Abstract

This article links historical and religious views of morality with representations of gender and sex on the market. The intention has been to understand the trends towards commercialization of sex and intimate life in a late modernity where neoliberal economic theories could be in the process of losing the power they have had for several decades. Religious morality (understanding sex as sin), human rights (rejection of human slavery) and modernist feminism (claiming equality) clash with a neo-liberal discourse which legitimizes commercial sex as an outcome of individual choice and free will. The market for sex is highly lucrative and often still most often only quasi legal, which is perhaps why it has often been described in fiction as much as in theoretical treatises.