Interview of Julie Bindel ― Resistance Radio

June 3rd, 2018

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Hi, this is Derrick Jensen and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Julie Bindel. She is a journalist, broadcaster, author and feminist campaigner living in London. She writes for the Guardian, New Statesman, Unheard, The Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph, reporting on culture, music, food, film and sexual and gender identity. She is co-founder of Justice for Women, a feminist campaigning organization, that supports and advocates for women who have fought back against or killed violent male partners. Julie has worked extensively on research concerning domestic violence, prostitution and sex trafficking.

So first, thank you for your work, in the world, and second, thank you for being on the program.

JB: Thank you for yours, Derrick, and it’s a pleasure to talk to you again.

DJ: Well thank you. I enjoyed our first conversation very much.

So, you have a new book called “The Pimping of Prostitution.” Can you talk about how and why the left has so embraced prostitution, and what are some of the arguments in favor of its promotion? What’s wrong with these arguments?

JB: There are two key reasons why the left embraces the sex trade, when it should be as condemning of the sex trade as it is the tobacco industry, for example. One is because the political left is still dominated by men and by pro-male ideology, by patriarchy. And the second is because there is this misguided notion that a liberal or leftist approach to the sex trade is to see it as the choice of a woman to do what she wishes to do with her own body. Clearly that’s a ridiculous argument, because it’s as different as it could possibly be than the argument, for example, about how women should control our own reproductive rights, our own reproduction; that we should have safe and legal access to abortion. Prostitution is something done to women, and it’s backed up by a huge multibillion dollar industry. But the left gets itself in a twist about this, because there are so many women who are, quite frankly, wheeled out to speak on behalf of prostituted women, who define themselves as “sex workers,” but who are, in fact, running the business of profiting from other women’s abuse, and who are as unrepresentative of prostituted people as you could possibly imagine.

But the left rather uncritically, in the main, accepts the view that prostitution is about women’s empowerment and women’s choice.

DJ: So do I have a somewhat romantic view of the left, 100 years ago, or would it be accurate to say that the left has gotten much worse? Was there sort of a little bit of a golden age of the left, where the left did see prostitution as exploitative of women?

JB: I think there was never a golden age, but I do think it was a lot better. I certainly think that we have now gone into a postmodern neoliberal era where it’s now seen as progressive, and therefore leftist, to embrace ideology such as an innate sense of gender, or a kind of gender essentialism, as we’ve seen with some of the transgender ideology put forward, where there is a leftist response to feminist critiques of radical Islam, which is to adopt a knee-jerk position of “Oh, this is just racism, this is Islamophobia,” and shut down feminists and other progressive people who talk about religious fundamentalism as terribly bad for women and girls, and the rest of the world. And we certainly have now embraced a neoliberal view of sex and of the human body. So, for example, it’s not just prostitution that is idealized and, I suppose, sanitized by the left. It’s also what I would call the mining of poor women’s bodies, the bodies of the most disenfranchised women in the world, for the benefit of the rich. Breast milk is sold in Cambodia. It’s taken from the bodies of extremely poor, desperate women, and sold to wealthy white women or gay couples who have surrogate children, for their own convenience.

Speaking of surrogacy; womb trafficking, the renting of poor and desperate women’s wombs for the benefit and convenience of rich westerners, is now seen as a choice. It’s seen as something that is a human right for, for example gay male couples, to use the womb of a desperate woman to produce a baby that is nothing more than a fashion accessory in many instances. So we certainly are seeing a neoliberal approach amongst much of the left, that supports the selling and renting and brokering of female body parts and bodily functions.

DJ: So what I hear you saying is that prostitution in this case is not separated from the larger notion of male/social access to the body parts and the bodily excretions of women.

JB: That’s right. And I can’t understand why, when the progressive left has always traditionally had a strong critique of capitalizing on desperation and poverty, on commodifying the human body. Why it makes that exception when it’s about women’s body parts being rented, brokered and sold.

DJ: You have used the term “neoliberal” a couple of times. Can you define “neoliberal” as you mean it, so we can all know that we’re using the same word.

