
Michael Sheath explores the terrifying overlap between mainstream pornography and child sexual exploitation material (CSEM). Read More
Movement for the Abolition of Prostitution
Michael Sheath explores the terrifying overlap between mainstream pornography and child sexual exploitation material (CSEM). Read More
Review of Gary Wilson’s brilliant book, Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction. Read More
‘Cyanide circus’ talks of the impact of porn, on herself, her partners, and her sex life, and what happened when she tried webcamming. Read More
Kathleen Richardson argues for the end of sex robots and that we should problematise the use of the term ‘sex’ associated with them, and push back against attempts to dilute the meaning of ‘sex’. Read More
Thoughts on “He Chose Porn Over Me”: Women Harmed by Men Who Use Porn, edited by Melinda Tankard Reist Read More
Suzzan Blac explains why she spent years investigating the pornography that is available to anyone (including kids) for free on Pornhub and the disturbing reality that she found. Read More
Suzzan Blac introduces a selection of the extraordinary paintings she did as a way of processing the sexual abuse she suffered as a child and young adult, and as a sex trafficking victim in the pornography industry. Read More
Subtitled, ‘A brief reflection on pornography leads to a reflective tirade in statistical mode,’ this article by Elizabeth Matz was first published in Women & Therapy in 1994 and is reproduced here with the author’s permission. Read More
Must-read transcript of our ‘Talking with men and boys’ webinar that was held on 11 April 2021. Read More
Audio and video recordings of our ‘An evening with Suzzan Blac’ webinar that was held on 14 July 2021. Read More
Statement from Nordic Model Now! on the UK government’s new strategy for tackling violence against women and girls. Read More
Powerful feminist critique from Monica Mazzitelli of Ninja Thyberg’s new film “Pleasure”. Read More
In this podcast, Esther, who has a longstanding interest in research on legal and public policy approaches to sexualised violence and domestic abuse, uses her own experience of porn and prostitution to reflect on consent, the global reach of depictions of sexualised violence and what this means for women and girls. Read More
Also available as a podcast, this video essay provides a historical overview of prostitution and pornography and the position of women based on the work of, amongst others: Gerda Lerner, Marilyn French, Sylvia Federici and Andrea Dworkin. It is a re-recording of the first presentation at the webinar we hosted on 14 June, Porn, Prostitution and Violence against Women. Read More
“The global onslaught of online sexualised violence, competing for clicks with acts of destruction, torture and murder, its enactment against prostituted women and men, and its mainstreaming as part of a ‘bucket list’ of steps in a sexual apprenticeship dictated by untouchable, global corporations, has severe consequences for both women and men…” Read More
This article is based on the first presentation at our recent webinar, Porn, Prostitution and Violence against Women.
“It’s very easy to think that the world we know is normal and is how human beings have always lived. But what if that’s not true? What if the social structures we now live in are an anomaly in the long history of the human race? That’s what we’re going to explore in this presentation. We’re going to investigate the origins of patriarchy and capitalism, with a focus on the role of prostitution and pornography.”
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In this ground-breaking and harrowing article, Esther, who was herself involved in prostitution and the making of porn, shows how the eroticisation of cruelty in both the political and personal arenas is fed by the global sex industry’s violence and cruelty, and she reveals the hypocrisy of those who insist that ‘sex work’ is a private matter of no consequence to anyone else and who wilfully ignore its devastating consequences for both individuals and society. Read More
This is an edited transcript of the podcast with Professor Kathleen Richardson on our culture’s increasing obsession with sex dolls, and what this means for women, and human relationships.
“What’s interesting about sex dolls and sex robots, is that it reveals really clearly what patriarchy thinks of women and what men want from women.” Read More
We caught up with Kathleen Richardson, the founder of the Campaign Against Sex Robots, to talk about our culture’s increasing obsession with sex dolls and what this means for women, and human relationships. Read More
In this important article, Esther, who was herself in prostitution, draws parallels between methods of mass control and subjection introduced during the industrial revolution and the control of women and their widespread subjection to practices of sexual torture during the current technological revolution. She exposes the hypocrisy of the human rights organisations and capitalists who argue for the blanket decriminalisation of the sex trade, which would open up legal mega-brothels such as are found in Germany, and draws on her own experience to argue that the sex industry is rife with racism, sexism and classism, preys on the most powerless women and girls and is inherently traumatising. Legalising brothels benefits only the punters and the profiteers, not the women. Read More
Drawing on her own experiences in porn and prostitution, Esther asks that we break through our cultural denial and open our eyes to the brutal reality that easy access to online porn and anything goes prostitution has unleashed: The everyday sexual, bodily and psychic torture of women and girls throughout the world and the presentation of this to children as if it were normal sex and not fraught with danger, not only for the individual but for our very social fabric. Read More
In this article women who have not been in the sex trade themselves share how it has nevertheless affected their lives in various ways. We received these #MeToo accounts through our Share Your Story page. This provides a space for women to tell their stories in their own words.
