The twentieth century saw two world wars that massively expanded military commercial sex economies, massive migration patterns that created new trafficking vulnerabilities, and a wave of criminalization campaigns that often made things worse for the people they claimed to help. This episode traces how the modern policy landscape was created.

Victorian Britain preached sexual purity while building one of the most extensive commercial sex economies in European history. This episode examines the extraordinary contradiction between Victorian public morality and private practice, the Contagious Diseases Acts, the underground networks of London’s streets, and the investigative journalism that exposed child exploitation and changed the law.

European colonialism didn’t just extract gold, spices, and land from colonized peoples — it also created and exploited systems of sexual commerce that were explicitly organized around race. This episode examines how empire built racialized sex economies across Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

In Renaissance Europe and the Ottoman Empire, certain women leveraged beauty, intelligence, and proximity to power into remarkable — if precarious — social positions. This episode explores the cortigiana onesta, the imperial harem, and the Japanese geisha as case studies in how women navigated systems that simultaneously celebrated and constrained them.

The medieval Church condemned commercial sex as mortal sin — and then many of the same institutions that preached that message either tolerated or directly profited from licensed brothels. This episode explores the extraordinary contradiction at the heart of medieval sexuality and the economic logic that drove it.

From the intellectual companionship of Athenian hetaerae to the licensed brothels of imperial Rome, this episode examines how two of history’s most influential civilizations built elaborate social and legal structures around the commodification of sex — and who paid the price.