Introduction: Researching Commercial Sex in a Culture War

When people ask the icebreaker question, ‘What do you do for a living?’, one light-footed answer is: I am one of those who make sex boring. In the past decade and a half, I spent quite some time measuring and accounting for markets for sex work through collecting and analysing numbers. As much as the ‘boring’ may be true, talking about the exchange of things sexual against money or gain is also relevant, challenging and contentious.

This captures what the promise of this research into the hidden world of commercial sex is. Since early social scientists started to make more or less serious attempts to study commercial sex, they have struggled with the triangle between values and theory and how to collect data that can do more than parrot theory or values. With all his faults, Cesare Lombroso had this one right: he starts his Donna Delinquente (1893) with an ode to ‘blind observance of the facts’, winning from ‘a-prioristic adversaries, who opposed us only with logic and syllogisms’.¹ Like many high-spirited 19th-century ideas, this one proved overly naïve, and maybe for reasons Lombroso couldn’t have fathomed. For one thing, the man himself was to a large extent the product of the a priori thinking about women selling sex. We would fall into the same trap if we thought our time did not shape us. The problematic relationship between the battlefields within and between contradicting human values, scientific theory and measuring what is happening ‘in the streets’ remains difficult today.