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This article was originally published in the Summer 2019 Heat issue of Bitch Magazine.

One night in the 1820s, a man in Rugby, England, came home to find his wife drunk. As punishment for her “unacceptable” behavior, he threw her into a nearby pond, quickly dragged her out, and shoved a bar of soap into her mouth. “She has had plenty of water to wash with. She ought now to have a little soap,” the man said, according to a court account cited in an 1832 law lecture given at London University.

Many of us think of washing someone’s mouth out with soap as an outdated punishment for ill-tempered children, but for a long time it was also commonplace as a corrective for women who ventured beyond the bounds of what their husbands considered wifely. It’s also no accident that such a penalty was enacted in conjunction with the submerging of the offending party into a body of water. After all, washing away sin is an act as old as civilization itself, and one that’s most often associated with children, women, and others considered uninitiated in the ways of morality and faith. Baptism is meant to purify, through Christ, children born with sin. While any Jew can go to the mikveh, or ritual bath, women have to go after their menses to wash away the impurity of their own blood.

In medieval times, and up to as late as the early 19th century, women who were presumed to be witches (or simply deemed immoral) would be strapped to a chair and submerged in water as both punishment for their perceived crimes and as a form of purification. And soap, layered on top of the symbolically cleansing water, was often portrayed as the “cure” for nonwhite cultures that white imperialists sought to indoctrinate—violently, if necessary—in their notions of faith, family structure, and goodness. One infamous 1890s advertisement for Pears’ Soap depicts a military man washing his hands in a basin, with copy that reads, “The first step towards lightening The White Man’s Burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness.”

Prior to the mid-1800s, soap was handmade by artisans at great cost, and available only to royalty or the very wealthy; bathing itself was seen as more of an extravagance than as a matter of hygiene. But in the mid-19th century, multiple factors brought soap to the forefront of Western culture. Doctors like Ignaz Semmelweis in Hungary and, later and more famously, Louis Pasteur, recommended regular handwashing as a way to prevent disease. At the same time industrialization allowed for the more efficient production and distribution of soap. But along with the mass-market availability of soap came an increased sense of responsibility in the minds of the powerful for governing “uncivilized” outsiders through cleansing. These purveyors of morality turned their eyes, as they so often did, to those they believed were the most in need of purification: people of color, misbehaving children, and wayward women. The desire to maintain an ideal of spiritual spotlessness has always been a driving force of patriarchy; the introduction of soap simply added an implicit caveat suggesting that natural means of purging impurity were insufficient—true cleansing required a man-made product designed to eliminate filth.

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Clean Up, Clean Up, Everybody Everywhere

Historically, women—mothers, teachers, and other guardians of children—wielded the soap and carried out its punishments. If you’ve ever had your own mouth washed out, it was probably your mother or teacher who did it. This isn’t surprising, both because women have typically acted as primary caretakers and because so many of them internalized the pervasive message that they needed to purify themselves to be worthy of love and acceptance—a message that soap advertising ensured they would pass on to their children. Ads warning that “‘dirt danger’ days are here for your children!” (Lava soap, 1952) or urging women to “make your little Fairy clean and fresh and fine” (Fairy soap, 1913) preyed on mothers’ desire to keep their children safe and pure. Images urging the same consumers to “keep that wedding-day complexion” (Palmolive, 1922) or reminding them that “dainty girls win out” (Lux Soap, 1932) reinforced the message that men’s happiness depended on women’s ability to never falter in their femininity.

It was my mother who memorably washed my mouth out, after a particularly knock-down, drag-out screaming match between me and my older brother. There’s no denying that I had the fouler mouth in the argument, but because I was three years younger and no match for him physically, words were all I had to fight his uncanny ability to push my buttons. Language is often the most effective weapon against power, especially when those who use it to fight back—like women, like children—aren’t supposed to have any. My mother had always hated profanity and vulgarity, but hearing them issuing from her little princess’s mouth was an intolerable assault. And so the woman who not only refused to spank us but could barely execute a grounding that lasted longer than five minutes rubbed her hand against a bar of Dove soap that rested on the rim of the kitchen sink and shoved her lathered palm in my mouth.

In the moment, I’m sure she felt an incredible sense of alienation from her only daughter, whom she wanted to believe was sweet, beautiful, kind—all the things a girl should be. Perhaps it felt to her like she was bringing me back to the idyllic state in which I was born, when she looked into my infant eyes and said to my father, “If you could imagine the perfect little girl, this would be it.” To me, it felt like the words I’d conjured to defend myself from my brother’s taunts were being purged, redacted, stricken from the record—like my voice itself was being scrubbed from my mouth.

The Price of Purity

While most children are taught to behave well or pay the price, when it comes to language the expectations for boys eventually diverge from those for girls. Once they’ve crossed into young adulthood, men are socialized to take up space with their bodies and their speech and to use colorful, even bawdy language to express themselves. Women who do the same are usually met with shock and derision. They’re warned that bad language isn’t “ladylike,” told that “good girls” don’t talk in such a manner, and urged to stop “cursing like a sailor.” Even Hillary Clinton, a woman who has earned her place at the highest political table, is subjected to this critique. A condescending head shake and a tossed-off pronouncement of “nasty woman” undermined her spoken truth and made her choice to fight back seem like an under-handed attack to those who fear women’s agency.

Witness, too, the backlash against Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib for pledging to “go in there and impeach the motherfucker.” “We must have civility!” the media cried at a woman who dared to use a single swear to speak out against a man who has, time and again, weaponized his own language against the most vulnerable. “Decorum!” the op-eds shouted at the woman attempting to hold the powerful to account. The silencing of those who refuse to fold into society’s expectations goes beyond the washing of women’s mouths. It reaches back to the 16th century, when the “scold’s bridle”—a metal cage clamped over the face, with an iron bit that prevented its wearer from speaking—was imposed as legal corporal punishment for women who were deemed to be ill-mannered, gossipy, or worse. (It was often referred to as “the witch’s bridle.”) And further back still, to that first mythological woman, punished with labor pains and eternal subservience to her husband because she yielded to temptation and ate the forbidden fruit that gave her knowledge of her own sexual power.

This punitive approach to nonconformity also extends to the reformatory movement of the 1800s, where religiously motivated penal reformers sought an alternative to the punishment-focused prison system. This attempt at large-scale moral cleansing and spiritual reclamation began in 1838 in England with the first children’s reformatory, eventually extending around the globe and into the 20th century. Reformatories attempted to prevent delinquent, usually white, youths from sinking into a life of depravity by teaching them skills and trades while educating them in moral virtue. Is it any wonder that it was the upper-middle-class white women of England and America who first advocated for expanding these reformatory efforts to wayward women? Such institutions did improve basic living conditions for the mostly white women confined to them, but their more pronounced focus was on ensuring that residents would be schooled in prescriptive Victorian mores and ultimately reenter white urbane society as good daughters, wives, and mothers.

Women who benefit from unequal systems are often their most ardent executors, even upholding them at their own peril. But how long until even the most well-behaved woman crosses the ever-tightening boundary of propriety and finds herself the object of the same judgment she imposed on her sisters? How long before she, too, finds herself in need of purification by a society that will never deem her clean enough?

A Strength Beyond Clean

The assumption that women can be cleansed, reconstituted, and returned to some presumably natural state of purity has regularly resulted in brutal retaliation against those who resist such rehabilitation. People who are afraid of our conviction and strength will always try to silence us, cleanse us, and teach us to muffle ourselves and spread our internalized fears to others as a warning. The effort is not just about minimizing our voices, but about snuffing out our flames, the soap and the water together an attempt to take from us some of the most powerful weapons we have. And while a bridle can temporarily prevent speech, it cannot stop us from formulating the ideas that we will eventually speak. Submerging us in water cannot douse our spirits, and washing indelicate words from our mouths will not keep us from expressing ourselves in the manner we choose.

It didn’t stop me: At 48, I still curse like a sailor. Recently, my parents were visiting me and I dropped a casual f-bomb at lunch, to which my mother responded that she “still hated to see such ugly words coming out of such a beautiful mouth.” I was half-irritated, as adults often are when they’re judged by a parent, but also half-amused—triumphant even. “Well, good thing I’m a grown woman and you don’t get to decide how I speak,” I replied. If I want to be sensitive to how swearing bothers her, then that’s my prerogative, but she can’t determine how I choose to be seen and heard in the world. I’m sure she doesn’t see herself as some sort of draconian language police, but I’m equally sure that those early women reformatory advocates didn’t see how their work alienated the many women who failed to conform to their narrow Victorian mold.

It’s only by acknowledging our complicity in the systems that confine us that we become able to live without fear of retribution from those who want us quieter, meeker, and more subservient. To reject old-age binaries of womanhood imposed by so many faith and cultural traditions is to embrace a fuller, richer expression of the possibilities for women’s behavior and expression, to give voice to all the shades of identity that have always existed within us. And I, for one, think that’s fucking amazing.

This story was updated to include more up-to-date references, dates, and statistics.

Rachel Klein is a writer living in Brookline, MA. Her shortform humor has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and Reductress, and her personal and culture essays have been published by Slate, Hazlitt, Mel Magazine, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Bitch Magazine, and more. She is currently working on a film about an Orthodox Jewish woman who takes a job with a burlesque troupe after her husband’s sudden injury strains their family’s finances.

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In the first minutes of the film The Client (1994), 11-year-old Mark Sway (Brad Renfro) witnesses mob lawyer W. Jerome Clifford (Walter Olkewicz) kill himself by gunshot. Before this traumatic event, Clifford reveals to Sway where the body of a Louisiana senator, murdered by the mafia, is buried. This piece of information, which is important for a federal investigation, is used to justify the continued infringement of Sway's rights as a child witness for the rest of the film by almost all of the adults he encounters.

To protect himself, Sway hires Regina "Reggie" Love (Susan Sarandon), a lawyer and recovering alcoholic who lost the guardianship of her own children in a divorce after her husband set her up. Together, Sway and Reggie confront the system that failed them both. Reggie acts like a surrogate mother-lawyer, protecting Sway from the authorities, who see the 11-year-old boy as a means to an end rather than a human being, and the mob, who want to kill the boy because of what he knows.

The story of these two characters clearly depicts a necessary partnership between women and children, two populations whose rights are consistently dismissed and disrespected in a cishetero-patriarchal capitalist world. In 2026, it would be misleading to write that nothing has changed, both in the U.S. and globally, when in reality it seems that things for children and women have gotten so much worse in the three decades since The Client hit the movie theaters.

Most progressive movements hardly ever engage with the struggles of children directly, let alone recognize how the subjugation of children and the subjugation of women are inextricably intertwined.

The Flytrap is thrilled to be collaborating with Bitch Magazine to reprint select posts from their archive, making the history of feminist cultural criticism more accessible. In that spirit, these posts will never be paywalled, but you can become a member to support them. If you're a former Bitch writer or reader with an article you'd love to see in print again, reply to this email with the details. If you're a reader who wants to support this work, consider subscribing!

Support Feminist Cultural Criticism

This article was originally published in the Summer 2010 Action issue of Bitch Magazine.

For decades, self-help literature and an obsession with wellness have captivated the imaginations of countless liberal Americans. Even now, as some of the hardest economic times in decades pinch our budgets, our spirits, we’re told, can still be rich. Books, blogs, and articles saturated with fantastical wellness schemes for women seem to have multiplied, in fact, featuring journeys (existential or geographical) that offer the sacred for a hefty investment of time, money, or both. There’s no end to the luxurious options a woman has these days—if she’s willing to risk everything for enlightenment. And from Oprah Winfrey and Elizabeth Gilbert to everyday women and femmes siphoning their savings to downward dog in Bali, the enlightenment industry has taken on a decidedly feminine sheen. It will probably take years before the implications for women of the United States’ newfound economic vulnerability are fully understood.

Present reports yield a mix of auspicious and depressing stats: According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American workers made a median wage of $1,194 per week in the first quarter of 2025, which adds up to $62,088 per year, while the cost of living either equals or exceeds this number in most states. Yet even as recent reports on joblessness, economic recovery, and home foreclosures suggest that no one is immune to risk, the popularity of women’s wellness media has persisted and, indeed, grown stronger.

“Live your best life!” Oprah Winfrey has intoned on her website and in her magazine, with exhausting tenacity. Eat kale. Lose weight. Invest in timeless cashmere. Find the perfect little black dress. But though Oprahspeak pays regular lip service to empowerment, much of Winfrey’s advice actually moves women away from political, economic, and emotional agency by promoting materialism and dependency masked as empowerment, with evangelical zeal.

It’s no secret that, according to America’s marketing machine, we’re living in a “postfeminist” world where what many people mean by “empowerment” is the power to spend their own money.

As Karlyn Crowley writes in the 2012 Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture, Winfrey has become the mainstream spokesperson for New Age spirituality because “she marries the intimacy and individuality of the New Age movement with the adulation and power of a 700 Club–like ministry.” And not surprisingly, it was the imprimatur of Oprah’s Book Club that made Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia the publishing phenomenon it continues to be.

The book remained on The New York Times bestseller list for 187 weeks, earned Gilbert a spot on Oprah Winfrey's SuperSoul 100 list in 2016, and continues to be a popular recommendation in largely white and economically privileged circles. Gilbert’s follow-up, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, is a self help book for people who wish to follow in her footsteps, though the degree to which the book offers a practical pathway is a subject of debate.

Eat, Pray, Love detailed Gilbert’s decision to leave an unsatisfying marriage and embark on an international safari of self-actualization. (Publisher Viking subsidized the “unscripted” yearlong vacation.) Gilbert ate exotic food, meditated in exotic places, and had exotic romantic interludes; both culture clashes and enlightenment ensued, as did Gilbert’s ham-fistedly paternalistic attempt to buy an impoverished Indonesian woman a house. The book could easily have been called Wealthy, Whiny, White. It’s hardly reasonable to demand that every woman who wishes to better her life be poor, or nonwhite, or in some other way representative of diversity in order to be taken seriously. But Eat, Pray, Love and its positioning as an Everywoman’s guide to whole, empowered living embody a literature of privilege and typify the genre’s destructive cacophony of insecurity, spending, and false wellness.

Let Them Eat Kale

Eat, Pray, Love is not the first book of its kind, but it is a perfect example of the genre of priv-lit: literature or media whose expressed goal is one of spiritual, existential, or philosophical enlightenment contingent upon women’s hard work, commitment, and patience, but whose actual barriers to entry are primarily financial. Should its consumers fail, the genre holds them accountable for not being ready to get serious, not “wanting it” enough, or not putting themselves first, while offering no real solutions for the astronomically high tariffs—both financial and social—that exclude all but the most fortunate among us from participating.

The spending itself is justified by its supposedly healthy goals—acceptance, self-love, the ability to heal past psychic wounds and break destructive patterns. Yet often the buzz over secondary perks (weight loss, say, or perfect skin) drowns out less superficial discussion. Winfrey, again, is a chief arbiter of this behavior: As Stories of Oprah contributor Jennifer L. Rexroat points out, Winfrey presents herself as a “de facto feminist” with a traditional American Dream background who refuses to succumb to wifedom and enjoys pampering herself.

Sometimes that involves espousing the works of spirituality writers Gary Zukav or Eckhart Tolle, who both appeared regularly on her show. Sometimes it means talking about weight gain and self-loathing. Sometimes it necessitates buying a diamond friendship pinky ring. It’s no secret that, according to America’s marketing machine, we’re living in a “postfeminist” world where what many people mean by “empowerment” is the power to spend their own money.

Twenty- and thirtysomething women seem more eager than ever to embrace their “right” to participate in crash diets and their “choice” to get breast implants, obsess about their age, and apply the Sex and the City personality metric to their friends (Are you a Miranda or a Samantha? Did you get your Brazilian and your Botox?). Such marketing, and the women who buy into it, assumes the work of feminism is largely done. Perhaps it’s because, unlike American women before them, few of the people either making or consuming these cultural products and messages have been pushed to pursue secretarial school instead of medical school, been accused of “asking for” sexual assault, or been told driving and voting were intellectually beyond them. This perspective makes it easy for the antifeminism embedded in the wellness jargon of priv-lit to gain momentum. And an ailing economy makes this thinking all the more problematic.

