Somewhere between a Dior “We Should All Be Feminists” T-shirt and Barbie’s body-positive makeover, feminism has become glossy enough to sit comfortably on billboards. And that alone should make us pause. Because if a movement built to dismantle power structures suddenly photographs well for those very structures- what exactly is being sold, and who is buying it?
This isn’t my anxiety talking; there’s more to it.
Feminism has always been “too loud,” “too angry,” “too unfeminine,” “too political,” or simply “too much.” But now, in the era of branded empowerment, it’s being told to be something entirely different: PALATABLE.
And palatable feminism is, frankly, useless.
Feminism isn’t supposed to be charming or polite. It’s not designed to flatter society—it’s meant to interrogate it. Yet today’s mainstream feminism is increasingly being marketed like a lifestyle aesthetic: wear a slogan, repost a quote, call it liberation.
But the messy parts—the violence, inequality, racialized harm, labor exploitation, the structural stuff—rarely fit into a commercial frame.
These things don’t trend well. They don’t sell magazines, makeup, movies, or empowerment merch.
And that is exactly where I get flabbergasted!
The Tagged Seat: A Seat at the Table, But Whose Table?
Let me be precise about something. When we talk about women “having a seat at the table,” we’ve always talked about it as arrival. Triumph. Liberation. But there’s a detail that gets glossed over in that metaphor: the seat almost always comes with a tag on it. Not a name tag—a role tag.
Mother. Daughter. Sister. Wife. The social contract that gets attached to the seat we’re so glad to have. Just woman or empowered. Never just human. The seat is conditional. Its tenancy depends on how well we perform the role assigned to it. We play characters—carefully, convincingly, often exhaustingly—with minimal return, navigating what sociologist Arlie Hochschild once called “emotional labor”: the managed performance of feeling, the requirement not just to do work but to be perceived as warmly, helpfully, appropriately feminine while doing it.
Scholars in Bangladesh and across South Asia have documented how this functions through what researchers describe as izzat—a system of family honor that operates as a panoptic mechanism. Girls regulate their own behavior and mobility not because they’ve been explicitly instructed to in every instance, but because they’ve internalized the surveillance. Daughters are culturally positioned as “symbolic capital”—investments in family reputation—while sons are framed as “appreciating assets” and future economic providers. The distinction is not incidental. It structures what questions get asked, whose education gets funded, what futures get imagined.
And here’s where it gets complicated for modern, urban, educated families who genuinely believe they’ve moved beyond this: they often have, partially. Fathers support daughters’ dreams. Brothers cite feminist rights in conversations. But as I’ve sat with this long enough to recognize the pattern clearly—the support is conditional at the borderline of convention. The moment something truly unconventional arrives on the doorstep of a modern Asian family, the answer changes. Not through cruelty, but through something more sophisticated: what will people say?
That question— লোকে কি বলবে?—is not a small question. It is the full weight of the social structure. It is centuries of negotiated survival dressed in the language of family concern. It is the mechanism through which structural constraint becomes personal love, so seamlessly interwoven that to resist it feels like refusing affection itself.
Feminist theory has named this, though it took some time to develop a vocabulary adequate to the experience. Kandiyoti’s concept of the “patriarchal bargain” explains it partially—women navigating the best deal available within systems they didn’t create, extracting concessions without dismantling the framework.
And then—here is the part that took me the longest to see clearly—some of us find our way through. Through books, through conversations, through the slow, privately painful work of recognizing the cage for what it is. We arrive at feminist consciousness. We unlearn the surveillance. We start to understand that lok ki bolbe is not a moral question but a control mechanism. We breathe a little differently. We think we’ve stepped outside.
And then we look around.
