If you didn’t read the comments on my recent post about Important Enemies you really should. Nearly every one is interesting, thoughtful or nutty-entertaining, far from the tedious comments often heard at places like the Guardian. No, this was an authentic conversation with drama. My original idea was to have a section on my cv where important slag-offs would be listed, but the latest characterisation of my work is quite wonderful. In a round-up review of several recent books on the sex industry, Ken Plummer has called me an Intellectual Feminist Maverick after finishing up his take on Jeffreys’s Industrial Vagina:

Of course, I think [Jeffreys] is over the top and lacks some subtlety – but that is often what is needed so that the big issues can be seen. . . she would make a great starting point in a classroom and elsewhere for a debate on these issues.

But then, immediately, one needs to read the work of Laura Agustín as a counterpoint. Laura María Agustín is an intellectual feminist maverick who seeks to deconstruct the entire field and challenge much thinking. In Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, she draws from years of researching and thinking about the position of women travelling in the global economy, many of whom engage in various forms of ‘selling sex’. Much of what Jeffreys claims, I guess Agustín would dismiss as myth. At the core of her argument is the idea that migrants often make ‘personal choices’ to travel and work in the sex industry. Her specific interests though are not with groups like street workers but with migration and trafficking. She sees them as a part of a dynamic global economy; and one where often the sex control industry makes the situation worse, not better, for them. Indeed the core of this book is an attack upon the ‘rescue industry’, which ostensibly has a long history of ‘saving women’ while in fact it is driven by a ‘feminist fundamentalism’ which frequently and actually harms women. This book is reviewed elsewhere in Sexualities (Vol. 12, no. 6) and her ideas are developed in a special issue of Sexualities in 2007 (Vol 19, no. 4). But it has to be mentioned again here. She problematizes the whole area of those who work to help these women – and who place them ‘in need’. She advocates listening to the voices of the migrant women. Between the work of Agustín and Jeffreys there is a major and long-standing feminist tension at work on many levels.

The only thing I’d take exception to is Plummer’s guess that I’d call Jeffreys’s ideas ‘myth’. Numerous reviewers of my work use this word, but I personally don’t. To me, myth makes it sound as though I think fundamentalist feminist ideas about trafficking are fabrication, which isn’t right. Instead, I see those ideas as gender ideology and a campaign strategy: change the language, reduce complexity to a simple, quickly comprehensible type, hold fast to the line. I don’t think the world is a happy, unsexist place, that globalisation is fair, that no one is ever made miserable by migration or sex work or any other simplistic thing. The long-standing tension Plummer mentions is between a hard-line reductionist (or totalising) view of women as always exploited and a nuanced and doubting view that wants to recognise as much female agency as possible, on principle.

The excerpt is from ‘A Round Up of Some Recent Books on Prostitution and Sex Work, by Ken Plummer. Sexualities 13(3): 394-400, (2010).