As Kat Banyard demonstrates in her excoriating account of the modern trade in women's bodies, they seek variety, sex acts they can't get in voluntary relationships and, above all, power The debate has become poisonous and Banyard's book provides a much-needed corrective, skewering the myths promoted by the commercial industry with forensic intelligence By putting equality and human rights at the heart of this vital debate, she has done us a tremendous service.
People knew. Pimp State , a barnstorming polemic against the horrors of the sex industry porn, lap-dancing and prostitution filled me with a similar sense of unease I challenge anyone to read this book and not feel there is something profoundly immoral and wrong about all of this. And it is there in plain sight. Methodically and thoroughly, Banyard dismantles the "myths" that support this presumption. Pimp State doesn't limit itself to activities conventionally regarded as prostitution.
Instead, Banyard is concerned with the entire field of commercial sexual services, including lap dancing and pornography What shines through this uncompromising book is an optimism about change. Domestic violence and compulsory "conjugal rights" were once seen as normal, a husband's due. And there are laws against undesirable transactions such as selling human organs or entering into bonded labour contracts.
So why not prostitution? Never before have prostitution, strip clubs and pornography been as profitable, widely used or embedded in mainstream culture as they are today.
How society should respond to the rise of the sex trade is shaping up to be one of the Twenty-First Century's big questions. Should it be legal to pay for sex? Isn't it a woman's choice whether she strips for money? Could online porn warping the attitudes of a generation of boys?