Because the exit from the patriarchal performance does not open into open air. It opens into another room. Commodity feminism is waiting there with its own set of role tags, its own taxonomy of acceptable womanhood. Now you must be vocal. Visible. Unapologetic. You must perform your liberation with sufficient legibility—preferably photogenic legibility. You must be the right kind of angry: righteous but not hysterical, political but still palatable, feminist but not so structurally threatening that anyone with a marketing budget gets nervous. The old script demanded softness, compliance, decorative grace. The new script demands fierceness, self-optimization, empowered consumption. What both scripts share is this: they are scripts. Someone else wrote them. Someone else profits from your performance of them.
This is the new tagged seat. Not Mother. Daughter. Wife. But Girlboss. Advocate. Empowered Consumer. The tag has been redesigned. The seat is the same. And the woman sitting in it is still performing for an audience that has, once again, decided in advance who she is supposed to be.
The exhaustion is identical. What changed was only the aesthetics of the demand.
But what happens when feminism itself becomes such a bargain? What happens when the movement meant to name and dismantle these structures learns to offer its own version of the tagged seat?
What does it mean to have a feminist movement that talks about seats at the table while leaving the architecture of the table—and who built it, and whose labor maintains it—entirely untouched?
Faux-Feminism and the Burden of the Superwoman
There is a marketing concept that appears, reliably, every March 8th: the advertisement that tells women they can do everything. Work. Parent. Lead. Nurture. Create. Earn. Sustain. Excel. The imagery is usually stunning. The music is usually swelling. The emotion is usually warm. And the underlying message, if you trace it carefully, is not you are enough as you are. It is: you have no excuse now.
This is what I’ve started calling the Superwoman Tax—an invisible invoice that arrives with every empowerment campaign. You’ve been told you can do anything. Therefore, you’re responsible for everything. The gap between your reality and this marketed ideal is your personal failure, your insufficient ambition, your inadequate self-optimization, your self-victimization. Not systemic. Not structural. Yours.
Catherine Rottenberg, whose book The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism has become one of the more precise accounts of how this happened, traces the mechanism clearly. Neoliberal feminism, she argues, “incessantly incites women to accept full responsibility for their own well-being and self-care.” It acknowledges the gender wage gap. It acknowledges sexual harassment. But the solutions it proposes “elide the structural and economic undergirding of these phenomena.” The problems are acknowledged; the causes are not named. And so the burden shifts—from a broken system to individual women navigating that system with insufficient resources.
This creates a specific and cruel double bind. If a woman cannot “do everything,” neoliberal feminist logic reframes her struggle as a personal crisis rather than a structural outcome. As scholars Gill and Orgad have documented, women who fail to achieve “resilience”—itself a market-ready term that transforms structural precarity into individual psychological opportunity—are positioned as lacking the necessary tools. The movement that was supposed to end their oppression becomes the framework through which their oppression is re-explained as personal deficit.
But there’s another pressure that doesn’t come from corporations or governments. It comes from fellow travelers. From within the movement itself. And this one is rarely discussed with full honesty: the pressure of feminist prescription—the narrow bandwidth of what counts as properly feminist womanhood.
In 1976, Adrienne Rich published Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, which remains one of the most intellectually precise interventions on this question. Rich distinguished between two things that are constantly conflated: the experience of mothering—which can be chosen, powerful, creative, and profoundly meaningful—and the institution of motherhood—the patriarchal structure that demands women be mothers, that positions motherhood as women’s primary identity and purpose, that unpaid domestic labor as natural feminine instinct rather than as work deserving recognition and compensation.
Rich wrote: “To destroy the institution is not to abolish motherhood. It is to release the creation and sustenance of life into the same realm of decision, struggle, surprise, imagination and conscious intelligence, as any other difficult, but freely chosen work.” The institution demands maternal selflessness, positions women as naturally suited for care work, and structures economic and social systems such that women who refuse motherhood or prioritize other work are punished. The critique of this institution is legitimate, necessary, and ongoing.
But here is where contemporary feminism has generated its own institutional problem. In critiquing the patriarchal demand that all women be mothers, some strands of feminism have created a mirror prescription: that liberated women don’t choose domesticity, that career ambition is the true measure of feminist consciousness, that the woman who is soft-spoken, home-oriented, or domestically inclined is either suffering false consciousness or failing to live up to feminist ideals.
