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. 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).

She argues that 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".

Dines was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Manchester, England, and attended King David School. When she was 18, after reading Robin Morgan's book Sisterhood is Powerful (1970), she abandoned Orthodox Judaism and became a radical feminist, later calling her relationship to feminism "a passionate love affair". She spoke in 2011 about the appeal of radical feminism: "After teaching women for 20-odd years, if I go in and I teach liberal feminism, I get looked [at] blank ... I go in and teach radical feminism, bang, the room explodes. ... I remember what happened to me the first time I read radical feminism. I remember thinking: 'I have been waiting for this my entire life, and I didn't even know I was waiting for it."

She obtained her BSc from Salford University, where she met her husband, David Levy, who was studying at the University of Manchester. She embraced Marxism but became disillusioned with the British left when the students' unions voted to support that Zionism is racism, following United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, which meant Jewish student groups were denied funding. The atmosphere in the UK led to increased antisemitism. Swastikas were painted on Jewish homes; in a pub with Jewish friends, Dines heard a nearby group say they could "smell gas".

As a result, in 1980 when she was 22, Dines and Levy moved to Israel. While there she co-founded a feminist group, Isha L'isha ("Woman to Woman"), which described itself in 2018 as "the oldest grassroots feminist organization in Israel", and engaged in research at the University of Haifa into violence against women. She started her PhD thesis while volunteering in a rape crisis centre, after encountering pornography during a meeting in Haifa arranged by Women Against Pornography. The following day, she told her thesis advisor she wanted to write her dissertation on pornography: "I literally couldn't believe the images. I couldn't believe that men created such images, and that other men wanted to watch them."

The couple had a son, who was born while Levy was in Lebanon with the Israel Defence Forces, although both he and Dines opposed the war in Lebanon. Dines joined the Israeli peace movement and has continued to be critical of the expansion of Israeli settlements and the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza. Finding it increasingly difficult to live with the hyper-masculinity of Israeli culture, the family moved to the United States in 1986, where Levy began studying at Harvard Business School. Dines obtained her PhD in 1990, again from Salford, for a thesis entitled Towards a Sociology of Cartoons: A Framework for Sociological Investigation with Special Reference to "Playboy" Sex Cartoons.

Dines worked at Wheelock College in Boston from 1986 for around 30 years; she became professor of sociology and women's studies there and chair of its American studies department. Levy became professor of management at the University of Massachusetts Boston.