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That's kind of conversation between your soul.

That's conversation.

It's all. And then I'm going to know. Hello, Prestige heads, and welcome.

I'm Danny Bestner, here as always with my friend and comrade, Derek Davidson, and we're very excited to welcome to American prestige. I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade,

Derek Davison. And we're very excited to welcome to the podcast today. Eva Payne. Eva's the author

of Empire of Purity, The History of American's Global War on Prostitution, and also an assistant professor

in history at the University of Mississippi. So Eva, thank you so much for joining

us. It's a pleasure to be here with you both. It's a very apropos day to do this book because we are

recording the day after Anora won the Oscar for Best Pictures. So there is a god. This demonstrates

that.

So Eva, let's just jump right into it.

And the first thing that I want to ask you about is this notion that you introduce at the beginning of your book of this idea of American sexual exceptionalism.

So before we actually dive into the book itself, could you maybe talk about what got you interested in this subject?

What is American sexual exceptionalism?

And how does this shape or how should this reshape how we understand the United States' relationship to prostitution and sex work?

And also, before actually, maybe a quick question, can we just use those words interchangeably, prostitution and sex work, or should we

be more specific with the term that we use here? So historians like to sort of debate about this.

I use, in the book, I use prostitution when I'm kind of talking about the

past because it is a particular legal concept as well as sort of social concept, right? The idea

...