r/fourthwavewomen

A victory for our sisters in Colombia!

Welcome to r/fourthwavewomen's weekly open discussion thread!

This thread is for the community to discuss whatever is on your mind. Have a question that you've been meaning to ask but haven't gotten around to making a post yet? An interesting article you'd like to share? Any work-related matters you'd like to get feedback on or talk about? Questions and advice are welcome here.

I keep running into a specific rhetorical move in pro-legalization/"sex work is work" arguments and I finally have language for it.

The pattern: the underlying patriarchal premise (men have sexual needs that require an outlet, the disparity in sexual access between men and women is a natural condition to manage rather than a structure to dismantle) is never actually questioned. It's accepted as the fixed starting point. Then a whole "progressive" policy framework gets built on top of that premise: harm reduction, labor rights, decriminalization, destigmatization. And yes here we know if dosent reduce harm, it increase them, but thats for another day.

All of it operating entirely inside a frame that was never interrogated in the first place.

I've started calling this patriarchy-captive defeatism.

Captive, because the ideology is never the thing being challenged, it's the unquestioned floor everyone builds on. Defeatist, because the implicit logic is always some version of "this will exist no matter what, so the only realistic move is to manage it better," dressed up as pragmatism instead of what it actually is: the least ambitious political position available.

You see this exact move everywhere once you notice it:

"Without sex workers, the streets would be full of rape" : defeatism about male behavior, presented as a feminist safety argument. It assumes male sexual violence is an unmanageable constant that needs an outlet, rather than something that can actually be reduced (which, by the way, the data on buyer behavior doesn't even support, criminalizing buyers correlates with lower demand, not displaced rape rates).

"Criminalizing buyers pushes them into dangerous/desperate situations" : again, men's comfort and access is the subject of concern, framed as a safety issue, while the actual person being bought disappears from the sentence entirely.

"It's just a natural disparity in access between men and women when it comes to sex" : said almost verbatim in arguments I've debunked recently, and it's the premise stated outright instead of implied. It treats women's bodies as a resource that needs distributing to meet "demand," like it's a supply chain problem instead of a structure of violence.

What's frustrating is how often this gets coded as the enlightened, sex-positive, harm-reduction position, while actual abolition, which asks "why does this demand exist and how do we end it instead of supplying it," gets coded as prudish, unrealistic, or carceral.

I've been seeing a lot of content about prison abolition lately, mostly because of an algorithmic rabbit hole I'm trying to escape from, haha. But these ideas clearly exist and attract a lot of views, likes, and comments.

Many of the people promoting prison abolition present themselves as progressive, or even feminist. I understand some of the reasoning behind it: prison itself doesn't necessarily "teach someone a lesson," and some women/girls may be reluctant to report a male relative or partner who harmed them because they don't want their father, uncle, husband, etc., to go to prison.

That said, many of these activists seem to come from decolonial or circles. I know there have been books written on this subject, for example.

What bothers me about some of this content is that it often seems to assume that most men who harm women are redeemable, or that they simply didn't fully understand the harm of their actions. The research show now that its not true for most perpetrators. Similarly, we've learned that pedophilia-related abuse is more about power and control than about sexual desire.

There's also a practical question: what do we do right now to stop a man from continuing to harm a girl or a woman? I've seen some people argue that removing offenders from the community is pointless or even counterproductive. I understand the theoretical argument, but in practice this seems deeply unprotective of victims, especially in situations involving coercive control or DARVO.

These views are often linked to restorative justice. But from what I understand, restorative justice only works for victims who actually want forgiveness or reconciliation, and from what i know most victims do not. It also only works when offenders genuinely want to take responsibility and change.

To me, some of these discussions also risk minimizing the harm that was done.

So, what do you think?

ps : wow , love all your responses!!

very different from AskFeminist , uh...They were repeating the most tired , criminal apologist arguments

Many pro-sw libfems will point to the vocal minority of “sex workers” who support full decrim and hate on the Nordic Model for personal profit motives as proof that full decrim is the feminist position. However, I don't think this argument works because women are capable of being anti-feminist and “sex workers” who use their position of privilege in the industry to justify males paying to sexually exploit women and children are exactly that.

Prostitution is a male supremacist institution catered to sexually entitled males who think they have the right to purchase women’s bodies and use them as sex objects. The fact that some women choose to participate in it doesn’t change that premise. Actually, I think willingly choosing to participate in and justifying prostitution makes them a perpetrator of misogyny and I have a lot of difficulty accepting the fact that I'm expected to elevate their voices when they are using it to support anti-feminist activities.

