Fans pick 89 books like Temporarily Yours

This is the first book I read about sex tourism, which is a growing part of the market for sex work in developing countries. 

This book focuses on the men who provide services to men who are travelling to the Dominican Republic to engage with sex workers. Most of the men in this book identify as “straight” and have to navigate their personal identity and relationships while earning a living providing this service to other men.

I also really like the way this book discusses the health risks and how sex workers use various strategies to minimize the risk to themselves and their partners in an occupation that places them in the cross-hairs of an international market for sex tourism.

In my own work on male sex workers in the US, I found that race played a key role in the market—determining prices and popularity, for example. 

While sex tourism can also play on race and ethnicity and their sexual stereotypes, most countries do not have the American system of race. This book was the one that showed me how male sex workers in another country with racial dynamics similar to those in the US. 

But the biggest takeaway from this detailed ethnography is that sex work is work but also acting—sex workers are providing a service that requires them to play specific roles with their clients, and many times these roles are based on sexual/racial tropes.

Playing into racial stereotypes is one-way sex workers remain in the business.

If you want to know how economists think about sex work (which is, after all, a market transaction) this is the book to go to. 

This is a collected volume, but if you were interested in how economists do work on sex work and what the major findings have been in the process, you would want to read this book.

There are technical issues covered here in terms of data, how research on sex work is different in developed versus developing countries, and the online market for sex work. 

It also contains a great discussion of the public health issues involved and what we know about sex work and its relationship to STIs.  

This book is the one that attempts to show, from a variety of angles, how Male sex work operates primarily in Western society, but more importantly takes a deliberately global vision of the process. 

Male sex work operates along cultural and social definitions of gender and sexuality, in addition to culturally defined subjects like work, risk, and sexual transactions. This collected volume covers both the long history (from ancient times) as well as the current spatial dimensions of male sex work. 

I really like this book because it drives home the point that you need to think carefully about the time and place before beginning a social science or public health approach to male sex work. 

Whilst studying in the U.S. in the early-2000s, Tiantian Zheng decided to return to her home city of Dalian, in northeast China, to embed herself for over two years with sex workers at local karaoke parlors. There, she witnessed, and at times personally endured, all manner of customer abuse, police crackdowns, government corruption, and catty relationships between hostesses, while somehow managing to keep copious secret notes for her ethnographic fieldwork (which eventually became Red Lights). It is an eye-opening but purely academic text, not a mass-market page-turner, which will primarily be of interest only to those of us researching socioeconomic conditions in China.

The definitive sociological examination of prostitution in contemporary Hong Kong, Yeeshan Yang spent one year – out of plain curiosity – alongside the city’s sex workers, listening to their stories of how they arrived there, how they spend their days/nights, and what becomes of them when they leave the trade. These humanizing case studies provide separate yet occasionally intersecting profiles of female streetwalkers and club hostesses, as well as male prossies and pimps, and their sometimes sad, sometimes funny, tales of the world’s oldest profession in the Orient. Whispers and Moans was also adapted (by Yang) into a 2007 film by the famed Cat-III Hong Kong director Herman Yau.

In this first book in English about the history of sexual commerce in Peru during the state regulation of brothels, Drinot tells a multilayered story of the complex interactions among sex workers, clients, the police, the government, feminists, and physicians. With a remarkable diversity of archival sources, Drinot explores topics that are frequently disregarded in the history of prostitution like the meanings of masculinity and the interaction between race and venereal diseases that, in the case of Lima, resulted in the stigmatization of Chinese migrants and indigenous men as infectious agents.

I think if we went back in time to 1700s London, we would see very little of the wealthy, privileged world so often depicted on stage and screen, and find ourselves far more excited by the filth and clatter of real London–the London of street sellers, stray dogs, pillorying, bawdy houses, and taverns. I know I would.

Without a doubt, all echelons of society took an interest in bawdy houses back then, particularly those in and around Covent Garden, where sex workers milled around the hummums and various shops, pamphleteers, and stalls, selling their wares.

In Hallie Rubenhold’s brilliant book, we get a glimpse into a surprising world, where (mainly) women found misery but also–in some cases–agency and wealth by selling themselves to well-to-do ‘gents’. This book is thrilling and heartbreaking in equal measure, and it proved to be an essential companion as I wandered through the backstreets of old… show more.

Mrs. Seagraves used real facts and lots of sources to tell her stories, and her book was one of the first to address the prostitution industry in the west. Because of her, some of the women who were formerly cast aside finally got the recognition they deserved. For those seeking a more romanticized look at the biographies of prostitutes and why it is important to remember them, this is the book.

Like Anne Butler, Ms. Rosen used credible sources to explain the “whys and hows” of frontier prostitution, prostitutes’ roles in society, and the culture that kept them in their place. Her book includes government studies conducted with the women themselves regarding their careers. Statistics on the ladies’ health and social diseases are included here too.