A review of a Bristol Festival of Ideas Event on 14th March 2018
The sex trade is rape culture, said Julie Bindel on Wednesday night in Waterstones. It involves people (mostly men) having sex with other people (mostly women) who do not want to have sex with them. To legalise it is to sanction and normalise men desiring sex with women who do not desire them.
Normalising, or indeed eroticising sex with people who don’t want sex: that’s rape culture.
I had never heard it put like that before. There are passionate and persuasive arguments being made on both sides of the abolish/legalise debate, all claiming to be more progressive and humane than the rest; one casts about in the dark trying to get at the truth. But when I heard Bindel’s simple and devastating argument it was as though she had hit the switch of a particularly stark and unforgiving light. …
Science and the Sexes 