Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States

by Rita Nakashima Brock, Susan B. Thistlethwaite, Susan Brooks Thistlewaite, et al.

Book Overview

This stunning look at the global sex industry brings fresh analysis and new approaches to the baffling and complex issues that surround prostitution.

Religion and society have both cast stones at prostitutes, seeing them as archetypal sinners and blaming them for their situation. Brock and Thistlethwaite, after many years of research, travel, and interviews, offer this cross-cultural study. They compare and highlight structures that sustain...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0800629795
• ISBN13: 9780800629793
• Release Date: September 1996
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Length: 392 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

the price of being a thing

Politics, sex, global economics, religion: sounds like a pot-boiling fiction best seller. But, while there are many harrowing scenes and both despicable and heroic characters, there's precious little "romance" in this study of prostitution and the international sex trade in Asia (Korea, Japan, Philippines, Thailand and Taiwan) and the United States. As the authors quote one prostitute, "It kind of kills you, but it's over fast." And yet, one Thai military officer, suspected of being more than a customer, took offence at the authors' use of the term "sex industry"!The authors, both Christian feminists, interviewed hundreds of prostitutes and those who would provide them refuge on both sides of the Pacific, and their analysis owes much to Liberation Theology, particularly Korean minjung theology. "Evil," they write, "should be reconceived as whatever increases human helplessness, reinforces or inflicts pain without a healing purpose, and/or creates separation from relationships of love and nurture. Those three things - helplessness, pain, and separation - define evil as it is experienced by those exploited by the sex industry." It is no surprise, the authors point out, that this particular form of evil trade has taken root in and between the United States and (with the exception of Singapore) the most developed and developing countries of Eastern Asia. "The temptations of market economic theory are to reduce every aspect of human life to its value in the marketplace. .... The way in which certain economic systems contribute to human sin is to institutionalize the lack of care in a society and to make the consequences of this lack of care invisible."This is an extraordinarily written, researched and thoroughly thought out work. The authors do their humanly best to understand and have compassion for all the players in this industry. As an introduction to how the world presently works, there may be no better book.Read it.