Biography

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. Described in 2010 as the world's leading anti-pornography campaigner, she is a founding member of Stop Porn Culture and founder of Culture Reframed, created to address pornography as a public-health crisis. Dines is co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (1997) and author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (2010).

Dines writes that boys and men are exposed online to pornography that is increasingly cruel and violent toward women; she argues that pornography is "the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy". The exposure of teenage girls to the images affects their sense of sexual identity, with the result, Dines writes, that women are "held captive" by images that lie about them, and that femininity is reduced to the "hypersexualized, young, thin, toned, hairless, and, in many cases, surgically enhanced woman with a come-hither look on her face".