The internet transformed commercial sex as radically as anything since the industrial revolution — enabling greater autonomy for some, creating new vectors for exploitation for others, and producing a legislative and ethical landscape that nobody has figured out how to navigate. This episode examines FOSTA-SESTA, OnlyFans, the trafficking-platform debate, and where we actually stand.

Beneath the historical narrative is an economic structure — one characterized by specific mechanisms of recruitment, control, and profit extraction that have remained remarkably consistent across centuries and continents. This episode examines the business of commercial sex as a business: how it actually operates, how exploitation is maintained, and where the money actually goes.

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.