Books

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

PROSTITUTION AND MORALITY by Harry Benjamin, M. D., and R. E. L. Masters, New York, The Julian Press, Inc., 1964, 495 pp., $12.50.

We have here a monumental study of the subject of prostitution by authors who have an enormously wide grasp of the subject not only from the side of literature but also from interviews with the foremost authorities on sex in the period, Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis for example, and a long personal acquaintance with famous (or notorious) madams and prostitutes, many of whom were competent to give intelligent and literate accounts of their experience. A number of actual cases are reported.

The keynote of the book is perhaps expressed by Dr. W. C. Alvarez in the Introduction. He tells of an episode which occurred in Hawaii in 1898. The police had segregated the prostitutes in a stockade where supervision ruled out most of the criminals and crimes, all too common in the sex area, and lessened the rate of incidence of venereal disease. The bitter opposition of the church people eventually closed the stockade and the result was that prostitutes were scattered throughout the city of Honolulu beyond the reach of supervision and venereal disease shot up, more criminals got into the business, and many more policemen got rich on bribes and income from blackmail. On the whole, prostitution was not lessened,

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but only driven more underground. The lesson here as elsewhere seems to be that laws on the Statute Books do not abolish prostitution. They simply drive some policemen into crookedness and blackmail and women into the hands of pimps, crooked lawyers, and others who prey upon them and take away their earnings.

The scope of the book is so great that one can only touch upon a few points in a brief review. The topics treated include the history of prostitution with some surprising facts, such, for example, as the fact that both St. Augustine and St. Thomas of Aquinas tolerated and even sanctioned it. Other topics elaborated are: motivation and attitudes of prostitutes, social causes and effects, prevention, varieties including call girls, statistics, (Kinsey found that sixtynine per cent of men used prostitutes), licensing, pimps, government participation, public attitudes, and many others.

One of the greatest contributions of the book lies in its breaking down. of popular myths and misapprehensions. For example, the popular mind has long held the concept of white slavery in horror. The authors state that it simply has not existed in Europe or the United States to any significant extent. In fact the motives of individual prostitutes are highly mixed so that one may separate them into two groups: compulsory and voluntary, the latter in reality pre-