The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade (RIPE Series in Global Political Economy)
Sheila Jeffreys
Language: English
Pages: 264
ISBN: 0415412331
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The industrialization of prostitution and the sex trade has created a multibillion-dollar global market, involving millions of women, that makes a substantial contribution to national and global economies.
The Industrial Vagina examines how prostitution and other aspects of the sex industry have moved from being small-scale, clandestine, and socially despised practices to become very profitable legitimate market sectors that are being legalised and decriminalised by governments. Sheila Jeffreys demonstrates how prostitution has been globalized through an examination of:
- the growth of pornography and its new global reach
- the boom in adult shops, strip clubs and escort agencies
- military prostitution and sexual violence in war
- marriage and the mail order bride industry
- the rise in sex tourism and trafficking in women.
She argues that through these practices women’s subordination has been outsourced and that states that legalise this industry are acting as pimps, enabling male buyers in countries in which women’s equality threatens male dominance, to buy access to the bodies of women from poor countries who are paid for their sexual subservience.
This major and provocative contribution is essential reading for all with an interest in feminist, gender and critical globalisation issues as well as students and scholars of international political economy.
It requires the provision of support services for trafficking victims in the form of ‘counseling and temporary shelter to trafficked persons’, legal and medical help, livelihood and skills training, educational assistance to children, without the requirement that exists in trafficking legislation in other jurisdictions that such help will depend upon willingness to act as a witness for the prosecution. This legislation breaks new ground because it targets the prostitutors even though it makes a
46–53. Melrose, Margaret and Barrett, David (2006). ‘The Flesh Trade in Europe: Trafficking in Women and Children for the Purpose of Commercial Sexual Exploitation’. Police Practice and Research, 7.2 (May): 111–23. Millett, Kate (1972). Sexual Politics. London: Abacus, Sphere Books. Millett, Kate (1975). The Prostitution Papers. St Albans: Paladin. Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights (2007). ‘New Law in Taiwan Bans Overseas Marriage Brokers’. Stop Violence Against Women. A project by
pornography, since the US is the main fount of the pornography that penetrates these societies. As Stiki Lole comments in an article on changing sexual practices in the Solomon Islands: ‘While Malaitan Kastom and Christianity are still influential, young people’s sexual practices are influenced also through globalizing processes, including the increased movement of people and exposure to radio, television and videos, pornography and the Internet’(Lole, 2003, p. 219). Pornography has been
has enabled sex tourism, the mail order bride business and other forms of prostitution to expand and interrelate. New electronic technologies from the videotape to the Internet have enabled the development of a massively profitable industry with a global reach, in which women in poor countries can be delivered in film or in real time to perform sex acts for men in the west (Hughes, 1999). Though the technologies which enable women’s bodies to be deliv- ered to male buyers change and
clients seen by the NGO were sold by their relatives, husband or boyfriend, 50 per cent were 14–21 years old (ibid.). The methods of coercion that had been used on them included brainwashing through violence and gang rapes, the witnessing of violence and even murders and executions, and threats of violence against the prostituted women, their families and relatives. Their sense of autonomy was destroyed through isolation or denial of contact with people outside, through psychological