NON FICTION

WHORES IN HISTORY by Nickie Roberts. (HarperCollins: $28; 380 pp.) OK, how many historians do you know who started out as strippers? Nickie Roberts, who used to take her clothes off in London, now intends to strip away the layers of lies that she says male historians have applied to the story of prostitutes in Western society. It used to be a delightful line of work, says Roberts: Prostitutes in Egypt were not the dregs of society, but high-class priestesses, worshiped by men. They were ultra-liberated, beyond the constraints that society placed on mere wives and mothers, a model of free behavior. What’s given modern prostitution a bad name, Roberts argues, is society’s insistence that sex for hire is a crime. Criminalization robs the prostitute of free will and invites pimps and other sex entrepreneurs to get into the act, all of them muscling in on the prostitute’s territory and choice. The book is a ringing cry for decriminalization, as though that were the only obstacle preventing the prostitute from regaining her supposedly once-elevated status.