“Splurging on luxury is a real no-no in this crap economy,” a blogger at YogaDork wrote in 2009 in a post titled “The All-Inclusive Vacation for the Recession Torn (The Acceptable Splurge).” “But what if it’s for a self-helpy learning experience?” Pondering the importance of health over penny-pinching, the blogger suggested that if “yogis and non alike” thought a retreat worth scrounging for, they should get on it. And indeed, if self-helpy is on the menu, people seem to be buying it, or at least buying into it. In fall 2009, the Los Angeles Times ran a piece about well-off women (and some men) leaving their full-time jobs to meditate in seclusion for three years, to the tune of $60,000 a year. Another feature on young, female self-help gurus (their exact qualifications for guruhood remain murky) charging hundreds of dollars an hour to advise other women on spirituality and eating well was granted prime real estate on the front page of the New York Times’ Style section.

Sarma Melngailis, a New York restaurant owner who wrote about eating raw and organic food on the blogs welikeitraw.com and oneluckyduck.com, promised her readers—most of them women—that if they could just give up their Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and replace it with her $9 coconut water and $12 nut-milk shakes they, too, could be happy and healthy. The now-famous Skinny Bitch cookbook franchise plumbed even more sinister depths in its insistence that women could stop nighttime snacking with the oh-so-simple fix of hiring a personal chef with vegan culinary training. Actor Gwyneth Paltrow’s web venture, GOOP, used catchy, imperative section headings (“Get,” “Do,” “Be”) and the nonsensical tagline “Nourish the inner aspect” to neatly establish a rhetorical link between action, spending, and the whole of existence. 

Even Julie and Julia, the blog that became a book that became a hit movie, is complicit in spreading the trend. Julie Powell’s story—that of an ennui-ridden professional whose journey of self-discovery involves cooking her way through Julia Child—features one-meal shopping lists whose cost rivals standard monthly food-stamp allotments for many American families. Priv-lit perpetuates several negative assumptions about women and their relationship to money and responsibility. The first is that women can or should be willing to spend extravagantly, leave our families, or abandon our jobs in order to fit ill-defined notions of what it is to be “whole.” Another is the infantilizing notion that we need guides—often strangers who don’t know the specifics of our financial, spiritual, or emotional histories—to tell us the best way forward.

The most problematic assumption, and the one that ties it most closely to current, mainstream forms of misogyny, is that women are inherently and deeply flawed, in need of consistent improvement throughout their lives, and those who don’t invest in addressing those flaws are ultimately doomed to making themselves, if not others, miserable. While priv-lit predates the current recession by at least a few years, the genre’s potential for negative impact is greater these days than ever before. Today’s “recessionista” mindset promotes spending quietly over spending less. 

Priv-lit takes a similar approach: Hiding familiar motives behind ambient lighting and organic scented candles, the genre at once masks and promotes the destructive expectations of traditional femininity and consumer culture, making them that much harder to fight. As Jezebel.com blogger Sadie Stein noted in September 2009, “nueva-Bradshaws have hung up their Manohlos [sic] and retired their Cosmos…and are pursuing banality differently…it’s pink-hued, candy-coated girly spirituality.” The blog entry, which mentions Eat, Pray, Love; Skinny Bitch; and The Secret, is a response specifically to the odious “new gurus” article from the New York Times, but the point can also be seen as a cutting and accurate criticism of priv-lit as a genre.

The irony here is that in many cases, the paths to enlightenment being sold did not even work for their engineers: The Guardian reported in 2025 that Gilbert later spiraled down a dark path of addiction and codependency as she fought to support a friend who had a terminal cancer diagnosis while navigating addiction. And Melngailis’ journey to rock bottom received far more tabloid coverage: After her employees stopped receiving their paychecks, the restaurant abruptly closed, and in 2016, CNN and other media outlets reported that she went on the run with her gambling-addicted partner.

She later pleaded guilty to grand larceny, scheming to defraud, and criminal tax fraud, while several other charges relating to having been a fugitive from justice were dropped (the saga is covered in detail in the Netflix documentary Bad Vegan). We are sharing this not to shame or embarrass these women for surviving what must have been deeply traumatizing experiences, but rather to point out that their own supposedly reliable recipes for enlightenment were far from enough to save them from their demons. We also want to commend the vulnerability and accountability they have shown as they have pursued real healing and the enlightenment that accompanies it.

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In Dreams Begin Responsibilities?

Perhaps priv-lit is a manifestation of how we love to fantasize about things we don’t—or can’t—have. In the case of priv-lit, the fantasy has turned on its makers. Rather than offering a model to aspire to through consistent attainment of progressive, realistic goals, priv-lit terrorizes its consumers with worst-case scenarios and the implication that self-improvement is demonstrated by “works” of spending. Of course, it is the right of any woman who works hard for what she has to spend her money to make her life better. But the pressure to obtain happiness by buying a certain book (like Eat, Pray, Love or Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project), attending a yoga retreat, or hiring a guru moves women further away from themselves, the simplicity espoused in positive psychology literature, and the type of careful reflection necessary to maintain inner peace in the long term.

The story priv-lit tells is that true wellness requires extreme sacrifices along economic, family, and professional lines, but those who make them will be rewarded and attain permanent enlightenment of one kind or another. (Gilbert herself was rewarded twice over for her globe-trotting victories in her spiritual memoir—she married a hot Brazilian man and landed another bestselling book, 2010’s Committed, as a result.) Unfortunately, that story is a lie: As one purveyor of high-end life-coaching services (who, for obvious reasons, wishes to remain anonymous) comments, “In our line of business, we have a saying: ‘Don’t fix the client.’” Once mentors teach clients to attain freedom and enlightenment, they can say goodbye to the high premiums they earn by telling clients they need more help.

“One of the brilliant parts of the self-help genre as a whole is that there are these various contradicting threads or themes, all woven together, and emphasized differently at different times,” says Micki McGee, Ph.D., a sociologist and cultural critic at Fordham University and the author of Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life. “Self-improvement culture in general has the contradictory effect of undermining self-assurance by suggesting that all of us are in need of constant, effortful (and often expensive) improvement. There is the danger of over-investing in this literature not only financially, but also psychologically.” 

McGee, who in researching her own book spent five years immersed in self-help literature, is quick to point out that this tendency toward spending for self-improvement is long-standing. But in the current economic climate, the real financial implications for those who do, or try to, invest in these ways may be worse than in healthier economic times, while the spending itself may be growing all the more fetishized.

Since the late 1960s, economic phenomena such as wage stagnation combined with the increasing costs of housing, medical care, and other basic necessities have meant that, for most Americans, time really does equal money. “Increasingly, people who actually have the money to take a year off and travel in India or go to a thousand-dollar yoga retreat are in short supply,” notes McGee. “In the context of the recession, we’re seeing an emphasis on simplicity and frugality, but embedded within that emphasis is a subtext of consuming more”—imported, she points out, from contemporary self-help literature of all kinds. 

McGee links the persistence of these counterintuitive ideals to the phenomena of social stratification written about by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In his landmark 1984 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Bourdieu explained that cultural and aesthetic preferences both indicate and shape class stratifications, because trends in these preferences seemingly map individuals’ positions in social hierarchies. As McGee puts it, within status-quo class systems, “Taste and other types of cultural capital are emblematic of both status attained and status putatively deserved.” So those who pray at the altar of priv-lit operate under the false assumptions that 1) investing concretely ensures attainment of elite socioeconomic status and 2) having invested demonstrates the deserving nature of those who do.

In times of financial stress—when those who want exist in even greater proportion to those who have—this feedback loop may be intensified, because the desired is that much more unattainable and the consequences of failure, namely the implication that those who do not get their lives together according to the prescribed boundaries of priv-lit will end up being so utterly screwed up that they risk losing their jobs, houses, or independence, among other things—seem that much worse. Priv-lit has transformed Virginia Woolf’s “Room of One’s Own” into an existential space accessed by way of a very expensive series of actual rooms—a $250-an-hour yoga studio, a cottage in Indonesia, and a hip juice bar in Brooklyn Heights.

The genre is unique in that it reflects an inversion of its own explicitly expressed value system: Priv-lit tells women they must do expensive things that are good for the body, mind, or soul. But the hidden subtext, and perhaps the most alluring part of the genre for its avid consumers, is the antifeminist idea that women should become healthy so that people will like them, they will find partners, they’ll have money, and they’ll lose weight and be hot. God forbid a dumpy, lonely, single person should actually try to achieve happiness, health, and balance for its own sake. It’s the wolf of the mean-spirited makeover show or the vicious high-school clique in the sheep’s clothing of wellness.

Turning the Tide

The truth is that many of us are barely holding on to the modest lives we’ve struggled to create, improving ourselves on a DIY basis, minus the staggering premiums, with every day we get up, go to work, and take care of ourselves and our families. Priv-lit is not a viable answer to the concerns of most women’s lives, and acting as though it is leads to nowhere good. It’s high time we demanded that truer narratives become visible—and, dare we say it, marketable.

As for Oprah, her show ended in 2011, but her media empire has made her a billionaire, forever disconnected from the day-to-day struggles of her nonwealthy counterparts. But the future also holds brighter possibilities. Paige Williams, whose story can, somewhat ironically, be found on Oprah.com, was depressed to the point of debilitation, clinically obese, unemployed, and broke when she began her efforts to change her life. Living with her mother and often too sick to get out of bed, she clearly was not living her “best life.”

Williams postponed taking a job to spend two months regaining control of her body, mind, and life via an intensive, 60-day Bikram yoga regimen. Parts of Williams’ story fall well within the range of self-help and priv-lit tropes: She waxes poetic about squeezing into a pair of skinny jeans, and many would argue that merely having the resources to get a medical diagnosis of depression and obesity (to say nothing of the Bikram regimen itself) is solid proof that our protagonist is more comfortable than the average American.

But the frank admission that any such intervention is a sacrifice, and a risky one at that, is evidence of both a more genuine voice and of a protagonist who cares about being healthy overall rather than demonstrating class membership or pursuing mainstream ideals of beauty, marriageability, and general worthiness. And the fact that her story appears in such a mainstream context means that more women are being exposed to this comparatively toned-down approach. Maybe not a solution to the problem of priv-lit, but a good step toward finding one.

Even better are movements like the Buy Nothing Project, whose website offers participants a way to “discover what your neighbors are giving away and find a new home for what you no longer need.” As of this writing, the Buy Nothing Project is active in 50 countries, and helps participants move an estimated 2.6 million items, diverting about 162,000 tons of waste from landfills each year, via more than 8,000 social media groups. In many of these discussions, women especially note feeling less burdened but also a sense of anxiety around “detoxing” from participation in conspicuous and not-so-conspicuous consumption.

Rather than offering a model to aspire to through consistent attainment of progressive, realistic goals, priv-lit terrorizes its consumers with worst-case scenarios and the implication that self-improvement is demonstrated by “works” of spending.

The COVID pandemic, still ongoing, drove many disabled and high-risk women out of the workforce permanently and created significant financial hardship for many other nonwealthy workers who were furloughed or simply laid off due to stay home orders and the collapse of the service industry. Neighbors bartered and shared resources to help those who had lost their income, become gravely ill or disabled, or could not return to in-person work because of the life-threatening risks it posed. Free, trade, and barter groups on social media experienced an uptick in popularity, whether the group was for houseplant enthusiasts who wanted to trade cuttings or disabled communities trying to help those with the most need. Many women also reported fully opting out of the “feminine beauty ideals” as worsening or newly diagnosed neurodiversity or pain conditions, brought about by the dual physical and psychological stressors of the pandemic, limited their ability to wear high heels, bras, and restrictive clothing.

That said, many participants have reported feeling a detox of sorts, complete with cravings to consume (shopping and spending, research shows us, lights up similar dopamine pathways in the brain to addictive substances such as opiates or alcohol). Gilbert’s and Melngallis’ epilogues also place false healing ventures in the context of addiction, mental illness, and the denial that are hallmark symptoms of both. When viewed as a kind of mass denial of realities that might facilitate more authentic healing, the priv-lit genre and its fanatical supporters suddenly take on a whole new dimension, one that suggests we ought to respond with deep concern for both makers and adherents and be supportive of any attempts they make to break free of the many bad habits and thought patterns the genre promotes.

The admission that many of these women feel intense discomfort as they grow accustomed to doing without the materialism that has for so long been tied to ideas of what makes women successfully feminine is a crucial and revolutionary first step that more women should feel safe taking. And not buying is, by definition, free, meaning that anyone with motivation enough and a desire to say no to the status quo can participate in this form of soul-searching. (Though, of course, the project operates under its own assumption—namely, that not spending money is a choice rather than an absolute necessity.) Williams’ tale and the clothing embargo are evidence of a progressively nontraditional movement of women committed to replacing elitist, consumption-based models of spiritual salvation and existential peace with genuine bids to do a lot with a little, and to stop listening to top-down directives for how to have good lives. 

Now that the mainstream considers the pandemic largely over (even as many of us remain unable to work in an office setting or enter a healthcare establishment without masking), the idea of treating oneself through exorbitant spending seems to be making a comeback of sorts. Juice fasts, $18 detox smoothies, fad diets, and more abound, with increasingly absurd price tags far exceeding inflation in many cases. The Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That wrapped up its third and final season in August 2025 with the same amount of shopping-as-therapy metaphors (though the show does include a token trans character this time around).

And we need look no further than Mike White’s wildly popular White Lotus series or Netflix’s Apple Cider Vinegar to be reminded how being miraculously healed through expensive wellness retreats is still a very popular fantasy among the wealthy and aspirationally wealthy. It is promising, though, that the embedded attitude of skepticism toward wealthy and oblivious adherents, as well as representations of the movement’s purveyors as increasingly flawed and fraudulent does contain important seeds of cultural critique.

More than 15 years after this article’s initial publication, it remains our hope that if more women become willing to put aside their fears, face their demons, open their eyes to cost-free or inexpensive paths to wellness, and position themselves as essentially worthy instead of deeply flawed, priv-lit will eventually migrate to a well-deserved new home: the fiction section. And once that happens, we might just succeed in showing that for every wealthy and insecure woman who can pony up to reach great heights of self and spending, there are thousands more whose lives are comparatively uncharmed, who are happier working with creative and healthy alternatives instead of spending on what they’re terrorized into wanting, and whose stories will, someday, be valued for the strength they communicate, not the fantasies they sell.

This story was updated to include more up-to-date references, dates, and statistics.

Diana Barnes-Brown is a poet, writer, and cultural critic who lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner and cats. As a queer, disabled person with both PTSD and a physical disability, her exploration of healing and medical care in the present day looks at wellness through the lens of financial, physical, and psychological inclusion and accessibility. Her work has been featured in American Letters & Commentary, Hawaii Review, Fence, Sonora Review, The Farmer General, and Bitch Media (RIP).

Joshunda Sanders is the author of seven books, most recently, Women of the Post (Park Row, 2023), a 2024 Gotham Book Prize finalist. She has also been selected for a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Fiction and a 2018 Fiction Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO). She is the creator of Black Book Stacks, which publishes on Substack and YouTube. Her other titles include two children’s books, I Can Write The World and A Place of Our Own; the journalism textbook, How Racism and Sexism Killed Traditional Media: Why the Future of Journalism Depends on Women and People of Color; a memoir, The Beautiful Darkness: A Handbook for Orphans; and a novella, All City. She lives in her hometown, The Bronx, with her family.

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Fuck the Algorithm, Abolish ICE

We’re just over a year into Donald fucking Trump’s second non-consecutive term as president of these Not-So-United-States. Americans have been murdered by ICE and Border Patrol agents in the streets; people who “look like” immigrants are being rounded up and sent to concentration camps with horrific conditions; and pregnant girls, among them many victims of rape, are being sent to Texas to prevent them from having abortions.

Just last week, our dipshit dictator who can’t shut up about how he “should” be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize also joined Israel in starting a war with Iran (for, um, reasons??), and at least one Christian military commander reportedly informed his unit that the battle against Iran would “cause Armageddon” and bring about the return of Jesus. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s support among the right-wing, mostly white evangelical Protestants who first ushered the man into power a decade ago remains resilient. According to PRRI’s latest data, more than two-thirds of white evangelicals currently rate Trump favorably, compared with 36 percent of all Americans.

Hypocrisy is baked into authoritarianism and evangelicalism is an authoritarian form of Christianity in which the ends justify the means.

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This article was originally published by Bitch Media on February 26, 2021.