The result is a specific bind, documented by researchers studying contemporary motherhood discourse. Women who choose to stay home or scale back careers face judgment not only from traditionalists who question whether they’re “wasting” their education, but also from feminist circles where domesticity itself becomes suspect. As scholars analyzing what they term “intensive mothering ideology” have found, modern mothers navigate impossible standards: they’re told that good mothers are home-based caregivers, while simultaneously being told that liberated women pursue careers. The discourse creates categories of “good choice makers” and “bad choice makers” based on whether women’s decisions align with middle-class professional norms.
Anthropologist Rickie Solinger has argued that the framework of “choice” itself is profoundly classed and raced. She points to how foreign adoption by U.S. parents depends on the effacement of biological mothers in poor countries whose parenting “choices” are anything but free. The celebration of middle-class women’s “choice” to work or stay home operates in a context where working-class women and women of color have never had that choice—they’ve always worked, often in multiple jobs, often in care work for other people’s children, and their mothering has never been celebrated as an empowered decision.
This is not an argument for celebrating domesticity as inherently feminist. It isn’t. Not when domestic labor remains unpaid, undervalued, and disproportionately performed by women. Not when “choosing” to stay home often means “choosing” between economic precarity and the prohibitive cost of childcare. Not when that “choice” happens in societies that provide no parental leave, no affordable childcare, no structural support for the work of social reproduction.
But it’s also not an argument that career success equals feminist liberation. Not when professional advancement often requires women to work like they don’t have children while mothering like they don’t have jobs. Not when the women who “make it” in corporate structures often do so by outsourcing their domestic labor to other women—frequently immigrant women, women of color, women whose own mothering is then compromised by the demands of caring for someone else’s children. As Nancy Fraser has argued, this creates a feminism where elite women’s advancement is enabled by the exploitation of working-class women, a “progressive neoliberalism” that achieves gender parity at the top while leaving class hierarchies intact.
What feminist analysis of domesticity requires is not a judgment about whether individual women should or shouldn’t be in the home. It requires structural analysis of why care work is economically invisible, why the work of social reproduction falls disproportionately on women, and why both the traditionalist “go home” and the neoliberal feminist “lean in” positions leave those structures untouched.
The woman who is quiet, domestic, soft-spoken—she’s not the problem. The structure that gives her no other socially valued option is the problem. The structure that tells her she’s failing feminism if she doesn’t want visibility or corporate success is also the problem. Both are forms of institutional control masquerading as natural feminine inclination or enlightened feminist choice.
The question worth sitting with: If feminism has legitimately critiqued patriarchal domesticity as institutional coercion, why has it simultaneously created its own prescriptions about what liberated womanhood must look like—and whose lives those prescriptions serve?
The T-Shirt and the Woman Who Sewed It
I think, now almost everybody knows the dark truth of fast fashion, it’s impact on both environment, employee mistreatment, sustainability, and overall valuation process. Here, I’m not going into that, that’s for another day. Let’s talk about fashion.
In November 2014, Mail on Sunday journalist Ben Ellery published an investigation that became one of the more complete encapsulations of the commodity feminism problem ever reported. The target was a T-shirt—specifically, the “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” shirt launched by Elle UK in partnership with the Fawcett Society, Britain’s oldest women’s rights charity, for their December issue.
The campaign had been genuinely successful. Politicians wore it in Parliament—Labour’s Harriet Harman wore hers at Prime Minister’s Questions. Nick Clegg wore one. Ed Miliband wore one. Actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne, and Tom Hiddleston had all been photographed in it. The shirt was generating real cultural conversation about feminism’s place in mainstream public life.
