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 […]

The feminist author Sheila Jeffreys has never shied away from controversy. Now, with The Industrial Vagina, she takes on the global sex trade. Julie Bindel meets her. It was in the early 1990s, when the British feminist Sheila Jeffreys migrated to Australia, that she realised just how huge the global sex industry had become. Prostitution […]

Sheila Jeffreys speaks on beauty practices and misogyny This speech was given by Sheila Jeffreys at the Andrea Dworkin Commemorative Conference, April 7, 2006. This original transcript was prepared by another radical feminist (blog now defunct). Hello everybody, it’s terrific to be here, and to be invited to be here, for this Commemoration of Andrea Dworkin, because of […]

Breast implants for 18-year-olds? Hymen reconstructions? Rape-themed fashion collections? Don’t tell Sheila Jeffreys these are signs of female liberation. The radical feminist talks to Julie Bindel Jeffreys, a revolutionary lesbian feminist, is pursuing her 30-odd-year mission to shift women out of their collective complacency. Beauty And Misogyny is her sixth book. Like the others, its […]

I have a radical lesbian feminist position on marriage which is well expressed by the US lesbian legal theorist Ruthann Robson (1992) who argues for the general abolition of marriage saying that ‘lesbian survival is not furthered by embracing the law’s rule of marriage. Our legal energy is better directed at abolishing marriage as a […]

“I want to talk about how queer and ‘postmodern’ theory has affected the ability of feminists and lesbians to organise against, or even to recognise violence against women. In queer and postmodern theory, based on liberal individualism, important forms of violence are renamed ‘transgression’, ‘choice’ or ‘agency’. I shall concentrate on 3 forms of violence here, men’s prostitution […]

Interview with Sheila Jeffreys on “Kenny Live”, an Irish TV show, in 1990, following publication of her book “Anticlimax”. Watch the interview on YouTube here.