It is now widely acknowledged that the unprecedented mainstreaming of the global pornography industry is transforming the sexual politics of intimate and public life, popularising new forms of hardcore misogyny, and strongly contributing to the sexualisation of children. Yet challenges to the pornography industry continue to be dismissed as uncool, anti-sex and moral panics.

With...

A feminist anthology that ranges widely across women’s writing on sex. In fiction, poetry and experimental forms, feminist writers unveil a world of female sexual experience. The editors have chosen pieces that portray women’s sexual experiences from youth to old age. The writers explore celibacy, lesbianism, heterosexuality and bisexuality but consistently return to the simple wonders of...

Sheila Jeffreys examines the activities of feminist campaigners around such issues as child abuse and prostitution and how these campaigns shaped social purity in the 1880s and 1890s. She demonstrates how the thriving and militant feminism of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was undermined, and asserts that the decline of this feminism was due largely to the promotion of a sexual...