SWOP Behind Bars Advocacy from the Margins

Gloria Steinem died on September 2 at her home in New York City. She was 92.
We are not going to pretend that she was nothing to us. We are not going to pretend she was everything, either.

Eleven jurors were reportedly prepared to acquit Lindsay Clancy. One was not. On September 4, 2026, after seven days and more than 38 hours of deliberation, that was enough for Judge William Sullivan to declare a mistrial in the Massachusetts case that has forced the country to confront hard questions about motherhood, mental illness, and criminal responsibility.

This story really began in 2018, at the Florida NOW Conference, when I supported what I believed was a modest resolution. It did not ask Florida NOW to endorse full decriminalization of adult consensual sex work. It did not ask the organization to adopt the sex worker rights movement’s entire policy platform. It asked something much simpler: that Florida NOW not support legislation affecting sex workers when sex workers themselves opposed that legislation. That was it. It was essentially a request that a feminist organization not advocate for laws governing a marginalized population over the objections of the people who would actually have to live under those laws.

Here is the ad, told as plainly as possible. A woman reaches for a golf club. A man charges her, knocks her to the ground, stands over her body, and says: "Don't touch my driver."
That was the pitch. That was the thing a room full of people looked at, workshopped, approved, and pushed live to sell a piece of graphite.
Golf calls itself the gentleman's game. This weekend it showed its work.

Jeffrey Epstein has become shorthand for sex trafficking—and, predictably, ammunition for advocates who argue that criminalizing the purchase of sex is the answer to exploitation.
But Epstein wasn’t buying consensual adult sex work. He was accused of exploiting children, conduct that was already profoundly illegal. Police had laws. Prosecutors had evidence. Victims spoke. The system had enormous power—and still failed to stop him.
In this episode of The Pink Patriarchy Files, SWOP Behind Bars asks what the Epstein case actually tells us about trafficking, institutional power, and the Nordic Model. We examine what happens when feminism collapses consensual sex work, trafficking, and sexual violence into one category—and why more criminalization isn't necessarily the same thing as more protection.
Timed for the Florida NOW State Conference and its theme, “Feminists Fight Fascism,” we leave feminists with a harder question: Can we really challenge patriarchal state power while demanding more police, surveillance, and criminalization of the women we claim to protect?
Protect children. Prosecute traffickers and predators. Believe survivors. Listen to sex workers.
The patriarchy has spent centuries telling women that someone else knows what is best for them.
Feminism should know better.

America has produced an alarming number of serial killers who discovered the same thing: if you wanted to murder women repeatedly, sex workers were among the least protected victims you could choose.
But when Gary Ridgway, Samuel Little, Joel Rifkin, Robert Pickton, Anthony Sowell, Rex Heuermann, and others all independently arrive at the same conclusion - that women involved in the sex trade are easier to hunt because their disappearances generate less urgency - we should stop treating these cases as isolated tragedies.
The disturbing question isn't why so many serial killers targeted sex workers.
The disturbing question is why so many of them independently reached the same conclusion - and were right.

There is a photograph that appears almost every time Robert Pickton's name is mentioned.
It is not a photograph of the women he murdered.

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.