OnlyFans is the same as any other porn platform or brothel: it enables a small minority of mostly men to get rich from the exploitation of women. What’s remarkable, though, is not that another business is making money from sexism, but that so few progressives are interested in criticising it. 
The leftist magazine Jacobin, for example, ran an article in 2021 about the site, much of which reads like an OnlyFans infomercial. It argues against measures to ensure that people appearing in adult content videos are doing so consensually and makes no mention of OnlyFans’ role in manufacturing misogyny and sexism. An <a href="https://www.queermajority.com/essays-all/critique-of-the-swerf-on-feminism-and-sex-work">article</a>
written for Queer Majority magazine likewise defends sex work as providing “many with the means of caring for themselves and facilitating the freedom to make their own decisions”. But there is nothing to defend, and certainly nothing progressive about OnlyFans nor the industry it is part of. 
For the uninitiated, OnlyFans is a subscription-based DIY porn site which exploded into the mainstream during the COVID-19 pandemic. As people spent more time at home and on their phones on Instagram and TikTok, and men were no longer able to access brothels and strip clubs, OnlyFans became a convenient substitute. In 2020, it was estimated there were over a million content creators on the platform; now that number has swelled to <a href="https://www.economist.com/business/2025/06/24/how-onlyfans-transformed-porn">around 4 million</a>. The company, which is currently owned by billionaire Leonid Radvinsky and is reportedly for sale, is estimated to be worth anything between $8 billion and $28 billion. 
The rise of OnlyFans is part of the wider normalisation of pornography and its increasing accessibility. Violent and degrading treatment of women in much of this material is widespread: one <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20980228/">landmark study</a> of 300 popular porn videos found that nearly 90 percent of them featured physical aggression towards women. This has real world implications. As Sophie Gilbert, author of Girl on Girl, argues, “inevitably, these kinds of behaviours [filter] out, leading to demonstrable changes in how people [are] having sex in their own lives. A 2019 study found that 38 percent of British women under 40 reported having experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during sex”. 
OnlyFans content is contributing to the normalisation and spread of harmful sexual practices, partly because in order to attract more “subs”, creators are pushed to create more shocking and sensational content. This content helps creators increase their market share and make more money, but also usually involves more misogynistic content. This is the logic of market competition, and, as in every other area, the market is willing to do anything for money. This includes the sexualisation of children or the promotion of paedophilic fantasies—many OnlyFans content creators act in “childlike” ways to attract viewers or dress in school uniforms or other children’s clothing. These practices are lucrative business opportunities for OnlyFans creators and bosses, which is much more important than the fact that the real-world sexualisation of children destroys untold numbers of lives. 
It seems like a no-brainer that progressives who oppose sexism should recognise the viciously sexist nature of sites like OnlyFans and the porn industry in general. So why is it that when you Google “OnlyFans sexism”, the majority of articles that are critical are from conservatives on the Christian right or radical feminists, who are mostly not associated with the radical left.
There are myriad reasons why the left has been reluctant to take up the issue of porn and the sex industry. One is the hangover of the debates about pornography that took place in the 1970s and ’80s. Then, the debate was between the libertarians, who were for no intervention, censorship or restrictions, and those who, like the radical feminists, teamed up with conservatives to campaign for the state to intervene to restrict the import and availability of pornography. In response to this unholy alliance, much of the left sided with the former, seeing “censorship” and “prudishness” as the greater evil.
This camp championed “choice” for women, and argued that people who were hostile to things such as BDSM, fetish, sex work and the porn industry as sexist were reactionaries who shamed women and men who were just acting out their sexual desires in consensual ways.
These positions were more defensible at the time than they are now. Opposition to the state exercising more control over people’s lives, for example, was and continues to be a legitimate concern for the left. Another valid concern was that state repression and censorship would be used by reactionaries to target the LGBTI community, and that gay porn and erotica would end up banned rather than sexist and misogynistic content. Yet another was the assumption that the main issue facing women was their being siloed off into a domestic, motherly stereotype and having their sexuality denied in the process, which more repression would reinforce. 
The explosion of the sex industry since these debates several decades ago has shown these concerns to be largely erroneous, and that the intensification of sexism, not some sort of sexual liberation, has been the most important upshot and social negative of the normalisation of porn. The legacy of progressives having a one-sided approach to these questions historically is now reflected in a widespread acceptance of the sex industry and downplaying of the sexism inherent in it. 
Progressive-sounding justifications for the sex industry are now commonplace among much of the left. One of these is that porn, the sex industry and kink are OK if they take place between consenting adults. But the oppressed consenting to degrading and dehumanising practices doesn’t make them OK or any less oppressive; it just indicates an acceptance of aspects of oppression.
A focus on consent and the subjective attitudes of participants also doesn’t address the wider social ramifications of the sex industry and its offshoots, or the question of how and why people come to find dynamics of power and violence sexually gratifying. These are important considerations for anyone interested in challenging sexism and uniting the working class to smash oppression and liberate the oppressed.
Another justification is that it is prudish or “<a href="https://partisanmagazine.org/2025/07/03/womans-worst-friend/">busybody</a>”ish to interrogate the ways that women’s oppression is expressed and reinforced in the porn and sex industry. It has become taboo to address the issue, and doing so brings with it the risk of being labelled anti-sex. But there is nothing necessarily left wing, liberating or empowering about sex, and sex has and is used as a means of abuse in epidemic proportions. How sexuality is expressed is also closely linked to how women and men relate to each other, and navigate the systematic social inequality that invariably colours their relationships. So sex has to be understood in its social context, not just blindly championed. 
But it’s even worse than that. Many progressives now see sex work as not just a better alternative to prudery, but proactively empowering. They argue that it is the stigma that makes it a problem, not the inherent sexism, and that removing the stigma is desirable so that women can be better exploited without social disapproval. We shouldn’t critique the industry, in other words; we should promote and normalise it. 
Obviously, women in the industry should not be demonised, attacked or criminalised. But at the same time, an industry that relies on the eroticisation of non-consensual sex and dehumanised attitudes towards women should legitimately be stigmatised. Its existence has terrible consequences for women and men, and the dynamics between them. Porn and sex work creates a society that is increasingly sexist and tolerant of sexist attitudes and behaviour, which is a profoundly reactionary development. 
The sex industry bosses and promoters have done a lot of work to sanitise the image of porn and sex work. In her book Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self, Kajsa Ekis Ekman explores the way this happened over the last few decades. One of the things she points to is the way that the act of sex and the men who are buying sex are never mentioned in accounts of the sex industry written to portray it in a positive light. Discussing an article written by a defender of the sex industry, she writes, “If we didn’t know better, we might think prostitution was a strictly female affair. There is hardly a single word about men”. By not discussing the men, we don’t have to imagine the disgusting men who objectify women by masturbating to images of them, or purchase them for sex. 
One agency that manages OnlyFans accounts argued against stigmatising the agencies! “Part of the problem is not accepting sex work as work. This mainly affects the cis women and the LGBTQ+ community, who are often the target of nasty comments and vitriol from those who don’t understand the freedom gained from their sexual liberation.” This is a particularly galling example of a business using progressive language to defend their business model. Agencies, as well as the men who purchase sex, should experience social stigma. Not because sex is something that people should be ashamed of, but because these agencies and men are engaging in sexist, abusive and exploitative behaviours.
The reality of sex work and platforms such as OnlyFans is that they have nothing to do with empowerment and everything to do with a pro-capitalist ideology, summed up by “hustle culture”. According to those on the “grindset”, if you’re not making money via your social media, your body, your house, your car or your ability to do jobs in your spare time, you are failing. For women, the rationale to sell sex online is that if they are going to have sex anyway, they may as well profit from it. Everything is a potential transaction. As it was put in the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/lily-phillips-outrage-porn-100-men/681032/">Atlantic</a>, “it’s considered better to monetize your objectification than endure it without compensation”. The sort of mentality this promotes is directly at odds with the ethos of the workers’ movement, which is that our work is collective and interdependent, as are our incomes and standard of life. This is the material reality that unites workers and many of the oppressed. Seeing ourselves as one-person small businesses runs directly counter to that. 
Some women may earn large amounts of money engaging in OnlyFans, but this is not empowerment. Empowerment would mean liberation. That does not mean men having the right to sex or to women’s bodies. We need to fight for a society where women are not systematically oppressed, where they’re not constantly objectified and treated as sex objects. It’s clear that OnlyFans is nothing but a reactionary capitalist industry—it should be a no-brainer for the left to grasp that and to be confident to argue to smash it.

