Buying sex across the Iron Curtain: Western men and transactional intimacy in state-socialist Hungary during the long 1960s
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: By the late 1960s, Budapest had an international reputation as Eastern Europe’s most swinging city, where the Western tourist could find luxury hotels, striptease and charming girls in short skirts. This article investigates the relationship between masculinity, money and intimacy and how this played out in the historically and geographically specific context of Hungary’s opening up to Western tourism in the Hungarian ‘long 1960s’. Focusing on Western, specifically German-speaking men who bought sex in Hungary between 1963 and 1973, I explore the interaction between payment, authenticity and power within intimate transactional sex encounters. Taking a micro-historical approach, using letters from clients and trial documents of women who sold sex to Western men, I investigate how both ethno-sexual stereotypes and dominant Cold War narratives around sexuality and gender roles shaped these encounters, and how these men positioned themselves as men and negotiated power within them. While their position as citizens of Western capitalist states with access to hard currency afforded them attractiveness and a certain power, in many cases these men distanced themselves from the transactional nature of the relationship. Instead, they framed their encounters in terms of mutuality and emotional intimacy and displayed vulnerability and anxiety about the authenticity of their experience.
Source: Rethinking History
Author: Priska Komaromi
Institution: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Language: English
Topic: Sex work and related issues
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4409396608