Not Your Mama’s Feminism: Sex Workers Have Always Been Here

There is a persistent fiction at the heart of modern feminist policy debates: the idea that sex workers are a new complication, an inconvenient edge case, or a group that can be spoken about rather than listened to. As if we arrived late to the conversation. As if we are an add-on, not a foundation. This framing makes it easier to design policy without us—and easier still to ignore the harm that follows. The truth is far less comfortable for mainstream feminism. Sex workers have been part of feminist movements from the beginning. We have organized, theorized, provided care, funded mutual aid, built safety networks, resisted police violence, and articulated critiques of state power long before those ideas were safe, fundable, or hashtag-ready. What changes across feminist eras is not our presence, but whether feminism chooses to see us.