Pornography

Feminists take multiple sides in the pornography debate: Some say pornography is harmful, leading to male sexual aggression or violence, while others argue that it can be empowering in a sex-negative culture. Ultimately, the pornography industry should be non-coercive and safe for all people involved.

Never Surrender: Empowered Wives Were Never the Problem

PUBLISHED 7/31/2026 by

Over the past year, several women-focused articles in the New York Times declared feminism has gone too far, and put the onus on women to fix what is broken.

An article asking if liberal feminism “ruined the workplace” broke the internet late last year.

An article last month featured a conversation with influential, right-wing columnist Louise Perry, about how women need to change, in order to close the growing gap between men and women. Perry’s position justifies re‑inscribing patriarchal control over women’s bodies and sexuality in the name of “protecting” us.

I feel a familiar sense of disappointment in the recent feature, “Women Are Too Controlling, She Wrote. Her Message Still Resonates,” about Laura Doyle, author of The Surrendered Wife, a 2001 self‑help book and the basis for a relationship “movement” that teaches women to relinquish control in their marriages, defer to their husbands’ decisions (including finances), and focus on their own “self‑care” and gratitude to restore intimacy and harmony.

Each article asks a version of the same question: How should women change?

Doyle’s message and the broader “surrendered wife” ideology, is troubling.

What struck me even more was that one of the country’s most influential newspapers presented it as a growing cultural trend, without examining the cultural forces and gender expectations that have long reinforced this ideology.

Women and feminism don’t need to surrender. They were never the problem.    

The Curious Case of Afong Moy: Asian Womanhood and National Belonging In the U.S. 

PUBLISHED 4/6/2026 by

The Asian woman in America has long been both overnamed and erased—reduced to stereotypes that obscure her humanity while fixating on her image.

In Afong Moy, a teenage girl exhibited across the U.S. as “The Chinese Lady,” we see how fascination and domination intertwine: her body staged as spectacle, her silence misread as passivity, her personhood collapsed into an object for public consumption.

That same logic shaped the law. From Chy Lung v. Freeman to the Page Act of 1875, Asian women were treated as presumptively immoral, their bodies scrutinized and excluded based on racialized assumptions.

What began as spectacle hardened into policy—ensuring that Asian women’s belonging in America has never been fully granted, only contested.

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

We Need a Word for What’s Happening to Jewish Women

PUBLISHED 3/27/2026 by

Ever since I’ve been writing about slut-shaming, I’ve been called a slut and a whore.

In the 1990s, the age of doorstopper phone books (the kind with white pages and yellow pages), I received alarming letters delivered to my mailbox. In the early 2000s, the letters morphed into emails. And when I began posting on Instagram, the insults followed me there, too.

Over three decades, the insults were consistent: I was called various synonyms for prostitute and vagina, and an ugly pedophile for good measure. The hatred was misogyny—targeted, specific and designed to put me back in my place.

Then Hamas brutally attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel retaliated in a devastating war in Gaza. The insults changed. I am no longer a regular slut and a whore; I am a “Jewish whore,” a “chosenite supporting the porn industry,” and a “whore” whom everyone could agree was bad apart from “tribes who hate Jesus.” 

I call it “misogynam” (mih-SAH-jih-NAHM)—the intertwined violence of anti-Semitism and misogyny directed at Jewish women.

The Missing Voices in the Epstein Files’ Media Commentary: Sexual Assault Prevention Educators

PUBLISHED 2/19/2026 by

The Epstein files scandal has all the elements of a gigantic media spectacle. It encompasses everything from true crime to political intrigue, and offers a peak behind closed doors into the lifestyles of the rich and famous. It has more than a little sex and violence. 

It’s a conspiracy theory come to life.

Media commentary has explored seemingly every angle. Or has it? On closer examination, something has been missing.

Misogyny, Racism, Power: Connecting the Dots in the Violent Far Right

PUBLISHED 12/6/2025 by | UPDATED 1/23/2026 at 10:47 A.M. PT

In Part 2 of the Q&A between Jackson Katz and Cynthia Miller-Idriss, the author of Man Up discusses the link of misogynists and mass shooters: “The fact that so many domestically violent extremist attacks have both gendered and racialized dimensions shows that racism and misogyny are inseparable in the minds of many perpetrators.”

Miller-Idriss explains the key role online gaming and chat spaces play within the radicalization of young men and boys.

Misogyny is no doubt threaded through nearly ever mass shooting, and feminists are used as a scapegoat for taking away men’s opportunities.

