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Sheila Jeffreys

Sheila Jeffreys Books

Political Scientist

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“For women as a class, the ability to transform sexual practice, to achieve respect from men as equal human beings and thus break out of their subordinate status, is undermined by the ability of men to escape from the responsibility of acknowledging women's equality. Men's use of women in prostitution stands directly in the way of women's efforts to improve their status.”

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Book:The Idea of Prostitution
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“I don’t have a gender. I’ve no intention of having a gender. I don’t do masculinity which is the behavior of male dominance, and I don’t do femininity which is the behavior of female subordination, women’s subordination. I hope to engage in human behavior and I hope at some point in the future everybody will be able to do that too, but gender I definitely do not have. I am a conscientious objector to gender as I would be indeed to being drafted into the military.”

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Author:Sheila Jeffreys
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“Under the guise that their predilections were about something biological - a misplaced female mind in a male body rather than sexual excitement - they have represented themselves as an oppressed minority akin to homosexuals. This has enabled them to infiltrate their fantasies and priorities into policy making at local and national levels, health policy, sports policy, education policy, prison policy.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical Feminism
Book:Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
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“Women and girls need single sex toilets to avoid men's sexual harassment and aggression. In the UK in 2018, it was reported that just under 90% of complaints regarding changing room sexual assaults, voyeurism and harassment were about incidents in unisex facilities, and two thirds of all sexual harassment in leisure centres and public swimming pools were in unisex changing rooms.”

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Book:Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
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“Transgender rights activists campaign to downgrade the importance of biology in support of the claim that men can really be women. This has had particularly widespread consequences for women's status. For a feminist movement to exist, women have to be thinkable, to conceptualise themselves as an oppressed group based upon a common characteristic. If the word 'woman' ceases to have any meaning, or the meaning is downgraded, then feminism cannot exist because 'women' have become unthinkable. This erasure of women is the ultimate triumph of transvestism at this time in history.”

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“Transvestites are seeking to empty the word 'woman' of meaning and are forming language about female biology to suit their own sexual excitements and to prevent any challenge to their ideology. They have created their own language to downgrade women's status such as the word 'ciswoman' which they use to distinguish adult human females from 'transwomen'. In this way they demote those born female to just one variety of the category of women and provide an object lesson in how men have labelled and defined women to suit their purposes over the centuries of male domination.”

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“Men who practice transvestism as an expression of the male sex right have been turned into a rights-bearing category, an oppressed minority whose excitements have precedents over the dignity, safety, and civil and political freedoms of women, and even the existence of women as a social and biological category. This achievement has depending upon obscuring their sexual motivations in favour of the idea that they are somehow essentially female in their heads.”

FeminismSexismWomens RightsMisogynyRadical FeminismWomens Liberation
Book:Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
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“There can be no liberation of women without a complete transformation of the way that male sexuality is constructed. Whilst the eroticising of women's subordination remains the basis of what is seen as sex, women cannot escape coercion in the bedroom, sexual harassment on the streets and at work, and the requirement to service men's excitements in the way they dress and behave. Women's appearance, behaviour, body language, opportunities are shaped by this 'duty'.”

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Book:Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
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“The most obvious proof that male sexuality is constructed to be abusive is the fact that men do not rape women in the breakfast cereal isle of the local supermarket. They are not subject to forces beyond their control. Men's sex right is socially constructed and expressed only where there is likely to be no immediate sanction. Men's sexual violence towards women is a product of their minds and not their biology.”

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Book:Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
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“Men's sexual violence in all these forms ensures women's awareness of their second class status and constructs the way in which women interact with the world. However, many of the forms of men's sexual violence are not taken seriously, they are blamed on women, hidden, or compartmentalised so that the whole picture of how women's lives are affected cannot be grasped.”

FeminismSexismMisogynyWomen S RightsWomen S LiberationRadical Feminism
Book:Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
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“The forms of men's fetish behaviour that have been unleashed in recent decades are not private. They do not consist of fantasies that men keep to themselves but affect women profoundly. In some cases, as with contemporary men's transvestism, they threaten the whole understanding of what women are, attack the very basis of feminism and destroy women's human rights because the men actually claim to be women.”

