Julie Bindel - The Pimping of Prostitution : Abolishing the Sex Work Myth

Julie Bindel

The Pimping of Prostitution Abolishing the Sex Work Myth 2nd ed. 2019

The first step in recognizing a big injustice is often an end to blaming the victim - say, to stop assuming that most poor people are lazy, or that battered women could just leave, or that our prisons are so racially imbalanced because the imbalance is deserved. To find out the truth behind all those Pretty Woman myths about the global sex trade read this well documented book by Julie Bindel.

Gloria Steinem, feminist, journalist and social and political activist

This book is comprehensive, authoritative, personally revealing, and a clear headed rage against a tide of modern double think. It will help feminism untangle itself from all the knots of faux progressiveness about prostitution, which is repackaging sexual abuse as empowerment. Bindel is a fearless, uncompromising voice who deserves to be universally heard.

Janice Turner, Times Newspaper columnist

A profoundly impressive piece of reporting and polemic into a commercial industry. You may love Bindels work, you may profoundly disagree with it. But it will never leave you indifferent, and it will always make you question, which is why there should be more of it.

Rose George, Author and journalist

No one in Britain knows more than Julie Bindel about prostitution - the politics, the debates, the myths, the scale, and the damage to individuals and to the culture that sustains it. Every word in this long-awaited book is worth reading. It combines scholarship, activism, personal narratives and political analysis. It is a mighty challenge to the pessimism of the oldest profession and above all it offers hope of a society free of sexism and sexual exploitation.

Bea Campbell, writer, activist, and author of The End of Equality

An excoriating response to those who say prostitution is inevitable, that it is work like any other, and that prostituted women need labour rights and state regulation, not abolition. Bindel exposes gender inequality at its most brutal and violent in this intelligent, well-researched and well-written critique. Agree or disagree, Ive no doubt it will become a core text for the study of patriarchy and its consequences.

Karon Monaghan QC, leading human rights and equality law practitioner

This book is persuasive, clear, revealing and very powerful. It brilliantly exposes the outright abuse and misogyny at the heart of a worldwide system in which men and boys control, buy, sell, rent and use women and girls. And it answers back to any apologist, male or female, who defends mens renting and use of women in the worldwide system of sexual exploitation.

Bidisha, Writer, critic and broadcaster

This is a critically important book on a critically important subject by one of our most courageous and incisive social critics. Read it and understand that there is no human right to prostitute women and girls that prostitution is about power and profit, degradation, pain, fear and exploitation. Julie Bindel has made the argument: we have a duty to echo it. Essential reading.

Dexter Dias QC, human rights lawyer and author of The Ten Types of Human

For decades, Julie Bindels journalism has helped us see the pathology of patriarchy. This brave new book tells the stories not only of the incredible women who have survived prostitution but the men who choose to buy and sell womens bodies. Bindel peels away the liberal veneer from the pro-prostitution lobby and its academic supporters to show how a feminist analysis of the sex trade is essential to give meaning to the cultures claim to support human rights. With the voices of prostitution survivors at the core of the book, Bindels reporting provides the context to understand the routine abuse in the sexual-exploitation industries.

Robert Jensen, Professor, University of Texas at Austin, School of Journalism, and author of The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men

This book is dedicated to the late Denise Marshall, as a small gesture of gratitude for everything she did to end mens violence towards women and girls throughout her too-short life. Denise was the finest feminist and friend who saved lives and changed hearts and minds. I am sure that her legacy will be to inspire new generations of feminists to be the best they can.