“[The] politics of pessimism defines the liberal consensus that prostitution should be regulated rather than abolished. This attitude is the antithesis of feminism. ‘We do not say, poverty will always exist, let’s build more poor houses,’ one survivor activist told me during the research for my book on the global sex trade. ‘Or ‘there will always be rape, so let’s focus on patching up victims,’ but we do say that about prostitution.”