30/08/2026
This story really began in 2018, at the Florida NOW Conference, when I supported what I believed was a modest resolution.
It asked something much simple: that Florida NOW not support legislation affecting s*x workers when s*x 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.
A retired judge fought that resolution hard. Her opposition surprised me, not simply because of its intensity, but because I knew her to be someone who had devoted much of her life to women’s rights. She considered herself a feminist. She had spent decades in the legal system. She had seen violence against women up close. But prostitution was different for her. When she thought about prostitution, she did not think about s*x workers organizing for labor rights or demanding a voice in legislation. She thought about the women who had passed through her courtroom.
But the women who came before her were not a representative sample of people selling s*x. They were the people policing had selected for her.
What would have been much harder for her to see were all the people who never entered her courtroom at all.
The independent worker who screened clients and then went home. The person who chose s*x work because it paid substantially more than another available job. The person who did s*x work intermittently.
Those people were far less likely to appear before her because they had not been arrested. The courtroom had given her an extraordinarily powerful view of prostitution, but it had also given her a profoundly incomplete one.
If we oppose carceral feminism, what exactly are we opposing? Are we opposing only the incarceration of women? Or are we questioning feminism’s reliance on police, surveillance, prosecution, criminal statutes, and punishment as tools for solving complicated social problems?
The distinction matters enormously when we talk about the Nordic Model. Its appeal is easy to understand. For someone horrified by the historical arrest and incarceration of people selling s*x, it offers an apparently simple correction: We arrested the wrong person. Stop arresting sellers. Arrest buyers. That can feel like an obvious feminist evolution.
But s*x workers do not live in a separate universe from the people purchasing s*x. Enforcement against clients still occurs in the environments where s*x workers live and work. Policing the transaction necessarily entails policing its participants, communications, workplaces, advertising, and surrounding networks.
That is why the question cannot end with Who gets arrested? We also have to ask: What does the enforcement strategy do to the people we say we are trying to protect?
For me, rejecting carceral feminism means more than deciding that s*x workers should not be arrested while preserving criminal law around the consensual transaction. It means questioning whether policing and punishment should remain our default response to consensual adult s*xual commerce at all.
Above all, it means listening when the people most directly affected by a policy tell us what that policy does to their lives.
