Sex industry
The industry includes activities involving direct provision of sex-related services, such as prostitution, strip clubs, host and hostess clubs, and sex-related pastimes, such as pornography, sex-oriented men's magazines, women's magazines, sex movies, sex toys, and fetish or BDSM paraphernalia.
[7][6][8][9][10] Institutionalized racism in the United States has been cited as a reason for the prevalence of sex workers who are Black or other people of color, as this leads to inequality and a lack of access to resources.
[11] A brothel is a commercial establishment where people may engage in sexual activity with a prostitute,[12] though for legal or cultural reasons they may describe themselves as massage parlors, bars, strip clubs or by some other description.
In some countries, brothels are subject to strict planning restrictions and in some cases are confined to designated red-light districts.
Some men and women may travel away from their home to engage with local prostitutes, in a practice called sex tourism, and can have a variety of different socio-economic effects on the destinations.
Prostitution is extremely prevalent in Asia, particularly in Southeast Asian nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand.
[16] Due to the longstanding economic instability of many of these nations, increasing numbers of women have been forced to turn towards the sex industry there for work.
The nation's liberal economic policies in the early 1980s have been credited with revitalizing the sex industry as rural communities rapidly expand into highly developed urban centers.
The city was declared a special economic zone in 1984; by the twenty-first century what had been a small fishing community developed an advanced commercial sector and a correspondingly large sex industry.
Their governments are challenged in this regard because of the differing contexts that surround prostitution, from voluntary and financially beneficial labor to virtual slavery.
[16] As a result of Southeast Asia's lax policies regarding prostitution,[16] the region has also become a hotbed for sex tourism, with a significant portion of this industry's clients being North American or European.
The first home-PCs capable of network communication prompted the arrival of online services for adults in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The wide-open early days of the World Wide Web quickly snowballed into the dot-com boom, in-part fueled by an incredible global increase in the demand for and consumption of pornography and erotica.
A 2009 review stated that all scientific investigations of increases in the availability of pornography show no change or a decrease in the level of sexual offending.
[24] Additionally, a sample of Americans revealed in 2017 that those who had viewed pornography were more likely to experience romantic relationship breakup than their non-pornography watching counterparts, and that the effect was more pronounced with men.
Other specialists in the wider industry include courtesans and dominatrixes, some of whom may hope to earn more by specialising in these niche markets.
Some create business models, negotiate trade, make press releases, draw up contracts with other owners, buy and sell content, offer technical support, run servers, billing services, or payroll, organize trade shows and various events, do marketing and sales forecasts, provide human resources, or provide tax services and legal support.
The sex industry is controversial, and there are people, organizations and governments that have objections to it, and, as a result, pornography, prostitution, striptease and other similar occupations are illegal in many countries.
However, other feminists are opposed to censorship, and have argued against the introduction of anti-porn legislation in the United States—among them Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Karen DeCrow, Wendy Kaminer and Jamaica Kincaid.
[37] While the legality of adult sexual entertainment varies by country, the use of children in the sex industry is illegal nearly everywhere in the world.
Thailand, Cambodia, India, Brazil, and Mexico have been identified as the primary countries where the commercial sexual exploitation of children takes place.
In pre-modern Korea, the Kisaeng were women from the lower caste Cheonmin who were trained to provide entertainment, conversation, and sexual services to men of the upper class.
In her essay "Selling Sex for Visas: Sex Tourism as a Stepping-Stone to International Migration" anthropologist Denise Brennan cited an example of prostitutes in the Dominican Republic resort town of Sosúa, where some female prostitutes marry their customers in order to immigrate to other countries and seek a better life.
[46] The customers are, however, the ones that hold the power in this situation as they can withhold or revoke the sex worker's visa, either denying them the ability to immigrate or forcing them to return to their country of origin.
