This image is the cover for the book Love for Sale

Love for Sale

“[An] enlightening and entertaining . . . survey of the world’s oldest profession” from the Whore of Babylon to the modern sex-worker movement (Kirkus Reviews).

From Eve and Lilith to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, the prostitute has been both a target of scorn and a catalyst for social change. In Love for Sale, cultural historian Nils Johan Ringdal delivers an authoritative and engaging history of this most maligned, yet globally ubiquitous, form of human commerce.

Beginning with the epic of Gilgamesh, the Old Testament, and ancient cultures from Asia to the Mediterranean, Ringdal considers the varying way societies have dealt with and thought about prostitutes through history. He discusses how they were included in the priestess class in ancient Greece and Rome; how the rise of the courtesan in nineteenth-century Europe shaped literature, fashion, the arts, and modern sensibilities. He uncovers the first manuals on the art of sex and seduction, the British Empire’s campaigns against prostitution in India, and stories of the Japanese “comfort women” who served the armies in the Pacific theater of World War II. Ringdal closes with the rise of the sex-workers’ rights movement and ‘sex-positive” feminism, and a realistic look at the true risks and rewards of prostitution in the present day.

Recalling Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae with its broad sweep across centuries and continents, Love for Sale “uses [its] subject as a springboard for exploring the ever-changing notions of love, sexual identity, morality and gender among various cultures” (Nan Goldberg, Newark Sunday Star-Ledger).

Nils Johan Ringdal

Nils Johan Ringdal (born 1952) is a Norwegian historian and writer whose books and essays have always garnered tremendous attention in Norway and been the subject of much debate in the media. He has written about the police, the administration of justice, Norwegian nationalism, and the German occupation during the Second World War. He has also written an autobiographical collection of essays entitled The Death of Lust?: A Journey through Gay Culture. He became interested in writing about prostitution when his partner Georg Petersen, an M.D. working in public health, spearheaded an AIDS-prevention program in Oslo, which hired a prostitute as a consultant. Petersen later used this experience as advisor to the World Health Organization.

Grove Press