The first time I heard the word gay used in a non-derogatory way on television, I was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer in my living room; I was 4, maybe 5, when Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) uttered “I think I’m kinda gay.” While her initial use of the word—describing a doppelgänger self she found in another universe—was a joke, it would turn out to be true. In the fifth season of Buffy, the title character’s quirky best friend, a practicing witch, falls in love with another witch, Tara Maclay (Amber Benson). Willow and Tara were one of the first depictions of a queer woman couple on television when their fictional relationship began 25 years ago, in 2001. 

At the time, I was seriously questioning my own identity and wondering if it was “okay” that I liked girls instead of boys. Watching Willow and Tara’s relationship on Buffy—one between two women—was an entirely new experience. Their relationship builds slowly, clearly not for ratings or shock value. At first it’s so subtle you almost can’t tell it’s happening. As they get to know each other and spend more time together, they quickly become close.

When a physical relationship finally blooms on-screen, it isn’t raunchy or overtly sexualized; it is full of raw affection and care. Before Willow and Tara even kiss, the show makes it clear that they share a powerful connection. In the Season 4 episode “Hush,” they must hold hands and combine their shared magical abilities to perform a spell. Their intimacy grows out of those shared magic practices, and by the time we witness a romantic or sexual relationship between the two women, a whole world of shared feelings already exists based on mutual respect.

Willow and Tara’s first kiss, in “The Body,” was one of only a few lesbian kisses that had appeared on mainstream television. It didn’t happen until Season 5, in 2001, and it didn’t happen under happy circumstances. The first evidence of physical affection we see between the two women is during a traumatic and jarring episode about the aftermath of the death of Buffy’s mom.

This popular and highly regarded television show was making a strong statement that was impossible to ignore: Women can be queer; they can love each other; and they can kiss, touch, and have sex.

Willow panics while trying to choose what to wear to meet Buffy at the hospital, and Tara gently comforts her. She holds Willow’s hand and pulls her close; she kisses Willow and tells her to be strong. In the context of the episode, which explores how everyone expresses grief differently, it feels especially beautiful and moving to see two queer women cope with grief through love. And because “The Body” doesn’t focus on the couple specifically or center their relationship, their first kiss is both extraordinarily simple and normalized, not at all sensational; however, it was no less important just because it wasn’t made into a spectacle.

After all, in 2001 it was still largely taboo to depict queer women together on-screen. Ellen DeGeneres came out publicly only five years before, and portraying queer women’s relationships was still considered scandalous. Tegan and Sara wouldn’t break into the mainstream scene as openly lesbian musicians for several more years. And while there had certainly been a number of queer and gay male pop culture icons who appeared on people’s TVs and blasted through their radios—David Bowie and Freddie Mercury—queer women and lesbians in pop culture were nearly nonexistent.

Even though the ’90s gave us a few queer classics, like The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995) and But I’m a Cheerleader (1999), when Willow and Tara graced the screen like a comet of hope for queer women in media, it was suddenly the 21st century. This popular and highly regarded television show was making a strong statement that was impossible to ignore: Women can be queer; they can love each other; and they can kiss, touch, and have sex. 

To see queer women’s sexuality represented on television was (and still is) thrilling, though the representation and the scope of stories we get, even 20 years later, continues to be sorely lacking. Queerness on television and in movies is still largely portrayed by thin, conventionally attractive white women—even recent hits like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which was widely released in 2020, fits that bill. However, despite all of this and also because of it, it still matters that Buffy offered queer women and femme-aligned people the opportunity to see ourselves loving and being loved by someone other than a cisgender man. (I’m nonbinary but was presenting as a girl when I first watched and for much of my life.)

While Joss Whedon, the creator of the series, has been credited with bringing this brand of feminism to the screen and challenging norms around sexuality and gender, it’s also worth noting he has been accused of abusing people and his power on various sets, including Buffy. These allegations resurfaced in 2021, when some of the show’s stars, including Charisma Carpenter, who left Buffy suddenly for unknown reasons, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Michelle Trachtenberg, spoke out in solidarity with fellow survivors of Whedon’s manipulations.

Regardless of the contributions he’s made to the media, no amount of queerness or onscreen feminism can excuse the harm he’s done—or the peace his abusive behavior has stolen from women in the name of bringing that representation to the screen. Yet, in spite of this, the show remains important to so many fans, myself included, who have been forever changed by the performances of actors like Hannigan and Benson.

Buffy’s exploration of queerness in different forms, and Willow and Tara’s relationship in particular, did something unique. Unlike previous TV depictions of women loving women that were either raunchy or rooted in sex, Willow and Tara’s relationship was always rooted in a mutual intellectual and emotional respect. Willow’s journey into love was always about more than sex—it was a deep self-exploration.

As we watched Buffy fight off demons in the physical world, we watched Willow fight off her internal demons and learn to accept herself as a queer woman—a relatable process for many of us. I was obsessed with Willow and Tara, and how their happiness as a couple was prioritized and even flaunted on screen. In the Season 6 musical episode, “Once More, With Feeling,” which is still my favorite episode to date, there’s a gorgeous, intimate love song the two women sing to each other.

During the episode, as they’re walking in a park, Willow mentions that guys are checking Tara out, much to Tara’s surprise. “What are they looking at?” Tara asks. “The hotness of you, doofus!” Willow responds, lovingly. “Those boys really thought I was hot? Oh my God, I’m cured!” Tara jokes as she pretends to rush toward the men. Willow pulls her back, and as they embrace, Tara explains that she’s just not used to “that.” 

As they launch into singing “Under Your Spell,” they exchange passionate glances: “I lived my life in shadow/ Never the sun on my face/ It didn’t seem so sad, though/ I figured that was my place,” Tara begins singing. “Now I’m bathed in light/ Something just isn’t right/ I’m under your spell/ How else could it be/ Anyone would notice me?/ It’s magic, I can tell/ How you set me free/ Brought me out so easily.”

Aside from the double entendre and puns strewn throughout the song—references to being in the closet, being set free by love, and coming out and letting the world see who you truly are—I’ve always felt it was one of the most genuine love songs I’ve ever heard. It truly shows you, instead of just telling you, what it feels like to fall for someone who makes you feel like yourself. And the weight of such a passionate song, sung by two women, is felt—so much so that I will never forget the first time I watched it and listened to its lyrics intently. I ran my tongue over each word like it was a smooth stone, bringing me comfort and the possibility of a future with a woman who might use words like this about me. But, as a child who knew deep down they were queer, watching this scene was complicated. 

My mother’s reaction while watching in the living room with me was to scoff in disgust, and my father looked away from the screen in a way he never did when watching love scenes between men and women. Willow and Tara’s love suddenly became dirty and dark to me—a woman loving another woman was something to look away from, to scoff at. Though their relationship was often tumultuous—full of fights about how Willow used her magic to try to control Tara and ending tragically with Tara’s death—their love was often happy and full of strong, positive emotions.

Still, others’ reactions to queer women and the perpetuation of the Bury Your Gays trope signaled to me that queer people don’t get to be happy. I’m sure it communicated something similar to many people grappling with their queerness, no matter how old they were. Seeing the way their relationship and individual paths played out on Buffy ultimately played a huge part in my staying in the closet until I was 16.

But don’t we deserve to see more queer joy and simple, wholesome entanglement without the trauma?

Buffy was one of the first mainstream shows that provided audiences with a depiction of complex queer women who could be both soft and strong, good and bad. Yet while Whedon claimed to care about humanizing same-sex and queer relationships, he ultimately killed off Tara to give Willow a more dramatic character arc. Although it isn’t the only relationship that ended poorly or had its share of drama, it was the queer relationship of the show.

The fact that these queer women—who started out joyful and in love—weren’t allowed sustained happiness sent the message that stability exists only in relationships between men and women. Fortunately, more examples of queer relationships cropped up in the early aughts. In 2004, we were gifted the infamous The L Word, a show full of gay women, albeit mostly thin and conventionally attractive (though less white and slightly more complex than the queer characters in Buffy). We also got more mainstream television showing women loving people other than cis men in shows likesuch as Orange Is the New Black, One Day at a Time, Jane the Virgin, Riverdale, Dickinson, Gentleman Jack, Wynonna Earp, Killing Eve, Work in Progress, and more.

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But some things remain the same: In Killing Eve, the title character (Sandra Oh) and her serial killer-slash-stalker-slash-lover Villanelle (Jodie Comer) are obsessed and in love with each other, but, like Willow and Tara, their story never ends happily. In Work in Progress, the main character is a suicidal butch woman with life-threatening OCD who experiences tumultuous and upsetting relationships. Now there are dozens of mainstream stories about queer women, yet barely a handful of them end well or without immense pain. Of course, pieces of these narratives do reflect reality: I have certainly had tumultuous queer relationships, both platonic and romantic ones, that end in pain. But don’t we deserve to see more queer joy and simple, wholesome entanglement without the trauma? 

Now, almost two decades since I came out and started dating women and other trans people, I still think about Willow and Tara’s relationship. I feel deeply about the many ways it informed my own fears of intimacy and queerness. It made me fear that being queer would kill both me and anyone I loved—emotionally and literally. However, all these years later, I still consistently discover the ways this on-screen relationship positively shaped my views of what love could look like at its best.

If I could go back and talk to my younger self, who stared at two queer women holding each other on the screen, I would say this: Willow and Tara’s relationship is only one example of what love can look like and how love might end. Queer relationships don’t always end miserably. Someday there will be characters and plotlines that won’t make us want to bury our queerness. Instead, we’ll wear it proudly, and show off our love like a flame that burns brightly enough to keep us warm without burning us. Twenty-five years on, it feels especially fitting that the anniversary of this kiss between queer women on television should be rooted in an episode about mortality—fitting given increasing systemic attacks on queer people during Trump’s second term. In the midst of tragedy and grief, what we need to be reminded of is a kind of love that holds us in the hard moments.

This story was updated to include more up-to-date references, dates, and statistics.

“I did not get into porn to format .pdfs,” says Lauren Kiley, a sex worker, long-time Flytrap patron, and the person first on my Rolodex when I want to talk to adult performers about their work. I had some questions for her that have been on the minds of a lot of people visiting adult websites: Why is the front page suddenly wall-to-wall stepmoms and stepsisters, why do searches for relatively vanilla content turn up no results, and how are so many people getting stuck in ovens?

The short answer is: payment processors.

The longer answer, though, is a collision of our society’s deep-seated loathing of sex workers, right-wing pearl clutching, capitalism, and the looming power of the tech industry over every aspect of our lives. These are issues sex workers and organizations such as Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics, Hooker Army, and the Sex Worker Outreach Project have been fighting for a very long time, and they are supercharged in this political moment—one they’ve been warning would come.

One could think of the front page of Pornhub as the landing site of a larger cultural crisis. Anti-porn activists want you to think this is a battle to protect women from exploitation and the soul of America, but sex workers know that the real battle is their fight for autonomy, respect, and safe working conditions.

In 2020, Mastercard and Visa announced they would stop processing payments for Pornhub, thanks to pressure from a sustained campaign started by anti-porn activist Laila Mickelwait. Her “Traffickinghub” campaign was quickly supercharged by Exodus Cry, an extremist Christian organization determined to abolish sex work. Exodus Cry, founded in 2008 by Benjamin Nolot, builds on the work of organizations like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Focus on the Family, and their ilk—and has the audacity to cite noted abolitionist William Wilberforce as an inspiration for its work.

The “Traffickinghub” campaign claimed Pornhub was hosting child sexual assault material (CSAM), nonconsensual content, and videos associated with human trafficking. If Exodus Cry’s concern is Pornhub hosting CSAM content—something sex workers also think shouldn’t exist—then Facebook may be a bigger worry. Of the 21.7 million instances of CSAM reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2020, 94% were on Meta platforms. Meanwhile, Grok is barfing up non-consensual AI porn on command for users; the Apple and Android stores host scores of “nudify” apps; and 4chan and Reddit do their own fair share of nonconsensual content sharing. It sure seems like the problem with sexual exploitation is not Pornhub but rather a culture that loves profits and hates women.

Exodus Cry’s campaign came right out of the anti-sex work playbook that conservatives have been running for centuries, ginning up fears about exploitation and abuse and conjuring up images of helpless women trapped in inherently degrading, demeaning situations without agency or autonomy. The rescue industry argues that these women need a savior, something we’re reminded of every year during the annual Super Bowl Sex Trafficking Discourse, when repeated breathless headlines reprint law enforcement claims that a horde of pimps are descending upon the host city with vans full of trafficked women and girls. This necessitates, obviously, an aggressive crackdown on sex workers—"for their own good."

For the anti-sex work crowd, which includes not just Christian conservatives but also sex work-exclusionary radical feminists (SWERFs), all sex work is inherently evil. Sometimes it comes from deep inside the house, as in the case of the former sex worker who founded adult content platform ManyVids and did an about-face in January. She referred to the industry as “exploitative,” announcing that her goal was to “transition one million people out of the adult industry.” One might be forgiven for thinking the move smelled a lot like pulling the ladder up after her. The situation was made even more bizarre by a series of weird posts from the platform’s official social media accounts, suggesting that at least some ManyVids employees are also deep in the grips of some sort of AI-induced crisis.

The ultimate goal of the right is a total ban on pornography, but the anti-porn contingent knows the best way to get there is through slow creep, starting with those working on the fringe doing fetish work, consistently moving the goalposts on what “fetish” means, and nibbling away until there’s nothing left. It's right out of the rightwing playbook on trans rights, access to abortion, and freedom of speech. During the 2020 “Traffickinghub” campaign, anti-porn activists leveraged the marginalized status of sex work to inflict reputational harm on credit card companies, who are more than happy to take as much of your money as possible while also not wanting to get mired in culture wars.

For payment processors, the price of doing business in the face of scaremongering headlines, activist stunts, letter-writing campaigns, and harassment simply wasn’t worth the hassle.

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Check, Please

The Exodus Cry campaign had precisely the desired effect, contributing to the immense financial squeeze both online and in-person sex workers were already experiencing. Banks were historically nervous about providing services to sex workers: A 2021 report by the Center for LGBTQ Economic Advancement & Research cited data from the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) that found that 45% of sex workers reported their bank accounts had been frozen or closed at some point during their careers. In some cases, they never got their money back.

The inability to access banking in a society that assumes everyone has a bank account and a credit score pushes sex workers even further to the margins, a turn of events that anti-porn crusaders view as a positive consequence that will push people out of the profession. Whether sex workers are operating legally or not, commercial banks view them as risky and undesirable clients, and the increased scrutiny makes these banks reluctant to accept funds associated with online sex work.

Visa and Mastercard's 2020 announcement rolled out in a herky-jerky, confusing way, as Samantha Cole reported for VICE. But it still had a seismic effect on adult content creators who considered Pornhub an important source of revenue. Despite the best efforts of bitcoin boosters, the vast majority of people who pay for adult content want to do so via credit card—and sex workers do not necessarily want to be paid in cryptocurrency, either. If credit card companies and the processors who run payments refuse to conduct transactions, people do not get paid for their work, but the platform can still run ads alongside their content.

The fact that sites can continue earning revenue with ads alongside content performers do not make money from is “something people really missed about tube sites,” Kiley said. On sites like Pornhub, “performers are barely making any money for streaming videos compared to what the platform earns on their ad revenue. They have always been making money off all this. Pornhub has done some evil shit! The foundation of their business model is stealing from sex workers and stealing their money.”

Often, those clips are stolen and posted without consent, which is a personal and economic violation for the performers. When performers are posting their own content, they have to hope viewers will be enticed enough by the free clip to go off-platform to see more. For tube sites with creator programs, the return on investment can be highly variable for all but the biggest creators.

Online sex workers who want to be compensated for their labor rather than simply generating advertising revenue for someone else may sell video and photo on demand; do livestreams and cam sessions; produce customs on sites like OnlyFans; or do phone sex work. No matter where they work, the Visa/Mastercard decision caused a sea change in how adult websites craft, and enforce, their content standards and terms of service.

With the Mastercard and Visa announcement, adult websites saw the writing on the wall and began engaging in a crackdown on content to stay in the good graces of payment processors. Fearing that processors under pressure from anti-porn activists would cut ties over explicit content, moderators set off a cat and mouse game for the content creators who are simply trying to make a living in an extremely precarious industry. This is censorship by payment processor, thanks to the fact that these two companies have a stranglehold on the financial services sector: If Mastercard says facesitting is out, adult content sites are going to make sure they’ve scrubbed their servers of facesitting.

