ancient cities

702 Sex Industry
(and, by implication, legal) context in which
“goods and services of an erotic and sexual kind”
are consumed. Developing this, she contends that
while there is considerable discussion about the
regulation of prostitution, the vast majority of sex
businesses are not recognized as spaces of prostitution
and may be unaffected by prostitution laws.
In the current context, for instance, it is important
to note the sale of sexual goods and services occurs
across sites including, Agustin lists, “bars, restaurants,
cabarets, clubs, brothels, discotheques, saunas,
massage parlors, sex shops with private
booths, hotels, flats, dungeons for bondage and
domination, Internet sites, cinemas and anywhere
that sex is offered for sale on an occasional basis.”
Regulating this diverse range of sites presents a
number of legal and logistical challenges, and
many forms of commercial sex slip through the
net, subject to no specific forms of licensing or
surveillance. Nonetheless, most nation-states have
adopted laws and policies that aim to confine
sexual acts and nudity to specific private spaces,
and many forms of sexual display are subject to
obscenity acts, which attempt to limit the circulation
of materials with sexual content in both public
and private spaces. Here, it is worth noting the
most important consideration in the regulation of
sexual goods and services has traditionally been to
protect those deemed vulnerable to corruption. In
this respect, it is notable that middle-class White
men have tended to protect their access to materials
deemed pornographic while limiting the availability
of these materials to those “less-civilized” individuals
who might more easily be seduced and
depraved by explicit images. This was explicit in
the mid-Victorian period, when the rhetoric surrounding
the 1857 Obscene Publications Act
(England and Wales) emphasized the potentially
“deadly” impact of pornography on the working
classes, not least working-class women. Subsequently,
access to pornography has become more
democratized—thanks in part to Internet access—
with the protection of children becoming the dominant
justification for the regulation of pornography
in the urban West. Here, the influence of religious
groups has often been considerable, with the antipornography
movement drawing sustenance from
fundamentalist worldviews that emphasize the dangers
associated with “an open marketplace of morals.”
The desire to protect “family values” has thus
encouraged the introduction of a rich and diverse
range of legislation intended to control the content
of and access to, for example, pornographic materials,
with legislators constantly seeking to refine
the boundaries between what is suitable for general
consumption and what only (consenting)
adults can access. One manifestation of this is
attempts by the state and the legislature to limit the
sale or display of pornographic material to specific
spaces that are evidentially not part of the
public realm (i.e., are inaccessible to minors) yet
are accessible to the public (whether freely or by
way of payment).
Describing the evolution of adult entertainment
districts, Andrew Ryder highlights the role
of civic leaders and urban governments in trying
to control adult entertainment activities through
a variety of “command-and-control” techniques,
including obscenity laws, licensing, zoning, and
planning powers. For instance, in the United States,
licensing and zoning ordinances have been widely
used to control the number and location of sexually
oriented businesses. Whereas the former place
limits on the way a premise advertises, opens, and
admits customers, the latter tend to identify which
districts are appropriate for sexually oriented businesses.
In U.S. cities, zoning regulations typically
prevent sexually oriented businesses from operating
within a certain number of feet from residences,
schools, and religious facilities, characteristically
pushing adult businesses toward the fringes of cities
and away from middle-class census tracts. In most
instances, zoning laws also prevent the co-location
of sexually oriented businesses; several U.S. city
ordinances prohibit such businesses within 1,000
feet of one another on the basis that clusters of
such businesses are associated with nuisance and
criminality. Despite the contested evidence for
such nuisance, U.S. courts have tended to uphold
zoning ordinances, overruling claims they conflict
with First Amendment rights to commercial rights
of expression as long as ordinances leave adequate
alternative sites for adult businesses. This type of
judgment has also been extended to nude dancing,
with attempts by municipalities to prevent the
opening of nude dancing venues through antinudity
ordinances, which are challenged by owners
who argue that dancers are expressing a message
and their conduct is therefore protected as symbolic
speech. Yet although the federal courts have