Idk I’m just tired of libfems smearing abolitionist feminists as bigots for supporting the Nordic Model, while acting like these entrepreneurial self-aware girlboss-type “sex workers” are irreproachable models of feminist enlightenment whose opinions should be elevated at all costs even though their whole business model is just pandering to sexist rapist males, at the expense of not just millions of vulnerable women and children being sexually exploited but all women in general.

So I'm curious what you all think: Does feminism always have to be inclusive? Is swerfism politically necessary as part of our greater goal to protect women and children from male sexual violence?

While the world is buzzing with excitement over the World Cup, at least three players have been accused of sexual offenses. One of them is a player from my country, and I am deeply disappointed that soccer fans in my country are cheering him on as if nothing had happened.

We’ve all seen her in movies and video games: a terrifying creature with snakes for hair, turning men to stone. Modern media loves to portray Medusa as the ultimate female monster.

But if you actually go back to the classical texts—specifically Ovid’s Metamorphoses—the story is heartbreakingly different. Medusa wasn't born a monster. She was a beautiful maiden, a priestess of Athena, who was assaulted by Poseidon inside the goddess's own temple.

Instead of punishing Poseidon, Athena punished Medusa. She cursed her, turning her hair into vipers and condemning her to eternal isolation. The "monstrous" gaze that turns men to stone wasn't an weapon of terror; it was a tragic, permanent defense mechanism so no one could ever touch or hurt her again.

History and pop culture completely erased her survival story to sell us a generic villain. Why do you think Hollywood keeps ignoring the tragic depth of this myth? Is it just lazyness or do monsters sell better than complex victims?

Ps. I got so frustrated by how her story is always misrepresented that I spent weeks creating a short 8-minute cinematic documentary analyzing the original texts and her erased history. If you want to see the visual breakdown, I’ll leave the link in the comments below!

With all the media buzz and excitement surrounding the current Football World Cup, I found myself going down a bit of a rabbit hole. I started wondering about the women who paved the way decades ago, long before women's football had this kind of global platform.

That’s how I stumbled upon the story of Lily Parr, and honestly, I’m blown away by how she isn't a household name.

Back in the 1920s, after WWI, women’s football was actually massive in the UK. Lily played for a team called the Dick, Kerr Ladies, and they were drawing crowds of over 50,000 people—sometimes outselling the men’s first-division teams.

Lily herself was an absolute powerhouse. She wasn't just good; she was terrifyingly dominant on the pitch. There's an infamous story that she had a shot so powerful she literally broke a male goalkeeper’s arm who dared her to take a penalty. She scored nearly 1,000 goals throughout her career and was openly living with her female partner at a time when that was deeply dangerous.

But the part that infuriated me the most? When the Football Association (FA) saw how popular these women were becoming, the patriarchy panicked. In 1921, they banned women from using official FA pitches, claiming the game was "unsuitable for females." It was a blatant corporate and structural move to protect the men's monopoly on the sport. Yet, Lily and her team refused to back down. They kept playing on makeshift fields, going on international tours, and fighting the system for decades.

Honestly, it infuriates me so deeply how figures like her are routinely erased and minimized in mainstream history just because they made the establishment uncomfortable. It actually made me so angry a while ago that I decided to channel that frustration into something productive: I started a small, independent YouTube channel completely dedicated to uncovering these forgotten women and giving them the historical respect they were denied.

Looking at Lily, it makes me realize that the institutional gatekeeping we still fight today isn't new—it’s just the continuation of what they did to women a century ago.

Has anyone else looked into early women's sports rebellions? I'd love to know if there are other forgotten icons from this era that we should be talking about more.

Welcome to r/fourthwavewomen's weekly open discussion thread!

This thread is for the community to discuss whatever is on your mind. Have a question that you've been meaning to ask but haven't gotten around to making a post yet? An interesting article you'd like to share? Any work-related matters you'd like to get feedback on or talk about? Questions and advice are welcome here.

Before the 20th century, tobacco had been the domain of men. Sure some women would smoke, but generally, it was a male pursuit.

This changed when Big Tobacco decided that they wanted a lot more customers. So what did they do? Via PR and advertising campaigns, they managed to connect the idea of women‘s emancipation with smoking tobacco. After all, in the past, tobacco had been a men‘s thing only, so women taking up smoking was actually incredibly feminist and emancipatory by breaking down gender norms!!

There‘s no need to tell anyone here that smoking not only risks the smoker‘s life and health, but also causes stillbirths and awful medical conditions in foetuses exposed to it? This reminds me of all the other substances that were marketed to women as safe and great, and turned out to be…well, more like thalidomide.

Also, this cynical hijacking of the women‘s movement for profit with something that makes users ill is just—I have no words.

If you’re interested in all its terrible glory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches\_of\_Freedom