JB: Well, in the sense that I’m talking about neoliberalism at the moment, it’s where it relates to a kind of free market capitalism that has gone completely out of control. So it’s laissez faire economic liberalism on speed. It is the lack of a critique of the exploitative capitalism that affects the poorest and the most desperate people. And where it applies to prostitution; the way that I can describe prostitution is that interface between extreme capitalism and extreme patriarchy. And the acceptance of the sex trade, and the emphasis here on trade, by the left, is to adopt a neoliberal approach to this, which flies in the face of leftist or Marxist, if you like, notions of exploitation of workers.

And then of course when you get some of the left, particularly left men, who tie themselves in knots trying to place prostitution within a workerist world view, it gets more ridiculous, because of course the inside of a woman’s body cannot be a workplace, cannot be a place of work. And it’s impossible to regulate this form of so-called work. And you can’t ever afford women so-called worker’s rights when this is about paid sexual abuse; how, of course, the sex trade survivors define prostitution.

DJ: Okay, I’m going to throw out a couple of the arguments that we hear fairly often. One is: You’re talking about desperately poor women, you say, but I have seen women, for example, on Facebook, making the argument that “Hey, this is a great way for me to make a living. I made a ton of money and paid off my college debt in two months.” That is, unfortunately, something I’ve heard and I’m sure you have heard too. How do you respond to that one?

JB: Well first of all, I – I’m going to respond to you, of course. But when I’m in debates and discussions about this, I never focus on the so-called right or lack of right of a woman to prostitute. I always look at whether or not men have the right to pay for sex, whether men have the right to buy and sell women. But when women say things like “You’re taking away my right to earn a lot of money, to pay for my kids to go to private school, to buy a second home,” whatever, I’ll just say: “Okay. So imagine if there is a woman. Imagine if she existed. She has had no damage whatsoever. No psychological damage, no physical damage. She hasn’t developed any addiction. Her children haven’t been taken away from her. She hasn’t been raped. She doesn’t have a sexually transmitted infection. She’s fine. Okay, great! Because that’s not my business or concern. She’s clearly unrepresentative of the vast majority of people in prostitution. And therefore, she doesn’t have a right to speak for those people. She only has a right to speak for herself.”

If we heard about a man who had sold his kidney in order to escape from certain death within a war zone or an area of famine, we would be looking not at his so-called good or bad experiences of selling that kidney. We would look towards criminalizing the surgeon who performed the operation, the broker that organized the sale, and the person that ordered the kidney. His experiences, good or bad – and let’s face it, we know that they’re not going to be good – would be irrelevant in the argument. They would not be seen as part of the political analysis. His individual good experience, or bad experience, would be seen as an individual person’s experience. He wouldn’t be, therefore, asked to speak for the organ sale industry as a poster boy, if he said that it was fine and dandy and it was great that he was able to get so much money to bring his family over to Europe. We would all condemn the organ trade, and we would say that there should be stigma upon those that profit from it.

DJ: My experience in, sort of, and again, I don’t mean to talk too much about Facebook, but my experience on posting, like, excerpts of my work or just comments in general about things, is that I can comment about a lot of things that people will ignore. But if I post something…like the other day I posted something about Stephen Hawking having paid to sexually exploit women. And if I post anything along those lines, I can guarantee that there is going to be a flood of males, especially, freaking out about how could I possibly say anything bad about this male, or how could I say – males will jump in to completely freak out.

I’m just saying that and now you can take that wherever you want.

JB: It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the knights in shining armor, the men rushing to support and defend women, are never more active than when they are rushing to defend the sex trade and our so-called right to be exploited within it. Men tend not to rush to our aid when we’re talking about rapists who walk free, or clean got away with it. All of a sudden it’s more nuanced than that. “There are false accusations of rape,” these men will say. But whenever it’s supporting something like Slut Walk or pole dancing or stripping, or the sex trade in general; there they are, killing themselves to protect our right to be abused by them. So it’s just part of the men’s rights movement. That’s all it is. They pretend that they are doing this on our behalf.

But when we’re talking about 1950’s America or the U.K., when there were calls for women to be kept at home, in the kitchen, to be breeding machines, to be married to men, and be in a subservient position, post-WW II, after women had actually finally got out of the home and been employed in real and important jobs; when there was a discussion about “Well, should women still be allowed to work?” all these men rushed to women’s defense, saying “No! They should be able to be housewives and raise their children, if that’s what they so wish.”

