Bad Girls Dirty Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim Feminism - Softcover

For well over a decade, half-baked analysis and phony science have been used by some feminists to side-track the women's movement into puritanical campaigns against sexual material and imaginative sexual exploration.

Many feminists would say that this widely publicised version of feminism is itself sexist, and that the increasingly vocal anti-pornography campaigns are founded on theoretical dead-ends that have allowed feminists to deviate drastically from the basic goals of women's liberation.

Bad Girls & Dirty Pictures puts these anti-sex, anti-porn arguments under the microscope of a more thorough and considered feminist analysis. It examines the flaws in the research that purports to prove the harm of pornography and warns against the continuing use of censorship by politicians and the moral right, as well as exposing the dangers of anti-porn feminist arguments.

Contributions from a wide range of women, including sex workers and academics, remind us that pornography does not have a special place in our oppression, and that censorship must still be seen as dangerous enemy of women. Bad Girls & Dirty Pictures is a much-needed antidote to falsehoods, shabby thinking, and patronizing sexism that have fuelled anti-pornography campaigns and misled the women's movement.

Alison Assiter is Director of the Enterprise in Higher Education unit at the Metropolitan University.

Carol Avedon is a freelance writer and journalist. She is active in the Feminists Against Censorship campaign.