Anneke Demanuele

Why does OnlyFans have so few critics on the left?

These days, the usual refrain when it comes to women working topless in bars, in the sex industry or otherwise being sexually objectified at work, is that it’s about a woman’s right to choose this treatment and that it can even be a sign of empowerment. The increasingly extreme objectification of women and the normalisation of violent sexual practices, far from being condemned, are increasingly apologised for, even by supposed anti-sexists, as women “<a href="https://www.theage.com.au/culture/music/sabrina-carpenter-s-new-album-cover-has-sparked-uproar-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-20250612-p5m6up.html">taking ownership</a>” and being “active agents” in their sexual life, or savvy entrepreneurs. 
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was a different story. Many young adults had had some experience of fighting to win women’s rights against hostile authorities, or of confronting other social injustices. They were also much more likely to be members of a union—the rate of union membership was much higher than today, and more workers had some experience of industrial action. This demonstrated in practice to many the importance of unity and solidarity, and gave workers a sense of their own power to shape and change the society around them. There was an understanding that something practical could be done about social or economic injustices, and that they weren’t simply moral concerns. This applied to the discriminatory treatment faced by women and included the sexualisation they were subject to in the workplace. 
A particular battleground was the hospitality industry. Denis Evans was a militant and organiser in the industry and recently spoke to Red Flag about this campaign. After doing a variety of jobs, Evans became a shop steward at a winery, after which, around 1969, he went to work at the Carlton and United Brewery in Melbourne. It was there that he “soon learned the benefits of militant union action”. 
Between 1975 and 1982, Denis worked as an organiser with the Liquor Trades Union (now United Workers Union). In 1979, the union faced a new scourge—a management push to have more women bar workers and wait staff working topless. As soon as it was notified of this development by some of the bar workers, the union took up the fight. 
The union’s women and men organisers had worked in the hotels before becoming organisers and knew immediately what this would mean for working conditions and occupational health and safety. Denis recalls that the feeling was “someone had to stop it”, or the exploitative practice would only spread. Women who refused to comply with management’s demand to work topless and who objected to working alongside topless co-workers were sacked and quickly replaced by women brought in by the criminal-run employment agencies. 
It was going to take a serious union campaign to defeat the power of the hotel industry, known at the time for its strong criminal links. As Denis explains: “Organisers [including Denis] visiting these shonky premises were routinely threatened with violence, knives held to their throats, or in two incidents two organisers taken out the back of the premises and guns drawn and held to their heads, women organisers threatened with rape or worse”. Despite the threats, the organisers went around the pubs telling hotel bosses to stop their discriminatory practices, which were not only demeaning to the women involved, but made their work more dangerous. 
A problem the union faced was that sexism was so profitable that the bosses were willing to pay women well over the going rate to work topless, “up to five times the rate”, according to Denis. But for the union, it was a matter of principle—higher wages should be won based on industrial power, not by individuals unilaterally giving up important conditions and dignity at work. This, Denis argues, left “other hard-working women to survive on the hard-won wages and conditions fought for by them, and the union”, and undermined solidarity.
Stepping up the campaign, the union went to the brewery workers who supplied the hotels, calling for support. At stop-work meetings in every brewery, the workers passed resolutions of support for the bar workers, promising to take their own industrial action. 
After a negotiation between the union and management at the Tarmac Hotel in Melbourne’s west, the publican refused to stop using topless bar staff and to stop showing pornographic movies in the bar, deriding Denis as a prude. This didn’t worry Denis: “I couldn’t wait to let our members at the brewery know about my failed talks with management at the Tarmac Hotel. The instant reaction was one of solidarity with the female workers, and the passing of a resolution confirming the planned industrial action”.
The union’s motto became, “No porn, no top, no beer!”, Denis says. “All the Sunday papers were on to it, five topless women turned up in the union office the next day organised by the criminal element in the hotel industry and the sensationalist media in tandem. Fronting up at the front desk, I was summoned to face the women with cameras flashing and videos whirring; they were hoping my face would be flushed with embarrassment.” 
But Denis didn’t react in quite the way they were hoping. “Well, you could have knocked me over with a wet tram ticket; they continued the theme in the headlines of the newspapers that I was a 40-year-old prude, with photo, mind you. The shame, the ignominy! How was I going to hold my head up in the trade union movement for attempting to wipe out this insidious practice?” 
Denis exposed the hypocrisy of the bosses’ justifications of the practice by asking them whether they would employ their wives or girlfriends as topless bar staff, or do such work themselves. He described their response: “How dare you even suggest that we would subject our loved ones to such a display of semi nudity in public? Well then, [Denis countered] how about you publicans doing a few hours with your penis hanging out, just make sure it goes nowhere near the drip tray. The reaction was apoplexy!”
The first target of the industrial campaign was the Tarmac Hotel. “I told them to consider filling the cellars with coal, because the brewery workers were not going to supply any beer sourced by their labour from that point, and a cellar full of coal might help them survive the coming winter”, remembers Denis. After that, “The victories came fast and furious. Every hotel employing topless bar attendants or waiters was now on a final warning to cease this practice or answer to union members employed at the brewery. It’s called cap in hand. The cellars were soon running low on the amber liquid, and bosses who previously had refused to take down their pornographic movies or sack the women prepared to break down hard-won union conditions for a price, soon mellowed.” The result was that a conga line of publicans “beat a path to the union office to offer their sincere condolences for putting profit before people in an already lucrative business”.
Denis gives most credit to the tremendous work of the rank-and-file women and men in the industry for shutting down the practice at the time. He also points out that it was a warning shot across the bow to other employers who were thinking of employing topless sandwich makers, hardware assistants, hairdressers and the like, that their businesses would get the same treatment. He quipped “Thankfully we were able to cease the practice before seeing topless parliamentarians or, worse still, half-naked bosses”.
It is, however, an ongoing battle. The action taken by the brewery workers, thanks to former Prime Minister Bob Hawke and the ACTU-ALP Accord of the 1980s, is now illegal. Known as secondary boycotts, such solidarity action today incurs huge fines, which are a significant deterrent. 
The battle against sexualisation at work likewise is ongoing. In 1991, liquor trades and retail workers, along with bodies such as women’s refuges and legal groups, set up Women Against Sexual Exploitation in Training. It was followed by the inclusion of a statement of condemnation in the ACTU’s Working Women’s policy. Today, the normalisation of the sex industry and associated practices has broken down consciousness of sexism and the need to take it on industrially as well as in broader society. 
Now in his 70s, Denis still believes it should be a priority of the union movement to stand up for women’s rights and end sexualisation at work. Using occupational health and safety provisions is an obvious basis to object to such practices, but, Denis insists, this has to be combined with industrial action to actually shut down this demeaning, unsafe and exploitative practice, which must be understood as a blatant profit grab. 
The rhetoric of “empowerment” to justify appalling sexism, along with a weakening of the unions and with them class consciousness, means sexual exploitation at work is rife today. It is therefore more important than ever that we remember the history of the workers’ movement fighting back against this, and, in this case, winning.

