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Title: The trick's in the title
Review: The oxymoronic title of Nagle's book, "Whores and Other Feminists" signals from the start that this is just another entry in the disingenuous genre of books about prostitution that redefine feminism as what it is not. Feminism doesn't sugar coat sexism, or try to make women comfy with it. Feminism analyzes what John Adams smugly termed "our masculine systems" - of which prostitution is a primary example - and fights back because sexist systems pay off for men at women's expense. And telling the hard truth about the political meaning and lived realities of prostitution is not "blaming prostitutes" - it is holding men responsible for what they do to women, something that handmaidens to misogyny like Nagle et al. are afraid to do. Nagle strategically ignores a key fact - women don't write the script for whores - men do, and if calling misogyny feminism broadens the market for prostitution, hey give the customer what he wants. That's what prostitution is all about.
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