[anon1385]

>I invite the reader to search for any serious discourse on problems within "sex work" at Current Affairs or The Intercept, The Guardian

It's always dangerous to make generalisations about feminism, especially across different countries where the various splits evolved quite differently. The sex-positive version of feminism seems pretty dominant in the US but that's really not the case in the UK. The mainstream feminist voices you will hear in the UK media are almost exclusively not the sex-positive type that dominates in the US, other than a few younger writers. It's still very much dominated by what people call SWERF (sex worker exclusionary radical feminists) and TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) types of feminist. That's especially true of the liberal media like the Guardian and New Statesman. (Grassroots organisations aren't dominated in the same way as far as I can tell, and neither is academia, although I think you are still going to find far more 2nd wave type voices than in the US).

This stuff has been in the news fairly recently here because of an attempt by some feminist MPs to criminalise prostitution organised over the internet (and there are groups that have been pushing for it, some of them with links to the kind of evangelical US funds that you mention). There has been considerable backlash from sex workers and various grass roots feminist movements against this.

If you want an example a country where the sex industry has been regulated very differently then look at Norway and Sweden (if you start reading about this stuff you will quickly find people referring to the 'Nordic Model'). There's a huge amount of discussion of the topic academically and elsewhere. The results have not been what you are hoping for though (assuming your interest is reducing violence and exploitation).

[_bfhp]

In the UK there is certainly a degree of magnitude more diversity to the voices who engage in the discourse and are listened to. But can we name even one 'radfem' with similar mainstream platforms and access to the sort enjoyed by Owen Jones or Laurie Penny? I would think it would make sense to have named at least one if the situation is that of a "very much dominated" area.

As a rough marker of popularity, Owen Jones and Laurie Penny enjoy followers in the 100,000s (Jones over 700K). Sarah Ditum and Glosswitch each fail to break 20k. Helen Lewis, who hasn't written on sex work on the Internet more than a few times and certainly not strongly for abolition or the Nordic model, has barely 100k followers.

Unfortunately I don't see it as a pejorative that the grassroots movements we hear and know about tend to be protective of porn and prostitution as institutions. Small independent groups all supposedly working for the same better world will always end up in a survival-of-the-fittest contest, making concessions at the most controversial nodes to win favor. Basically every man in the Anglosphere who counts himself as progressive or leftist engages with the sex industry in some way, while basically none will care about anyone's abortion. Directly thus, we have the political movements we see today.