ABSTRACT
Prostitution did not wither away. Despite the confident understandings of feminists before the 1980s that prostitution was a sign and example of women’s subordination which would cease to exist when women gained equality, at the end of the 20th century it had been constructed into a burgeoning and immensely profitable global market sector. This development is surprising if we consider the ways in which prostitution has been regarded by feminists over two centuries to be the very model of women’s subordination (Jeffreys, 1985a). Kate Millett wrote in 1970 that prostitution was, ‘paradigmatic, somehow the very core of the female’s condition’ which reduced woman to ‘cunt’ (Millett, 1975, p. 56). Feminists in the 1960s and 1970s understood prostitution to be a hangover from traditional male dominant societies that would disappear with the advance ofwomen’s equality. It was, asMillett put it, a ‘living fossil’, an old form of slave relations still existing in the present (ibid.). However, in the late 20th century various forces came together to breathe new life into this ‘harmful cultural practice’ (Jeffreys, 2004). The most important is the new economic ideology and practice of these times, neo-liberalism, in which the tolerance of ‘sexual freedom’ has been merged with a free market ideology to reconstruct prostitution as legitimate ‘work’ which can form the basis of national and international sex industries. This book analyses the processes by which prostitution has been industrialized and globalized in the late 20th and early 21st century. It argues that this growing market sector needs to be understood as the commercialization ofwomen’s subordination, and suggests how the rolling back of the global sex industry can begin.
