In contemporary feminist discourse, a figure has emerged whose influence is both subtle and insidious: the SWELF, the Sex Worker Excluding Liberal Feminist. These actors are not directly violent, but they operate as ideological gatekeepers, curating a vision of sex work that is safe, glossy, platformed, and utterly depoliticized. They celebrate the aestheticized labor of the privileged—OnlyFans creators, influencer-adjacent performers, the visible, the monetizable—and declare it empowerment, autonomy, liberation. Meanwhile, the material majority—the coerced, the survival-driven, the trafficked, the trauma-impacted—is rendered invisible, delegitimized, and rhetorically erased. The SWELF flattens complexity into a binary of choice versus oppression, creating an epistemic regime in which only the experiences that conform to their sanitized vision are intelligible within feminist discourse.

The material realities underlying this erasure are stark, well-documented, and devastating. Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is massively overrepresented among sex workers, particularly at the street and trafficking levels, with studies reporting that 65–95% of women in street prostitution have CSA histories, 75% of sex-traded women in Canada have experienced prior abuse, and sexual trauma is among the strongest predictors of minor exploitation (Farley et al., 1998; Nixon et al., 2002; Cole et al., 2016). Multiple mechanisms account for this overrepresentation: broken boundaries that normalize exploitation, poverty and homelessness driving survival sex, disrupted education and labor opportunities narrowing life options, targeted grooming by pimps and traffickers, and coping or repetition strategies – dissociation, reenactment, or the illusion of choice – that structure engagement. For a substantial portion of women in the sex trade, participation is survival, not empowerment; the choice discourse propagated by SWELFs masks this reality.

SWELFs act as glossed-over intermediaries between feminist discourse and the material exploitation of women. They police narratives, dismiss survivors as anecdotal or ideologically inconvenient, and co-opt feminist language to sanitize the appearance of empowerment. Phrases such as “you’re just a minority voice,” “that’s not representative,” or “you sound SWERF-y” serve as rhetorical blunt instruments, shoring up ideological boundaries while erasing lived experience. They produce a system in which coercion, poverty, trauma, and systemic marginalization are invisible, subordinated to the aesthetic of autonomy. By flattening materiality into a discourse of choice, SWELFs do not directly exploit, but they reproduce the structural conditions under which exploitation thrives—they supply the ideological scaffolding for the very labor conditions they claim to celebrate.

The absurdity of SWELFs reaches its apex when these so-called feminists – mostly privileged, platformed, and often never themselves engaged in sex work – accuse actual survivors or former sex workers of being SWERFs (“sex work exclusionary radical feminists“). Here, the ideological inversion becomes grotesque: those who have endured coercion, poverty, trafficking, or survival sex are branded as exclusionary, while those whose labor is safe, aestheticized, and voluntary dictate the terms of legitimacy. This is not merely rhetorical cruelty; it is the culmination of the SWELF’s epistemic project, the point at which ideology displaces material reality entirely. Survivors’ voices, grounded in lived experience, are recast as suspect or ideologically impure, while the discourse of empowerment is monopolized by women who have never confronted the structural conditions that define the vast majority of sex work. The result is an inversion of accountability: the materially and experientially marginalized are disciplined for speaking truth, while the privileged curate the narrative and define feminist legitimacy.

While the immediate violence of pimps, traffickers, and buyers is irrefutable, SWELFs contribute to the reproduction of that violence by legitimizing a selective, depoliticized version of empowerment. They sanitize, aestheticize, and normalize forms of exploitation while disavowing the systemic conditions that make survival sex necessary.

In this reading, the SWELF is an ideological enabler, not the primary exploiter. They craft the narrative, polices feminist discourse, and render structural coercion , thus reinforcing patriarchal capitalism’s capacity to extract labor from women.