The Business of Pleasure: A History of Paid Sex in the Heart of Europe

Originally published in Dutch in 2022, the English edition of The Business of Pleasure: A History of Paid Sex in the Heart of Europe offers a comprehensive survey of the history of female sex work in Belgium from the Middle Ages until the present. Though each chapter features a different author, the book reads, stylistically and thematically, as a holistic volume. As a synthetic work, The Business of Pleasure brings existing research on the history of sex work in Belgium to a new audience.The chapters that comprise The Business of Pleasure largely proceed chronologically, and each covers a single period. The two exceptions are a chapter about the Belgian Congo and an oral history from sex worker and activist Sonia Verstappen. Each chapter addresses a number of related themes: discussion of regulation and moral debates about sex work complement efforts to illuminate the lives of sex workers and to situate sex work in its broader economic, social, and political context. Many also attempt, if briefly, to place other forms of sex work—such as that performed by men—in that context as well. What comes through the book’s seven chapters is the claim that whatever the period, female sex work always occupies an “ambiguous” position, both reviled and central to social life (22).Each chapter opens with an anecdote documenting the business of sex work or the life of an individual sex worker. Doing so not only creates structural harmony between the chapters but also foregrounds social life as essential to understanding the history of sex work, regardless of the period. For instance, the first chapter, by Jelle Haemers, opens with the co-owners of a fifteenth-century brothel who found themselves in trouble for, among other things, heating bathwater in a kettle that contained the amputated hand of a criminal. These brothelkeepers found themselves in hot water (so to speak) not because they ran a business that sold sex. Rather, they were in trouble for their unsanitary practices outside that realm. The anecdote shapes the rest of the chapter, which shows some of the ways that sex work, despite often appearing on the margins of medieval social life, was also widely accepted as part of it.Other chapters take a similar approach, introducing their themes through an anecdote and providing an overview of the period. Each hits topics that historians of sex work have come to expect, but the focus on Belgium makes the book more original. For instance, while historians of prostitution have shown how brothels in Brussels became a target of abolitionist panics around sex trafficking in the late nineteenth century, it is rare that we get that story from the perspective of Belgians themselves, as we do in Pieter Vanhees’s and Magaly Rodríguez García’s chapters. Unfortunately, putting that perspective into dialogue with other historians’ work is difficult, as the book lacks the scholarly apparatus we expect from an edited collection or monograph. Instead, it only includes suggested reading at the end. This practice may be somewhat typical of a textbook, but it does limit the volume’s utility to both researchers and students.It is worth highlighting the two chapters that stand outside the overall structure of the volume. First, Amandine Lauro’s “Worlds Apart” focuses on the Belgian Congo. Lauro’s task in recapturing the experience of Congolese “sex workers” is, as she admits, more difficult than it would be for metropolitan Belgium. Lauro nonetheless successfully shows how the colonial experience reshaped the meaning of sex work in the Belgian Congo. Prostitution, as defined by Europeans, emerged with colonization itself: “In the case of Central Africa, and of the Congo in particular, there was no commercial sex trade prior to colonization” (88). Lauro shows how the imposition of colonial law reshaped the sex-gender system that previously existed in the Congo as colonial administrators struggled to understand and control diverse forms of “transactional sex” simply as prostitution (92–93). Colonial officials in other states also struggled with the same problem, but the Congolese solution was somewhat original. Rather than set up systems of regulation that one might have seen in Europe, the authorities instead imposed a “tax” on “women theoretically living alone” (94). The breadth of those caught up by this tax—which also involved medical examination and surveillance—points to the particular difficulties the colonial state faced in monitoring an unfamiliar sex market, maintaining racial segregation, and ensuring colonial power.Second, Sonia Verstappen’s oral history closes the book’s main chapters. Verstappen describes how she began engaging in sex work as a barmaid in the 1970s, before working full-time for a madam. Verstappen’s story illustrates the complicated realities of modern sex work. She notes, for instance, that she often made more than her “peers in other professions,” while also being afraid of the real risks (“STDs, drug addictions”) that came with the territory as well (146). She tells the reader about working in the windows of Brussels, about how her clients changed as the neighborhoods declined, about the rhythm of sex work and the life she made through it. She closes her story with her turn to activism after “coming out” as a sex worker on Belgian TV in 2004 and her founding, in 2015, of the Union des travailleu(r)ses du Sexe Organisé-e-s Pour l’Indépendance, which has achieved a great deal of success in Belgium even though sex workers “are still not treated like other citizens” (154). This chapter in particular would work well in the classroom, especially to begin a discussion of the nuanced realities of contemporary sex worker politics.The Business of Pleasure closes with a short afterword by García that draws on the previous chapters to challenge some of the most damaging clichés regarding sex work. As the conclusion to a survey that will most readily be used by undergraduate students, this chapter is effective in bringing history directly into the present. Overall, the book succeeds at revealing some of the major themes within the European history of sex work. Individual chapters will work well in courses in European history and the history of sexuality, while the book as a whole should be considered for any class that plans to address sex work in detail. Readers of Labor, in particular, will get a great deal out of the book’s effort to bring out the experience of sex work and highlight actual lives of sex workers.