The Red Light Review

It is a Tuesday afternoon in Pompeii, sometime in the decade before 79 CE. A man — a wool-worker, perhaps, or a sailor off a grain ship docked at Puteoli — navigates the basalt-paved streets by following stone phalluses carved directly into the road surface, each one pointing like an arrow toward the same destination. He rounds a corner at the intersection of Vico del Lupanare and Vico del Balcone...

Across two thousand years of commercial sex work, heterosexual anal sex has carried its own price tag — sometimes lower, sometimes higher, almost never absent — and the history of that surcharge is the history of three different logics layered on top of each other: contraception, honor, and taboo. In Pompeii's Lupanar, the wall graffiti record named workers and explicit acts. J.N. Adams and Sarah...

In March 2005, a stepmother in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, walked into the Palm Beach Police Department and reported something that should have ended a career decades in the making. Her fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, a high school student, had been paid $300 to give a massage to an older man on Palm Beach Island. The man had then groped her. The detective who took the report, Joseph Recarey, began...

It is 7:30 on a Thursday evening in the narrow alley of Molensteeg, one block east of the Oude Kerk — the Old Church — whose Gothic spire has watched over this neighborhood since 1306. The brick is old, the canal below is black and still, and the red neon tubes behind floor-to-ceiling glass panels cast everything in the color of a darkroom. A woman in a lace body-stocking stands in the frame of a...

It is 10:45 PM on a Thursday in January, peak tourist season. The temperature outside is still 32 degrees Celsius. You are on the second floor of Nana Plaza, Bangkok's self-described "World's Largest Adult Playground," squeezing past a Japanese salaryman in a crisp white shirt and an Australian in board shorts who are both staring at the same elevated runway. Ninety women in bikinis rotate on a ci...