So these men, in their droves, will only support us; in the main of course, there are some exceptions; when it benefits them. And the sex trade is a perfect example of this.

DJ: So can you talk about the ascendancy of the pimp lobby and how that has really mainstreamed pimp ideology? I have interviewed Gail Dines before, and she did her sort of basic talk on porn and the harms of pornography, and was talking about, she often uses the phrase “body punishing.” And that’s all really important stuff, but there’s another thing I think’s really interesting, which is, you know, that she has the organization Stop Porn Culture, and I’m really interested also in porn culture and how it infuses every part of society, from advertising to newspapers. So can you talk a little bit about how the pimp lobby has mainstreamed itself?

JB: Well, the pimp lobby has had a really good run. It has delivered a very persuasive, palatable message for a long time, which is that prostitution exists because there are some women who want to do it and can only do that to earn money, and that men need it. That a man who can’t get instant sexual access to a prostituted woman and use her orifices could well end up a dangerous man, who will go out and have to rape “real” women. This is how the mantra goes, and I think it keeps a particular world order. It relies on hierarchies, of course, of “deserving” and “undeserving” victims; of some women who are an underclass to other women, and that means that the women who aren’t prostituted feel a bit safer to know that they’re not the ones at the bottom of the pile.

And it also suits the, in many ways, women’s kind of need to think that there is a way we can control male sexuality. In reality, what feminists know is that men can control their own sexuality. It’s not in the slightest bit uncontrollable. That’s a myth. But if women think men will choose other women to rape, or that men can be actually kept in check by having access to prostituted women’s bodies, then everyone will be fine.

So the pimp lobby presents itself as progressive, when in fact what it’s peddling is the most regressive position that you’ve ever heard. It peddles the notion that all men are potential rapists, which radical feminists are supposed to be the ones to have said, and we never did. It’s in fact the pimp lobby that says men have to have sex when they need it, when they want it, or they’ll become monsters. And it satisfies all kinds of what is seen as progressive agendas, that this is all about choice and agency of women who want to do this. So they masquerade as extremely liberated people simply offering another product. And the truth, of course, is known very well by prostituted people and by the johns who use them, and by those who broker the deals, in other words the pimps. But it’s only since sex trade survivors have been speaking out and speaking the truth and campaigning as experts against the sex trade that we’ve seen a little bit of insecurity from the sex industry spokespeople, from those who have controlled the narrative so far.

DJ: Can you expand on those last two sentences a little bit? About the discomfort in the pimp industry that may be manifesting.

JB: The pimps have led the agenda for a long time, and it has remained the dominant narrative. And now there is a certain amount of insecurity creeping into what was an all-powerful lobby. Five years ago, ten years ago I certainly wouldn’t have been able to get a publisher for my book, which is a global critique of the sex trade, and I wouldn’t be able to have been invited to many countries to launch it. It would have just been seen as completely left field, because of course the dominant narrative that the pimps propagate for profit has been upheld and exacerbated by those within academia who see this pro-sex work position as progressive, and as cool, and as woke, and as a bit, kind of, chic. So we, those of us who are abolitionists, have been painted as the regressives, as the old-fashioned pearl clutchers, the anti-sex women and men who really don’t understand what true sexual liberation is. In other words, we’ve been gaslighted. It’s been an Orwellian process by which the truth becomes lies and lies become the truth. And we’re now trying to sort that out, because we have – for my book, I interviewed, at length, 50 sex trade survivors from around the world, who are telling the truth, and who are experts, and who know what the pimps and the johns are like and how they manipulate the truth to convince people out there who aren’t involved in the sex trade at all, to convince them that this is something that is regular work and is not harmful.

DJ: So I want to be clear that I am not asking about your sex life, but let’s address this question, because I get this too all the time and it makes me laugh out loud sometimes when we are accused of being against the exploitation and commercial sexual exploitation of women both, regular exploitation and commercial exploitation; because we’re against that, we are accused of being somehow frigid or as you said, pearl clutching. I don’t have any pearls to clutch. But how do you respond to the notion that the fact that you are against the sexual exploitation of women means you must not like sex?