Sex, Power and Impunity: Epstein’s Legacy in Historical Perspective

PUBLISHED 12/3/2025 by

The scandal that has preoccupied much of mainstream U.S. politics has, been, at one level, delightful: We have seen extremist Republicans—Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Thomas Massie and Nancy Mace—break with their party and its president in an effort to force into light the U.S. Department of Justice files on convicted sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. 

The story is almost irresistible for critics of the current national administration, feminists among them: Will we finally get to items from Epstein like the CD labeled “girl pics nude book 4”? What might these materials reveal? And whose misbehavior might they reveal?  

Fire the starting gun on analyses from every liberal, left, critical corner. Claims abound of shifting coalitions, changing tides, pages turned, a president’s authority shredded. 

But there are still as many questions stirring in the Epstein pot as there are answers. Why did these particular Republicans break from the pack? Is this a contemporary Republican version of feminism? 

And beneath them all: What good does it actually do us—or Epstein’s particular victims, or the scads of other victims of sexual coercion, trafficking and other mistreatment—to raise the heat so high on this particular scandal?

What Boys Learn When Powerful Men Face No Consequences

PUBLISHED 11/21/2025 by

For decades, Donald Trump has modeled a version of masculinity rooted in entitlement, impunity and the casual degradation of women—and he has done so from one of the most visible platforms on Earth. That visibility matters. When the most powerful man in the country repeatedly evades consequences for misogynous acts, it sends a potent cultural message to boys and young men about what manhood looks like and what women’s lives are worth.

This is why the stakes of the Epstein files extend far beyond Trump’s personal exposure. His ability—or inability—to finally face accountability is inseparable from the broader crisis of male socialization and the normalization of men’s violence against women.

At the same time, focusing solely on Trump risks missing the larger system that made Jeffrey Epstein’s predation possible. As feminists have long argued, these abuses were not aberrations but expressions of a patriarchal network that exploited girls and women with impunity. The Epstein saga is not simply a story of individual bad actors; it is an indictment of the cultural, financial and political institutions that protected them. Whether the public and political leaders confront that reality—or once again look away—will reveal as much about our collective values as it does about the men at the center of this scandal.

Virginia Giuffre’s Posthumous Memoir Is an Indictment of the Men and Institutions That Enabled Her Abuse

PUBLISHED 11/20/2025 by

I thought I was mentally prepared to read Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s posthumous book, Nobody’s Girl. I was wrong. If reading the book was gut-wrenching, I can’t imagine what it was like for her and other girls and women who experience the horrors of being trafficked.

In the final paragraph of the book, and perhaps in some of the final sentences she ever wrote, Giuffre tells that she will have achieved her goal with Nobody’s Girl if “just one person” is moved to create “a world in which predators are punished, not protected; victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as everybody else.”

Although she never lived to see this day, her book, her courage and her rage compel us to fight for this goal in the name of all victims and survivors of sex trafficking. 

Actually It’s Good That Fewer High Schoolers Want to Get Married

PUBLISHED 11/20/2025 by

High schoolers, and especially high school girls, are less likely than ever to say that they want to get married someday, according to new research from Pew Research Center. While boys have stayed fairly stable in how many of them say they want to marry, girls have gone from overwhelmingly wanting marriage to being even less likely than boys to want to wed.

Conservative groups and writers have met this new survey with some panic. If 12th graders don’t want to get married, I guess the logic goes, then they won’t get married, and America’s declining rates of marriage and childbearing will continue and will eventually destroy society. To them, this new survey indicates a broader social shift away from marriage and childbearing, which is bad, because in their view, the nuclear family is the good and necessary backbone of any moral and functional culture. 

But actually, it’s great that far fewer high school girls are even thinking about marriage.

The teenage girls who are thinking about their weekends instead of their weddings? They’re doing something right. 

America Is an Increasingly Dangerous Place for Women and Girls 

PUBLISHED 10/17/2025 by

In America’s hyper-macho, gun-drenched culture, growing up female has never been safe. But under the Trump administration, America is becoming a much more dangerous place for women and girls.

America is dangerous for women and girls because our leaders choose to make it so. The Trump administration has already begun blocking access to abortion and Medicaid coverage for reproductive health, as well as targeting the rights of pregnant people within the 2023 Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Already, the macho culture of the U.S. has steadily made women’s safety in the nation decline. Around 41 percent of women in the U.S. have experienced sexual violence, while a third of women reported severe assault by a husband or boyfriend. The normalization of gun violence and violent pornography have also run rampant across the country, making America more dangerous day by day.