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Book:Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women's Subordination
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“...the work of sexologists and the development of sex therapy are all instances of how men’s power over women was to be supported and managed through the regulation of marital sex. Sex, in this scheme of things, was not a natural and spontaneous seeking after pleasure by men and women, but a regulatory mechanism designed and constructed to enforce male dominance and female submission.”

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Book:Anticlimax: a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution
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“Sexual intercourse is the only purely reproductive sexual practice and if it is engaged in by women only when they wish to procreate then reproduction is under women's control. Once sexual intercourse is established as compulsory then women have recourse only to artificial contraception, abortion, and infanticide, to control reproduction and childbearing.”

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“Male and female sexuality are very different, we are told, [...] None the less women are instructed to try to develop male sexual responses in order to be the 'ideal lover'. [...] So clearly sexual behaviour is not natural or inevitable. It can be learned where this serves the interests of male-dominant heterosexuality, and is only disconcertingly recalcitrant where such learning might serve women's interests.”

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Book:Anticlimax: a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution
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“There should be no necessary contradiction between recognizing the harms women suffer from male dominance as well as their courage and resourcefulness in dealing with them. Otherwise feminist critique might have to be abandoned altogether on the grounds that it is insulting to women.”

Radical FeminismMale Dominance
Book:The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade
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“Women and girls cannot access full humanity and the rights and opportunities of full human status while the idea that there are personality traits and appearance norms that are naturally and essentially associated with girls and women still has social currency and serves to control and limit their lives.”

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Book:Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism
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“Despite women's experience or knowledge of sexual violence, despite whatever is going on in their marriages and how their husbands behave, women are expected to engage with enthusiasm in sex. [Women] have to make a separation between the sex in which they 'let go' and become enthusiastic and the rape they experienced last night or the pornographic advert they saw on the underground this morning. What is required is either a mind/body split or an eroticising of the oppression itself.”

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Book:Anticlimax: a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution
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“A woman who has experienced rape or sexual harassment in childhood or adulthood, who knows about the rape and murder of women from the media, who has seen the sexual values of men portrayed in their pornography and on billboards, has a difficult choice in the area of sex with men. She can choose to treat her man as being quite different from other men and as being in no way implicated in men's sexual violence. This is not easy and requires an awkward split in her mind. She is still unlikely to escape having her sexual and emotional responses affected by her experience and knowledge.”

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Book:Anticlimax: a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution
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“Starting with rape, feminists dragged into the public arena plentiful evidence that sex was not an unproblematic joy for women. The result of uncovering the huge but hidden amount of abuse that women and girl children suffered in the form of sexual harassment, sexual abuse in childhood and marital rape, was that the sexual-liberation agenda had to be submitted to critical scrutiny.”

Male Sexuality
Book:Anticlimax: a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution
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“When women and girls experienced throughout life such systematic sexual aggression from men it was realistic and reasonable for women to be resistant to and suspicious of male sexuality. The focus moved away from women as the problem to a critique of male sexual behaviour and an analysis of the ways in which men's sexual violence sustained their power.”

Male Sexuality
Book:Anticlimax: a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution
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“When feminist analysis moved on from stranger rape to the much more likely possibility in a woman's life of rape by a man close to her, the male establishment and heterosexual system suffered a more serious challenge. The issues of incest and marital rape strike blows at the fundamental institution of male supremacy itself, the heterosexual family. The serious contradiction faced by heterosexual women became much more pronounced as the prevalence of child sexual abuse and relationship rape was revealed. How could the trust and innocence required to get women to love and marry men, and produce children with them, be sustained in the context of this knowledge?”

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“...a consequence which the pornbrokers may not have intended. Women were able to look at pornography and for the first time had at their disposal a panoramic view of what constituted male sexuality. [...] pornography became more and more concerned with sadomasochism and much more brutal in its portrayal of women. [...] We decided we needed to study pornography, to see exactly what was in it and understand what it told us about men's attitude to women, about male sexuality and about the construction of heterosexuality.”