Liz Ross

When the workers’ movement took on sexual objectification

Cherry is a British nurse who has experienced a lifetime of sexualisation and objectification. Working in a hospital hasn’t offered an escape, but new worries. Cherry has large breasts, and reports that a lot of her mental energy is spent thinking about them. “It’s a bit pornographic” is how she <a href="https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/_That_s_just_par_for_the_course_social_class_objectification_and_body_image_among_white_working-class_women_in_the_United_Kingdom/26356876?file=48809890">described</a> it to Jamie Chen, a researcher at the University of Sussex studying the impacts of sexualisation on working-class women. Her work uniform made her feel particularly self-conscious: it was so tight she worried people would think she was trying to look like a “saucy nurse”. Cherry told researchers that because of this sexualisation, she decided against breastfeeding her child. “I didn’t really like breastfeeding because I felt, because they were so big, it looks inappropriate in my mind, that these massive, you know, boobs sticking out in public”. 
Compare this with the sales pitch for Kim Kardashian’s new <a href="https://skims.com/en-au/products/skims-ultimate-pierced-nipple-push-up-bra-clay">push-up bra</a>: “Made to be seen. Our viral Ultimate bra is back, reinvented with a built-in raised nipple detail and removable nylon-coated nipple piercing for an unforgettable statement”. Women can now buy a bra that not only gives them “sexy, natural-looking lift and support”, but also the appearance of pierced nipples under their baby-crop tees. While Cherry feels unable to carry out the natural function of her breasts, Kardashian is cashing in on the business opportunity that sexual objectification represents—her fashion company Skims is currently valued at US$4 billion. 
It is no exaggeration to say that sexual objectification is ruining women’s lives. From childhood, women are made to understand that their appearance is all-important, regardless of any and all other achievements. Their faces and bodies are treated like things, objects primarily for the use and pleasure of others, overwhelmingly men. The unrelenting portrayal of women as sex objects has been shown, in multiple <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2016.1142496">studies</a>, to lead to a “diminished view of women’s competence, morality and humanity”. 
New York University professor and author of Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt, has detailed how predatory tech companies turn this oppression into a business opportunity. When women delete selfies on social media, he says, algorithms are programmed to detect the behaviour and treat the assumed negative self-image as a marketing opportunity, bombarding the woman with beauty product advertisements. This is contributing to a mental health epidemic among young girls, around <a href="https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic">57 percent</a> currently reporting a persistent sadness or helplessness, up from 36 percent in 2011.
Objectification is the reality for women, day in day out, their entire lives. From childhood to old age, the measure of a woman’s worth is their ability to remain young and attractive to men. Margaret Atwood, echoing art critic John Berger’s description of the male gaze, described the effect: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur”. Sociologists describe this as self-objectification—when women wake up in the morning and plug in the epilator, they are listening to the voice inside their head put there by the advertising executives who decided making women feel like shit was a good way to make money. 
To add insult to injury, at the same time as women are being sexualised to an absurd degree, ironically, they are getting as little pleasure from sex as ever. Heterosexual sex is most unequal—<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-orgasm-gap-and-why-women-climax-less-than-men-208614">one study</a> found that only 65 percent of heterosexual women usually orgasm during sex, compared with 95 percent of men. 
So while women are pressured to worry about being “sexy”, their own sexual desire and agency are suppressed. Women are taught not to be sexual, but sexy. They have to control what they eat in order to fit the ideal body type, they have to wax and pluck and shave every part of their body below their hairline. Women internalise that as normal, and failure to conform, at least to some degree, has consequences. Their conditioning is always to alter themselves to meet others, mostly men’s, expectations and desires, to the point where they often can’t even define what their own are in relation to sex and relationships.
This is particularly the case for younger women. Most young women’s first experience of sex is likely to be at a party when they’re drunk or because they feel pressured into it. In the words of one of the many teenagers Deborah Tolman spoke to when writing Dilemmas of Desire, which documents the experience of young women and sex, sex was something that “just happened” to them. In her book Consent Laid Bare, Chanel Contos describes the way that, when men’s desires are the centre of sex, women lose out. “This puts an unspoken sense of control in [men’s] hands about whether they want you
or not, and leaves the woman in the heterosexual relationship with no agency.” 
Women are socialised to see their feelings as less important than those of their male partner. From film, TV and seeing their parents interact, women learn the role they are meant to play. They are trained to notice a shift in someone’s emotional state, to push down their own feelings in order not to upset the men around them. 
It’s no surprise, then, that relationships are frequently unequal and sites of abuse. <a href="https://www.casahouse.com.au/resources/statistics-about-sexual-assault-in-australia">One in five</a> Australian women over the age of 15 has experienced sexual violence, according to the Centre Against Sexual Assault. A recent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/03/one-in-three-australian-men-say-they-have-committed-intimate-partner-violence-world-first-research-finds">study</a>
undertaken by the Australian Institute of Family Studies found that one in three men has committed intimate partner violence. One ABS report from 2022 showed that 23 percent of women experienced emotional abuse in relationships. This is likely an understatement given the normalisation of emotional manipulation in relationships, but it is a form of intimate partner violence. Men can create a climate of fear for women in situations where they make their partners feel like they are required to “walk on eggshells” in order not to provoke them, which can be just as damaging as physical violence.
Making matters worse, men are entering relationships with attitudes and expectations shaped by the same extreme sexism that women are. They are encouraged to see themselves as domineering, aggressive and unconcerned about feelings—their own or those of others. They learn the lesson that women are there to provide for them. They also learn to objectify and dehumanise women. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2016.1142496">One study</a> found that men’s frequent exposure to sexually objectifying media was associated with greater objectification of their romantic partners. 
The consumption of porn is an important part of this. Young men are more likely to consume porn than young women, and this is often the major factor shaping both men’s and women’s understanding of sex and sexuality. Jess Hill, in her recent Quarterly Essay, describes the impact of this consumption of porn—which is more readily available today and often extremely violent towards women—as part of understanding the increasing rates of sexual violence among young people. “On average, young people are thirteen when they get their first lessons in sex and intimacy from free online porn ... In much of this porn, degrading and painful sex acts are unremarkable ... In the majority of these clips, women not only go along with degrading treatment but are almost always grateful for it.” 
An outcome of this is that there has been a mainstreaming of violent sex acts, particularly <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-02/choking-strangulation-sexual-partners-young-people/104043900">strangulation during sex</a>. According to a new study, 61 percent of women have reported being choked during sex. Maree Crabb, a sexual violence prevention educator, told the ABC, “Young women have talked about [how] they have felt like they're genuinely being murdered ... they’re really uncomfortable and feeling very, very unsafe”. Women are being murdered by their male partners. These men then claim it was a “sex game gone wrong”. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/10/rough-sex-excuse-in-womens-deaths-is-variation-of-of-passion-study">According</a> to the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This, there has been a tenfold increase of the rough sex defence between 1996 and 2016 in the United Kingdom. 
All of this leads us to ask: Who is responsible for this sexist state of affairs, and is there any hope that it could change? The sexism that surrounds us and that is constantly being reinforced by social media, pop culture, mainstream media, the entertainment industry, the beauty and fashion industries among others, destroys the humanity and empathy of men, and belittles and endangers women. But it is not ordinary men, and certainly not women, who benefit. Rather, it is ideologically useful and extremely profitable to the capitalist system. 
Advertising companies, the fashion and cosmetic industries directly profit from women’s insecurities—and create them where they don’t already exist as a way to open up new markets. Every part of a woman’s body is now subject to fashion trends and must look “perfect”, and every one represents an opportunity to sell something to help achieve this “perfection”. Exploitative images of women are used to sell anything and everything, and the pornography and sex industry—which could not exist without the oppression of women—are worth hundreds of billions. 
Added to that, bosses in every industry maximise their profits by paying women on average less than men, and rely on sexist socialisation to normalise this inequality. And the whole system benefits from forcing women to do unpaid labour in the home, which maintains the stability and productivity of the workforce capitalism needs. The resulting division between the lives, experience and social standing of working-class men and women has a further benefit—it undermines the likelihood of united working-class resistance to the system. 
Despite all this, it is possible for working-class men and women to see themselves as allies rather than sex objects or potential dominators/sexist creeps and to fight back. Fortunately, this possibility doesn’t rest on every sexist individual being convinced not to be a sexist prick, though this definitely can happen and should. It’s because the conditions of capitalism bring people together as relative equals in the workplace, and give them a common interest that can manifest in collective resistance and struggle. This sort of activity, and the consciousness it gives rise to among those involved, pushes against the degrading and dehumanising way we are usually socialised to see others. 
Women are conditioned to accept sexism, but they are also able to rebel against it in the right circumstances. That which drags people down at one time can fuel resistance at another. The conservative conformism of the 1950s eventually gave rise to the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s—discontent was brewing below the surface and exploded when the general atmosphere of society shifted to one of rebellion rather than resignation.
This has happened before and can happen again. When people go on strike against a bastard boss, or join an anti-war protest, when they stand on picket lines to defend public housing—they become more keenly aware of their joint interests and the benefit of unity. Places that were previously sites of exploitation and oppression, such as the workplace, now become sites of strength and resistance. Both men and women can see each other in a new light—as fighters for their class and equals in struggle. 
Actions like this start to transform mass attitudes. But ultimately, we need a society built on equality to have a world where we are not perennially fighting sexism, but are free from it. This means collective, democratic control over every aspect of social and economic life: a world in which working-class women and men could have real say over the conditions they live in, rather than being dominated by the capitalist class and the institutions and ideology that maintain its power and privilege; a world in which hierarchies of class wouldn’t be justified by hierarchies of gender. 
We need to get rid of this system that denies women their sexuality and treats them as nothing more than little pieces of fat and muscle for the sexual gratification of men. We need women to fight back against the voice inside their head that tells them they aren’t good enough. We need working-class men to join the struggle against women’s oppression and to learn genuine empathy and care. We need women rebels to build the power of our side and smash this sexist system.