Ellery traced the supply chain. The shirts were made at a factory owned by Compagnie Mauricienne de Textile in Mauritius. Workers—migrant women from Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka—were earning 62 pence an hour. They slept sixteen to a room in on-site dormitories. The factory’s managing director told the paper he “would not be happy” if the women left the camp on weeknights, because then “they will turn up for work the next day hung-over.” The T-shirt cost £9 to manufacture. It was sold for £45. It would take a woman working in the factory nearly two weeks of wages to buy the one she produced. [Reported by the Mail on Sunday, November 2014; corroborated by the Guardian, Raw Story, The Nation, and Jezebel.]
One worker at the factory said, in a statement that should be quoted precisely and not paraphrased: “How can this T-shirt be a symbol of feminism when we do not see ourselves as feminists? We see ourselves as trapped.”
The union president at the factory put the arithmetic plainly: “It would take a woman working in the factory nearly two weeks just to buy one shirt. What is feminist about that?” [Fayzal Ally Beegun, International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers Union, quoted in Mail on Sunday, November 2014.]
This was not an isolated incident. In January 2019, The Guardian published an investigation into T-shirts produced for the Spice Girls’ reunion—shirts printed with #IWannaBeASpiceGirl and sold to raise money for Comic Relief’s “gender justice” campaign. Factory workers in Gazipur, Bangladesh, were found to be earning as little as 35 pence an hour, forced to work up to sixteen-hour days, and subjected to verbal harassment including being called “daughter of a prostitute” by management when production targets were missed. The Spice Girls, to their credit, immediately called it “horrific” and funded their own investigation. [Guardian, January 2019, investigation by Simon Murphy and Redwan Ahmed.]
One month later, the same newspaper published a separate investigation into the UK-based feminist brand F=—which billed itself as “all about inspiring and empowering girls” and sold £28 “GIRL POWER” T-shirts with celebrity endorsements from TV presenter Holly Willoughby and former Spice Girl Emma Bunton. Workers at the Bangladeshi factory producing them earned as little as 42 pence an hour. Over a hundred workers were fired after they went on strike to protest their wages. In one case, a female employee was reportedly beaten on the orders of management and threatened with murder. F= suspended production after the Guardian report was published. [Guardian, March 2019, investigation by Simon Murphy.]
Here is what makes this structurally significant rather than merely ironic: according to ILO data, women make up approximately 60–80% of the global garment workforce—the figure reaching close to 80% in garment manufacturing specifically. [ILO Better Work Programme; ILO/IFC 2019 sector report.]
The industry that is literally sewing the uniforms of the feminist movement is overwhelmingly composed of the women the movement claims to represent. They are disproportionately in the lowest-paid, lowest-security roles. They are the ones most exposed to harassment, wage theft, and precarious employment. And the factories that make feminist T-shirts are subject to the same supply chain pressures, audit failures, and buyer-driven cost-cutting as every other fast fashion producer—because that’s exactly what they are.
The scholars Goldman, Heath, and Smith named this dynamic “commodity feminism” in 1991—the appropriation of feminist ideals for commercial purposes. What distinguishes commodity feminism from ordinary advertising isn’t that it sells to women. It’s that it deploys feminist critique itself as the vehicle of sale. The image of liberation is the product. The irony is structural, not coincidental: the liberation being sold is produced by the labor of women who are among those most urgently in need of liberating.
Nancy Fraser’s analysis is worth sitting with here. She argues that neoliberalism didn’t simply defeat feminism—it co-opted it. It selected the parts of feminist critique that aligned with market logic—individual empowerment, autonomy, personal success—and discarded the parts that threatened capital: collective organizing, structural analysis, redistribution, solidarity across class and race lines. The result is a feminism legible enough to print on a T-shirt, marketable enough to sell through a fashion retailer, and carefully defanged of anything that would threaten the business model of the company selling it.
And yet—because honest analysis requires this—the dismissal is too easy. The Fawcett Society was, and is, doing real legal and political work on women’s rights that has materially changed policy. Elle UK was using mainstream cultural platform to center feminist conversation. The visibility shifted something. Some women who bought that T-shirt became more engaged with feminist organizing, not less. The relationship between symbolic gesture and material transformation is not linear, and it is not zero-sum.
