Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution: a compelling take down of pro-prostitution myths I recently read Rachel Moran’s autobiography Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (Spinifex Press, 2013). It is the most compelling take down of pro- prostitution myths I have ever read. As Amnesty International goes against all it supposedly stands for in backing […]
If Tracy Connelly were alive today and living in France, it’s possible she might have found a way out of prostitution. She would have at least known that the society she lived in cared enough to want to help her out. But Tracy lived in Australia and was murdered on July 21, by a man […]
Prostituted women are the ones at the coalface of the misogyny and pornography-fuelled attitudes Caroline Norma Commentators this week have been falling over themselves to decry the ‘hypocritical’ public quiet over the murder of St Kilda prostituted woman ‘Tracy’, compared to the attention Jill Meagher’s death attracted last year. Wendy Squires wrote that, even though […]
Sadistic Romance by GAIL DINES The porn industry must be throwing a fit right now. The adult book Fifty Shades of Grey has sold over twenty million copies in record time, and sales are still going strong. How did E.L. James, a first-time author who was a television executive, manage to pull off a feat […]
Whatever Happened to Melissa Harris-Perry? by GAIL DINES Last week, midway through a leisurely Saturday afternoon, I got an email from MSNBC asking me to be on the Melissa Harris Perry Show a week later (July 7th). I was delighted to accept, as MHP is not your usual American journalist. A professor of political science […]
Big Porn Inc: Exposing the harms of the global porn industry (Spinifex Press, edited by Dr Abigail Bray and me) is now appearing on bookstore shelves in the UK and North America. Host and producer of The F Word radio show and the executive editor of feminisms.org, Meghan Murphy interviewed me recently. It was good […]
ACT committee misses opportunity to address harms: ‘normalises prostitution, cuts back on regulation, waters down health safeguards’ Caroline Norma The chair of a committee appointed to review the ACT’s Prostitution Act took the significant step last week of attaching a 9-page appendix to the committee’s final report outlining her ‘dissent’ to its findings. In this […]
A young man taking the lead Now and then I stumble on a brave man passionate about the issues taken up here on the MTR blog. Recently I’ve made the acquaintance of Matthew Holloway. Only 26, Matthew’s written some compelling pieces in recent months on pornography, prostitution and rape-permission giving in men’s magazines. I thought […]
By Renate Klein and Susan Hawthorne Since the publication of Rachael Hills’s article “Who’s Afraid of Melinda Tankard Reist” (and see her reflections two weeks later) at least ten on-line and print media articles have joined in a public dissection and commentary along the lines of, “she’s a conservative religious fundamentalist” and “she’s pro-life and […]
As I read Jennifer Wilson’s article, I couldn’t help thinking that the pro-porn crowd must be producing a list of talking points that they endlessly circulate among themselves. They trot out the same old arguments without a shred of empirical evidence to back them up, and then they suggest that it is the anti-porn feminists […]
What passing bells for those who die as cattle? By Dr Helen Pringle Ten years ago, Puangthong Simaplee died at the age of 27. She had been picked up in a police raid on a Surry Hills brothel on 23 September 2001, and was sent to Villawood Detention Centre. Three days later, she died in […]
If the market wants young, petite, fresh Asian women for sexual use then that’s what it’ll get Caroline Norma Pimps won’t be surprised that bidding has reached $15,000 for a 19-year-old ‘virgin’ Chinese woman currently up for auction for four days of sex. Pimps know what men will pay for, and they know the business […]
