Acknowledgments Preface, 2025 Preface, 2013 PART I Prostitution Chapter One: The Story of the Sex Worker or How Prostitution Became the World’s Most Modern Profession The ‘Sex Worker’ and the Feminist Sexual Orientation The Victim and the Subject A Slippery Slope: From the Independent Escort … … to Human Trafficking … … and Children The Invulnerable Person The Narrator The Cult of the Whore The World’s Oldest Profession: Regulation The Drainage Model Chapter Two: An Industry is Born–1970 to present The 1970s: The Sex Industry Expands—and Gets Into Trouble The 1980s: Holland Takes Up the Thread The 1990s: HIV/AIDS—Money Comes Through The New Millennium: ‘Unions for Sex Workers’ The International Union of Sex Workers—Pimps Les Putes/STRASS—The Men The International Committee of the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe —The Researchers Ámbit Dóna—The Social Workers The Industry False Façades Rhetoric from the Left—Money from the Right Power Transformed—The Legacy of 1968 Chapter Three: The Self and the Commodity in the Sex Industry “My body is not my Self” “Sex is not the body” Reification—When Sexuality becomes a Commodity The Struggle for the Woman The Buyer’s Dilemma The Postmodern Story: A False Dialectic The Way Out PART II Surrogate Motherhood Chapter Four: The Reality of Surrogacy Background The Buyers and the Bearers of the Bought Chapter Five: The Story of the Happy Breeder Happy Families A ‘Revolutionary Act’ The ‘Feminist’ Arguments Prostitution Child Trafficking Sold with Fatal Relativism Turning the Law of Demand and Supply into a Human Right On the Term ‘Surrogate Mother’ The Capitalist Creation Myth ‘For a Friend’s Sake’ – About Altruistic Surrogacy Chapter Six: Inside the Surrogacy Industry Uterus Pimps – About the Agencies The Most Surrogacy-Friendly Courts in the World “If I do feel sad after the birth, I won’t show it” The Ultimate Reification The Virgin Mary in the Marketplace Women who Change their Minds: “I am not a surrogate; I am a mother” Bibliography Index

The story of the sex worker is another way for society to keep prostitution at a distance. By making prostitution a discourse, a topic of debate, a semantic issue, people think they can keep ‘real’ prostitution away. This is the core of prostitution: the buyer’s paradox. He both wants and doesn’t want prostitution to be work. He wants to be able to buy sex, but he doesn’t want the woman to behave as if she is being paid to perform the act. The buyer wants prostitution to exist, but he doesn’t want it to resemble prostitution. The more it resembles a routine chore—the more the woman acts like a cashier at a grocery store—the more displeased he becomes. The postmodern Left and the neoliberal Right have entered into a tacit pact. The Right gains power, and in exchange, the postmodern Left saves face because the power is masked in their words. While the neoliberal Right attacks the welfare state and increases the gaps between socioeconomic classes, the postmodern Left costumes the attacks in the language of rebellion. It is just like prostitution all over again, coming back to haunt us. It is the same division of the Self and the body, person and function, mother and child, soul and sexuality. And the same fear that the two will be reunited. The division is made sacred while the unity is demonized. What everyone in surrogacy longs for—whole families, happiness, sacredness, Virgin Mary status, forgiveness and atonement—is the diametric opposite of the functionalization and commodification that is actually taking place.