JB: Well, you know, this is something that girls grow up hearing almost immediately when they start mixing with boys. So when I was at school, if I didn’t respond happily to sexual harassment or a sexual assault or a sexual innuendo, it was because I was frigid. Or I must be a lesbian. There was something wrong with me. So in other words, if you don’t like sexual assault or sexual aggression that means you don’t like sex, because in the minds of those accusing us of this, they can’t separate harassment, aggression, assault, and sex. It’s how men have been socialized throughout boyhood to respond sexually under patriarchy. So of course those pro-feminist men, feminist allies, who refuse to accept that sex has to be about punishment and abuse of women and girls are also called sissies and faggots and just somehow not real men, which is what the “faggot” slur is and the “sissy” slur is.

So this is something that we’re very, very familiar with. When it comes to those slurs when we critique the sex trade, I mean there are pornographers and pimps and sex workers’ rights activists, as they call themselves, on social media, mainly Twitter, that have said the most appalling things about what should be done to me, and of course other feminists and our allies. Because we criticize men’s use of women, women’s bodies, for commercial exploitation. I mean literally rape fantasies. Horrific sadistic brutal sexual punishment has been suggested for women like me who say men shouldn’t buy and sell the inside of women’s bodies. So were it not so horrific and vile, you could laugh at this. It’s so clear what they’re doing. It’s so clear that they’re trying to shame women out of critiquing what men do with their penises when it hurts women.

DJ: So the fact that they’re trying to shame you, or terrorize you, into silence brings up the next question I wanted to talk about, which is deplatforming. It’s really striking to me that these days it is not uncommon for universities to deplatform as proponents of hate speech those who object to the commercialized sexual exploitation of women. I don’t know what even to ask because it just seems so absurd to me, but it’s happening fairly often, that they get deplatformed as “SWERFS” or as somehow hating women who are sexually exploited.

JB: It’s crazy, isn’t it? I suppose the only example that I can think of that tells its own story was, I think it was about three years ago, I was invited by some of the lecturers to a big university here in England, to debate a pornographer about whether or not pornography harms women. And I actually happened to meet this pornographer, that I’d seen before this event, on the train. We were both met at the same time by our hosts, and we were walked through the University campus together. This pornographer is a man who has accepted awards for producing porn, such as exploitedafricans dot com. Pornography that’s based on women coming from Africa to Europe and being raped by white men upon their arrival and being grateful for that. He was also given an award for a genre of porn from a very real case here in the U.K., of a taxi driver called John Worboys who is thought to have raped about 500 women, in the back of his cab. Police didn’t believe the women and it was only when they linked several of the cases that he was apprehended at all.

And this man was given free rein to walk through the campus. I was screamed at and heckled by students calling me whorephobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, because I; along with many other feminists who were born into, under Muslim law; critique the wearing of the full-face veil. And they were absolutely vile. They were trying to block me going into the lecture hall. They had tried to get the lecturers to cancel my appearance. They disrupted the talk. They were screaming at me afterwards, holding up their banners and placards, telling me I was hateful, a bigot, similar to Hitler. Wouldn’t speak to me when I asked them to engage. And the pornographer was just left completely alone. And I thought, this is an absolutely topsy-turvy world we’re living in. It’s feminism that is now seen as bigoted and fascist. And this is clearly because the men’s rights movement has gained a lot of ground lately by supporting the crazy notion that gender is innate, and that some people are born in the wrong bodies and need surgery to correct what is effectively being unhappy with the enforced stereotypical gender roles imposed upon us. The men’s rights movement has had a massive shot in the arm from transgender ideology, and by supporting the very vocal pro-sex work lobby.

So they’re just men’s rights activists. And they’re bringing a lot of students with them who don’t know any better, because they’re being discouraged from debate, because they’re scared to speak out and say “Why are you no-platforming a feminist who spent her life campaigning against sexual violence?” They literally are bullied out of questioning this, let alone challenging it.

DJ: So I don’t know that it is possible to really have the discussion you and I are having right now without talking about – we can talk about this in terms of hatred of women, we can talk about this in terms of men’s perceived entitlement to the bodies of women. We can talk about this in terms of aggrieved entitlement. I guess what I’m trying to say is that all of the atrocities that you’re describing don’t emerge in a vacuum. They emerge in the context of a larger culture of contempt for women.

