Search results for ""Author Kajsa Ekis Ekman"

In 1998, Sweden passed ground-breaking legislation criminalizing the purchase of sexual services which sought to curb demand and support women exiting the sex industry. Grounded in the reality of the violence and abuse inherent in prostitution—and reeling from the death of a friend to prostitution in Spain—Kajsa Ekis Ekman exposes the many lies in the ‘sex work’ scenario. Trade unions aren’t trade unions. Groups for prostituted women are simultaneously groups for brothel owners. And prostitution is always presented from a woman’s point of view. The men who buy sex are left out. Turning to the practice of surrogate motherhood, Kajsa Ekis Ekman identifies the same components: that the woman is neither connected to her own body nor to the child she grows in her body and gives birth to. Surrogacy becomes an extended form of prostitution. In this capitalist creation story, the parent is the one who pays. The product sold is not sex but a baby. Ekis Ekman asks: why should this not be called child trafficking?

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A new definition of woman has taken hold in Western societies. Instead of a matter of biology and material reality, we are told it is an identity. Anyone who declares herself to be a woman is a woman; the body has henceforth become irrelevant. Gender, we are told, is a spectrum, and it resides in the mind. In countries such as Norway, Canada, Argentina, and Australia, laws have been enacted that give anyone the right to change his or her legal sex, irrespective of whether the person has had a medical procedure. At the same time, the industry for gender reassignment surgery is growing at an unprecedented pace. Seven out of 10 teenagers who seek treatment are now girls. The new definition of sex has been hailed as progressive. But is it really? And is it new? In this groundbreaking book, Swedish feminist and Marxist author Kajsa Ekis Ekman traces the ideological roots of this new definition.

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