asing market-oriented institutionalization of urban sexuality. Gilfoyle describes the big picture in terms of evolution of the form that prostitution as an institution took in New York over the period covered in the book--from sacral or covert (in the 18th century and earliest 19th) to highly public (through most of the 19th century until the Progressive Era), and back to sacral again, as prostitution went more or less underground and became institutionalized according to officially criminalized social norms. Indeed, the reference to the sacralization of prostitution is ironic; GilfoyleÆs characterization refers to the fact that prostitution moved from the fringes of New York social life, to the very core of its mainstream social and public life (at least as available to heterosexual men), and back again to the fringes of respectable society, between 1790 and 1920 (Gilfoyle 313).
It may seem a tautology to assert that market forces have a totalizing role in Gilfoyle's presentation, given the fact that individual instances of prostitution by definition are embedded in a commercial transaction. But, in fact, City of Eros demonstrates that prostitution cannot be fully understood as one or myriad exchanges of sex for pay as the fundamental artifact of its appearance in New York. Rather, the petty commercial transactions of prostitution between 1790 and 1920 were (and doubtless are) an attribute of a relational economic structure that dominates and determines the very character of human experience in New York.
That is, as private and covert as unconventional sexual praxis might at first seem to be, the fact is that human experience, perceptions, and appetites did not determine the growing institutionalization and commercialization of sex in New York; economic and institutional conditions determined the quality of human experience. Indeed, the shape (more exactly succession of shapes, for the landscape changed both qualitatively and p...