Encyclopedia

The Encyclopedia is the reference half of this site: short entries, defined terms, dated facts, and as few adjectives as we can manage.

It exists because adult culture has a poor reference literature. The vocabulary is barely documented. The history is written either as moral argument or as marketing, and you can usually tell which within a sentence. What is properly recorded sits in academic papers that nobody outside the field will ever open. This section is the missing middle: accurate, plainly written, and useful to someone who arrived with one specific question.

What the Encyclopedia covers

Vocabulary. The terms the industry uses about itself, what they mean, where they came from, and which of them are contested. Definitions carry a date, because usage moves, and a word does not always tell you when it changed sides.

Places. Districts, streets and institutions with a documented history: what they were, what they became, and what changed them. Amsterdam’s Wallen and Hamburg’s Reeperbahn are the obvious entries. The interesting ones are the districts that disappeared.

Media history. Magazines and photography, then cinema, then cable, then webcams, streaming, and the creator platforms that replaced most of what came before. Each technology reshaped the economics of the industry before it reshaped the culture, in that order, consistently enough to be worth documenting.

Law and regulation. Which jurisdictions legislated what, when, and with what stated intent. The practical version, the one you want before a trip, lives in the Guides. Here we record what the statutes say and when they changed, and nothing more entertaining than that.

Economics. How money moved through the industry in each technological era, and who ended up holding it.

How entries are written

Every entry is written from more than one source, and the sources are named. Where accounts conflict, the entry says so instead of tidying the disagreement away, because the disagreement is usually the most interesting thing in the entry. Where we do not know, it says that too.

We do not reproduce other reference works. An entry that could be replaced by a link to somebody else’s page should not exist, so what we publish is what we have something to add to: a comparison, a timeline, a structure, or a correction.

Terms used in the City Index scoring and in the Rankings tables are defined here. Our sourcing rules are in the editorial standards.