Review of: Sheila Jeffreys: The Industrial Vagina. The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade. London: Routledge 2008.

Abstract

Sheila Jeffreys analyzes the processes that led to the industrialization and globalization of prostitution in the late 20^th and 21^th centuries. Jeffreys considers those primary factors responsible for the current shift in discourse on prostitution, which can be attributed to the sexual revolution of the 1970s on the one hand, and to massive financing of HIV prevention in the 1980s by sex worker supporters on the other. As in earlier studies, Jeffreys presents readers with her radical-feminist position and demands prostitution be abolished. In her confrontation with liberal-feminist discourse, in which the support of sex workers takes priority, she ignores the inconsistencies and complexities of real lived experience. At many points throughout her book, Jeffreys affirms stereotypical male conceptions, which could have been avoided had she looked beyond the theoretical frame of reference that makes up her comfort zone.