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The new edition of Beauty and Misogyny revisits and updates Sheila Jeffreys'uncompromising critique of Western beauty practice and the industries and ideologies behind it. Jeffreys argues that beauty practices are not related to individual female choice or creative expression, but represent instead an important aspect of women's oppression. As these practices have become increasingly brutal and pervasive, the need to scrutinize and dismantle them is if anything more urgent now as it was in 2005 when the first edition of the book was published.The United Nations concept of'harmful traditional/cultural practices'provides a useful lens for the author to advance her critique. She makes the case for including Western beauty practices within this definition, examining their role in damaging women's health, creating sexual difference and enforcing female deference.First-wave feminists of the 1970s criticized pervasive beauty regimes such as dieting and depilation, but a later argument took hold that beauty practices were no longer oppressive now that women could'choose'them. In recent years the reality of Western beauty practices has become much more bloody and severe, requiring the breaking of skin and the rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Beauty and Misogyny seeks to make sense of why beauty practices have not only persisted but become more extreme. It examines the pervasive use of makeup, the misogyny of fashion and high-heeled shoes, and looks at the role of pornography in the creation of increasingly popular beauty practices such as breast implants, genital waxing, surgical alteration of the labia and other forms of self-mutilation. The book concludes by considering how a culture of resistance to these practices can be created.A new and thoroughly updated edition of this essential work will appeal to all levels of students and teachers of gender studies, cultural studies and feminist psychology, and to anyone with an interest in feminism, women and beauty, and women's health.

Sexuality has been reframed by postmoderism, but this clear discussion of literature, politics, and popular culture provides a useful historical view. The sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s is remembered as a time of great freedom for women, but did the sexual revolution have the same goals as the Women's Liberation Movement? Was it truly liberation for women or just another insidious form of oppression? This provocative book argues that sexual freedom sometimes directly opposed actual freedom for women. Tracing sexual mores and attitudes from the 1950s through the 1990s, it explores the nature of both straight and gay relationships and offers original and compelling commentary on The Joy of Sex, Lolita, Naked Lunch, and other representations in the literature on sexuality. Newly updated, this edition provides an important critique and insight into these controversial issues.

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 ideology which was hostile to women's independence. The circumstances about which she writes are frighteningly familiar in the present political climate.

There are (at least) two competing views on prostitution: Prostitution as a legitimate and acceptable form of employment, freely chosen by women and Men's use of prostitution as a form of degrading the women and causing grave psychological damage. In The Idea of Prostitution Sheila Jeffreys explores these sharply contrasting views. She examines the changing concept of prostitution from White Slave Traffic of the nineteenth century to its present status as legal. The book includes discussion of the varieties of prostitution such as: the experience of male prostitutes; the uses of women in pornography; and the role of military brothels compared with slavery and rape in marriage. Sheila Jeffreys explodes the distinction between “forced” and “free”prostitution, and documents the expanding international traffic in women. The author examines the claims of the prostitutes'rights movement and the sex industry, while supporting prostituted women.

A critique of the lesbian sex industry's efforts to profit from women's oppression.