But this is what a supply chain audit doesn’t solve: the fact that the same market logic that makes feminist T-shirts profitable also makes the exploitation of garment workers structurally necessary. Auditing for ethical compliance doesn’t dismantle the buyer-driven cost pressures that push wages down. It doesn’t organize workers. It doesn’t give the woman in the Mauritius dormitory the power to refuse a contract. It just certifies that the conditions of her exploitation meet a minimum threshold.
If the woman who sewed the feminist T-shirt sees herself not as liberated but as trapped—and if the market conditions that keep her trapped are inseparable from the market conditions that make the T-shirt profitable—then whose feminism, exactly, is being sold?
The False Equivalence
Here’s where the conversation about feminism has ended up, and it’s worth examining the mechanics of how we got here. When women articulate demands for equal rights, the discourse has increasingly devolved into what can only be described as a face-off—where serious structural demands are met with trivial social grievances positioned as equivalent counter-arguments.
The pattern is consistent enough to be recognizable. Women raise issues of equal pay, protection from sexual violence, freedom from harassment, bodily autonomy. The response from certain quarters arrives predictably: if you want equality, you should go Dutch on dates. If you want equal rights, you can’t expect men to open doors. Chivalry is dead, and feminism killed it. These counter-arguments are presented not as tangential points but as direct responses to feminist demands—as if they occupy the same conceptual terrain, address the same stakes, warrant equal consideration in the calculus of gender justice.
Let me be precise about what’s being equated here. On one side: women asking not to be raped, not to be groped, not to be pestered and coerced into dates by men who won’t accept “no” until she says she has a boyfriend (because another man’s claim is more legitimate than her own refusal), not to be forced into early marriage or child motherhood, not to be passed over for promotions despite equal or superior qualifications, not to be terminated from employment because pregnancy signals divided loyalties, not to be dismissed as intellectually inferior by default, not to be trafficked, not to be catcalled on public streets, not to be the target of “jokes” that will later be defended with accusations that she’s “too dramatic” or “can’t take a joke,” not to be pulled from school so her brother’s education can be funded instead, not to feel unsafe walking home after dark, not to be assaulted, not to be reduced to sexual object, not to be commodified in industries where others profit substantially while she receives a fraction or nothing at all.
On the other side: complaints about dinner bills and door-holding etiquette.
The “you can’t have it both ways” argument has become particularly weaponized. Its internal logic sounds superficially reasonable: if women want equality, they must accept all aspects of it, including the withdrawal of traditional male courtesies. But this argument works only if one accepts several fundamentally flawed premises. First, it assumes that “traditional courtesies” like door-opening and dinner-paying are structurally significant benefits that women have historically extracted from men, rather than symbolic performances within a system where women were legally property, economically dependent, and systematically denied education, property rights, voting rights, and bodily autonomy. Second, it treats the withdrawal of minor social niceties as equivalent compensation for the dismantling of structural oppression. Third—and this is crucial—it positions “equality” as a zero-sum transaction where women’s gains must be balanced by equivalent losses, rather than as the establishment of baseline human dignity and safety for all people.
The alimony debate is instructive here, precisely because it sits at the intersection of marketed feminism’s failures and structural realities that cannot be solved through individual empowerment rhetoric. The neoliberal feminist response to women seeking alimony is frequently dismissive: she chose to leave the workforce, she should have maintained financial independence, she should have known better. But this analysis treats a structural outcome as a personal planning failure.
Consider the actual conditions. A woman exits the paid workforce—not always voluntarily, often under significant social and familial pressure, frequently because childcare costs would consume most or all of her earnings anyway, sometimes because her partner’s career advancement requires geographic mobility or long hours that make dual careers impossible. She spends years, sometimes decades, performing unpaid domestic labor and care work. She enables her partner’s career advancement by assuming total responsibility for household management and child-rearing. Her professional credentials atrophy. Her earning potential diminishes with each year out of the workforce. Her retirement savings—if any—remain minimal compared to her continuously employed partner’s accumulation.
