‘Have you ever climaxed… during business?’ Investigating Sexual Practices in Late State-Socialist Hungary through Histories of Commercial Sex

Beginning in the late 1950s, state socialist discourses on sexuality emphasized centrality of emotional attachment for fulfilling sexual relationships and the importance of female sexual pleasure for a fulfilling emotional relationship. By the 1980s, Hungarian sex advice literature increasingly focused on technique for achieving female sexual pleasure and advocated for men to engage in sexual practices beyond the conventional. Concurrently, criminological and legal texts defined ‘prostitution’ as sex devoid of emotion, ‘prostitutes’ as sexually deviant and non-conventional sex acts as perverse. While scholarship on sexuality in the Eastern Bloc has exploded in recent years, this has often focussed on expert discourses and only marginally engaged with commercial sex and sexual practice. I argue that sources on commercial sex offer a productive way of engaging with the history of sexuality in state socialist Hungary. Using sociologist Pál Diósi’s life course interviews with women and men involved in commercial sex in 1980s Budapest, I demonstrate how socialist sexual scripts around emotion and female pleasure were negotiated and embodied through sexual practice. These interviews highlight a shift in sexual practices and their framing, women focused increasingly on technique for achieving pleasure in their private sex lives, yet the de facto primacy of male sexual pleasure remained. The boundary between ‘private’ and ‘commercial’ sex, ostensibly demarcated by the presence or absence of emotion and pleasure, was in practice unstable. The increasingly widespread practice of oral sex was used to demarcate the boundaries of emotional intimacy and was imbued with different meanings depending on relational context.