Bernstein's Temporarily Yours is a masterful work of scholarship. Bernstein argues that new forms and meanings of sex commerce have developed in the context of postindustrial relations, globalization, the service economy, and related socioeconomic shifts of the last several decades. Her analysis is built on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with sex workers, customers, police, and others, in San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Stockholm.
After presenting an overview of its methods and analysis, the book's first several chapters focus on San Francisco. Chapter 2 offers a brief history of prostitution's establishment, forms, and geographic organization and dispersal, and it demonstrates how prostitution is shaped by and responds to social change. Chapter 3 provides a thoughtful analysis of modern street prostitution. Here Bernstein argues that “postindustrial economic transformations led to a privatization of sexual commerce” (p. 69), with spatial, social, and emotional consequences for workers and clients. Chapter 4 further explores this move off the streets, a move prompted by San Francisco police activity, city policies, and the emergence of the Internet economy. Chapter 5, focusing on clients, maintains that what is unique in the postindustrial era is some men's explicit preference for commodified sex.
These chapters lay the groundwork for and help elaborate Bernstein's signal concept, “bounded authenticity.” She asserts that the changes in sex work observed in her fieldwork, along with larger cultural shifts, have contributed to a new paradigm of commercial sexual services, of which bounded authenticity is a central feature. “Bounded authenticity” refers to clients' desire for, and sex workers' provision of, authentic emotional and sexual connection within the contours of a market-bounded exchange; the appearance of the “girlfriend experience” (“GFE”) in sex workers' advertising and in erotic review sites is one manifestation of this practice. Bernstein shows that these clients seek an exchange that is both authentic and bounded; the GFE is no poor substitute for satisfying sex and emotional connection within an ongoing interpersonal relationship, but is instead precisely the desired interaction. Moreover, men seeking GFEs also have fulfilling sex at home with partners they love; postindustrial male heterosexuality neither ties sex to relationship nor rigidly separates sex from emotional connection.
Chapter 6 explores transformations in European sex commerce and the unintended consequences of Dutch and Swedish prostitution law reform. Chapter 7 examines postindustrial moral panics about sexuality—especially trafficking and prostitution—in light of broader changes in norms of gender and sexuality, the demarcation of public and private, and the constitution of margin and center. Bernstein concludes by declaring that bounded authenticity and the new paradigm of sex work identified over the course of her fieldwork represent “important shifts in the cultural logics of male dominance and of capitalism” (p. 188).
Bernstein is a truly gifted analyst and writer. However, in a few places she draws too sharp a line between modern and postindustrial modes of prostitution. First, her suggestion that bounded authenticity is essentially a new facet of sex work is debatable. Rather, the GFE may be a new term for a pre-existing, but now much more pervasive, offering. That is, bounded authenticity likely pre-dated the current era, but the postindustrial economy greatly facilitated its expansion. Thus Bernstein's claim that some postindustrial sex workers' practices and understandings “would not have been possible” (p. 110) in earlier periods seems overstated. Second, her contention that some men's preference for commodified sex is “unique” (p. 120) to the new era may overreach. Bernstein is correct about the “profound reorganization of personal life” (p. 121) wrought in the postindustrial era; however, postindustrial relations again simply may have enabled the expression of long-standing preferences, at least in some men. Third, Bernstein occasionally draws too sharp a distinction between the orientations of middle-class and street prostitutes; not all indoor sex workers embrace the new paradigm.
A separate concern is whether Bernstein gives sufficient emphasis to the coercive role of the state in transforming sex work. Greater attention to the varying role of the state over time and space would further sharpen her analysis. For example, increasing police use of craig's list to arrest Internet sex workers merits attention, as it indicates that indoor prostitution has not been wholly normalized. Similarly, the claim that “most” American cities are moving toward greater parity between arrests of prostitutes and arrests of clients (p. 238, note 49) needs to be substantiated.
However, these questions are chiefly differences of interpretation, not challenges to Bernstein's larger thesis. On the whole, her research and argumentation are superb. She uses the ethnographic material carefully, builds the analysis logically and persuasively, and supports it with thoughtful readings of a wide range of scholarly sources. Her arguments will certainly provoke important and wide-ranging reconsiderations of the significance of sex work in postindustrial societies. The book is indispensable not only to prostitution researchers, but also to sociolegal scholars of globalization, to those who examine law and social control, and to those interested in the implications of postindustrial social and economic organization for gender, class, interpersonal, and sexual relations.
