The Pink Patriarchy Podcast

Whenever a serial killer targets sex workers, the same political argument seems to emerge. Before the victims are even buried, someone claims their deaths prove we need stronger laws against buying sex. The logic sounds simple enough: if fewer men bought sex, fewer women would be harmed. It is a comforting explanation because it suggests that another law, another arrest, or another slogan could have prevented unimaginable violence.

Let's clear something up before it calcifies into conventional wisdom: the Long Island serial killer case is not evidence that the Nordic Model works. It is not a signal. It is not a case study. It is not, despite what was said from a podium at the recent NOW conference, that criminalizing buyers saves lives. And yet there it was, presented like a smoking gun - as if a man capable of stalking, torturing, and killing multiple women over the course of years was one solicitation charge away from a moral awakening. He wasn't shopping around for the right incentive structure. He wasn't weighing the legal risk of buying sex and deciding it was finally too steep. He was picking victims he believed no one would look for hard enough, fast enough, or at all - women he correctly calculated the system had already deprioritized.

What Sex Workers Want Feminists at NOW to Know
As feminists gather for the National Organization for Women conference, sex workers have something important to say:
We are not asking feminism to abandon survivors.We are not asking anyone to ignore trafficking.We are not asking anyone to pretend exploitation does not exist.
We are asking feminists to stop building policy about us without us.
For too long, sex workers have been discussed in feminist spaces as symbols, cautionary tales, evidence of patriarchy, or objects of rescue. We have been spoken about as if we are all the same. We have been used to justify laws, policing strategies, and organizational positions that too often make our lives more dangerous. And when we have tried to speak for ourselves, we have too often been dismissed as exceptions, manipulated victims, privileged outliers, or inconvenient evidence.
That has to change.
Sex workers are workers, parents, organizers, survivors, disabled people, migrants, queer and trans people, formerly incarcerated people, poor people, students, caregivers, artists, advocates, and community members. Some of us entered the sex trade by choice. Some entered through poverty, coercion, homelessness, addiction, family rejection, immigration barriers, criminal records, or lack of better options. Many of us have complex stories that do not fit neatly into anyone’s political slogan.
But one thing is clear: we deserve safety, dignity, autonomy, and human rights.

One of the strangest recurring patterns inside institutional feminism is how efficiently it forgets the women who challenged its boundaries most aggressively. Not accidentally forgets - the forgetting tends to be too consistent and too convenient to be accidental. The women who are quietly edited out of official histories are usually the ones whose existence raises questions the institution is not prepared to answer. The ones whose politics could not be absorbed without requiring something to change.

One of the strangest recurring patterns inside institutional feminism is how efficiently it forgets the women who challenged its boundaries most aggressively. Not accidentally forgets - the forgetting tends to be too consistent and too convenient to be accidental. The women who are quietly edited out of official histories are usually the ones whose existence raises questions the institution is not prepared to answer. The ones whose politics could not be absorbed without requiring something to change.

Carceral feminism is a branch of feminist politics that relies primarily on policing, prosecution, incarceration, and other punitive state mechanisms as the main tools for addressing gender-based violence, sexual exploitation, trafficking, and abuse. It treats punishment as a path to liberation  -  but critics argue that in practice, it often strengthens the very systems that harm the people feminism claims to protect.
Carceral feminism didn't begin as a conspiracy. It began as a strategy.

On paper, buyer criminalization is sold as a feminist compromise. Sex workers won’t be punished, the story goes. Only buyers will be targeted. Demand will shrink. Exploitation will end. Everyone claps. Grants are written. Panels are booked. The theory is neat, morally satisfying, and endlessly fundable.
On the ground, that story collapses almost immediately.
 

Spoiler: If your feminism relies on police and prisons, it's not protecting us—it's punishing us.
For a movement that claims to be rooted in liberation, carceral feminism sure loves a cage.
Carceral feminism is the belief that the best—or only—way to address gender-based violence is through criminalization, policing, and punishment. It rose to prominence in the 1990s alongside tough-on-crime legislation and second-wave calls for legal reform. On the surface, it sounds reasonable: violence against women is bad, so we should punish the people who commit it.