To its buyers and sellers, the sex trade is just another business. So is the champagne. Next door, in Kiel's Eros Centre one of Germany's big licensed brothels , scores of prostitutes stand waiting at the doors of their rooms, ogled by a trickle of men traipsing along the red-lit corridors. Business is bad here too. It is the black sheep of the entertainment industry, in parts hugely lucrative, in parts pitifully poorly paid. Riddled with malpractice and sleaze, it unites one of the world's oldest businesses, prostitution, and one of its newest, Internet sex.
Just possibly, respectability beckons. To start with, some categories. There are what may be called services: prostitution, striptease and telephone sex. And there are products: pornography and sex aids. In both parts of the industry, a handful of well-run and imaginative businesses are making money as never beforeβthrough upmarket escort agencies, for instance, or over the Internet, or by intelligently exploiting market niches. Traditional businesses, especially the many small and amateurish ones, are threatened with extinction.
What is going on? The biggest change, as in so many industries, is globalisation. In many poor countries, international tourism and business travel have made prostitution spectacularly rewarding. In the Hotel Gellert, in Budapest, a Hungarian woman proudly shows off one of the world's most coveted passports: her earnings have financed a marriage of convenience with a Swiss.
Hundreds of thousands of women from poor countries dream of something similar. For most, a tourist visa suffices. At the bottom of the market, few language or other skills are required. Increasingly, western providers of sexual services are finding it difficult to compete with foreigners.
As in other industries, these new competitors work longer hours, for less money, and with less concern for safety and comfort than their western counterparts.
