Gail Dines

Gail Dines (born 29 July 1958) is Professor Emerita of Sociology and Women's Studies at Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts. A radical feminist, Dines specializes in the study of pornography; Julie Bindel described her in 2010 as the world's leading anti-pornography campaigner. She is the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (2010) and co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (1997). She is also a founding member of Stop Porn Culture and founder of Culture Reframed, created to address pornography as a public-health crisis. Dines writes that boys and men are exposed online to pornography that is increasingly cruel and violent toward women. That men can be aroused by such imagery is "quite profound", she argues: "Pornography is the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy." The exposure of teenage girls to the images affects their sense of sexual identity. The result, Dines writes, is that women are "held captive" by images that lie about them, and that "contemporary idealized femininity" has been reduced to the "hypersexualized, young, thin, toned, hairless, and, in many cases, surgically enhanced woman with a come-hither look on her face".