The book starts describing the research that Albert uses to gain access to the brothel. A book about the spread of AIDS or the use of condoms would have been very interesting. However, the book quickly devolves into a book so voyeuristic it makes Fabio novels look like honest depictions of love. The author is clearly fascinated with the life and struggles of prostitution. She then uses her credentials as a legitimate researcher to explore her personal desires. Note, that I in no way think that her fascination with prostitution is sexual, she never uses language which would suggest her interest is sexual in nature. But her objectivity absent and her language in the face of what these women experience expresses itself more as detachment than true objectivity.

The description of the lives the women face, essentially prisoners in what is an implicit agreement between the brothel and the police to violate these women’s civil rights, is treated as just another fact. Paying only menial lip service to a violation of civil liberties under the guise of objectivity and fairness is despicable.

Albert then sits in on two sexual encounters. She crosses a line which an objective researcher would never cross and which an advocate would never claim was useful. Albert is not giving a voice to these women; she is exploring her own fascinations. If she wanted to give voice she could have easily just written the firsthand experience of these women and the struggles they face. Instead she hides behind a guise of scientific credibility in order to explore her own fascination with prostitution. Her actions are exploitive on two levels.

First she is clearly experiencing sex in a new and novel way for herself, using this opportunity to get in all the experience she missed out by being a “square”. This book is less about what the women whom she claims to be writing for experience everyday of their lives (and are most likely still experiencing), than Albert and what she, a white Harvard-educated married woman with few sexual exploitations of her own, experiences inside of a brothel.

But a more disturbing exploitation taking place is the exploitation of these prostitutes by Albert for financial gain. Albert is proclaiming herself a voice for the voiceless, a writer sharing the stories of hidden women who are subject to the myths and fears of an uninformed society. But Albert chooses not to donate proceeds from this book to any organization that I can find. She keeps the money for herself! Proceeds from this book, which are made all the more sizeable by the fact that the subject is sexual and taboo in nature, go directly to Albert and not the prostitutes. This is sexual exploitation. The sexual nature of these women’s work sells books and Albert profits from this taboo just as the brothel owners profit from the women’s actual sexual acts. Albert is essentially no better than the john’s who buy the service or the brothel owners who run the joint.

This book has been recommended for women’s studies classes, and in fact this is where I was exposed to the work, which is extraordinarily ironic because the goal of women’s studies (or at least one of three) is to end sexual exploitation, something that seems impossible as long as tripe like this is passed off as a work of advocacy.