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Book:Anticlimax: a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution
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“But the increasing independence of women provided a direct threat to the maintenance of male power and privilege. That no such threat did materialise, it will be argued here, owes a great deal to the success of the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was a counter-revolution and constituted a timely adjustment to the fine-tuning of the heterosexual institution. [...] . Sex was constructed to be the new binding ingredient in marriage which would compensate for the decreased efficiency of legal and economic constraints. The 1960s was a new time of crisis for male supremacy and a new adjustment had to be made.”

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Book:Anticlimax: a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution
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“Women incorporate the values of the male sexual objectifiers within themselves. Catharine MacKinnon calls this being "thingified" in the head (MacKinnon, 1989). They learn to treat their own bodies as objects separate from themselves. Bartky explains how this works: the wolf whistle sexually objectifies a woman from without with the result that, ``"The body which only a moment before I inhabited with such ease now floods my consciousness. I have been made into an object'' (Bartky, 1990, p. 27). She explains that it is not sufficient for a man simply to look at the woman secretly, he must make her aware of his looking with the whistle. She must, "be made to know that I am a 'nice piece of ass': I must be made to see myself as they see me'' (p. 27). The effect of such male policing behaviour is that, "Subject to the evaluating eye of the male connoisseur, women learn to evaluate themselves first and best'" (Bartky, 1990, p. 28). Women thus become alienated from their own bodies.”

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Book:Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West
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“The sexual revolution completed the sexualisation of women. Both married and unmarried women were expected now to become experts in sexually servicing men, and to get over their own tastes and interests in order to become efficient at this task. Where once a large group of single women might have escaped the destiny of servicing men and concentrated upon their own life work, they were now conscripted into compulsory heterosexuality.”

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Book:Anticlimax: a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution
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“Caputi defines serial sex murder as 'gynocide, sexually political murder, an extreme form of terrorism in the service of the patriarchal state'. The result of this and other acts of sexual terrorism is that 'women are supposed to accept it as a "normal" , unavoidable consequence of modern life that we must conduct our lives in constant vigilance and fear, restricting our movements, staying inside at night'.”

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Book:Anticlimax: a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution
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“[Transsexual surgery] could be likened to political psychiatry in the Soviet Union. I suggest that transsexualism should best be seen in this light, as directly political, medical abuse of human rights. The mutilation of healthy bodies and the subjection of such bodies to dangerous and life-threatening continuing treatment violates such people's rights to live with dignity in the body into which they were born.”

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Author:Sheila Jeffreys
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“The bonding of women that is woman-loving, or Gyn/affection, is very different from male bonding. Male bonding has been the glue of male dominance. It has been based upon recognition of the difference men see between themselves and women, and is a form of the behaviour, masculinity, that creates and maintains male power… Male comradeship/bonding depends upon energy drained from women.”

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“Male domination, and the low and stigmatised status of women, cause teenage girls to engage in punishment of their bodies through eating disorders and self-mutilation. There is increasing evidence that woman-hating Western cultures are toxic to girls and very harmful to their mental health. It is, perhaps, not surprising, therefore, that there seem to be some girls baling out and seeking to upgrade their status.”

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“Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.”

BitsClassFeminismApproachAimMalesFeministGenderRadicalBehaviourMasculinityFemininityRulingFlexibleFrameworkDominanceSubordinatesRadical FeminismTheoristsRationaleAbolitionistRadical FeministMale Dominance
Book:Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism
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“It should not be a surprise to find that s/m fantasy is significant in women's sex lives. Women may be born free but they are born into a system of subordination. We are not born into equality and do not have equality to eroticise. We are not born into power and do not have power to eroticise. We are born into subordination and it is in subordination that we learn our sexual and emotional responses. It would be surprising indeed if any woman reared under male supremacy was able to escape the forces constructing her into a member of an inferior slave class.”

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Author:Sheila Jeffreys
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“As a feminist, I consider the female pronoun to be an honorific, a term that conveys respect. Respect is due to women as members of a sex caste that have survived subordination and deserve to be addressed with honour. Men who transgender cannot occupy such a position.”

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Book:Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism
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