Prostitution cannot be contained in one small corner of the culture. Once we accept and endorse the sale of women for men’s sexual use and abuse, the ideas and practices of prostitution bleeds into all layers of society. Germany shows us how. In 2002, Germany gave state-sanctioned approval to the sex-trade and made prostitution a legal and legitimate industry in cities and towns across the land. Researcher, writer and public speaker Elly Arrow tracks and reports on all aspects of prostitution ...

The institution of prostitution has received a re-branding in recent times, appropriating terms from labor and the corporate world such as “sex work”, “full-service”, “clients”, “sex workers” “doing bookings” arranged by “managers” - presumably in order to de-stigmatize women who sell sex, to make the practice safer for sex sellers, and to make the sex industry mainstream. But has the nature of the practice - of men buying women for sexual use - really changed? In this episode, Elle talks to a...

No status puts a woman at greater vulnerability than that of being a migrant or refugee. Anna Zobnina is a Strategy and Executive Director at European Network of Migrant Women, and she knows first-hand the realities and complex challenges that migrant and refugee women face in Europe. With over 15 years of experience in feminist analysis of male violence & discrimination against women and girls, sexual and reproductive exploitation, and international human rights policy work, Anna and her organ...

In her new book Body Shell Girl, poet and sex trade survivor Rose Hunter brings us into the strange theater that takes place between sex buyers and prostitutes when money is exchanged for various sex acts. Describing the everyday reality of her ten years in massage parlors, brothels and hotel rooms of Toronto and Vancouver, Hunter says of prostitution, “it’s really nothing to do with sex, it's this other odd category, with its own bizarre rules, a very strange sphere unto itself.” In this episo...

The sexual exploitation industries have been extremely successful in penetrating (pun intended) every layer of society - and like Gail Dines calls it - “pornifying our culture”. But amid full decriminalization of prostitution, the rise of OnlyFans and Pornhub, pervasive global sex trafficking, and social media providing exploiters and predators free and open access to vulnerable populations - the liberal myth of sexual self-empowerment is cracking. This in part because survivors of the sex tra...

For many of us, pornography seems like an inevitable fact of life. Internet porn use is so widespread, so normalized, so uncontroversial - that it’s controversial to be critical of pornography. But, as Dr. Gail Dines says, questioning what IS - is in her job description - as a feminist, and as a sociologist and world-leading expert on pornography. Gail is the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality and founding president and CEO of Culture Reframed, an organization that provide...

We know that our sexuality is central and significant to our human existence. Human sexuality is a complex package of functions - biological surely, but also it allows us crucial intimate connections with other human beings, it is a powerful regulator and stress reducer, and a portal to joy, and many other life-giving emotions and expressions. And yet, we have allowed a massive commercial industry that brutally exploits vulnerable women and children for men’s disconnected, private, anonymous se...

We are in our 6th millennia of patriarchy, and as this episode’s guest Susan Hawthorne puts it, “the publicity program for patriarchy has been going for some 5,000 years”. As a poet, author and founder of the feminist publishing house Spinifex Press, and as a lesbian radical feminist, Susan decidedly belongs to the publicity program for the other side, the side that has been fighting against ‘the rule of the father’ since the time of Cassandra. Susan, herself a feminist prophetess of our time, ...

If we were to devise a mechanism by which male power writ large can reach the innermost center of female power - and maim or destroy it - it would look like the internet-fueled sexual exploitation industries that are now in full bloom. If we were to devise a mechanism by which we remove men’s empathy and humanity, making them dangerous to all humans - it would look like today’s pornography landscape. Robert Jensen is a lifelong radical thinker, speaker and author who have researched, analyzed a...