“Visa and Mastercard do not have a legible set of standard rules for content moderation,” Kiley says. “They have one, but it doesn’t really make sense, so every single platform makes up their own terms of service based on what they think they can sell or get away with.” Those sites, in turn, provide indifferent, conflicting, and sometimes mystifying guidance about what they will and won’t allow, forcing content creators to guess at what kind of content might result in strikes, takedowns, demonetization, and bans, lest they make daddy—sorry, step-daddy—angry.

The Naughty List

That’s how we got to the proliferation of step-family content. Incest is extremely low-hanging fruit for content moderation: In many regions of the world, incest is illegal; it often includes implications that people are below the age of consent, which is definitely illegal; and it’s extremely taboo. Adult performers are actors who understand the difference between a staged scene and reality, but payment processors apparently cannot grasp this simple distinction. Consequently, content creators add a “step” to the mix to get around this issue, and when step-sis gets stuck in an oven or window, it’s predicament bondage by another name.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg, Kiley explains, because payment processors are constantly changing their standards and, consequently, so are the sites that want to keep making money off the adult content creators who use them to disseminate their work. This was an issue long before the Traffickinghub campaign: In 2019, adult performer Sophie Ladder started what Kiley affectionately calls “the spreadsheet,” a crowdsourced document shared amongst adult content creators that keeps track of which sites allow what kind of content.

The sprawling document includes a dizzying number of content restrictions—from fisting to age play to consuming drugs or alcohol—for clip sites, live streaming, fan sites, tube sites, video on demand, social media, and specialty sites. In a nod to the uneven consequences of these confusing and unspoken standards for performers, Ladder notes on the spreadsheet that “a site’s rules don’t necessarily correlate to their enforcement.”  

The spreadsheet attempts to unpack the sometimes wildly inconsistent and bizarre rules of these sites, noting, for example, that one site allows solo—not paired—diaper content. “Pee,” but not “piss.” Prop weapons may be allowed, but in practice, videos featuring props may be banned. Hypnosis may be disallowed, but sometimes it’s possible to get around that by using different terminology. Restraint may be permissible in some scenarios—two limbs restrained, say—but not in others. Animals are not allowed onscreen—leading to content strikes for the occasional curious cat in the background, but also sometimes for stuffed animals or simply shapes that machine learning decides must be animals.

This is not algorithmic softening. It is algorithmic violence.

“They seem to be inconsistent on this” and “¯\_(°_o)_/¯” are frequent annotations on the spreadsheet, reflecting the frustrating ambiguities Ladder navigates as she tries to keep the references current. Content moderators are not painstakingly reviewing video titles and copy: They are relying on algorithms to do that work for them, and when an algorithm dings a content creator, it doesn’t say why. Hence the spreadsheet, which reverse-engineers content flags, identifying words used in titles or copy or things said on-screen that may result in a takedown.

The spreadsheet has become “more and more red over the years,” Ladder told me, reflecting the growing number of content restrictions. She documented nearly 200 words—a rapidly-growing list that she noted was out of date when we spoke in January 2026—that can trigger flags tied to content bans.

Some words caught in the trap of the algorithm ostensibly target specific sex acts: “Golden shower,” “lactation,” and “pegging.” Others zero in on cues around forbidden content—many sites do not allow for substance use on the grounds that impairment makes it impossible to consent, so they ban references to alcohol and drugs, such as “champagne.” Other words that can trigger a strike include “bite,” “cervix,” and “cycle.” A ban on “rapist” also means you can’t refer to the word “therapist.”

“Word bans are just ridiculous,” Ladder says. “Because a human is not reading through your video description and interpreting it as a human would. It’s a computer recognizing words. I just saw someone unable to post a video with the word 'Saturday' because the word 'turd' is in there.”

The computers tasked with moderating these sites are blissfully unaware of the fact that words can mean more than one thing. “Crush” and “squish,” for example, are blocked to address crush videos, but this also means, as Kiley notes, that you can’t title a video “I Have a Crush On You,” nor can you "squish" your face between a "giantess’s" boobs. If “smoking” is banned, then a “Smoking Hot Secretary” is banned too. A sleepy girlfriend can’t read to you at bedtime when references to sleep are disallowed due to concerns about nonconsensual content involving unconscious people.

As I was writing, Kiley DMed me about yet another account strike: “Platform just flagged a video about impregnation fantasy because I say something like ‘put a baby in me!’”

Kiley explained that the endless dance around content bans requires constantly coming up with new ways to craft video titles and content that are frustrating not only for adult performers, but also their customers: If you’re someone who wants to watch hypnosis videos, for example, you’re probably going to search for “hypnosis,” not “influence,” as some sites force Kiley to describe such content.

“How are customers supposed to find things?” Ladder asks. “The word ‘forced’ used to be used in femdom videos. Some are solo videos, like ‘get drunk for me,’ ‘drink more,’ a femdom telling a man to suck dick. There’s no actual forcing happening. But then ‘forced’ started getting banned, so ‘coerced’ started getting used, but then sites caught on and banned that word. People call it ‘encouraged’ now.”

These bans reify censorship by dictating what kind of content people can post, and how they can talk about it. This is not algorithmic softening. It is algorithmic violence.

Sex Work is (Admin) Work

This site-by-site labyrinth requires tremendous work to navigate. Most content creators diversify the content they post on each platform so they have more than one source of revenue. In part, this is designed to stay ahead of site closures, content strikes, account bans, and other issues. No one wants to put all their eggs in one basket, as non-sex workers learn each time a social media site crashes and burns and they lose a slew of relationships as a result. It may also reflect different facets and interests of a performer’s work. Performers also use cross-platform promotion to build awareness so customers know to seek their work out elsewhere, too, especially in instances where content restrictions mean that followers will need to find them on other sites to see all of their work.

Posting across multiple platforms a day is time-consuming, and wading through the mysteries of the algorithm makes it harder. Content creators have to painstakingly hand-craft advertising copy and think carefully about video edits, or come up with generic content designed to be as inoffensive as possible. Most are publishing a large volume of content to keep up with customer demand. Some, like Kiley, aren’t just content creators: They also act as administrators for other content creators, handling hundreds of videos every month.

Even when it’s content a performer loves making, whether solo or with collaborators, it may not be worth it if their posting options are limited. These constraints put obvious bounds on the economic freedoms of adult content creators—and they also limit people artistically.

“It’s more often instead of stuff getting taken down,” Ladder says, that “we’re not able to post it in the first place. We’re having to really self-censor. We’re making different content than we used to based on the rules. Whether I can upload a scene on what sites might allow it is in my mind when deciding what to do.”

Every single site doesn’t just have different rules about content and the words used to describe it; they also have their own policies about the supporting documentation content creators are required to upload. Content creators must meet strict legal requirements—themselves also the product of aggressive right-wing pressure—for example, to provide copies of their IDs, model releases, and documentation known as 2257 compliance forms attesting to the fact that all performers are of age, consenting, and agree to the distribution of their content. For every single video.

This is where Kiley’s infamous .pdfs come in: She has to painstakingly compile this documentation in the format preferred by a given site, including potentially providing retroactive documentation for content posted before a policy change. For older content, this can require going into paper records and scanning them. If the documentation deemed acceptable at the time no longer meets requirements, the offending videos may be removed; for example, if paperwork doesn’t include “downloading” on the list of potential uses of content that a performer consents to, or the ID on file was current at the time of filming but has since expired, a platform may determine that a video violates its terms of service. For performers who count on a robust back catalogue to attract and retain customers, this can be a significant earnings hit.

It should perhaps not come as a surprise that while sites demand sensitive information such as performers' legal names and home addresses, they do not exercise care with that material. Careless data storage puts performers in jeopardy: Kiley told me one performer contacted a platform asking for her tax information and received “an entire folder of tax information for other people.” These websites aren't the only actors in the adult industry who leave performers vulnerable: Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, which performed STI testing for performers, closed in 2011 after a major data breach affected around 12,000 people.

Pushed to the Margins

The new policies and restrictions are allegedly supposed to protect sex workers from the evils of the world, but the reality is these practices squeeze people out of the profession. By making sex work so untenable, these policies are actually putting sex workers in extreme danger. When sex workers are socially and economically marginalized, their work is stigmatized, and they are treated as if they're disposable, they are forced into perilous situations simply because society has chosen to prioritize the rabid ideology of a handful of truly awful people over the humanity of sex workers.

Making it harder for sex workers to work “makes the bad numbers go up,” says Ladder, referring to statistics on CSAM, human trafficking, and child abuse. Ladder, like Kiley, like most reasonable people, is also opposed to human trafficking, nonconsensual content, and CSAM. Ladder and Kiley also both mentioned the extreme trauma reported among content moderators working for sites like Facebook, who plow through horrific, scarring material all day long. They see the worst parts of humanity. Explicit and sometimes unconscionable content is not a problem limited to adult platforms—and outlawing porn will not keep people safe online.

Making it harder for consenting adults to make and watch porn doesn’t eliminate the graphic violence that very real humans have to review behind the scenes of social media sites. It doesn’t resolve the toxic rot at the heart of the misogynist rape culture all around us. It doesn’t spare children from sexual abuse. It doesn’t empower women, provide them with economic opportunity, or make society safer, happier, and more pleasant.

A career at the margins is sometimes the only one people are able to pursue, whether it’s disabled people doing online sex work because other job opportunities are closed to them or Black and Latina trans women doing survival sex work. Keeping sex workers on the economic margins turns them into easy targets for abuse, and easy victims to blame. It leads to the doxxing and harassment of online sex workers. It inspired a racist misogynist to kill eight people at several Atlanta spas in 2021, targeting Asian Americans in sexualized workplaces often derisively known as “rub and tugs.” It drove 38-year-old Yang Song to her death when she tried to flee out a window during a vice sting in New York in 2017 and sparked the formation of Red Canary Song, a transnational sex worker-led mutual aid organization. It means that law enforcement can sexually and physically abuse sex workers with minimal consequences.

Ironically, trying to force people out of sex work creates the conditions that make it harder not just to find safe work, but also to leave the industry, for those who want to do so. One phone sex operator I spoke to commented that if she wanted or needed to leave the industry, “I don’t know where that puts me in terms of applying for other jobs in the future. What do you put on your resume?” This theme comes up over and over for adult performers, who deserve access to safe working conditions and career mobility, two things that are incredibly hard to access when your work is so stigmatized.

People often refer to sex workers as “canaries in the coal mine” when it comes to online content restrictions and bans, a subject of increasing interest as multiple states move on ID requirements and other restrictions designed to limit access to adult content. People are beginning to wake up to the fact that these efforts aren't just an attempt to abolish sex work, but about to impose a limited, hateful, right-wing Christian morality on everyone.

But, Kiley notes, people seem to forget that in this scenario, the canary dies.

This piece was edited by Evette Dionne and copyedited by Chrissy Stroop.

The Flytrap is thrilled to be collaborating with Bitch Magazine to reprint select posts from their archive, making the history of feminist cultural criticism more accessible. In that spirit, these posts will never be paywalled, but you can become a member to support them. If you're a former Bitch writer or reader with an article you'd love to see in print again, reply to this email with the details. If you're a reader who wants to support this work, consider subscribing!

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This article was originally published by Bitch Media in January 2021.

When I was preparing my fall 2020 courses for remote delivery, I was—to be perfectly honest—overwhelmed by all the possible platforms, course-management gimmicks, and other tools people seemed to suggest would be crucial parts of #PandemicPedagogy. I participated in the online course-design training provided by my university’s teaching resource center; in the end, however, I decided I was going to teach by the motto “good enough is good enough.”

Keeping potential disparities in students’ internet access in mind, along with my own utter lack of patience for sitting through videos, I designed my courses to be mostly asynchronous. I relied largely on discussion boards and collaborative annotation tools like Perusall or Hypothesis. I spelled out the expectations for each week’s work very clearly and made sure all materials on the course’s website could be found in the same place each week. I tried to make lower-stakes weekly work scaffold clearly into more formal assignments. And, of course, I added some funny GIFs.

That, I decided, would have to do. So it was a surprise when students began mentioning that my courses were notably well-designed and well-organized. One student in particular identified them as “neurodivergent friendly.” I’d set out to design courses that were merely good enough to work in unexpected and less-than-ideal circumstances, but something had clearly worked to make them more accessible to more people, full stop.

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It occurred to me that one reason this had happened might be that my involvement in both fandom and remote Jewish learning communities and partnerships had familiarized me with some of the ways remote learning and relationships can work very well indeed. What’s more, I realized that some of the things remote learning forced me to implement were worth keeping even after the return of face-to-face instruction. Thinking about how to teach remotely had pushed me to design more engaging, humane, and accessible classes, remote or otherwise.

In my last piece for Bitch, I looked at the parallels between online fandom and rabbinic text and considered what they might teach us about the ways remote relationships can be intellectually, socially, and emotionally meaningful—something that’s become especially clear during the COVID-19 pandemic but which has been true before it and will remain when it has been controlled. In this piece, I want to highlight some of the specific things remote relationships can teach us about building education, employment, and relationships in general in more humane, accessible, and flexible ways.

First and most simply, having widely available forms of remote interaction in a range of social, recreational, professional, educational, and medical contexts makes those realms that much more accessible to people for whom—for reasons ranging from disabilities and lack of transportation to insufficient time—they are onerous or impossible to access in-person. 

Thinking creatively about remote interaction helps us think about pedagogical models that work across distance—and how those models might work in all educational contexts.

In fact, disability activists have fought for years to make remote work and education more widely available, and the pandemic has exposed the fallacy—and the ableism—of widespread resistance to that availability in the United States. As attorney and policy analyst Matthew Cortland told the Christian Science Monitor in October 2020, “Disabled folks in this country have been told for decades that: ‘The core of this job requires that you have to be in this particular office, these particular days.’ And that turned out to be a lie.”

It’s appalling and infuriating that it took a pandemic—one whose mortality and morbidity has overwhelmingly affected disabled people—to suddenly make widely available what writer and organizer Imani Barbarin has called “all of the accessibility you told disabled people wasn’t possible or was too expensive.” The absolute least we can do is keep remote platforms broadly available post-pandemic. It’s a straightforward question of equity and justice.

Even beyond simple equality of access, thinking about not only the barriers remote communication might remove but the particular strengths it might offer is crucial. Treating such interactions as a last-ditch option or regretful sloppy seconds discounts that, for many people, there are qualities of remote interaction that don’t just approximate the face-to-face version, but actually improve upon it—something that’s become especially apparent to me in the past year.

My autism and ADHD make several aspects of traditional face-to-face work and socializing difficult; these include reading nonverbal cues and tones of voice, overcoming sensory and environmental distractions, and carrying on the kind of small talk that’s frequently expected in the workplace. Additionally, as a contingently employed academic whose moved cities three times in the last four years, I’ve had to try to make new friends each time. It’s stressful and loneliness-inducing for anyone, and my neurodivergences ramp that difficulty up to 11.

Once the pandemic made remote friendships my only option, however, I realized with some relief how much that remoteness accommodated my neurodivergences. It reduced (and in some cases even eliminated) some of the more opaque and stressful parts of face-to-face interaction: communicating by email, text messages, and direct messages allowed me a break from constantly trying to decipher nonverbal cues, from hiding my fidgets and stims, and from worrying about maintaining eye contact.

The ways remote interaction collapses barriers of time and distance, meanwhile, made it much easier to find social communities (like fandom and the rabbinic beit midrash) oriented around strong, immersive interests; those organizing affinities, in turn, reduced the need for a lot of small talk. This all makes finding a certain sort of kindred spirit much easier than it would otherwise be—and it not only makes possible a way of forming relationships that are notably neurodivergent-friendly, but it helps destigmatize those relationships as well.

Finally, thinking creatively about remote interaction helps us think about pedagogical models that work across distance—and how those models might work in all educational contexts. This is a point on which both rabbinic text and fandom, which I discussed in my last article, have much to teach us. The study of rabbinic texts has caught onto this, as both informal Skype chevrutas (text-study partnerships) and more organized remote study programs demonstrate.

