Gail Dines



Gail Dines is a radical feminist media scholar known for her anti-pornography work.

Anti-pornography scholarship and activism
Dines is the founder of Stop Porn Culture, a politically feminist organization which publishes material for activists to use for anti-pornography "education".

Half of her beef is with the porn industry for profiting from what she considers to be the humiliation of women and men, reproducing (har) and reinforcing sexist and racist ideology, preying on adolescent and pre-adolescent minors, and, in her view, trying to make everyone's sexuality the same. The other half of her beef is concerned with the fact that softcore pornography has migrated into mainstream culture (shocking, we know).

According to Dines, "88 percent of porn videos contain violence against women." However, these results were taken from a single study which used an extremely broad definition of violence, including such horrifying acts as "spanking" and "name-calling". Dines also "believes that pornography is driving men to commit particular acts of violence towards women", an allegation which ignores the fact that "as pornography has increased in availability, sex crimes have either decreased or not increased." Numerous studies have concluded that "there is no connection between pornography consumption and sexual violence."

Opinion of third-wave feminism
While acknowledging that third-wave feminism has produced some good work, like intersectionality, Dines claims that on the whole, it is just neoliberal ideology applied to the women's movement. Among her arguments is that third-wavers seem to emphasize individual women's empowerment, whereas second-wavers were big on women's liberation as an entire gender/class. She's not wrong that there are plenty of third-wavers who think this way, or that it seems to be the prevailing feminist ideology today. Where she is incorrect is in seeing second-wavers as the radicals and third-wavers as the (neo)liberals. There have been radical traditions in all three waves, and there have been liberal/moderate/conservative traditions in all three waves.

Books

 * Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (with Robert Jensen and Ann Russo, 1997; ISBN 978-0-415-91813-8)
 * PornLand: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (2010; ISBN 978-0-8070-4452-0)