The everyday horror of modern sexism

In her 1996 hit song “Ironic”, Alanis Morissette takes us through scenarios ranging from irritating (a black fly in your chardonnay) to downright devastating (a man’s long-awaited flight turning fatal). Ironically though, none of these situations are actually ironic. Much like Morissette, defenders of US singer Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album cover, titled Man’s Best Friend and featuring Carpenter’s hair being pulled like a dog on a lead by a faceless man while on her hands and knees, also seem to have a little trouble understanding the concept. 
For most people, the image of a young woman posing as a dog and being dragged along by her hair by a man would be understood as yet another sexist and demeaning image. It is not even a particularly exaggerated version of the degrading presentation of women that advertising, pop culture and the entertainment industry surround us with every day. 
Some fans of Carpenter, however, say that the cover, and other promotional material like her cover for Rolling Stone featuring her nude but for a pair of knee-length white stockings, are an ironic nod and wink to the “male gaze”. What seems like garden variety sexism is, in fact, according to Carpenter’s defenders, the clever use of sexist imagery to gain attention, “reclaim” her sexuality and sell records. She doesn’t perform sexism for men, she performs it for her own gain. Profiting from your own degradation is therefore not a sad reflection of the state of sexual politics, but boundary-pushing social commentary— subversive entrepreneurism. 
Dr Emma Phillips, an academic at the University of Canberra, author of a PhD on the topic of sexualisation, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/culture/music/sabrina-carpenter-s-new-album-cover-has-sparked-uproar-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-20250612-p5m6up.html?fbclid=IwQ0xDSwK3tdNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHp25cnhRbPv1xMqfTPMQocEhy6hSFX-ONMfm57Qa-MxOtitk2t5d8Fhjdxiy_aem_QghJ_BRP4bBTWcdf0PPyDQ&amp;utm_medium=Social&amp;utm_source=Facebook%23Echobox=1749704706">argued</a> in the Age that “we see Carpenter being an active agent in her sexual life, and immediately she’s derided for that”. But Carpenter isn’t being derided for having agency in her sex life. She is being criticised for an album cover that glamorises the abuse of women, with nothing to suggest subversive intent. This is not sexual agency. It is what it looks like: a transparent attempt to sell records through ever-more-extreme sexist imagery. Women are supposed to aspire to look and be like her, and men to have sex with her, and both desires are harnessed to make money.
Another Carpenter defender, Markiel Magsalin, writing in Vogue, argued that the cover is “a masterclass in satire” but one that the “audience [isn’t] equipped to recognise”. It is hard to see this as anything other than the collective gaslighting of women. What seems to be a sexist image that adds to the mountain of sexist and demeaning images women have to endure through every single day of their lives is not what it seems—it is a fellow woman making an ironic statement that you have failed to understand. Your reactions are not a healthy awareness of the sexist rubbish around you and an effort to resist the effect it has, but a reflection of your own stupidity. This trash album cover is powerful social commentary, not the tired cliché millions of women perceive it to be.
We are told that Sabrina is doing all of this in the name of empowerment, or “<a href="https://stellar.ie/trending/sabrina-carpenter-the-power-of-the-female-gaze/137825">for the girls</a>”. In reality, Carpenter is just a reheated version of what the music industry, among others, has been selling for decades. That it is women who are now doing it and making some of the money only makes it more contemptible. 
Carpenter has form cashing in on reactionary tropes. Before the dog thing it was paedophilia. She wears bejewelled “baby doll” lingerie on stage in her Short n’ Sweet tour, harking back to an outfit worn by actress Carroll Baker in the 1956 film Baby Doll, where the adult female lead literally sleeps in a crib. In one less-than-subtle photo shoot with<a href="https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/sabrina-carpenter-cover-interview-2024"> </a><a href="https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/sabrina-carpenter-cover-interview-2024">W</a><a href="https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/sabrina-carpenter-cover-interview-2024"> magazine,</a> she made visual reference to the film Lolita, where a grown man pursues a child. Sabrina is presented as childlike, and as Jade Hurley, a feminist writer on <a href="https://jadehurley.substack.com/p/your-fave-is-selling-a-pedophilic">Substack</a> points out, she more than alludes to this in her “Nonsense” outro: “I’m full grown but I look like a niña/ Come put something big in my casita/ Mexico, I think you are bonita!” 
So just as the official line of society is that sexism is wrong, but there is sexism everywhere because it is profitable, we are told the sexualisation of children is wrong, except when it turns men on and sells records. In an interview with Vogue, talking about the corseted sparkly lingerie she wears on stage, Carpenter described how “there’s a stiffness to the corset, so it’s a little harder to dance in. But my waist is non-existent, so we love her”. Girls, don’t move, don’t breathe—but remember it’s worth it to be thin and sexy. No-one said empowerment would be comfortable after all. Just think of the money someone is making—one <a href="https://touringdata.wordpress.com/2025/04/07/sabrina-carpenter-short-n-sweet-tour/">estimate</a> puts the total likely revenue from Carpenter’s latest tour at $50 million.
All this is nothing new—women have had to be sex objects first and foremost and artists second for decades. Some have eventually spoken out against it, most notably Britney Spears, who describes being uncomfortable about being sexualised and infantilised in the 1990s but being too under-confident to object. But the normalisation of the violent porn and the sexual exploitation of women in the sex industry have only made this more prevalent, and criticism of it more marginal.
Marie Solis, a writer for the New York Times, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/style/sabrina-carpenter-album-art-feminism.html">remarked</a> that, despite Carpenter’s latest album cover being so overtly sexy, it is a remarkably “sexless” photograph. Unlike actual satire or irony, it doesn’t make you question received wisdom or the status quo. It just makes you wonder why an adult woman would want to present herself as a sexualised dog. Carpenter is not reclaiming anything. Instead, she is presenting a Hollywood glam version of female sexuality that still puts men firmly at the centre. With this latest cover and like much of Carpenter’s recent work, we are being force-fed sexist imagery in order to make industry producers, men and “empowered” women, big bucks.