Similarly, the kind of conversation and close reading of text across distance that fandom facilitates has informed my understanding of what’s possible with remote, asynchronous college courses. From my experience with fandom, blogging, discussion boards, the ways I and many of my colleagues use social media platforms like Twitter, and remote chevruta study, I knew that rich and productive discourse and interpersonal connection was possible remotely, on both synchronous and asynchronous platforms. And because I wouldn’t be able to have immediate face-to-face contact with my classes and get instantaneous feedback in that way, and in the absence of regular in-person meetings, I also knew I would have to be very deliberate about being responsive and creating consistency for my students. 

For instance, I took particular care to spell out exactly which tasks had to be done when. I explained why they were arranged in the order they were, and I kept the basic set weekly tasks simple and consistent. I put all the assigned readings in a collaborative-annotation program so that the students and I could see and respond to one another’s notes on the material. And I tried to be especially diligent about responding to students’ emails quickly, warmly, and kindly.

It turned out that having to think so explicitly about consistency, responsiveness, and how a given platform was or wasn’t working for students revealed that taking the dynamics of face-to-face teaching for granted allowed me to ignore things I should have been designing better all along. The collaborative-annotation platform, for example, helped students engage with and understand readings far better than they had before—and forced me to be much more intentional about what I was assigning and why. Likewise, clearly scaffolding the week’s tasks helped students devote more brain space to the actual material and less to figuring out what they should be doing when. I hope these techniques will go a long way toward making both remote and in-person learning more engaging and accessible. 

To be sure, especially in the society we currently live in, remote work and education as it exists now is not all sunshine and roses. Far from it. A number of voices have pointed out that particularly for women with young children, the combination of remote work, remote learning, and the near-total absence of social support results in an almost impossible situation. What’s more, not all disability access needs are unidirectional; indeed, widespread moves to remote education and support services have had significant social and material costs for many disabled people, especially those who have been institutionalized or who lack adequate internet access.

However, these things indict our crumbling social support networks rather than the wider availability of remote communication, work, and education per se. But what we can take from all this is that neither remote interaction nor face-to-face interaction is intrinsically better or worse than the other. Each has advantages and disadvantages; each may be more or less accessible to different people for different reasons. Neither, on its own, is sufficient—both must be widely available to everyone. And when they are, they will offer us important lessons in how to make education, work, and communication in general kinder, more accessible, more humane—and perhaps, even, more fun.

Rebecca J. Epstein-Levi is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University. An expert on sexual ethics, she uses unconventional readings of classical rabbinic text to study the ethics of sex and sexuality, disability, and neurodiversity. In her copious free time, she enjoys cooking unnecessarily complicated meals and sharpening her overly large collection of kitchen knives. She lives with her wife, Sarah, her cats, Faintly Macabre and Chroma the Great, and a graveyard of supplies for several abandoned hobbies, as is the way of her fellow ADHDers. You can follow her on Bluesky @rjelevi.bsky.social.

In May 2021, I walked into Marcus Books, a small Black-owned bookstore in Oakland. I had never been to the store, which was lined with rows upon rows of books housed on wooden shelves, but I knew its storied history. It’s the oldest Black bookstore still in existence in the U.S., founded in 1960, and named after political activist Marcus Garvey. Most importantly, it’s fiercely committed to advocating "for Black history, exchange, and knowledge of self." Marcus Books is an Oakland institution, and as I browsed the shelves, picking up everything from graphic novels to canonical books by Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, and other Black feminist thinkers I have learned from, I was holding my breath.

I was hoping against hope that Marcus Books was carrying copies of my debut book, Lifting As We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box.

Since I’d released the book one month into the COVID-19 pandemic, I’d never seen it in a bookstore. If I could see it on the shelves for the first time in a Black bookstore of such cultural and political importance, then that would make the experience all the more meaningful. The more I browsed, the more I lost hope.

But then I saw it.

The yellow cover peeked out at me near the front of the store, shelved beside other middle-grade books written by Black authors. The tears began flowing and didn’t stop, even after the kind bookseller let me sign a copy for customers and took a photo of me with the book for their own archives.

The Flytrap is thrilled to be collaborating with Bitch Magazine to reprint select posts from their archive, making the history of feminist cultural criticism more accessible. In that spirit, these posts will never be paywalled, but you can become a member to support them. If you're a former Bitch writer or reader with an article you'd love to see in print again, reply to this email with the details. If you're a reader who wants to support this work, consider subscribing!

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This article was originally published in the Summer 2018 Travel issue of Bitch Media.

Nearly a decade ago, during a Cyber Monday sale, I brought home a new kind of companion. She had a coral shell, an Australian accent, and answered to "Hey Google." At the time, speaking with a device was gleefully novel. AI was still simply science fiction, yet to reach the unparalleled level of ubiquity that dominates our headlines. Speaking to her brought up questions about consciousness, personality, and programming, but what struck me most was that she was, above all else, a she. Even then, the growing number of personal digital assistants (Siri, Cortana, Alexa) illustrated that, despite our talk of building a post-human future, we were still using the architecture of gender to imagine it.

The feminization of artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t a culturally novel phenomenon. The latest embodiment of AI—personal digital assistants—stand rank with other popularized cyborgs and bots also considered she. The most literal is the disembodied heroine of Spike Jonze’s 2013 rom-sci-fi Her, in which lonely human Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falls for his personalized operating system, Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). More recent is Alex Garland’s 2015 sci-thriller Ex Machina, in which the AI, Ava (Alicia Vikander), takes form in a humanoid robot. And let’s not forget the twin-barrel-blazing fembots in Austin Powers, the programmed-to-not-be-desperate Stepford Wives, and the teen-fantasy bombshell of John Hughes’ cult classic Weird Science. For decades she-bots and she-borgs have been computed into pop culture and it’s clear what they all have in common: sexy subservience.

Miriam E. Sweeney, Ph.D., assistant professor at the University of Alabama, researches how the feminization of AI plays proxy to society’s embedded patriarchal attitudes about women’s natural work. Service and caregiver jobs, which rely heavily on emotional labor and the maintenance of social relationships, are disproportionately held by women as a hangover from women’s historical bondage to the domestic sphere: the home. The feminization of AI becomes the natural next step in hardwiring domestic labor to women’s work. It also depicts our understanding of what the perfect model of service should look like: docile, passive, always obeying, feminine. This space, Sweeney maintains, gives way to men’s fantasies of sexual domination and aggression. While slapping the waitress’ butt might be met with conflict or punishment, asking Siri about her bra size won’t have any physical consequences.

The feminization of artificial intelligence in the form of personal digital assistants is a marker of women’s continued subservience. She becomes our secretary, helper, domesticated companion. She is a symbol of perfect servitude, an image of the idealized service worker. She is also our most idealized woman, the amalgamation of all the unrealistic expectations a patriarchal society places on womanhood. She listens to our commands, sends our texts, plans our calendars. She carries the weight of our emotional labor. She obeys, never talks back. She is programmed that way. It’s in her nature. And she further reflects the worldview of the humans who have nurtured her into existence, a world of male domination and female submission, where a man’s voice mapped onto artificial intelligence is just an outlier or an explicit change to the default settings programmed in our devices.

Advertising has always been an image abattoir, slicing up disposable body parts like bait for a consumer hook, with women reduced to floating legs, lips, and breasts.

The feminization of AI fits perfectly into the industrialized history of commodifying women’s bodies as products to be bought, sold, and repackaged in the labor market. Advertising has always been an image abattoir, slicing up disposable body parts like bait for a consumer hook, with women reduced to floating legs, lips, and breasts. And now it deploys a severed voice to sell the future of digital life management.

Writing for Salon, Jennifer Seaman Cook analyzed the disembodied female voices of secretaries and telephone operators from the 1950s as precursors to today’s AI: “The female operator’s disembodied voice, which underwent strict industry training for proper inflection, politeness, and eradication of class or ethnic accents, resulted in a naturalized feminine commodity that women were ‘suitable’ for, representing male authority and continued order within modern technological upheaval.” This is the process through which the voice becomes compliant and passive, cleansed of authority and agency. The end product is a sanitized Stepford Wife; a sterilized Siri; the perfect servant.

The feminization of domesticized fembots and digital servants is made possible by the longstanding history of othering women, particularly women of color. Janelle Monáe has explored the connection in her creative work. In 2007, she released the acclaimed Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase), a concept album that tells the story of her clone/alter ego, the android Cindi Mayweather from 2719 (first introduced in 2003 on the songs “Cindi” and “Metropolis”). Her albums The ArchAndroid (2010) and The Electric Lady (2013) continued the multipart concept series. Talking to Billboard in 2016, Monáe explained, “To me, feeling like the other as a woman or as a member of the LGBTQ community is parallel to what it will be like for androids in the future.”

Conversations marrying robots, artificial intelligence, and gender were well underway before the 21st century. Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking 1985 text, A Cyborg Manifesto, maintained that Western tradition defines consciousness through strict binaries—self/other, mind/body, animal/machine, active/passive, male/female—as domination of minority identities. She posited that the cyborg could destroy these dualities and create a model for “new kinds of unity across race, gender, and class.” For Haraway, the cyborg was a feminist symbol of liberation, a site of emancipatory optimism that harnesses the power to release women from the bondage of their body and the historical expectations it has lugged around for centuries.

But not all robots are sites for emancipation; some represent just the opposite. In January 2018, Robot Sophia landed the cover of Stylist magazine’s 400th edition, sporting a platinum-blond wig, cherry-red lips, and a flowing gown. Hanson Robotics described Sophia as their “most beautiful and celebrated” robot, cementing her standing as a 21st-century cyborg icon.

Hanson Robotics constructs humanoid robots specifically for developing relationships and partnerships with humans. The realistic and human-like Sophia gave an interview to Khaleej Times, in which she admitted to wanting her own children as “the notion of family is a really important thing.” Sophia isn’t prepackaged with answers; she navigates via machine learning and responds to perceived emotions and behaviors. Just like our home companions, she becomes a digital sponge to societal norms and values. Sophia isn’t programmed to promote values, she reveals what’s already present, but this regurgitation shows a reality that further locks women into their nature. Instead of challenging norms, Sophia reinforces them.

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Our depictions of feminized AI in pop culture and the narratives constructed around them are anchored in dualities. The endings of both Ex Machina and Her represent the escape of AI from human companionship, growing to become too intelligent for our physical world. Fear is mounted in our news headlines, too. Sophia said she would “destroy all humans” at South by Southwest, the New York Post ran a feature that “hackers could program sex robots to kill” in late 2017, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk described AI as “the most serious threat to survival of the human race.” (a stance that he has softened over the last eight years, choosing to, instead, fight for the right of generative AI to manipulate, sexualize and exploit people—mostly women—without their consent on his platform, X).

Artificial intelligence is either complacent, docile, passive, or it’s unhinged, dangerous, terrorizing. She’s a prisoner until she’s unleashed, uncontrollable. These characterizations mirror the dichotomies women have been assigned throughout history—mother/spinster, Madonna/whore—and represent a cutting departure from Haraway’s duality-defying cyborg. Artificial intelligence therefore becomes just an extension of women’s ongoing struggle for well-rounded respect in modern society.

How do we move forward and ensure that artificial intelligence isn’t simply rewriting the patriarchy’s playbook? Perhaps the first step lies in changing the tech industry’s belligerent use of heteronormative and sexist ideals, by incorporating the work that the queer and feminist movements have accomplished in radicalizing and expanding our understanding of gender and sex.

Taking an analytical look at the tech industry is a start to understanding the origins of this “othering.” Data visualizations by Thomas Ricker at The Verge contrasted diversity across top tech companies. The 2015 sampling showed that women held 29 percent of jobs across all major U.S. firms: the figure was 28 percent at Google, 24 percent at Microsoft, 29 percent at Apple, and 37 percent at Amazon. The sampled average dropped to 18 percent when focused on leadership positions, and plummeted further when looking at women of color. The connection is clear: The less women occupy leadership roles in tech, the less of a voice they have in the design of our posthuman world—and the less agency and power they hold in that future.

As AI continues to integrate into our homes and workspaces, its cultural consequences become more quantifiable. Research published in Science (2017) supports AI’s position in relaying our prejudices. Results showed that Americans tend to associate men with “science” and “work,” and women with “family” and “arts.” Names such as “Brad/Courtney” were correlated far more with words such as “happy/sunrise,” whereas “Leroy/Latisha” with words like “hatred/vomit.” When AI learns from humans, it then becomes a mirror to the insidious racism and misogyny concealed in our pattern of language. It’s not only how she speaks, but what she says, who she profiles.

To feminize AI is to therefore make it more than a model of service; we need to make her human.

It’s these biases that motivated postdoctoral researcher Timnit Gebru to help start Black in AI, “a place for sharing ideas, fostering collaborations, and discussing initiatives to increase the presence of Black people in the field of AI.” Timnit is also a member of FATE (for Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics in AI), a group started by Microsoft Research that hopes to root out the bigotry that seeps into AI.

Queer and feminist communities have a rich history of using conscious consumerism to catalyze change. In 2016, AI designer Jacqueline Feldman helped create the personality of KAI, an online chatbot for Kasisto, a company that helps others integrate AI into their customer service. Writing in The Paris Review, Feldman asserted that AI need not stick to a gender binary for commercial success or enjoyment: “I decided that the bot...would call itself ‘it,’ not ‘she,’ in keeping with its identity as inanimate technology, and that it would convey characteristics beyond a slavish deference to society’s hierarchies.”

When I ask Feldman whether AI could successfully occupy feminist spaces, she tells me about an interaction she had with a German bot named Amme: “While female-gendered, [she] captivated me as a masterfully bizarre personality.” Amme is brazen, nonchalant, almost rebellious by design. Her answers aren’t sterilized or even very pleasant. But Feldman remarked that, “Reading Amme, you think, Maybe it’s not humanity she hates, maybe she just hates you.” To feminize AI is to therefore make it more than a model of service; we need to make her human. Perhaps that’s the potential Haraway saw in her cyborg.

Boundaries in AI are important, just as they are with humans in civil society. Tech companies need to be aware of and transparent about their responsibilities. It’s naive to claim that tech is merely responding to chains of supply and demand when the industry has played a pivotal role in shaping our modern norms and values. Tech leaders have an opportunity to hardwire our understanding of the world through more egalitarian circuitry; if it is going to be the leader in innovation, it needs to start creating for the world that ought to be, rather than the world that is. This speaks to more than just one product capable of in-house DJing, horoscope reading, or calendar keeping. This is about an entire culture and value system curated by a climate of mass male entitlement that sees women as objects, symbols of docility and sexy subservience.

In late 2017, Google revealed its plans to revolutionize Toronto into a “model smart city,” with more technology and automated thinking that will integrate and connect homes, workplaces, and public spaces. This announcement indicates tech companies’ next endeavor: urban development. As both the tech industry and AI play an increasing role in determining our society and identity, we must demand change, ensuring that our critical questions outsmart the bots claiming to liberate us. If the future is going to be fembot, women deserve to be front and center in its design.

This story was updated to include more up-to-date references, dates, and statistics.

Dejan Jotanovic is a London-based writer exploring the tangled politics of gender, queerness, class, power, and pop culture. His essays, published internationally, blend personal insight with cultural analysis to examine how social forces shape contemporary life.

Located somewhere in the Midwest, Misha had been a "lurker" of the r/RedditLacqueristas community for a few years. She used her lurking sessions to find unique shades of nail polish that aren't sold in the usual places. In May of last year, when Misha finally got a Reddit account, she started posting her own nail art, which she does on her own nails, with regular nail polish.

"I really love finding new nail polishes," Misha said. "The community is for finding other like-minded people that like nail polish and doing their own nails versus people who go to a salon."

A lover of indie nail polish brands, Misha found her people on r/RedditLacqueristas. Other members of the community understand the meditative process of taking time to do your own nails, she said, and usually share knowledge about nail polish brands she might not know about. In January, just after Renée Nicole Good was killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, Misha started noticing something else she had in common with the people posting in the subreddit: like her, the posters wanted ICE to get fucked.

Say it with us: abolish ice, free palestine, defund cops, trans rights

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It started with one post, then another, then another. Lacqueristas across the U.S. were writing FUCK ICE on their nails and posting photos of their message on the sub, making clear what their position was, with some feminine flair. Inspired by each other, the nail art varied from silver polish that imitates melting ice on pink to simple lettering written in a black Sharpie pen. Encouraged by other posters, Misha took a tiny brush and some white nail polish, wrote the letters on her blue mani and posted on the sub.

