Kathleen Barry (born January 22, 1941) is an American sociologist and feminist.
[2][3] In 1985 she received the Wonder Woman Foundation Award for her strides towards the empowerment of women.
[6] Barry's first book, Female Sexual Slavery (1979), prompted international awareness of human sex trafficking [7] and has been translated into six languages.
[6] Her follow-up to Female Sexual Slavery, The Prostitution of Sexuality (1995) discusses the idea of "consent" in liberal modern American discourse, concluding that "every form of oppression is sustained" through apparent consent by the oppressed group or class to their exploitation.
She states that women, as members of an oppressed class under patriarchy, are compelled to "consent" to their own sexual exploitation by society, much in the way a Marxist would say workers are compelled to cooperate with their oppressors, the capitalists.