Posing as a dog ‘for the girls’: what in god’s name is going on with pop culture?

Progressive legislation allowing nurse practitioners and midwives to prescribe medication abortions has passed in the NSW parliament. Yet the debate over these laws illustrated the abject refusal of the Labor Party to challenge proactively the politics of the right.
The new bill, introduced by Greens MP Jenny Leong and MLC Amanda Cohn, was moved as a response to the postcode lottery that is abortion access in NSW. The 2019 legalisation of abortion has done little to make it more accessible in practice. Only three of the state’s 220 public hospitals are currently providing routine, open access to formal abortion services, according to researchers at the University of Sydney. 
A particularly egregious example of the barriers facing NSW women was brought to light by the ABC’s November 2024 investigation into abortion access at the Orange public hospital in regional NSW. Hospital staff were sent a flow chart explicitly banning them from providing abortions where there was “no identified pregnancy complication”. All women seeking abortions for non-medical reasons were to be directed to private providers like GPs or the nearest Family Planning clinic—neither of which provide surgical abortions. Staff reported to the ABC at the time that they believed this was part of an “unspoken ban” on abortion for non-medical reasons due to anti-abortion attitudes “high in the health bureaucracy” of the Western NSW Local Health District. 
The new legislation will help provide wider access by allowing a greater variety of healthcare providers to prescribe medication abortions. But that’s no substitute for widespread, free, on demand access to surgical abortions. Medication abortions are generally prescribed only up to nine weeks of pregnancy—there will inevitably be cases in which people either don’t realise they’re pregnant in time or simply change their minds about continuing a pregnancy. 
The Greens’ original draft of the bill acknowledged this and included other measures to boost abortion access. The two most important were a requirement for local health districts to ensure that public abortion is accessible to everyone in NSW within a reasonable distance of their homes, and stricter obligations for “conscientious objector” doctors to transfer patients directly to a provider who will give them an abortion. These measures were stripped out of the bill by Labor and Liberal MLCs backing up amendments moved by right-wing crank Rob Borsak of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers. 
Of course, this still wasn’t enough for the anti-abortion right, who mounted a repulsive sexist campaign against the bill. Leading the charge was Tony Abbott, who had the backing of all the usual suspects: the Catholic Church, alongside other ideologues from the religious and secular far right. But the campaign drew attention because of the addition of far-right “anti-abortion influencer” and Labor member Dr Joanna Howe, whose self-proclaimed goal is to “make abortion unthinkable”. 
It can seem as though abortion is a settled question in Australian politics. Polling repeatedly finds that a strong majority of people support unconditional abortion access. Attempts to wind back abortion rights are unpopular, as illustrated by the desperation with which Liberal leaders like Dutton and Queensland Premier David Crisafulli ducked the question during recent election campaigns.
But unpopularity has not deterred the right from campaigning stridently to chip away at abortion rights whenever they get the opportunity. As the US illustrates, we cannot be complacent about gains for progressive politics. They must be vigorously defended and strengthened in the fight against a right that show no signs of giving up on their reactionary agenda.
Many in parliament and the media decried the campaign against the bill as an attempt to bring Trump-style politics to Australia. It’s true that Trump has given a fillip of confidence, and something of a political role model, to many far-right ideologues. But sexist, anti-abortion politics and the religious right have a longstanding political home in Australian politics, not only on the fringes, but also in the mainstream parties of capitalist rule.
Labor’s pandering to the religious right is particularly shameful. Labor has a tradition of allowing a conscience vote on laws relating to abortion, meaning parliamentarians are not bound to vote with the official party position. This policy only legitimates anti-abortion politics as a spiritual belief that is above political challenge, rather than what it is: run-of-the-mill bigotry. No comparable exception exists for left-wing opposition to Labor’s line on morally pressing questions like the plight of refugees or Australia’s complicity in the war on Gaza—as Senator Fatima Payman found out just last year. Bigoted and sexist ideas can be tolerated because, unlike left-wing opposition, they do little to disrupt Labor’s enthusiastic commitment to ruling for the rich. 
Labor parliamentarians not only worked with the right-wing parties to strip the bill of important measures; even when the bill passed the lower house in this reduced form, five Labor MPs voted against it. 
Why does hard social conservatism have such a safe home in the Labor Party? In part, it’s about electoral opportunism. In certain conservative electorates, pandering to right-wing religious institutions by parroting their regressive social politics can help win votes. But it’s also about the political weight conservative religious institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, enjoy in Australian capitalism. The Catholic Church on its own is a massive, wealthy landowning institution, a bastion of conservative politics, and runs a vast network of private schools, hospitals, shelters and charities that function (poorly) to patch holes in the social safety net that Labor and Liberal have taken turns defunding and neglecting. 
In the case of the NSW abortion laws, there has been an unholy coalescence of Labor’s internal anti-abortion right with the party’s unanimous, bland, neoliberal unwillingness to spend on making public health care better for ordinary people. Just as despicable as the open bigotry of Labor parliamentarians like Greg Donnelly were the cynical speeches made by the likes of Penny Sharpe, who claimed “[Labor] realise there are issues for women” in accessing abortion, while at the same justifying her vote to strip the bill of its strongest provisions on the basis that cancer and heart attack treatment are not also mandated in legislation.
In the wake of a federal election result that Labor are trying to sell as the victory of the “sensible centre” over “extremism”, we would do well to draw the lesson that Labor governments are no bulwark against the bigoted politics of the right. Indeed, on questions like abortion, the call is coming from inside the house.

