Buying Love in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This chapter analyzes how the sex/work split became normalized in the twentieth century, and how this helped to render invisible the intimate connections between sexuality and economy. This involved something of a paradox for, on the one hand, large-scale consumer shifts meant that sexual and intimate life was increasingly governed by free-market rationalities whereas, on the other hand, ongoing moral panics meant that sex work was becoming ever more marked out against normality. The chapter argues that these apparently contradictory forces worked together to maintain the illusion that the sexual division of labor did little more than reflect women’s “natural” desires rather than operating as an instrument through which capitalism could extract their unpaid sexual labor.