The Industrial Vagina

I like a girl who knows where she's bound

I don't like girls who've been hanging around

The political economy of the global sex trade

Cheerleaders or critics?

Traditional international politics does not include the sex industry within its concerns, as indeed it does not consider many other issues that relate to women and girls.

Most of the academic and feminist literature on prostitution which uses the language of "sex work" is based upon the premise that it is possible, or even desirable, to make distinctions between various forms of the sex industry; between child and adult prostitution, between trafficking and prostitution, between forced and free trafficking, between forced and free prostitution, between legal and illegal sectors of the industry, between prostitution in the west and prostitution in the non-west. The creation of distinctions legitimizes forms of prostitution by criticizing some and not others. This book is different because it looks for connections and interrelationships rather than distinctions. It looks at the ways in which all these aspects of sexual exploitation depend upon and involve one another. Those who seek to make distinctions generally subscribe to the notion that there is a free and respectable kind of prostitution for adults which can be seen as ordinary work and legalized, a form of prostitution for the rational, choosing individual, based upon equality and contract. The vast majority of prostitution fits this image very badly indeed but it is the necessary fiction that underlies the normalization and legalization of the industry.

Sheila Jeffreys