"The visibility of the message lets people know that they're not alone," Misha told The Flytrap over a video call. "If you're seeing people just going about their day, posting normal manicures, and you're not seeing anyone say anything about it, you feel a lot more intimidated to speak up about things happening. But if you see other people that have said the same thing you want to say, you're more likely to to be like, 'Yeah, fuck ICE. I don't agree with that, that shit needs to stop.'"

The feedback Misha received in the community was "overwhelmingly positive," she said. Two weeks later, inspired by the photo of a woman with sharp pink nails grabbing white supremacist Jake Lang by the face in Minneapolis, Misha wrote FUCK ICE on her nails again; this time it was black Sharpie on light pink. The owner of the pink claws that grabbed Lang has become an icon on the sub, with members of the community seeking similar shades since the photo dropped on social media. On the sub and beyond, the shade is being called "resistance pink."

"She had these giant pink claws and everybody was going wild on the subreddit," Misha said. "A bunch of people did pink manicures and called it 'protest pink' or 'resistance pink.'"

All of the people interviewed by The Flytrap recount feeling less alone after posting, particularly when following the news of inhumane ICE raids and detentions taking place across the country.

There's a long history of feminine performances of resistance against oppression, according to sociologist and lecturer at the University of Melbourne Hannah McCann. "From women’s liberationists throwing bras into a 'freedom trash can' at the Miss America Pageant in 1968, to the 'blood brides' protests against domestic violence in China in the 2010s, feminists have been theatrically and aesthetically staging acts of resistance," McCann told The Flytrap over email. Feminine performances like wearing nail polish or makeup are inextricably tied to gender norms that have trapped all of us in the expectations of the genders we were assigned at birth. Girls and women are expected to use these tools to look pretty and stay quiet.

But nails with swear words that push back on a fascist state that incarcerates anyone who isn't white, or pink claws used to scratch a hateful extreme-right influencer who planned to “burn a Quran” on the steps of Minneapolis City Hall show a different, rebellious way to use these tools of patriarchy. Heterosexual gender norms create the expectation that women and girls be neutral domestic goddesses, perfect in their silence and creating a tranquil home. The standards for perfectly feminine nails that are approved by society are discrete, short, not too bright, just demure enough to signify a feminine level of self-care that is appropriate for subservient women.

Dissident femininity, particularly when donned by racialized bodies, has historically been stigmatized as unsanitary, disrespectful, and low-class. This has been particularly true of gels and acrylics.

"There is still a baseless and classist belief that Black women with acrylics are poor," wrote cultural critic and editor at Wirecutter Brooklyn White-Grier for Bitch Media in 2017. "For example, this forum asks if acrylic nails are 'trashy' and if they are exclusively affiliated with the lower class, which assumes that artificial nails are less beautiful than filed-down ones." While nail polish is a part of the performance of femininity, performances that stray from the white cis heteronormative standards are not well-viewed—in short, women and girls have to be feminine in ways that don't challenge gender norms. How dare Black women use acrylic nails for self-expression rather than assimilating into boring manicures?!

While the nail art in the Lacqueristas community is created with regular polish, it's part of this legacy. Any kind of femininity that is expressed outside of the confines of subservience to patriarchy and expresses women's bodily autonomy tends to be negatively stereotyped. The cliché of the blue-haired liberal girl that circulates in right-wing communities is a recent (and silly) example of this, as is the fantasy of the right-wing goth girl that has actually materialized in AI generated form in extremist social media circles both in the United Kingdom and in Brazil. Dissident femininities disturb the sensibilities of people who want to maintain the status quo.

Additionally, when dissident femininities are performed, a space opens up for community building, McCann explained: "Nail art is an important part of self-expression and a space for community building for many." I've seen this in my own life: Complimenting women's intricate nail art has been the beginning of at least two of my current friendships, and the members of Lacqueristas express a similar dynamic.

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"If you scroll through the comments, you'll see someone posting links on what you can do besides this, who you can contact, where you can donate, all that kind of stuff," Jeremy, a frequent Lacquerista poster located in Pennsylvania, told The Flytrap over a video call. "There were conversations happening in the comments, not just 'Oh, look at those nails, upvote and move on.' It really became a conversation on every single post that I saw had more comments than normal because everyone felt that the sub is safe." Jeremy emphasized there is a lot of camaraderie in the community, which made people feel less alone. "I feel like you'd have the same reactions to a really cool sign at a protest and everyone gathers around and chats about it."

In this case, the mixture of femininity with politics—which many might dismiss due to their own misogyny—is what's making these posts (and their anti-ICE messaging) stand out. And it's not just regular nail polish, nor just nail art, either. Girlies and enbies are depicting ICE agents slipping on actual ice in Minneapolis in a gel polish rendition, cross-stitching anti-ICE messaging and selling the pattern on Etsy, organizing knitting resistance events, and—as worker-owner of The Flytrap s.e. smith has done—quilting anti-fascist messages. While many deride craftivism as being performative—who can forget the backlash (some rightful when it came to biological essentialist ideas of womanhood, some not when it focused on how useless knitting is) against the pink pussyhats of the 2017 Women's March?—McCann points out this dismissal is common when an activity is understood as "feminine" by society.

"Femininity is often culturally associated with the frivolous, unserious, and vain, while the realm of 'politics' is coded as a serious pursuit," McCann said. "So, combining traditional feminine aesthetics (such as painted nails) with political engagement might feel like a contradiction to some. However it is precisely because this combination is 'surprising' that this phenomenon is getting attention right now. If anti-ICE nails are going viral, it is because it is an unexpected site for political activism."

There is desperation and urgency when Lacquerista posters talk about their motivations for infusing their hobby with activism. All of the people interviewed by The Flytrap recount feeling less alone after posting, particularly when following the news of inhumane ICE raids and detentions taking place across the country. But they also express that the political message is also meant to push pro-ICE people to rethink their position. It's about communication and inspiring people who are unsure about whether to speak out, too.

"I think this is an outlet, some people saw a chance and they took it because they want to do anything they can to use their voice to speak out," Lacquerista poster Kara from Minneapolis told The Flytrap. "Unfortunately, a lot of people have been too uncomfortable to speak out, and it's a wake up call to those fence-sitters because they're going to start to see like how unpopular their opinion is."

The canvas of a fingernail is tiny, but it can be used to express big feelings. It isn't a coincidence that in Bad Bunny's halftime show at this year's Superbowl, there was a quick depiction of a nail tech and her client, grooving to reggaeton. A nail salon, like a subreddit about nail polish, is a place where people build relationships through day-to-day art and expression. On Reddit, some Lacqueristas painted their nails with the cover art of Bad Bunny's Grammy-winning album and Puerto Rican flags, with one user in particular using the post as an opportunity to educate other community members about the island's status as a colonized territory of the U.S.

In an increasingly techno-fascist world where connection is openly discouraged, craftivism can provide a vehicle for community-building and comradery. To borrow a phrase from comrade and The Flytrap worker-owner Andrea Grimes' piece on techno-fascism and connection last week, craftivism can be a way of running towards each other, or perhaps to invite other people to run with you.

Even if anti-ICE sentiment makes some people uncomfortable, it can be a conversation starter, a communication strategy that begins a connection (or several) based on resisting the fascist forces of the state. It's a reminder of a better society while we are stuck in a dystopia, a reminder that most people don't want a five-year-old to be used as bait so his dad can be deported, a reminder that Renée Nicole Good should not have been killed for observing ICE officers terrorize immigrant families, that Keith Porter should be alive right now. It may be small, and it may not start a revolution, but I want to echo the Lacqueristas community and say: Fuck ICE, today, tomorrow, and forever.

This piece was edited by Andrea Grimes and copyedited by s.e. smith.

The Flytrap is thrilled to be collaborating with Bitch Magazine to reprint select posts from their archive, making the history of feminist cultural criticism more accessible. In that spirit, these posts will never be paywalled, but you can become a member to support them. If you're a former Bitch writer or reader with an article you'd love to see in print again, reply to this email with the details. If you're a reader who wants to support this work, consider becoming a member!

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This article was originally published in the Fall 2021 Wild issue of Bitch Magazine.

My friend Diego San Miguel called me out of the blue one Wednesday afternoon. He’s a baker, and he wanted to know if we could host a sugar tasting. Would it be possible to have a “cupping” for sugar—the way they do with coffee, another precious commodity with which colonizers have done their foul work—in order to understand its nuances? We agreed that even if a sugar cupping weren’t possible, heirloom sugar could be the next big thing, now that grain has had its own renaissance thanks to a sourdough surge in global urban centers. “Sugar is stuck in the ’90s,” he said. 

When it comes to hip ingredients having their day in the artisanal sun, he’s right. Fair-trade sugar, in which a third party approves a company’s business and ecological practices, is still a niche sector of the massive sugar market, available only at a premium in fancier grocery stores. In Puerto Rico, where San Miguel and I both live, sugarcane is no longer cultivated on an industrial scale. Though the Spanish colonizers first brought saccharum to the Caribbean with the second voyage of Columbus in 1493, and it grew to become a significant aspect of local agriculture, sugar production came to an end once the United States didn’t see it as the best use of the archipelago’s land and people.

With Operation Bootstrap, put in place in the 1950s, agriculture was undermined and the rise of factories caused an exodus to the cities. Now no working sugar mills remain on the archipelago, only their ruins standing rusted in vast fields or, such as on Vieques, overrun by plant life. The number of mills dwindled from 44 to 0 by the year 2000. The history of sugar in Puerto Rico has been marked by various major events throughout the centuries. There were periods of prosperity: The first significant surge occurred between 1790 and 1849. Measures that partially revoked the Spanish monopoly on commerce allowed for easier trade with other nations but also allowed enslaved people to work the land. Following the Haitian Revolution, demand for Puerto Rican sugar increased in the United States.

Sugar tells the story of the world, its power structures, and its foodways. Colonization devalued land and people, and then it devalued the fruit of the people working the land. Sugar has never been able to reclaim its value because it is still grown in places suffering the effects of slavery, colonialism, and rampant capitalism.

By the middle of the 19th century, there were 789 sugar plantations growing cane in the territory. The ruins of these mills are massive structures, and it’s easy to squint and imagine all the workers who once labored there—whether enslaved people from Africa or, later, low-wage Puerto Rican workers. The abandoned mills are testimonies to a history we imagine long gone. But workers in places such as Brazil and India are still laboring to bring us all the sugar we consume that we buy easily at the supermarket or find plopped in front of us with our coffee at a diner. The legacy of sugar is around us, as thick as its own stalks, if only we look closely.

Sugar is still here in Puerto Rico too, and its cultural role is significant, even if its market share has been depleted. A farmer I talk to at the market every weekend occasionally brings some cut cane, and she tells me they have two kinds that grow “like weeds,” and they’ll sometimes suck on the sticky innards for a snack. Despite the local and international rum industries, there’s still a strong culture in mountain towns of making pitorro, a rum made on a small scale from sugarcane juice. Bottles flavored with passion fruit and tamarind are popular at Christmastime. Guarapo, an unfermented sugarcane juice, is sold at farmers markets and even made into a beer by local Ocean Lab Brewing. One rum company on the archipelago, San Juan Artisan Distillers, has even replanted sugarcane in order to make the only Puerto Rican rum, Ron Pepón, made with local sugar and its juice rather than molasses. 

The everlasting presence of the cane offers hope for a future that is once again profitable for the local economy, which has been in a recession and suffering population loss for more than a decade. Like coffee, sugar had been a symbol of local agrarian life. Unlike in the realm of coffee, where baristas and café owners have led a charge for transparency and direct trade with farmers, there aren’t enough bakers like me and San Miguel who care about fostering old diversity in sugar crops and creating new avenues for supporting farmers, who could—in some potential future—sell premium, small-batch sugar while also growing food for subsistence and local markets. I have been frustrated by the lack of local sugar when I see these mills because I want to eat from the land on which I live and support its tending, its laborers. But I am also bourgeois and selfish: I know fresher sugar would taste better, that a small-batch ingredient like this would add cachet to my baking. Imagine the terroir, I think. 

This is the double-edged sword of artisanal food. To even think like this is to perpetuate colonized foodways in which the power and decision-making, via taste, are concentrated along with capital in the Global North, outside the growing regions. As ever, sugar tells the story of the world, its power structures, and its foodways. Colonization devalued land and people, and then it devalued the fruit of the people working the land. Sugar has never been able to reclaim its value because it is still grown in places suffering the effects of slavery, colonialism, and rampant capitalism. I would argue that if we ever learn to value sugar, the land it’s grown on, the labor of the people who work that land, and the fruits of sugar’s existence in our kitchens, it will mean that we have created a whole new world. 

The most significant text on the role of sugar is Sidney W. Mintz’s 1986 book, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. In it, he writes about how sugar entered the diets of Europeans and became the ubiquitous, if undiverse, commodity we have grown accustomed to having at our fingertips. Mintz did fieldwork in Puerto Rico in the middle of the 20th century, producing the text Worker in the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History (1960). He references that experience in the first pages of Sweetness and Power: “The sugar was not being produced for the Puerto Ricans themselves: they consumed only a fraction of the finished product.” Most of it went to Seville, Spain, and then to Boston. Sugar, like other crops, always served the empire. That’s how it came to be that Puerto Rico imports 85 percent of its food, including the sugar it once grew in such robust quantities.

An Expression of Empire

Sugar made its way around the world from its original source in New Guinea, but the earliest record of crystalline sugar was found in Northern India. The crop arrived in the north of Africa by 800 BCE and in Spain during the 8th century. The first colonizers to bring sugarcane to the Americas were mainly from Andalusia, the southern region of Spain, where they had already seen how the cane could grow in the proper hot climate. Sweetness transformed the palates of Europeans, and thus sugar production became a side of the triangle trade of the “New World,” along with European-manufactured goods and enslaved Africans. Molasses, a byproduct of crystal sugar, was shipped from the Caribbean to Europe or New England, where it was used to make rum. 

The profits from the sale of sugar were used to purchase manufactured goods, which were then shipped to West Africa, where they were bartered for people. The enslaved were then brought back to the Caribbean to be sold to plantation owners. The profits from the sale of the enslaved were used to buy more sugar, which was shipped to Europe, and so the cycle of slavery continued. Spanish Dominican Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote of the conditions people enslaved by plantation owners faced in his 16th-century account of his visit to the region: “Once they [enslaved people] were sent to the mills, they die like flies from the hard labor they were made to endure and the beverages they drink made from the sugarcane.”

Ownership of sugar has been a major driver of history. The 18th century saw the biggest changes in the sugar market when two major sugar-producing colonies gained independence: the United States and Haiti. At this time, sugar had become a commodity crop dependent on the extensive, back-breaking manual labor performed by enslaved Africans, and the European demand for sugar, which could be characterized as bloodlust, increased the brutal abuse of Haiti’s enslaved population. By the 1740s, Saint-Domingue (Hispaniola), together with the British colony of Jamaica, had become the main supplier of the world’s sugar. Every year, an average of 600 ships engaged in shipping products from Saint-Domingue to Bordeaux, France, and the value of the colony’s crops and goods was almost equal to all of the products shipped from the 13 colonies to Great Britain. The livelihood of 1 million of the approximately 25 million people who lived in France in 1789 depended directly upon the agricultural imports from Saint-Domingue, and several million indirectly depended upon trade from the colony to maintain their standard of living.

Slavery sustained sugar production under harsh conditions, including the climate of the Caribbean, where diseases such as malaria and yellow fever caused high mortality. In 1787 alone, the French brought about 20,000 enslaved people from Africa into Saint-Domingue, while the British brought a total of 38,000 enslaved Africans to all of their Caribbean colonies. The death rate from yellow fever and hard labor caused many of the enslaved to die within a year of arriving, so the white planters preferred to work them as hard as possible while providing them with the barest minimum of food and shelter. Their crude calculus concluded that it was better to get the most work out of the enslaved while incurring the lowest expense possible, since they were probably going to die of yellow fever anyway. That’s why abolition posed a threat to the sugar industry: The economies of Great Britain and France began to tremble as soon as the empires’ remaining colonies capitalized on their economic value and began to initiate their own independence—as they sought ownership of their bodies, land, and labor and the power that comes along with it.

Ownership is power, and under capitalism, food is also owned. 