Eddie Stephenson

Debates on NSW abortion legislation show Labor won’t fight the right

Every day we are bombarded with messages that degrade women. Sexualised images of women are used to attract attention to advertising, news stories, social media accounts, pop culture, TV shows and pretty much anything else you can possibly imagine. You only have to think of Bianca Censori attending the Grammys as Kanye West’s virtually naked accessory to appreciate how ingrained into celebrity culture the objectification of women is. Meanwhile, the spread and mainstreaming of horrifically sexist pornography and the sex industry is normalising violent sexual practices and the dehumanisation of women.
So imagine an artist is given a whole wall to make a statement, free from corporate influence, and the thing they choose to do is to add yet another demeaning, objectifying image of women to the world. This is exactly what happened in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, where a mural was recently installed depicting a bound and gagged female body in stilettos, a studded dog collar and cat ears. Rightly, the mural has been denounced by anti-violence group Collective Shout as “a chilling image of eroticised violence against women”. Many members of the public have likewise registered their outrage in emails to the council. And fair enough—are women entitled to no relief from this unrelenting reminder that we only have value when we’re being debased for the pleasure of someone else? 
The artist responsible for the mural, Los Angeles-based Lauren YS, responded to the criticism by saying that “anyone imposing negative narratives onto it is incorrectly assuming its meaning”. They claim it is a piece about “empowerment and queer selfhood”. A local man speaking to the ABC defended the work on the basis that it is “representing a culture that a lot of people don’t know about, shibari (Japanese rope bondage) is a beautiful art-form that brings intimacy in people”. Apparently, violence against women, when it is a reference to Japanese culture or a form of queer expression, is different to other misogynistic images. But why? If Andrew Tate were to claim that his interest in abusing women was a queer fetish with allusions to feudal customs would that make it ok? 
The refusal to engage with the idea that the mural might be sexist even extended to progressive Yarra mayor Steve Jolly. When asked about it, Jolly chose not to comment on the content of the image, citing his main concern as the potential breach of council by-laws. 
Most of the media reporting about the mural has focussed on its location on a public street where children might see it, and the appropriateness of exposing children to sexually explicit content. But this misses the point. Whether its children or adults exposed to it, the problem is the acceptance of the dehumanisation of women as legitimate sexual activity, in the context of a society in which women are oppressed and already subject to unacceptably high levels of violence, often deadly violence. How can we wring our hands at every news report of another woman killed by a man at the same time as every conceivable available space is saturated with images that erotise such violence to make money and, even worse, elevate it to art? 
There is no denying the connection between the demeaning portrayal of women in advertising, pop-culture and pornography and abuse in the real world. A 2023 report by a French equality watchdog found that 90 percent of online pornography <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/27/online-pornography-breaks-french-law-equality-watchdog-france" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">involved verbal, physical and sexual violence against women</a>. Higher levels of consumption of porn correlate with men holding <a href="https://cdn.jss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/05144735/The-Man-Box-2024-7.1-LR.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">more derogatory attitudes towards women</a>. Acts like choking, commonly depicted in porn, have become more mainstream with 61 percent of women, and 79 percent of trans and gender diverse people aged 18 to 35 <a href="https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/4978840/Sharman,-Fitzgerald-Douglas-2024.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reporting that they have been strangled during sex</a>. Sexual assault is also increasing among young people, <a href="https://www.anglicare-tas.org.au/young-in-love-and-in-danger/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">with 28 percent of men between 18 and 30</a> reporting using at least one form of physical or sexual violence against a partner. And, abhorrently, sexist attitudes among young men <a href="https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2024/july/radical-anti-feminism-the-most-prevalent-form-of-violent-extremism-in-australia,-report-finds" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">are on the rise</a>. 
Too often today, objections to sexist objectification and the normalisation of porn are dismissed as prudery, and support for it sold as “sex positivity”. But objecting to demeaning portrayals of women is not anti-sex. Sex is not synonymous with degrading other people. That young women and queer people are today exhorted to release their inner porn star, love kink and BDSM, and even see violence against (almost always) female bodies as “empowering” does not make these practices liberating. Rather, it is a victory for the sex and pornography industries, which are the main beneficiaries of the mainstreaming of violent or non-consensual sex as pleasurable. 
The acceptance of depictions of violence when they are sexualised points to a glaring cultural hypocrisy. If this mural had glamorised a woman being violently restrained in a police cell or lying unconscious on the kitchen floor after being assaulted by her partner, or being stalked by an ex, it would not have been seen as progressive or appropriate for public display. Similarly, if the figure in the mural had been a man, the meaning of the mural would be completely different. This double standard is a product of sexism—violence is not ok, unless it’s for someone’s sexual gratification and is being directed at a woman. 
Anti-sexists have a responsibility to resist this and to stand up for a world in which human interactions are first and foremost about equality and mutual respect, not degradation and dehumanisation. When I first got involved with activism, feminists and leftists would never have embraced such filth. Women have for a long time been subjected to demeaning stereotypes in popular culture. These things used to be met with hostile eye rolling, culture jamming or protest. Today, it is self-described activists and leftists who are embracing sexist symbols and tropes, or refusing to criticise them on an anti-sexist basis. Those of us who want to see a world of genuine liberation need to stand against this reactionary tide, to assert our right to be socially equal and sexually free.

Sarah Garnham

There is nothing edgy about turning violence against women into art

This International Women’s Day, the Labor government has tried to reassure Australian women that things are moving in the right direction by pointing to all the ways it has supposedly made life better for us since 2022.
“This Government has achieved many firsts”, federal Minister for Women Katy Gallagher said in a press release on 3 March, “including the lowest gender pay gap, 11.5 percent, and a Federal Parliament with over 52 per cent women”. Similarly, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reminded women at an IWD breakfast that Labor had changed the single parent payment to help single mothers get by.
Awkwardly for Gallagher, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) reported that the gender pay gap in 2023-24 was actually 21.8 percent on average. The WGEA calculation includes base salary, overtime, bonuses and additional payments. It also accounts for part-time and casual work—categories in which women are disproportionately represented. According to its report, “this offers a more complete picture of the real remuneration differences between women and men in Australia”. 
Gallagher appears to have quoted the pay gap calculated by the Bureau of Statistics, which reports only base salaries for full-time employees, a much more limited statistic. But hey, why let accuracy get in the way of some election spin?
Single parents can now access support payments until their youngest child turns 14, up from 8. This is a welcome change given the cost-of-living crisis affecting many single mothers. However, let’s not forget that it was former Labor (and first woman) Prime Minister Julia Gillard who lowered it from age 16 in 2012. That the Labor party hasn’t even expanded the scheme back to 2012 levels doesn’t exactly make it an anti-sexist hero.
In New South Wales, public sector nurses have been campaigning for a 15 percent pay rise, taking strike action against the Labor state government. This overwhelmingly female-dominated workforce is among the lowest paid in the country. The union is specifically highlighting this fact in its fight with the government, linking the struggle to raise wages in the sector with addressing pay disparities between female- and male-dominated industries. 
Premier Chris Minns has so far refused to meet the pay demand, claiming there is not enough money in the budget to raise nurses’ salaries. However, Minns somehow found a few extra million down the back of the couch to raise police salaries by up to 40 percent. But don’t despair, ladies, this doesn’t mean that Minns isn’t absolutely dedicated to gender equality; for the first time ever, 50 percent of the NSW cabinet is made up of women! Slay.
If Labor was serious about increasing the standard of living for women in Australia, implementing measures to ease the housing crisis would make a huge difference. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute highlighted in a <a href="https://www.ahuri.edu.au/analysis/brief/what-are-real-costs-australias-housing-crisis-women">brief</a> last year that lower weekly earnings translate into single women taking longer to save for a deposit on a home, being less likely to find an affordable rental, having less superannuation to pay for housing in retirement and facing a higher increased risk of homelessness than men. 
Labor has refused to cap or freeze rents, or abolish regressive tax concessions for wealthy investors. Its centrepiece housing policy, the Housing Australia Future Fund, involves a limited spend on social housing in partnership with private investors who are guaranteed to make a profit out of renting to low-income people, instead of directly investing in new, publicly owned affordable housing. 
And finally, the Labor government has refused to stand up to, or even blandly criticise, the new Trump administration, which is decked out with misogynists who are determined to claw women’s rights back to the 1950s.
Gallagher, Albanese and Minns would have us believe that a vote for Labor is a vote for women’s equality. But don’t be fooled. Labor governments, like their Liberal counterparts, are nothing but bad news for women.

