The facebook album is a small recent project situated within research and analysis I’ve been doing on all kinds of sex-industry issues since the early 1990s. I suggest you look through my blog and publications. I do not focus on brothels per se, or search for some bottom-line truth. The album depends on the availability of photos in the public domain and on my finding something interesting about them. I am not an encyclopedia. A third of the photos are not from Europe, but that’s by chance, perhaps in a few months the proportion will be greater or lesser.

You may not be interested in exteriors but many people are, and such an interest does not negate another in interiors. Your use of ‘should’ implies you believe there’s a single politically correct way to study something, and I don’t agree.

Is there a reason soc. images (and Laura herself at her blog) chose to show only pictures of European or American brothels (with the exception of the old 19th century pic from Japan)? In the facebook album, there are few pictures of Asian brothels as well as non-European sex workers, though the European exterior shots seem to dominate there as well. Is the assumption here (interesting in and of itself) that westerners will find sex trafficking or sex work more palatable and acceptable if it’s show as being “European”-ized? Thus, in an album attempting to show how sex work is (or should be thought to be) normalized, are we intentionally being shown the Euro/American/first-world/unionized and/or legalized vision, as opposed to less salubrious but nonetheless equally real visions? I appreciate the effort to get people to think outside of the box, but it also seems a little bit like we’re white-washing the box here, and that doesn’t seem to help us think critically, no?

Also, is the question that we should be focusing on here really that of the exterior? It seems to me that what a brothel looks like on the outside matters far less than what is going on on the inside and in the individual lives of the sex workers. Shouldn’t our focus be not on the exterior presentation, but on whether or not we’re looking at the homes of sex workers with agency and some measure of safety, or that of sexually trafficked people (mostly women) working against their will? How does looking at a building help us address either end of the spectrum, or those in between?