Julie Bindel – the UK’s Most Controversial Feminist Writer

Julie Bindel (1962, Darlington, United Kingdom) is a journalist, writer, radical feminist, and co-founder of Justice for Women, an organization supporting women prosecuted for killing their partners after being victims of gender-based violence. Author of books such as Straight expectations (2014) and The Pimping of Prostitution: Abolishing the Sex Work Myth (2017), she has also participated in the edition of The Map of My Life: The Story of Emma Humphreys (2003) and Exiting Prostitution: A Study in Female Desistance. In 2008 she was nominated as a Journalist of the Year at the Stonewall Awards, awards in recognition of people who have influenced the lives of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals in the United Kingdom.

She has been facing one of the main pillars that support patriarchy for decades: the prostitution system. Julie Bindel looks into the eyes of survivors of the sex industry around the world. Listening to them changed her life and marked a journalistic trajectory that has raised fierce criticism inside and outside the feminist movement but which, in turn, has inspired the new generations of journalists. Bindel dissects pornographers, pro-prostitution lobbyists, funders, and academics in favor of the legalization of prostitution. She does not fear the consequences because she firmly believes in her commitments to the abolitionist cause and one of the basic principles of journalism: to exercise control of power. In 2017 he published The Pimping of Prostitution: abolishing the sex work myth, a work product of years of research in which he breaks the myths of the sex industry and exposes his miseries after thoroughly knowing organizations, lobbyists, and pro-sex activists from around the world. It is a detailed and impressive story, as illuminating as overwhelming that it motivates the fight against slavery in the 21st century.

“The problem is that leftist men are deeply hypocritical on this issue. When you have an entire sex industry based on imperialism, colonialism, racism, misogyny, poverty, and extreme unregulated capitalism, it would be normal for the left to protest against it. However, as is the right of men to access women’s bodies and because they see it as part of what women want and what is good for us, their misogyny is quite clear. That is the greatest hypocrisy of the leftist agenda, regardless of whether they are self-convinced that they are supporting women’s rights by supporting the sex trade. They refuse to see it as they would see any other large corporation run by criminals, harming poor people, the most vulnerable. In this country, we have a Labor Party, a Green Party and a Liberal-Democratic Party that are officially in favor of the decriminalization of prostitution and say they do it in favor of sex workers. They need to be challenged in this regard, that their hypocrisy is highlighted and compared to other industries that exploit human beings because they make an exception to prostitution by supporting it.”

Part of the investigation of her book is dedicated to organized crime and its connection with legal and illegal pimps and leaders of these pseudo-union organizations.

“If you decriminalize the sex trade, you get more credibility with the prostitute claimants. You give support and respectability to the owners of the brothels and the pimps, who become managers or entrepreneurs, and the women have no more protection than they would have if they were criminalized. They cannot pick up a phone and go: “Here is a man who wants to pay for sex with me”; they don’t even need to perpetrate an act of violence against them because they are already criminalized. Therefore, if we decriminalize the sex trade and pimping becomes something like buying a hamburger, they will never be arrested. If you have more demand for prostitution, you have more prostituted women, you have more sexual acts and, therefore, more sexual violence because rape is endemic in prostitution. More women in prostitution lead to lower prices, and, therefore, the plaintiffs will be able to get sex without a condom if they pay a little more. In the absence of police chasing them, they are not afraid of that either: and how do you inspect if someone is carrying a condom within decriminalization? Are the agents in the room, or do they put the condom on his cock?”