Japan is home not only to some of the first erotic literature in narrative form (the classic pillow books written during the years 990-1000), but to the first mobile literature. The first mobile novel, Deep Love, a series of stories about a school girl prostitute, was published in Japan in 2003. This week, the first mobile novel award, out of 2,375 entries, has been presented to a “pure love story between a schoolgirl prostitute and a host club gigolo”:

Towa, the pen name of the author, received 1 million yen and the right to publish “Kurianesu,” her story about unlikely love.

“I received lots of advice from readers along the way and I’m sure the story would have been different if I had done it alone,” Towa said upon receiving her prize.

Writer Yuzuki Muroi praised Towa’s work and urged her to write more.

“Neither of the main characters are exactly types that society tends to admire, but the more you read about them, the more appeal they have. Characters are really important for novels. Even fiction needs a touch of reality to make it accessible to readers. I’d like to see more of the world this author creates,” Muroi said in a prepared statement.

(thanks, Warren, you techperv)

A students’ union in France has released a study showing a rise in the number of French students entering the sex industry:

According to the SUD-Etudiant union, 40,000 students in France - or nearly 2 per cent - fund their studies through the sex trade.

The union says jobs taken by female students include hostess work and freelancing for escort agencies - as well as pavement prostitution. Many, it says, use secure payment sites on the internet through which they offer webcam striptease.

“As a rule, student prostitution is an individual and occasional activity,” said a spokeswoman for the Office Central de la Répression de la Traite des Etres Humains, an anti-slavery group. “It is discreet, difficult to track and not a crime in itself.”

Even les flics are echoing this shift in sex work marketing:

One vice squad officer said there was little the authorities could do to combat the trade and that some young women would always be attracted to the supposed glitter and glamour of the escort world. He added that most student prostitutes did not solicit through pimps but “through small ads, erotic photos and webcams - areas which are difficult to police and which generally are not linked to vice”.

Of course, they aren’t all convinced (or, apparently, hanging out with many grad students these days):

Police are sceptical about the figures quoted by the student union. They say there are many more prostitutes pretending to be French students than there are students selling sex in pursuit of their degrees.

Want more for extra credit? Report back on French sex workers’ support organization Cabiria (English paper here) or this 1968 report on prostitution in France:

The great object of the system adopted in France is to repress private or secret, and to encourage public or avowed prostitution.

I may, however, as well premise by observing that the authorities of Paris by no means pretend to have established a control over the whole prostitution of that city. The concubinaires (kept mistresses) they cannot reach. The large sections of superior professional prostitutes, whom the French term femmes galantes (gay women) and lorettes (women of easy virtue), evade them, as do also vast hordes of the lowest class of strumpets who throng the low quarters and the villages of the Banlieue….

(Hint: la plus ca change…)

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