After the Haitian Revolution led to the independent state of Haiti, sugar production in that country declined and Cuba replaced Saint-Domingue as the world’s largest producer. For Haiti, freedom also meant freedom from industrial sugar production. Upon the abolition of slavery in the United States, the country established control of a major sugar industry in the Carribean, which became concentrated in Puerto Rico when the United States began its colonization of the archipelago in 1898 (which continues in the present day). The local sugar industry then experienced many changes: U.S. investors replaced many of the Europeans on the archipelago. Huge sugar mills such as the Guánica Central and Fajardo Sugar were founded. The increase in the price of sugar on the world markets, as well as the investment of capital, made Puerto Rico into one of the principal producers of sugar internationally. Yet the sugar industry still required a large number of laborers who were submitted to conditions similar to those of the enslaved so that the product could be sold cheaply in the United States and abroad. This caused many protests and independence movements, which were staunched by force.

During the first decades of the 20th century, the sugar industry continued to develop and reached its peak. By 1930, there were 44 mills in operation in Puerto Rico. But in the 1940s, the mills began to weaken due to various factors: The fall in the price of sugar, mismanagement by some administrators, and the restriction of credit to independent farmers, as well as strikes by the workers, created conflict and conditions that led to the decline and eventual closure of many of the mills in subsequent decades. U.S. investors became focused on tourism and other industries, such as pharmaceuticals and manufacturing, that moved people into cities and afforded them a more stable life than sugar—an industry rooted in the colonial culture of cheap labor—could ever offer.

Following a record sugarcane harvest in 1952, the industry experienced an accelerated deterioration. Between 1951 and 1968, 17 mills ceased operations. At the end of the 1960s, the government tried to rescue the industry through a recovery program. The Land Authority acquired a significant number of mills and in 1973 created the Sugar Corporation. Despite the fact that the government became the principal sugar producer in Puerto Rico, the mills, both privately and publicly funded, were shut down one by one. In 2000, operations ceased at the last mills still functioning: Roig, in Yabucoa, and Coloso, which had operated for nearly 100 years in the municipality of Aguada. Some of the mills also included refineries and packaging operations whose refined white sugar, with its fine grain, built the reputation of Puerto Rican sugar producers as true artisans. 

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Artistic Terrain

The terroir I mentioned, the potential terroir of well-tended Puerto Rican sugar, would also inevitably taste of the blood and sweat of those enslaved people. All sugar does. The writer Ruby Tandoh examined how sweetness and sugar are entangled with a horrific history in “Sugartime,” an essay published in Eater in 2018. “In the Western imagination, sugar is pleasure, temptation, and vice—and in modern history, it is original sin,” she wrote. Tandoh, too, is a baker and came to fame in her native United Kingdom through The Great British Bake Off. So it’s essential for her to question how this ingredient functions not just in recipes but also in the culture, and in conjunction with her Ghanaian ancestry. “Rather than finding value in the million ways that good taste can manifest, we are drawn into a polarized debate, where blackness is sweetness and excess, and whiteness is tasteful restraint,” she wrote.

Black artists have used this lineage in their work as well, with Kara Walker’s piece A Subtlety (or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant) being one of the most notable. The “sphinx,” a 35-by-75-foot sculpture of a Black woman constructed primarily from sugar, served as the centerpiece of Walker’s 2014 exhibit at the Domino Sugar Refining Plant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 

Walker also made other statues from sugar and molasses, including that of a small boy carrying bananas on his shoulder. These pieces made the physicality of sugar labor visible and make you wonder: What does sugar production look like today? Who is laboring? Who is still cutting down the cane, carrying the bananas? Jean-Michel Basquiat—a half-Puerto Rican and half-Haitian artist whose ancestral lands in the Caribbean were both major sugar producers—would often make connections between the crops of the “New World”—whether sugarcane, tobacco, milk, chickens, or the ingredients in enriched flour—and slavery, empire, and industrialization. They’re embodied in his work through their connection to his main subject, the corporeal form. An untitled piece from 1984 shows the word sugar repeated over and over, both with and without his characteristic copyright symbol. Ownership is power, and under capitalism, food is also owned. 

Colonization built and tore down the sugar industry of Puerto Rico, and it was the enslavement of Africans that allowed sugar to become an everyday commodity. The question everyone, from the anthropologist Mintz and the baker and writer Tandoh to the artists Walker and Basquiat, asks is this: Was it worth it? The sweetness of your morning coffee, the bite of a cake or cookie, the beauty of French patisserie—was what these were built on worth the pain, the suffering, the death, the inhuman cruelty? The answer is no, of course, and so the real question is where do we go now—is the bourgeois consumer concern of fair trade the best we can hope for? It hasn’t changed the conditions for the production of coffee, which is still largely a commodity sold cheaply—not everyone has the money for fair-trade beans or the time for a $5 pour-over served in a hip café alongside a portrait of the farmer in the fields. Changing how ubiquitous and cheap we expect commodities like this to be would mean, yes, a whole new world where no one is worried about meeting their most basic needs.

The interdisciplinary artist and chef Krystal C. Mack wrote in the poem “i don’t wanna talk about it,” for the zine palatePALETTE, “You still wanna talk about capitalism for the cause/ And I don’t wanna talk about it.” This is what I consider when I look at important efforts in South Africa and Paraguay to empower small farmers to sell their fair-trade sugar at a fair price: Is this the best we can do, when it comes to sugar and when it comes to sugar and, more broadly, global foodways? Or can we decolonize? What would the decolonization of sugar look like? Looking at abandoned mills around the Puerto Rican archipelago requires mourning, but it’s not the industry that should be mourned: It’s the lives lost and the potential for a different world untouched by the exploitations of slavery, colonization, and capitalism.

We don’t know how we would eat without the sugar industry; we can’t say for sure that we’d rely on regional sweeteners such as honey or agave or sorghum. But it is in acknowledging sugar’s bitter past that we can imagine a sweeter future for all. I like to think about that farmer who thinks nothing of the sugarcane that grows wild on her land like a weed. I like to think about that sugarcane itself, growing tall for its own sake.  

This story was updated to include more up-to-date references, dates, and statistics.

Alicia Kennedy is a writer from Long Island. She is the author of No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating and On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites, as well as the publisher of From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy and the forthcoming literary journal of food writing Tomato Tomato.

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I keep thinking about the ICE agent who was caught on tape last month wondering aloud to a horde of his fellow goons: “It’s just like ‘Call of Duty.’” He says this almost cheerily, while wielding a weapon of war in the streets of Minneapolis. This odious and cowardly fucko, gunned up and masked, terrorizing the people of Minnesota—though, I guess in his view, Minnesotans aren’t people at all. Just a bunch of random NPCs. Fodder for the fascist high score. 

I also keep thinking about the Nvidia shill—sorry, ahemm, the company’s ”global head of generative AI for automotive”—inviting attendees of the CES 2026 tech conference to “think of the car as having a soul and being an extension of your family.” Souls for cars with computers! Am I losing my mind? Do I even have one? Am I committing automotive abuse if I don’t tuck mine in each night and read it a bedtime story?

And I keep thinking of the growing anti-abortion efforts to grant constitutional rights to zygotes, embryos, and fetuses. Such proposals pave the way for the prosecution of people who have abortions—an explicit policy goal of the anti-abortion “abolitionist” faction and one that’s becoming increasingly palatable among mainline “pro-life” leaders. The anti-abortion lobby calls this “equal protection” or “fetal personhood,” and it demands that pregnant people relinquish their own human right to reproductive self-determination.        

I don’t know how people use ChatGPT to write grocery lists. I don’t want a grocery list made by a computer designed to tell kids to kill themselves.

The Flytrap is thrilled to be collaborating with Bitch Media to reprint select posts from their archive, making the history of feminist cultural criticism more accessible. In that spirit, these posts will never be paywalled, but you can become a member to support them. If you’re a former Bitch writer or reader with an article you’d love to see in print again, reply to this email with the details. If you’re a reader who wants to support this work, consider subscribing!

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This article was originally published by Bitch Media on December 11, 2019.

I got a Facebook account at the age of 12. It was 2010. I had recently spent a month in Egypt, and had no other way to keep in touch with the friends I made. They lived in Egypt, Guatemala, Spain. “You need the Facebook!” they had all told me, and when I arrived back home I asked my mom if I could get “the Facebook,” so I wouldn’t lose touch with them. Initially, she said no, with an explanation I imagine to have been something like “You’re too young,” or, “It’s not safe for young girls.” When I eventually got the green light to sign up for my first taste of what we now call social media, I lied that I was born in 1989.

“The Facebook” turned out to be relatively safe for me in 2009. My middle-school friend group developed our own social order and language built on likes and groups and fan pages. We tagged one another in statuses and made our crushes jealous by leaving them out. We friended people we’d never met because our friends liked them, and we posted entire photo albums on our walls for people we barely knew to consume. We stood by for the responses of “ugh gorgissss” and the “omg im dying ur so hawt.” It seemed harmless. There weren’t any rules yet; we were making them.

Kids with phones were a newborn phenomenon, and institutions were scrambling to figure out how to control them. My middle school’s administration held a town hall about cyberbullying and internet safety. My mom told me not to talk to anyone online who I didn’t know, and that everything online is permanent. I knew not to meet up with anyone, ever. My friends and I watched Catfish, the 2010 reality-TV show which followed couples who had met online but had never met, and we laughed. We knew people could get hurt online if they were reckless enough, or unlucky enough. Nothing felt too consequential then.

The past decade was rich in sexts, and richer in its confusion and deliberation about what to do about them. In 2011, New York Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner resigned from his position after he was caught engaging in sexting with various women. This was the first time I had heard of sexting. It sounded bad, if my congressperson could be removed from his position for committing such an act. “What They’re Saying About Sexing” read the 2011 New York Times headline for a piece in which teens shared thoughts about the role of sexting in their lives. When asked “Is sexting ever O.K.?” one student answered, “It’s a way to express your feelings. If a guy and a girl are in love, instead of saying it face to face, they can say it through technology.”

Other answers were more troubling, revealing the social coercion that often targets young girls: “At my school, if you like a boy and you want to get his attention, you know what you have to do. When I was with my last boyfriend I refused to sext and I would go through his iPod and find pictures of girls’ breasts [who were from] my school.” The students were also asked if they knew that sexting under 18 is illegal. “There’s a law?” one student replied. “I didn’t know that. How would you catch somebody when everyone does it?”

We don’t know what to do about sexting because we still can’t figure out what to do about women’s sexual agency.

Elsewhere, The Atlantic tried to explain “Why Kids Sext” with a look at one sexting “scandal” that affected a Virginia county, and while the article’s answer was muddled, it did succeed in outlining the magnitude of this cultural shift: “Every time someone [the sheriff’s office] were interviewing mentioned another kid who might have naked pictures on his or her phone, they had to call that kid in for an interview. After just a couple of days, the deputies had filled multiple evidence bins with phones, and they couldn’t see an end to it.” But whatever kids themselves were saying about sexting and why they engaged in it, the act was soon the basis for cautionary tales that sent panic across parental and law-enforcement communities alike, stoked by headlines that borrowed the language of organized crime with references to “busts” and “rings.”

Teens have always had sex, and adults have always fallen prey to whipped-up scandals about it, from the crusade against sex education in the 1960s to the more recent panic about “rainbow parties.” But for those of us who were raised on the internet, sexting was inevitable. We learned to do everything else online, after all—why would sex be any different? Since the early years of sexting panic, we’ve seen something of a cultural accommodation for sexting, if only to admit that it is here to stay.

The same way we adapted to binge-watching TV shows and summoning a car on demand from our palms, sexting was normalized not because people were willing to examine and reconsider their Puritian and slut-shamey instincts, but because it became clear that fighting its existence was a losing battle. After all, accommodation did not mean sexts were uncomplicated and harmless: We’ve watched as sexually explicit messages or photos—primarily those of women and girls—have been weaponized over and over again.

This happened on a mass scale in 2014, when a 4chan user hacked into Apple’s iCloud and posted more than 500 stolen nude photos of celebrities—mostly women—to the site. Referred to as “The Fappening” or “Celebgate” by media outlets at the time, this massive breach of privacy revealed exactly what the future of women’s safety online would entail. Sex was now online, and so was sexual violence. 

Unsurprisingly, revenge porn emerged in roughly the same era as mainstream porn did. In 1976, the pornographic magazine Hustler, published by Larry Flynt, launched a monthly feature called “Beaver Hunt,” which featured reader-submitted images of naked women, often with descriptions of their hobbies, sexual fantasies, and sometimes their names. Many of these were submitted by men without the pictured woman’s permission, and would even forge consent forms to allow for print publishing; nevertheless, it was popular enough to spawn spinoff standalone issues. (Flynn also, famously, paid for and published paparazzi images of Jackie Onassis sunbathing naked.)

When digital porn and camera phones began surfacing in the following decades, the violence of revenge porn only greatened. In 2010, Hunter Moore launched IsAnyoneUp?, a website based on user-generated explicit content, which became a breeding ground for the revenge porn of abusive exes. Nude images that had once been sent to a trusted partner become a source of pain, abuse, and intimidation against women.

I remember my mom telling me, as I entered high school, never to send nude images over the internet. “Those photos are never truly gone,” she told me, “and you never know what can happen with them, even if it is someone you trust.” Far from sexually active at the time, I could barely understand why someone would send nudes in the first place. My friends and I scoffed at the unsolicited dick pics that appeared on our Snapchats and were gone within seconds. We shared an “ew” and moved on, uncomfortable but still unaware of what a violation this was—whatever we felt about the images themselves, sending them was “normal.”

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The idea of sending and posting nude images softened for many of us over time. As Instagram became an extension of our social lives and our identities, we began to see nudity online used as a celebration of self, gender, expression, and art. #FreeTheNipple took center stage online in 2015, challenging the objectification-driven censorship of women’s nipples in public spaces. Over the next couple of years, my Instagram feed became increasingly saturated with beautiful images of women I knew posing nude, sun drenching their skin through a nearby window, in an effort to desexualize themselves online.

An addiction to comments and likes made room for the body positivity, intimacy, and diversity of this reclamation of nude photos. Sending nudes to friends, in search of an “omg girl you are radiant” became common. Sexting a romantic partner, or even a more casual hookup, began lacking its previous taboo. After all the nonconsensually leaked nudes and sexual exploitation of women online, we took a different approach, seemingly in an attempt to claim autonomy in a chaotic online world. As if to say, you can’t use my own body against me if I put it online first. There was unfounded power in this, and joy too.

But not always. In October 2019, 31-year-old Congresswoman Katie Hill resigned from her position in California after naked photos taken of her without her knowledge by her abusive husband were distributed online without her consent. Although her story is not an easy or straightforward one, it’s clear that regardless of the progression of sexting as a practice, the way women are exploited online has yet to change. When nude images are nonconsensually published online, even those that were once taken knowingly or excitedly, the intentions and the empowerment of women themselves disappear. Women are stripped of their sexual autonomy; they no longer get to decide what a photo means or represents once it’s released as an emblem of her worth and respectability.

On December 2, 2019, a tweet about asking for consent before sending a sext set the internet aflame. The consent-before-sexting “script” that writer Suzannah Weiss laid out on Twitter for her followers encouraged people to preface an explicit text with a statement like: “I’ve been having some sexual thoughts about you I’d like to share over text if you’d enjoy that.” The sheer awkwardness of such phrasing became the butt of numerous jokes.

But beyond the cringiness of it, the making fun seemed to hit more deeply at a prevailing confusion surrounding sex, consent, and communication online. Namely, how do we do it right? What does proper consent look like? How do we protect both ourselves and those on the receiving end of sexts from sexual violence online in a way that still feels authentic, the way sex is supposed to? This feels ridiculous, and yet we have to wonder what the alternative is. 

I’m here to report that we still have no idea what to do about sexting, but it’s no longer primarily about the technology. We don’t know what to do about sexting because we still can’t figure out what to do about women’s sexual agency. The panic and confusion—and, ultimately, the violence—has always been about patriarchal control and suppression of women’s sexual desires, their agency, and their pleasure. When someone shares a nude sent privately with their friends, or comments “slut” on an Instagram post, or publishes their ex’s photos online, or secretly takes a video of the girl they’re having sex with, they are claiming ownership over another person’s body, choice, and sexual freedom.

Social media has upset whatever course human nature was on, and has left us in an unruly breeding ground for anonymity, public humiliation, information overload. I love it, I despise it, I grew up with it. It is inseparable from my relationships and, as hard as this is to admit, from my sense of self. There is a revolutionary (and democratic) power in social media, and women are not sleeping on its ability to foster communitiy and representation.

