The Pink Patriarchy Podcast

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.

The term feminism entered the political landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as these long-standing struggles began to cohere into identifiable movements - particularly in Europe and the United States. Historians refer to this period as first-wave feminism, a label that is tidy in theory and messy in reality. It reflects a movement shaped by its time, its geography, and its proximity to power.

Fourth-wave feminism didn’t arrive quietly. It emerged loudly, online, and mid-crisis - shaped by social media, economic instability, racial reckoning, and a growing refusal to pretend that representation alone equals justice. Emerging in the early 2010s, this wave is defined less by a single ideology than by its tools and terrain. Digital platforms became the organizing space. Hashtags became rallying cries. And long-ignored forms of harm - sexual violence, state violence, economic precarity - were suddenly impossible to look away from.
If earlier waves argued over who women are, fourth-wave feminism returned to a harder question: who holds power, who is harmed by it, and how that harm is enforced. In theory, this was a correction. In practice, it’s where things get messy.