SWOP Behind Bars Advocacy from the Margins

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.

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.

Because if we have learned anything from the annual Super Bowl trafficking panic ritual, it is that major sporting events are never just major sporting events. They become convenient stages for moral panic, police funding, surveillance expansion, anti-trafficking theater, and breathless claims about “protecting women and girls” that somehow rarely translate into housing, health care, labor protections, immigration support, reentry services, or actually listening to sex workers and trafficking survivors.

I started standing up for myself in business about my respect and self-worth. For that, I lost friends who felt like I was acting “better” than them. But I continued walking in my truth no matter the cost. There’s no hustle without sacrifice.