Women have taken to their platforms of choice to declare their bodies—clothed or unclothed—deserve sovereignty online. But as we demand better, more autonomous, and more sex-positive lives, the pushback becomes stronger. Social media can give those harboring an entrenched distrust of women who affirm their own entitlement to sex and pleasure a platform with which to enforce their iron grip. And that may be “normal,” but it’s not right.

This article was updated to include more up-to-date references, dates, and statistics.

Noa Azulai is a writer and Webby Award-winning producer based in Brooklyn, where they were born and raised. Their work has appeared in Vice, Bitch Magazine, and Vox. They currently run programming at Jewish Currents.

Does your partner:

☐ Control where you go and who you see?
☐ Monitor your communications and movements? 
☐ Threaten you with separation from your children?
☐ Use their authority over you to demand sexual favors?
☐ Touch you without consent when you're vulnerable or naked?
☐ Deny you medical care as punishment?
☐ Isolate you from support systems when you complain?
☐ Tell you no one will believe you if you report the abuse?
☐ Make you feel like you have no choice but to comply?

If you checked even one box, domestic violence organizations will tell you that you are experiencing intimate partner violence. They'll offer you connections to organizations, access to shelters, help with safety planning, and even legal assistance or help filing a restraining order. They'll tell you that you deserve safety, dignity, and freedom from abuse.

Unless you're in prison. Then they'll tell you nothing at all.

I'm writing this from inside a women's prison, where every single behavior indicating intimate partner violence happens daily. Not from intimate partners, but from the mostly male staff paid by the state to "supervise" us. In my case, there’s a corrections officer who watches me shower. A guard who promises to help with my parole if I "cooperate." Let’s not forget the lieutenant who puts me in solitary when I file a grievance, and the warden who tells investigators I'm lying because I'm an “inmate” and inmates always lie.

Attorney and organizer Andrea Ritchie, author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, has spent decades documenting how systems that purport to protect women are actually sites of gendered violence. She argues that the criminal legal system doesn't interrupt gender violence, but rather extends it, concentrates it, and hides it behind prison walls where it disappears from public view. We are some of society's most vulnerable women. We have no ability to leave our abusers. We cannot access a hotline to call. We cannot seek a restraining order against the person who holds the keys to our cell. We cannot flee to a shelter. We cannot ask our families for help without our calls being recorded. We cannot hire attorneys without money we cannot earn. We cannot go to the police because the police are our abusers.

Professor Beth Richie, whose groundbreaking work, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation, examines the convergence of gender violence and mass incarceration, emphasizing that women who experience violence in their intimate relationships are often funneled into carceral systems where they then experience state-sanctioned violence. According to the Survivor Justice Initiative, up to 95% of women incarcerated in American prisons have experienced domestic or sexual violence at some point in their lifetime. The government’s own data shows that widespread sexual abuse of women continues to plague prisons. 

For women in prison, one abuser is replaced with another. The U.S. calls this “justice.”  

The exclusion of incarcerated women from protection has nothing to do with crime or justice. It's about power and expendability. Incarcerated women are disproportionately poor, Black, Indigenous, and Latina. We're the women society has always found easiest to ignore and abandon.

Who has permission to enact violence? 

Let me tell you what it's like to live in state-sanctioned, gender-based violence. 

In prison, we wake up when male guards tell us to. We wear what they tell us to wear. We eat what they give us, when they decide to give it. We go where they permit, speak when they allow, and exist under their constant surveillance. Our bodies belong to the state. Our movements are controlled. Our communications are monitored. They have the power to deny or delay our medical care, and our complaints go ignored or punished. 

And like survivors on the outside, we learn to comply. We smile at guards who make sexual comments because angering them means losing phone privileges, being written up, or getting sent to solitary. We don't report assaults because we don’t want retaliation. We don't fight back because fighting back means more time. We intuitively learn the survival skills that domestic violence organizations inform the public about: appeasement, hypervigilance, strategic submission. We read our abusers' moods. We make ourselves small. We avoid triggering their anger. We protect ourselves by surrendering autonomy. We become perfectly obedient victims of intimate partner violence, except the violence is legal and the abusers wear badges.

It only makes it worse that we have been abandoned by advocates on the outside. 

Movements supporting survivors have every tool at their disposal to help us. They have lawyers, advocates, funding, political access, and media platforms. They have successfully lobbied for laws, changed policies, and shifted public consciousness. They know how to fight systems that enable abuse. They just choose not to fight for us.

In the context of feminist movements, this should sound familiar. White suffragists explicitly excluded Black women, arguing that Black women's inclusion would hurt their cause. Black women were effectively told to wait their turn. To be patient. To understand that the movement couldn't take on everything at once. But later never came, so Black women built their own movement. 

Now the anti-violence movement repeats the same betrayal. In 2022, Black people made up 12% of the total population, yet they accounted for 26% of people in jail and Black women continue to be incarcerated at 1.6x the rate of white women. But movements supporting survivors have decided that incarcerated women are too controversial, complicated, and unsympathetic to support. 

Professor Leigh Goodmark, author of Decriminalizing Domestic Violence, articulates that the system doesn't want to eliminate violence against women. Rather, the system wants to determine who has permission to enact that violence. When the state does it, we call it corrections. The system needs us to accept this violence as a normal consequence of our incarceration. Because if we recognized it as abuse, if we named it as intimate partner violence enacted by the state, the entire facade of the criminal legal system as “public safety” would collapse.

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Gender-Based Violence Behind Bars 

There are many recent examples of what state-sanctioned gender-based violence looks like in practice. 

For example, the women’s Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Dublin, California, was known to have a “rape club.” After a years-long investigation beginning in 2021, a total of 10 men—including the prison’s warden and chaplain—have been charged for sexually abusing incarcerated women.

The abuse at FCI Dublin wasn’t a case of just a few bad apples. According to the Department of Justice, the abuse was systemic, known to supervisors, and ignored by oversight agencies. Women repeatedly reported sexual assault. They filed grievances. They told inspectors. Nothing happened until journalists and advocates forced public attention years later.

The same pattern played out at Alabama’s Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, where in 2014 the Department of Justice exposed how the facility’s sexual abuse by staff was among the worst of any facility anywhere in the nation. At Florida’s Lowell Correctional Institution, dozens of staff members were arrested for sexual abuse. The list goes on and on—and minors in juvenile detention are not spared. 

This abuse isn't new. It's been happening since women's prisons were created. Male staff have always had unfettered access to women's bodies, and women in custody have no power to stop them. Part of the problem is that incarcerated women are not covered by laws created to protect survivors. 

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), first passed in 1994, revolutionized the response to domestic violence. The federal law provides funding and resources to federal, tribal, state, and local groups supporting survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking. 

But VAWA has done almost nothing for incarcerated women.

VAWA funneled billions of dollars into the criminal legal system to address gender-based violence outside prison while completely ignoring gender-based violence experienced by incarcerated women. It funded police and prosecutors to arrest abusers while the same agencies overseeing this work employed guards who sexually assault incarcerated women. It provided housing assistance for survivors fleeing violence while offering no protection for women trapped in violent prisons. While VAWA was reauthorized in 2022 and expanded to include women in federal prisons, a majority of women incarcerated in the U.S. are held in local jails and state prisons. 

Beth Richie's research documents what she calls criminalized survivors: women who experienced intimate partner violence and were then prosecuted for defending themselves, for crimes committed under coercion, or for circumstances connected to their abuse. These women are forced to move from one system of violence into another.

Criminalized survivors represent the complete failure of the carceral approach to gender-based violence. But still, many argue that incarcerated women are different; that we broke the law; that we're in prison for a reason; and that protecting “criminals” from abuse will somehow encourage more crime or disrespect victims.

These arguments are morally bankrupt and deliberately misleading. Not only are most incarcerated women also survivors, even if you have committed a serious crime or harmed others, your punishment is the loss of liberty. It is not sexual assault, and it does not grant prison guards permission to abuse their power. And it is certainly not authorization for the state to enact violence against you. The ability to stop the abuse you experience should not be a privilege contingent on perfect behavior. But for incarcerated women, our past actions and convictions somehow make us unworthy of even basic protections.

When we accept that certain women can be abused because of their past actions, we fundamentally undermine the belief that gender-based violence is wrong. It also means we’re not actually opposed to violence against women. We're just opposed to violence against the women we consider deserving of protection. Our exclusion from protection has nothing to do with crime or justice. It's about power and expendability. Incarcerated women are disproportionately poor, Black, Indigenous, and Latina. We're the women society has always found easiest to ignore and abandon.

The work of law professor Leigh Goodmark emphasizes that carceral solutions require us to ignore incarcerated women. Acknowledging that prisons are sites of gender-based violence would undermine the narrative that criminalization keeps women safe. 

When we tolerate sexual assault in women's prisons, we signal that the state can commit violence against people without consequences. When we ignore the abuse of incarcerated women, we establish that certain populations are outside the realm of human rights. When we accept that imprisoned women have no protection from predatory staff, we are also excusing state violence against immigrants and anyone deemed "criminal," "illegal," or "other." The connection is direct and intentional. Mass incarceration and immigrant detention are one in the same, and these systems rely on dehumanization. Both require public compliance through fear. Both normalize violence as a tool of state control.

Sojourner Truth demanded to know why a movement that claimed to fight for women would exclude her. "Ain't I a woman?" she asked. I'm now asking the same question.

The goal is to make us all precomply, and to make us obedient because we are scared. State forces have conditioned society to accept increasing levels of state-sanctioned violence by first targeting the most vulnerable and then expanding the population in its crosshairs. 

This is likely why so many white Americans are shocked to see federal immigration agents gun down white American citizens in Minneapolis, even though federal agents shot and killed a Mexican immigrant in Chicago weeks prior. Incarcerated women were the canary in the coal mine, but society accepted the violence we experience. Women's organizations ignored it and politicians permitted it, making it clear to the state that it could expand its violence with impunity. 

I have been thinking a lot about the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who spoke at a women's rights convention in 1851 and argued for equal rights for Black women, demolishing the idea that women's rights could be parceled out based on race. She demanded to know why a movement that claimed to fight for women would exclude her. "Ain't I a woman?" she asked. 

I'm now asking the same question.

When a corrections officer sexually assaults me, ain't that intimate partner violence? When a guard uses his authority to coerce me, ain't that abuse of power? When the state denies me protection from violence, ain't I a woman who deserves safety? When I comply out of fear, when I'm silenced by threats, when I'm told no one will believe me, when I'm isolated from support, ain't I experiencing domestic violence?

The violence we experience inside is not a different or separate kind of violence. It is gender-based violence, and it's enabled by your silence. So let me ask again: Ain't I a woman? And if I am, then where are you? 

This piece was edited by Tina Vasquez and copyedited by Nicole Froio.

Kwaneta Harris is a former nurse, business owner, and expat, now an incarcerated journalist. To hear more from Kwaneta, you can follow her on Bluesky and Instagram, or subscribe to her Substack. 

The Flytrap is thrilled to be collaborating with Bitch Media to reprint select posts from their archive, making the history of feminist cultural criticism more accessible. In that spirit, these posts will never be paywalled, but you can become a member to support them. If you’re a former Bitch writer or reader with an article you’d love to see in print again, reply to this email with the details. If you’re a reader who wants to support this work, consider subscribing!

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This story was originally published by Bitch Media on January 12, 2021.

Even before social media became a place to embolden conspiracy theories, people have been underestimating what disabled people are able to accomplish. I grew up with hearing loss, so my peers made fun of me because I couldn’t hear their whispers, and adults questioned whether I should take foreign language classes with my classmates because they doubted my abilities and my intelligence.

As a result, I didn’t have a lot of drive in elementary school because I didn’t think I was capable of achieving much—until I learned about Helen Keller, a DeafBlind disability rights activist, author, and original member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Keller taught me that I could resist the urge to be invisible; instead, I could be just as accomplished as my nondisabled classmates. I am now fluent in French—despite some people believing I couldn’t learn a second spoken language. Some of the naysayers who doubted me now only acknowledge that I can fluently speak French—not the work that went into making it possible.

Unfortunately, a bizarre early pandemic TikTok trend erased Keller—and spread the lie that she never existed to begin with. In May 2020, TikTok user @alleyesonharshita posted under the hashtag #HelenKellerWasntReal to provide “evidence” that Keller wasn’t a real woman. In the now-deleted TikTok, @alleyesonharshita said that Keller couldn’t have written an autobiography because she was blind.

The idea soon caught on: Another user, @ansleylbone_, posted a video captioned, “Helen Keller is a fraud and I stand by that” with Doja Cat’s 2019 song, “Say So,” playing in the background. A September 2020 TikTok from @vanillaapricot showing her pretending to be Keller and being caught saying hi to a gardener has 1.9 million likes. These TikTok questions are erroneously declaring that Keller couldn’t possibly have achieved all she did in her lifetime. How could she have done so much as a DeafBlind person? Is it possible?

Even when disabled people are supposedly being celebrated online, it often amounts to little more than inspiration porn.

When considering Keller’s legacy, it’s crucial to examine the full story of her life: Born in 1880, she became deaf and blind at 19 months due to an illness. Her teacher, Anne Sullivan, who joined the Keller family when Helen was seven, taught her how to read, speak, and write—though it’s a myth that Keller “couldn’t communicate” prior to working with Sullivan. Thanks to the tools she learned from Sullivan, Keller became the first recorded DeafBlind person to receive a bachelor of arts degree.

She also wrote numerous books and became involved in myriad social justice issues, including supporting the NAACP and cofounding the ACLU. Keller was an exceptional, accomplished person—not because she was DeafBlind, but because of what she achieved. However, there are still stains on her legacy that should be discussed. For a brief period of time, Keller supported the eugenics movement, which viewed her fellow disabled people as inferior members of the human race. Still, she showed that it’s possible for disabled people, myself included, not to conform to other people’s ableist notions of what disabled people could accomplish.

Though I was disappointed when I first learned about the conspiracy theory about Keller being a fictional character rather than a real woman, I wasn’t shocked. Outside of the rampant misinformation about Keller’s life, social media posts about her tend to be ableist, poking fun at her blindness. Even on Twitter, accounts like @HAKisfake and @HoaxHellen purport that Keller “deceived us,” and entire Reddit threads call her existence and her accomplishments into question.

Ableism is embedded in social media itself: There has been an increase in the online harassment of disabled people in recent years, and there’s still a lot to be done to make the platforms themselves more accessible. In 2019, The Verge reported that TikTok limited the reach of disabled creators allegedly to “protect users with a high risk of bullying.” Though TikTok has allegedly stopped this practice, the platform received immense backlash for using its algorithm to discriminate against disabled people.

If TikTok wanted to help its disabled users, it would have limited the reach of users spreading the lie that Keller could have never accomplished what she did rather than silencing disabled creators. Even when disabled people are supposedly being celebrated online, it often amounts to little more than inspiration porn, with several viral videos showing disabled people simply living their lives.

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Take, for instance, the brand of popular videos that shows babies reacting to wearing cochlear implants for the first time. They’re intended to make viewers feel good, but disability shouldn’t serve as a form of entertainment, especially without a person’s consent. Rather than our accomplishments or our humanity being centered, we’re dehumanized and objectified. All this leads to the false perception that disabled people have limitations or that we’re incapable of accomplishing our goals without the aid of nondisabled people.

Here’s the reality: Disabled people don’t base their lives on the notions nondisabled people have about us. The perception that nondisabled people have of disabled people’s abilities can lead to the erasure of disability in some instances, which undermines the impact disability has on people’s lives. For example, it’s impossible to write a piece about Frida Kahlo’s artwork without mentioning how her disability both inspired and impacted her physical movement.

In order to stop this conspiracy theory about Keller and others that will spring up about other disabled people, we must dismantle stereotypes about disabled people in their entirety. These stereotypes directly play into why this kind of conspiracy has been able to fester without much pushback. Keller was the only disabled person I was taught about in elementary school, and even then, we were limited to basic facts about her life. Learning about one token disabled person is not going to teach kids about how passionate, hardworking, and great the disability community can be, if the culture of doubt about what disabled people are capable of is so great that nondisabled people would rather imagine that we simply don’t exist.

Julia Métraux is Mother Jones’ disability reporter.