Clara da Costa-Reidel

Women are no better off under Labor

The far right’s “war on woke” has been taken to a terrifying new level with Donald Trump in the White House. He has made it clear that oppressed groups will be trampled until they shut up and put up. Trans kids have no right to be addressed as themselves. Young Black men have no right to resist being murdered by cops. Women have no right to reproductive control. Immigrants are invaders. (But far-right criminals like Andrew Tate should be <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/27/europe/andrew-tate-romania-us-intl-hnk/index.html">brought back into</a> the country.) 
This isn’t just a push-back against cultural symbols; it is about winding back the clock more than half a century on the rights and expectations of the working class and all of its constituent oppressed groups. The left should oppose all of Trump’s “anti-woke” measures, individually and as a package. 
The move that has grabbed the most attention has been Trump’s orders to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and practices. Basically, DEI has been outlawed for government bureaucracies and institutions. Trump has even rescinded a 1965 executive order mandating non-discriminatory hiring practices for government employees and contractors. 
On the chopping block is everything from the high-profile cosmetic DEI government initiatives of recent years (for example, the <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/21/politics/cia-dismisses-intelligence-officers-diversity/index.html">CIA has dismissed its DEI officers</a>) through to <a href="https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/education/education-department-schools-cut-dei-lose-funding/">cutting vital education programs</a> for disadvantaged kids. In fact, Trump has threatened to shut the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-department-education-budget-employees-why-trump-wants-it-shut-down-2025-02-19/">whole federal education department</a> because it disproportionately assists kids in poverty or with special needs. This offensive against DEI dovetails with the DOGE campaign to trash the public service. 
Trump has also made it clear that the private sector is expected to follow suit in abandoning DEI and woke policies. The response has been more than obliging. Since the Supreme Court decision against affirmative action late in 2023, the anti-woke current has gained ground. But now there is a stampede away from DEI within corporate America. 
Walmart is ending diversity hiring commitments, shutting down its Center for Racial Equity and removing many LGBT-themed products from its website. Goldman Sachs is dropping its policy of having two “diverse members” on its board. Amazon is shutting down its “outdated programs and materials”. Google is ending diversity hiring and its observations of cultural events like Pride Month and Black History Month. Deloitte told its employees to remove pronouns from their email signatures. 
Meta is ending diversity hiring and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to bring more “masculine energy” into the company. Disney is getting rid of its Reimagine Tomorrow website, which highlights diverse employees. Talk about a bleak new order: no tomorrow for the kids. 
It’s an embarrassing turnaround, especially given the fanfare with which DEI was taken up by corporate elites just a few years ago. The craze began in response to the Black Lives Matter rebellion of 2020—the biggest demonstrations in US history. Corporations, government bureaucracies and NGOs rushed to capitalise on and contain the movement by rebranding themselves as “inclusive” and “culturally sensitive”. 
Some of the things they did were positive—like introducing or expanding non-discriminatory hiring processes. But mostly, it was about making token and well-publicised gestures, especially those that appeared to “diversify” management positions. There was also a rush to implement “implicit bias” training programs, often run by grifters such as Robin D’Angelo, who has amassed significant personal wealth by lecturing company employees about their inherent “privilege”.
It was no accident that US capitalists shelled out millions of dollars to corporate consultants like D’Angelo while opposing minimum wage rises and resisting workers’ attempts to form trade unions. 
Given the superficiality of DEI, it is no wonder that many corporate lackeys have quickly abandoned it in favour of the now trending far-right bigotry and an all-out assault on the oppressed. 
In general, the “woke era” offered only superficial reforms, at the same time as creating a sensibility that oppression is the result of cultural backwardness rather than structural and economic inequalities. It has been an era in which social solidarity and challenging the system have been jettisoned in favour of “calling out” bad ideas and the people holding them and adopting the supposedly “correct” and “inclusive” language, symbols and etiquette. 
Of course, it is perfectly legitimate to call people by their correct pronouns, rename or remove colonial monuments and so on. But we should not, especially now, go along with the liberal narrative that DEI and “woke” represented an important extension of the gains made by the civil rights movement and the liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. 
For the left, and those looking to dismantle systems of oppression, the “woke era” actually reflected a period of setbacks. It started with a turn away from the radicalism, collectivism and economic gains of the 1960s and 1970s, and towards the commodification and academisation of identity politics in the 1980s and 1990s. This happened alongside Reaganism (named after the Republican US president), which inflicted crushing defeats on working-class organisations and asserted the primacy of markets over all aspects of life. “Woke culture” represents the fusion of degenerated progressivism with the sensibilities of Wall Street financiers.
Nevertheless, while a left critique of modern identity politics and its effects is necessary, it should in no way prevent us from opposing Trump’s attacks and from recognising their much broader implications. Unfortunately, some on the reformist left have welcomed Trump’s offensive against “woke”. Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin magazine in the US, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/business/economy/trump-dei-democrats-left-unions.html">was quoted in the New York Times</a> as saying: “I am definitely happy this stuff is buried for now. What comes next might be worse ... [but] it has a chance to be better”.
This is deeply misguided. For one thing, Trump and his cronies have very different reasons for opposing “woke culture”. And in fact, the political right has, for now, won the conversation on “woke”, a term originally coined by anti-racist activists in the US but now turned into a pejorative term that encompasses every symbol of respect and dignity that oppressed groups have won, as well as our fundamental rights and protections. 
In their eyes, anyone who has even a passing concern about oppression is infected with “the woke mind virus”. And that is why Trump’s moves against DEI are far reaching and include attacks on laws and conventions established as a result of the civil rights movement. And his attacks on woke extend even further: to any individual institution or policy that defends the environment, to threats of deportation to people who dare to stand up to Israel’s attempted genocide in Palestine, to dismembering the National Labor Relations Board, opposing minimum wage increases, trashing the public service and firing thousands of workers. 
Also, the lines between cynical DEI measures and supportable measures are very blurry. The left should not call for diversity on corporate boards or support HR departments having more discretionary power. And the left should not support the punitive and censorial atmosphere that has become associated with social justice and identity politics. But more opposition to racism and other forms of oppression throughout society is a good thing—as is awareness of historical and contemporary injustices.
Rather than distinguishing between reasonable and reactionary “social justice” policies, we should recognise that the right-wing assault on “woke culture” is part of an assault on the working class in all its diversity. In fact, any criticism of wokeness that does not pose a superior way to advance the fight against oppression is a step in the wrong direction. This is especially the case when it is coming from a heinously reactionary administration that is inspiring fascists and the far right the world over. 
Trump is not clearing the path for the left to build a superior way of fighting against racism and other oppressions but throwing up more obstacles to the creation of a more caring and egalitarian society. Trump aims to create an atmosphere of fear. He wants to brutalise the most oppressed, and society more broadly, to lower all of our standards and expectations. He is about attacking the working class and any idea that workers should have rights. 
Sunkara’s comments are linked to a broader political view, termed “class first” socialism, which conflates neoliberal identity politics with all anti-racism and opposition to oppression, and which says that focusing on oppression is alienating to the working class, particularly at an electoral level. In practice, these people tend to support the Democrats. They blame the party’s adherence to identity politics when it fails and, while this is certainly a factor, their critique is aimed at rehabilitating the party. 
As well as a thin veneer for opportunist electoralism, these class reductionists sell out our side twice over: once by in effect arguing for the abandonment of the oppressed, and then again by arguing that the working class is too basic and self-interested to care about oppression. 
Yet, here we have such a clear example, in the negative, of how oppression and class are entwined. Trump wants to attack the oppressed, as a spearhead for a major assault on the working class—not one that is going to be phased in but one that is going on as we speak. In the name of the war on DEI and “woke”, vital services that workers rely on are being slashed, workers themselves are being fired, and basic standards that the workers’ movement has fought for are under threat. 
The political right has clearly benefited from defining its agenda as a “culture war” to make it seem separate from class attacks. The far-right politicians want to be able to masquerade as defenders of workers against culturally progressive elites. Liberal elites also like to peddle this idea, because it assists their class interests to present workers as culturally backwards but also to frame the struggles against oppression as classless pursuits of human progress. 
It is up to the left to reject these lies. The rights of racially oppressed groups, women and the LGBT community are inextricably bound with the class struggle. It was during high points of class struggle that oppressed groups won the most gains. Struggles against oppression have repeatedly been a lightning rod for broader working-class rebellion and advances. 
If we are going to defeat Trump’s assault, our side needs this history and political outlook. Fighting back will require mass resistance in the streets, industrial action by workers and the offering of an anti-capitalist horizon for our struggles. 
We have seen mass resistance in recent times: the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, the historic Palestine demonstrations in support of Gaza, some smaller but important mobilisations for trans rights recently. We need all these people and more to start organising, disrupting business as usual, asserting that the rights of the oppressed will be defended and expanded. 
And, crucially, we need to build links of solidarity between our struggles. Agonising about who has more privilege or whether people are harbouring implicit biases or manifesting micro-aggressions is a distraction from building these kinds of movements. 
Ultimately, to make real gains, we need the working class to move, to use its industrial power to fight for better wages and conditions and to fight like hell for the dignity and humanity that we all deserve. The workers’ movement, at its best, takes up the cause of every oppressed group because an injury to one is an injury to all. 
It is no accident that the far right and its billionaire champions want to degrade all of us: their power and wealth are based on trampling people. It is no accident that the liberal elites can be progressive only in tokenistic and superficial ways, because their power too is based on our oppression. 
In contrast to both, our power is based on solidarity and a collective drive for justice and dignity. It is this power—that of the working class and all of its constituent groups—that can one day establish a society that is genuinely diverse, equitable and inclusive.

