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 had been legalised in Australia in 1984 and, looking through the newspaper one day, she realised with horror that women were being advertised for sale alongside their photographs. In line with the government, many Australian feminists had come to view prostitution simply as a form of work, and Jeffreys found herself appalled by this “neo-liberalism” – the complete lack of moral outrage about the buying and selling of women’s bodies.
Read full interview with Julie Bindel in the Guardian here.