courtesan Phryne, who was being tried for impiety. In Gérôme’s version, sensing the case isn’t going well, her defender, Hypereides, tears off all Phryne’s clothes to expose her beautiful breasts, leaving her creamily naked and shielding her face in burning shame, reasoning that no jury will convict such an exquisite creature. Meanwhile, the 25 or so jurors, all male and middle-aged, hold their hands to their mouths in a stagey gesture of horror and desire.
Aesthetically stunning, the painting is nonetheless unbearable in its bad faith. For while it pretends to condemn Phryne as a seller of sex, it simultaneously tickles the viewer with the thought of what it might be like to sleep with her. And it is this tension that runs like a faultline through Kate Lister’s strangely unsatisfying history of sex for sale. For while her excellent introduction makes clear that the sex industry, even in its fancier incarnations, is intimately linked with poverty, disease and coercion, the illustrations that pack this book send a message of fantasy, fulfilment and fun.
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