Julie Bindel, the well-known British “feminist” and prohibitionist, likes to call herself a journalist; however, I can think of a few more apt labels: Huckster. Charlatan. Fruitcake. And most of all, lazy twit who can’t even keep track of her own lies. She’s been hawking a new book for a while now, but despite the help of a major UK newspaper giving her plenty of free column-inches in which to vomit out her regurgitated feces, it looks as though it’s going to flop in a big way. And though I lack the intellectual endurance to even scan her overpriced doorstop, fortunately my friend Brooke Magnanti has far more critical wherewithall than I do, and was happy to volunteer this synopsis so none of y’all have to bother touching it, either.
This week Julie Bindel releases a new text which I have been privileged to see an advance copy of. Unlike her previous efforts it’s aimed more at a scholarly market than a popular one, with aspirations to be a summary of investigations into sex workers’ organizations. The newspaper coverage in Britain has been unescapable in the run-up to its release, with Bindel herself penning vicious invectives against sex workers in all the major papers. Bindel initially crowdfunded the book to the tune of £7000. Backers could pay £250 for the honor of having lunch with the woman herself (ironic when criminalized sex workers are also often forced to advertise their services as “lunch dates”). On top of this, the book had an advance from Palgrave, so the punters end up paying twice. The title, The Pimping of Prostitution, is ironic given anti-sex work crusades demonstrably attract and spend far more money than shoestring operations like rights orgs do; it is offered at an eye-watering $39.99 for the paperback (and an unbelievable $37.99 for the Kindle edition). But while supporters paid a premium for the content, does the book deliver?
In a word: no. While advertised as a scholarly work it lacks any academic rigor. Most of the references are self-citations of privately published reviews written by Bindel and Melissa Farley. Peer review? What peer review? A few debunked statistics are trotted out as well. There is no content of note here, which is unsurprising given Bindel’s most famous quote is that if given a gun and forced to choose between shooting a pimp and an academic, she would shoot the academic. Bindel claims to have interviewed 250 people in 40 countries about sex work – by her own admission they are journalist friends of hers, police, and “regular members of the public who knew very little, if anything, about the sex trade”. If this were a middle school project it would be laughed out of class for its utter lack of quality. She notes in the acknowledgments that “the other side” trusted her to “represent their words and views fairly”. Is that so? She has called legalization and decriminalization the same thing when they are not. Despite being told many times sex workers support decriminalization, not legalization, Julie is too dishonest to admit this, setting up a straw (wo)man and knocking it down over and over.
She states over and over again that there is a “pro-prostitution lobby”. Who? She never exactly says and cannot produce any paper trail. That is for the simple reason that it is she and her friends who are lobbying politicians, setting up All Party Parliamentary Groups stuffed with MPs who want to see more women imprisoned, and paying for events to try to sway lawmakers to their ideology. The other side, such as it is, is sex workers unpaid for standing up for their rights, and a handful of front-line organizations trying desperately to make sure any sense is heard in the prohibitionist din. In any case, the claim she interviewed sex work activists is false; she has not so much interviewed her opponents as hand-selected people uninvolved in activism or sex work. Why are her lengthy conversations with Peter Tatchell about gay men and the age of consent here, if not to stoke pedophilia fears on the back of homophobia? Why does she place so much importance on tearing down sociologist Dr Catherine Hakim, whose area of research this is not? How is politician Keith Vaz’s relationship with male escorts related to violence against women? A few contextless quotes from Conner Habib and Janet Mock are thrown in to prove – well, it’s not clear what, actually. It’s a mystery: a bunch of unconnected hit jobs padding out an otherwise shoddy book. The rest is a collection of personal anecdotes, old feminists she once met, and so on. She also details the time in the ’70s she was pen-friends with imprisoned sex worker Emma Humphreys, while dodging the question of why the laws she supports would still put women like Emma in jail.
When discussing sex workers condescension drips from every sentence and it is clear she is used to having the floor to herself. Unable to take criticism or debate (the launch party for her book at “independent intellectual venue” Conway Hall expressly forbade sex work activists), disgusted by the humans she so profitably claims to save. Her schtick would be funny if it didn’t have real and damaging repercussions on people’s lives. But the main takeaway from the book is its desperation. The money she raised appears to have gone towards an all-expenses-paid international jaunt with only the slenderest of results to show for it. The text reads less like a new movement and more like a last gasp. If this is Bindel’s final shot at the history books than let it also be the epitaph for her career. Here lies prohibition: illogical, illiberal, and entirely without merit.
If you want real scholarship about sex work, including hard-hitting debunking of Bindel’s lies (and those of her cronies), please purchase Brooke’s new book Sex, Lies and Statistics (with a foreword by yours truly). And until Monday evening, Brooke is donating 100% of the profits from ALL preorders globally to SWOP Behind Bars, the nonprofit organization which specializes in helping the women Bindel and her ilk want to keep locking up in cages.
