Why International? Talk given at We Need to Talk, June 2018 “I am going to talk today about why it is important to think internationally when dealing with the threat posed by men’s crossdressing activism (commonly called the transgender rights movement) to women’s human rights. In the UK the feminist resistance has been growing exponentially […]

This article looks at the increasing links between the sex industry and business in the form of executives and companies using strip clubs and brothels to network and broker deals, using prostituted women as bribes, or offering visits to brothels as Christmas bonuses. This problem is only just beginning to be recognized by feminist researchers […]

This article examines a developing trend in the prostitution industry in the western world, the boom in escort prostitution. Escort prostitution, operating through mobile phones and the Internet, is supplanting the brothel as the major form in which prostituted women are delivered to male buyers. Policy-makers who promote the legalization of the prostitution industry have […]

Within the academy the ‘sex work’ position, i.e. that prostitution should be understood as legitimate work, and an expression of women’s choice and agency, has become the dominant perspective. Most feminist scholars now take this point of view or show sympathy towards it. The critical approach to prostitution that was almost universal amongst feminists from […]

This article looks at the increasing links between the sex industry and business in the form of executives and companies using strip clubs and brothels to network and broker deals, using prostituted women as bribes, or offering visits to brothels as Christmas bonuses. This problem is only just beginning to be recognized by feminist researchers […]

Access to prostituted women is increasingly justified by disability charities and services on the grounds of the sexual rights of the disabled. In Australia, for example, disabled men form a niche market for the legalised prostitution industry. Male sexuality is constructed out of male dominance and is likely to manifest the eroticisation of hierarchy and […]

This article examines a recent tendency amongst researchers of sex tourism to include women within the ranks of sex tourists in destinations such as the Caribbean and Indonesia. It argues that a careful attention to the power relations, context, meanings and effects of the behaviours of male and female tourists who engage in sexual relations […]

This article argues that contemporary concern about ending child prostitution is misdirected in its strategy. Some theorists and activists, even the ILO, are seeking to create a distinction between adult and child prostitution as if child prostitution could be ended whilst adult prostitution remains intact. The motivation for the distinction relies upon trends in the […]

Today there are many forces at work in the normalization of the international sex industry (Jeffreys, 1997). The sex industry has become immensely profitable, providing considerable resources, not just to individuals and networks involved in trafficking women but to governments who have come to depend on sex industry revenue. One aspect of the industry in […]

Can feminists theorize prostitution if they have never worked as prostitutes? Feminist analysis would be very partial if we could only speak of that which we had personally experienced. In the absence of personal experience feminist theorists can rely upon other women’s accounts and upon the exercise of their own critical political intelligence. In the […]