The Pink Patriarchy Podcast

Whenever a serial killer who targeted sex workers is identified, the same political argument inevitably follows. Their crimes, we're told, prove that we need to criminalize buyers. The logic sounds straightforward: if fewer men purchased sex, fewer women would be harmed. It is an emotionally compelling argument because it promises that another criminal law could have prevented unimaginable violenc...

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 ha...

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, tor...

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 t...

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...

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...

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 femin...

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 legis...

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...

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 ral...

Third-wave feminism emerged in the 1990s as both a continuation of and a reaction against the second wave. By this point, many of the second wave’s gains - legal protections against discrimination, expanded access to education and employment, and public conversations about violence and reproduction - were formally in place. But it was increasingly clear that those victories had not translated into...

Second-wave feminism emerged in the 1960s not because first-wave feminism had “finished the job,” but because its victories exposed how much work remained undone. Women could vote, in theory. They could own property, on paper. But in daily life, their bodies, labor, and private lives were still tightly controlled. The promise of equality stopped at the courthouse door and fell apart in kitchens, b...

Fourth-wave feminism is generally understood to have emerged in the early 2010s, shaped by two forces that dramatically altered feminist organizing: the rise of social media and the growing visibility of intersectional politics. While third-wave feminism expanded the conversation about identity, sexuality, and lived experience, the fourth wave moved those conversations onto global digital platform...

Third-wave feminism emerged in the early 1990s as both a continuation of - and a critique of - the feminist movements that came before it. Second-wave feminism had achieved major legal and cultural victories: workplace equality, reproductive rights, and anti-discrimination protections. But by the late 1980s and early 1990s, many younger feminists began asking a question that made the movement unco...

Second-wave feminism, spanning roughly the 1960s through the 1980s, transformed the political landscape for women in the United States and much of the Western world. The movement forced public recognition of issues that had long been dismissed as private or inevitable: workplace discrimination, reproductive autonomy, domestic violence, marital rape, and sexual harassment. Many of the legal protect...

First-wave feminism, usually dated from 1848 to 1920, is remembered as the era when women began openly demanding legal recognition - most famously the right to vote. But the movement didn’t appear out of nowhere. It grew out of abolitionist organizing, religious reform movements, labor agitation, and the basic realization that women were treated as legal dependents rather than citizens. The offici...

Starting The Pink Patriarchy wasn’t just a media project—it was a necessity.  📍 Because for too long, I’ve watched mainstream feminism wear a pretty face while doing some pretty ugly things.  I’ve sat in rooms where ‘empowerment’ was the word of the day—right before someone suggested we criminalize sex buyers without ever asking a sex worker what we need.  I’ve seen survivor stories edited until...