What exactly does the prostitute sell to her client? What is this sex that she offers, and how is its value determined? The impossibility of a simple answer to these questions lies in the ambivalence with which bourgeois-capitalist society views the prostitute and her profession. In the words of Walter Benjamin, the prostitute is both a seller and a commodity; she objectifies herself into a purchasable object while remaining an unavailable subject. Even in the debates of the enlightened present, she appears simultaneously as a sacrificed victim and a lazy fraudster, with prostitution seen as both an indispensable institution and a vice to be combated. The extent to which this relates to the bourgeois perspective on women and their bodies, which at all times embodies control and voyeurism, distance and curiosity, is examined by Theodora Becker in her dialectic of the prostitute. She questions the ambivalence of sexual commodities that underlie these attributions and behaviors. In doing so, she traces the connection between subjectivity, sexuality, commodity form, and labor in bourgeois society, as well as its transformations since the 19th century, while playing with the reader's desire to peek behind the curtain and catch a furtive glimpse of the prostitutes working there.