“It always made me sick to my stomach, the way that one human buys another. To use her as his toilet and dump her back in the street after – only for another man to pick her up.” Read More
In this brilliant and important interview, Yağmur Arica talks to Francine Sporenda about how technological developments have hugely increased the scale of sexual exploitation that is taking place and the vast profits that are being made from it. Yağmur goes on to argue, persuasively, that the popularity of sex dolls or robots, which she calls ‘masturbatory dolls,’ can be interpreted as yet another backlash against the gains of the feminist movement, as we rapidly approach the terrifying end-point where, “One woman is as good as any other and a doll is as good as a woman.” Read More
Advertising for the sex trade is prominent in Melbourne, Australia, where the sex trade has been legal since 1994. In this article, Jacqueline Gwynne explains how WOMEN WANTED flyers offer quick and easy cash. Read More
This article draws on the work of key feminist thinkers to provide a brief introduction to feminist theory and to show how many of the things we struggle with as women are not personal failings but are consequences of a system that is rigged against us – simply because we are female. That system has many threads – including the systematic deprivation of resources from women, men’s impunity to rape and abuse women, and the system of prostitution. Read More
This is the text of a short talk Anna Fisher gave at a Public Policy Exchange event, called “The Future of Sex Work in the UK: Working in Partnership to Support Sex Workers and Minimise Harm,” on Wednesday 19 September 2018.
When the state sanctions prostitution as work, it institutionalises male domination and female suffering, and motivation to address women’s poverty and fix the broken benefits system is lost – because prostitution is institutionalised as welfare for poor women. Read More
This is the text of our submission to the APPG on Hate Crime’s inquiry into hate crime in the UK. We argue that hate crime is typically the behaviour of members of a dominant group towards members of a less powerful group – usually with the motivation of maintaining their collective and individual dominance; that the hate crime framework must never be used to silence respectful debate and dissent; that porn should be considered a form of hate propaganda; and that the hate crimes that are centrally monitored and for which perpetrators can get an increased sentence should be extended to include misogynistic hate crime. Read More
This is the text of our submission to the Women & Equalities Committee’s inquiry into Sexual harassment of women and girls in public places, sent in early March 2018. Read More
Simon Häggström talks with Francine Sporenda about his work as a Swedish Detective Inspector in the Prostitution Unit enforcing the Sex Purchase Law in Stockholm. He now heads the Swedish Police Trafficking Unit, which tracks trafficking and pimping networks. He is the author of “Shadow’s Law: The True Story of a Swedish Detective Inspector Fighting Prostitution.” Read More
The media glamorises prostitution and presents the illusion that it’s sexually liberating for women, and sex industry lobbyists claim that it’s just regular work. For a long time Jacqueline Gwynne accepted this without question even while working as a receptionist in a legal brothel in Melbourne. It was only two years later that she began to see the dark, seedy and dangerous truth. Here she explains what it was like so you can decide for yourself whether prostitution can ever be considered a normal job. Read More
A few days ago we published a new Share Your Story page. We asked you to help us gather real experiences of the sex trade, to help put the record straight, to counteract the “Happy Hooker” myths and explain the truth, to say #MeToo, and #TimesUp for the sex industry. The responses have been overwhelming and heartbreaking and we want to thank everyone who has shared their story. This is a selection of the responses we’ve received so far. Read More
The London Mayor’s VAWG strategy no longer commits to targeting men’s demand for prostitution and does not even mention sex buyers once in its 100 pages. Meanwhile the men who bought children to rape and sexually abuse in Telford are mostly excised from the media reports. How can we address the heinous crimes of CSE, sex trafficking, and the pimping of women in prostitution if we refuse to look at the men who drive it and the culture that creates this behaviour and gives it impunity? Read More
A hard look at prostitution, and how it affects people, taking in its intrinsic links with porn, sex trafficking and child sexual exploitation, its inherent racism, and why we should hold those who drive it accountable. Read More
We talk with Dr Kathleen Richardson, Senior Research Fellow in the Ethics of Robotics at De Montford University, about what the idea of “sex robots” can tell us about prostitution.
The artwork is by Suzzan Blac, a survivor of child abuse, prostitution and sex trafficking, who through her art sheds light on the violence, objectification and dehumanisation that is intrinsic to the commercial sexual exploitation industry. Read More
Alice Glass reflects on how when male artists create works that dehumanise women it is taken to be a comment on society as a whole, while women’s resulting brutalisation, isolation and objectification is seen as little more than a sideshow. She compares this with the powerful art of Suzzan Blac who mines her own traumatic memories of abuse and prostitution to create a blistering commentary on pornographic, female objectification and paedophile culture. Read More
Not even that hot night when I was 19 and slept with the door to my stuffy windowless room open to catch the breeze caused the blinkers to fall from my eyes. The blinkers that blamed my recklessness in leaving the door open and not the man who walked by and saw my smooth body lying there in all its youthful sweetness. He knew he was the only one in the building still awake and so there was a high chance he could get away with it. As indeed he did. Read More
This is the text of a written submission to the Liberal Democrats’ consultation on their “Sex Work” policy. It was submitted by Nordic Model Now! jointly with eighteen other groups that work for women’s rights and development, and/or to resist the objectification of women and girls, and male violence against women and children. Read More
Nordic Model Now! recently shared a meme on Facebook and Twitter saying, “Since full decriminalisation of the sex trade in 2003, New Zealand has seen a huge increase in domestic violence and rape. This is related to the normalisation and acceptance of women as objects for use, abuse and discard.” This post explains evidence that backs this up. Read More