JB: Of course. This is about male entitlement and male hatred. And the transgender ideology, and the pro-sex work ideology, and the pro-Islamofascist ideology – and make no mistake, I consider orthodox Catholicism and orthodox Judaism to be religious fundamentalism also, but they’re not defended by the so-called progressive left. But these ideologies that leftist men have signed up to have merely given them an opportunity to scream, at feminists like myself who they are threatened by; “Transphobe,” “Whorephobe,” “Islamophobe”; and still to be seen as progressive, still to be seen as on the right side of history. There is one particular leftist man here in the U.K. who is a columnist for a liberal newspaper, who, you know, you scratch the surface of some men who present themselves as great feminist allies, and what you find is a rabid misogynist. And this is what this man is. He has used his so-called support of the most extreme transgender ideology, by which I mean “Some lesbians have a penis” -type crazy ideology, to give him the opportunity to stand alongside other men that hate us and scream at us that we are transphobes, and one of his favorite phrases is “You are on the wrong side of history.”

DJ: Given a choice between being on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of biology or justice, I think I’ll take biology and justice, frankly.

JB: Right. I’m with you on that.

DJ: I’ve long been thinking that one of the most brilliant parts of the left-wing form of misogyny, and trans ideology, and also pimp ideology, queer theory, is that they allow lefty men to feel self-righteous as they accuse women of being bigots.

JB: Completely.

DJ: That’s an extraordinary rhetorical accomplishment. We can imagine a late 19th century US ideology that would allow white people in Alabama to call those who are opposing Jim Crow laws the bigots. It’s a stunning reversal.

JB: Absolutely. I completely agree. And it is something that has become such a truism; that those younger people who aren’t as confident as we are in challenging things, because we have to be; will just get swept along with this nonsense and won’t dare question. And if they do, they’re called bigots. They’re called fascists. They’re told they’re on the wrong side of history, when every instinct in their body is telling them that the sex trade is abusive to women. That religious fundamentalism is never good for progress. And that it’s impossible to argue that some women have penises, and that sex is not a biological fact. They really get bullied out of questioning, let alone standing up and saying “You are wrong, and I don’t like the way you’re treating these second-wave feminists,” without whom you would not be able to have any rights, as a gay person, to walk down the street holding the hand of your same-sex partner, or demand that you get maternity leave, or be able to report your husband for rape, to the police.

There’s just this notion that second-wave feminists – and this is an ideological battle, not a generational one – this vilification of second-wave feminists, some older, some younger – it’s just this horrendous witch-hunt mentality, and vicious misogyny.

DJ: We’ve got maybe ten minutes left. In a couple minutes I want to ask you for some sort of political wind down, but in the meantime I would like to ask you a personal question, which is how do you, personally, deal with that hatred? And I’m asking for myself, because I get it too. And I’m asking for the people you’ve mentioned many times, young people who might be being bullied into either silence or expressing perspectives that don’t make any sense.

We are social creatures, and that sort of hatred that was aimed at you, that sort of jeering, and it’s been aimed at me too, is meant to silence us. How do you persevere, how do you not let that get to you, how do you persevere in the face of it? And how do you continue to do constructive work?

JB: Well, it does get to me. It does have an effect. It does take its toll. But when we decide we are going to be campaigners for change, when it’s a life or death situation, whether it’s trying to overthrow apartheid in South Africa, for example; patriarchy where women are being tortured, killed, and left on a rubbish heap. When it’s about saving the planet from destruction. We know that this is a very hard fight and that our enemies will come after us hard. And that of course happens with feminists. It happens with the kind of activism you have done. It happens when you support feminists in our work. We often get kicked hard for just standing up for other activists whose priorities might be a little different from our own.

But the way that I cope with it is because I’ve had, I’ve been very lucky. I’ve got a media platform, I’ve got a good and successful career, I’ve got a reputation as a feminist that extends beyond the U.K. where I live. I have a big friendship network, an extremely supportive partner and other family members. And I’m part of a movement, which means we protect each other. My heart breaks when I think about young activists doing the work that you’re doing, or doing the work that I’m doing, and coming into this without the kind of support network that we have, or the safety nets that we might have just managed to put in place for ourselves. Most activists I know are not privileged or wealthy, not cushioned from the harm that doing this work can bring about. Obviously, or we wouldn’t be doing this work. It’s the idea that we somehow cope with it in a way that just means it’s water off a duck’s back. I don’t believe anyone that tells me that. I really don’t. It’s meant to demean us, it’s meant to destroy us. The one thing that I can say is it won’t destroy us because we wouldn’t come into this work and be doing it for as long as we have, if we were to be destroyed it would have happened by now.