Trump’s ‘war on woke’ is a war on all the working class

The University of Technology Sydney has marked International Women’s Day by banning a poster asking the question: “Why are teenage boys so misogynistic?”. 
The meeting was called to discuss rising sexist attitudes among, and the broader right-wing drift of, young men. Numerous indicators point to this reality, including a recent King’s College London survey showing that young men are far more likely than young women, and even older men, to say that men have it tougher than women today. In the United States, Donald Trump increased his support among young men by 15 percentage points last year compared to the previous election; in Australia, young men support Liberal leader Peter Dutton in much higher numbers than young women. Also, a recent Monash University study found that female teachers are facing a rise in misogynistic behaviour everywhere—and many are quitting the profession because of it. 
One woman who attended the meeting told the audience that in her first-year business tutorial, the tutor had to tell off men in the class because they were rating every woman who spoke in the discussion in the zoom chat.
Most universities have put up posters celebrating women and our contributions to society. But the UTS administration has sided with Andrew Tate and Donald Trump stans. 
UTS was alerted to the poster by at least one male student on campus, who also emailed the UTS Socialist Alternative club complaining that he feels “unwelcome and stereotyped” by the mere presence of a poster advertising a campus meeting about the growth of the far right and its expression in the political attitudes of young men. 
For years, the political right called the left “snowflakes”. People wrote hundreds of books and articles lamenting the “coddling” culture in universities and about how the political left and progressives can’t cope with ideas they don’t agree with. Right-wing provocateurs such as Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson made famous phrases such as “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
How the tide has turned. It seems that young men from the political right, like those at UTS, are now the ones who might start campaigning for safe spaces and trigger warnings. 
The Centre for Social Justice &amp; Inclusion handles complaints relating to sex, gender identity, race and disability discrimination. According to its equity policy, it seeks “diversity, fairness, social justice and ethical treatment of others”. The policy seems to have been written with oppressed groups in mind, so it’s remarkable to see it being used against women on campus. 
The directive to remove the poster is also related to the university fad of introducing policies to protect the “psychosocial safety” of staff and students, which were initially designed to silence Palestine solidarity activists. The feelings and emotions of those in positions of power are being protected while those trying to address injustices face disciplinary hearings. 
A staff member from Activate, which manages campus life, instructed the club to remove the posters during a phone call with Yasmine Johnson, UTS Socialist Alternative club president and the woman who hosted the meeting.
“He said to me, ‘You followed all the correct procedures, but unfortunately you are going to have to take these down. This has gotten around the uni top level very fast—the deputy vice-chancellor, the equity department, everyone knows’”, Johnson recounted to Red Flag. “He even said that the deputy VC instructed that the posters be removed as they violate the UTS equity policy.” 
That university management is worried about some men being distressed because people are discussing sexism tells you something about the political shift that is happening. 
Johnson reported being mobbed by Trump supporters while she handed out leaflets for the meeting. They loudly professed their love for the racist and sexist president of the United States. They were precisely the sort of young men who have been politically drawn to the far right and influenced by the violent misogyny of the sex-trafficker Andrew Tate. They are much more confident to express their bigoted attitudes, which will only become worse as institutions like UTS support them.
By not wanting to trigger any boys on campus who have trouble distinguishing between fact (young men are pretty sexist) and their feelings (a poster made me sad), the UTS administration has silenced the free speech of young women who are trying to fight back against the growth of a global far right.

Why does OnlyFans have so few critics on the left?

When the workers’ movement took on sexual objectification

The everyday horror of modern sexism

Posing as a dog ‘for the girls’: what in god’s name is going on with pop culture?

Debates on NSW abortion legislation show Labor won’t fight the right

There is nothing edgy about turning violence against women into art

Women are no better off under Labor

Trump’s ‘war on woke’ is a war on all the working class

University of Technology Sydney stands with boys with big feelings

Capitalism can’t end women’s oppression: we need a revolution

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us