But we have to recognize the toll it takes on our health, on our mental health and our physical health. On our income and even on our friendship network. Because a lot of people can’t be as brave as we are, or they become – they make a choice to not stand up and fight when the going gets too tough. So I think we need to start talking about the real toll that it has on us and not have that British stiff upper lip, and not actually pretend that we are these warriors that are made of metal and steel, because we’re not.

DJ: Thank you for that. That was all very moving to me.

Something that helps me to keep going when I am getting yelled at or having people call me vile names is that I think that I still have a choice. That I can do this work or I can not. Of course, character-wise I don’t have a choice, but leave that aside. That things could be worse. I could be someone who is on the streets and who is actively being sex trafficked. Or I could be a coal miner in China. Or I could be a stevedore in Mumbai. When I think about it like that, I think; yeah, this really hurts but things could be a lot worse. I could be that person who is selling his kidney to get out of the country. And that helps me.

JB: Yeah. That’s how I do it.

DJ: And another thing I want to mention in passing is that we always hear that pornography is so liberating, and pornography is so wonderful, but I’m sure we’ve both noticed that whenever someone who is pro-porn or one of the pimp lobbyists attempts to attack us, one of the things they quite often do is throw pornographic images at us. They pornify us. Like you said about the rape fantasies that are thrown at you. So even the people who are throwing these understand that this pornography is demeaning.

JB: Oh, they know. They’re fueled by an absolute disdain for human dignity. For women’s dignity, and for the dignity of any of us, including male allies, who call them out on what they’re really about. These people – you know, I don’t believe in the notion of evil. I’m a complete secularist. I do not believe anyone is born with a criminal or a bad gene. I believe in the social construction of character, of gender, of every single societal issue of that nature. But some of these people, the only way that I can describe them is as monsters. They have become monsters. They have dehumanized those of us that they see as their enemies to the point of where they literally wish to see us dead. They have become dehumanized themselves. And they have no remorse, no shame, no conscience. And we honestly have to accept that. These are very, very bad people.

And then of course they become heroes to those that aren’t monsters, that are misguided, or that just find it easy to follow the ideology that Trump would actually support, if only they would admit it. So that is the selling, and buying, of the human body, including the kidneys and organs of men and children. That they support religious fundamentalism doing the most appalling things because these leaders are seen as somehow worthy of respect. That they support the notion of transgenderism because it’s more palatable to them than homosexuality.

So these people need to look at how their ideological belief system is very similar to that of Trump and his entourage. And we need to shame them out of perpetuating this ideology by calling it what it really is. It’s closer to fascism and totalitarianism than we would ever imagine in our wildest dreams ever becoming.

DJ: So that would be a fabulous ending, but I’m going to ask one more question, which is: So you have eloquently spoken against the pimp lobby and expressed the harms that prostitution does to women. Can you talk about what sort of solutions, for just a couple of minutes, what sort of solutions you propose to help women to not be put into these positions?

JB: Sex trade survivors are finding more support and more platforms around the world than ever before. The women I interviewed for my book, and the women I work with as feminist colleagues looking to a world without prostitution, are now opening doors around the world. We now have more countries that have adopted the so-called Nordic Model of criminalizing the johns and decriminalizing those who are prostituted than we do states that have legalized or decriminalized their sex trade. We will win. We will absolutely gather more momentum and more support. So I think, in terms of a solution as to what we can do to dismantle violence against women, and a big part of that is the commercial sex trade, is to pull in as many allies as we can, and try to persuade these people who think that a good response to the sex trade is to support women selling and buying bodies, and for men to have the right to do that. That we say this is not a progressive way to behave in the world and see the world, and to try to imagine a world without prostitution, in a way that we can imagine a world without child poverty or without racism.

DJ: My guest today has been Julie Bindel. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network.

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