When the marriage dissolves, she faces the labor market with a years-long gap in her resume, outdated skills, and in many cases, ongoing childcare responsibilities that constrain her work hours and mobility. Her ex-partner exits the marriage with accumulated career capital, professional networks, uninterrupted earning trajectory, and substantially greater financial security. The work she performed—the work that made his career progression possible, the work that raised their children, the work that maintained their household—remains economically invisible because it was never compensated as work.
The question of alimony is not, as it’s often framed, about whether women are entitled to men’s money after divorce. It is about whether the work of social reproduction—work that is necessary for society to function, work that someone must perform, work that is disproportionately performed by women—deserves recognition and compensation, or whether we will continue to treat it as free labor that women perform out of natural inclination and that leaves them economically vulnerable when partnerships dissolve.
Branded feminism has no adequate framework for this. It can offer advice about negotiating equal domestic labor division, about protecting your financial independence, about making empowered choices. What it cannot do is address the fact that individual negotiation within structurally unequal conditions produces structurally unequal outcomes. The woman who “chooses” to be the primary caregiver did not choose the society that makes quality childcare prohibitively expensive. She did not choose the workplace culture that treats motherhood as career liability. She did not choose the tax and social security structures that make her unpaid labor invisible to the state. She did not choose the marriage laws that may or may not recognize her contribution of labor as equivalent to his contribution of wages.
This is what gets lost when feminism becomes primarily a story about individual choices and empowerment. The structures remain. The constraints remain. The economic vulnerability remains. And when women point this out, they’re told they can’t have it both ways—they can’t claim independence and also expect support, can’t demand equality and also acknowledge dependence, can’t be empowered and also vulnerable.
But here is the truth that commodity feminism consistently obscures: human beings are always both empowered and vulnerable. Dignity is not the same as invulnerability. Equality is not the same as sameness. And the demand not to be raped, trafficked, or economically abandoned after years of unpaid labor is not equivalent to the demand that someone else pay for dinner.
The question demands direct confrontation: When demanding not to be violated becomes equated with demanding free dinner, and when pointing out this false equivalence gets dismissed as wanting to “have it both ways”—whose interests does this equation serve?
The Privilege Strike: “Day Without Women” and the Women Who Might Lose Their Jobs
On March 8, 2017—International Women’s Day—organizers of the Women’s March called for “A Day Without A Woman.” The idea was to demonstrate women’s indispensable contribution to economic life through a coordinated absence: don’t go to work, don’t shop, wear red in solidarity.
The symbolism was real. Women constitute roughly half of the U.S. workforce. They hold nearly two-thirds of minimum-wage jobs. They make up 91% of registered nurses, 76% of teachers. A day without women would not be invisible. It would be catastrophic.
But here’s what critics—including feminist critics—pointed out almost immediately: the ability to refuse to go to work is itself an indication of class and situational privilege. For the waitress who would be fired if she’s late again, for the domestic violence victim services coordinator who is also a single mother of two, for the women working precarious jobs in industries where “replaceability” is the employer’s permanent leverage—striking wasn’t civil disobedience. It was economic suicide.
The American Prospect noted that women make up nearly two-thirds of minimum-wage workers, and a quarter of those are women of color. These are exactly the women for whom feminist solidarity was supposed to matter most. These are exactly the women who couldn’t participate without risking the income that keeps food on their families’ tables. And in some cases—as happened with the “Day Without Immigrants” strike the month before—workers who participated in solidarity strikes were fired.
Think about what that means. A woman participates in a feminist action. She loses her job. The feminist action moves on to the next campaign. She looks for work. The cause celebrates its symbolism. She explains to her children why the rent is short.
This is what scholars of commodity activism have called “purplewashing”—the deployment of feminist aesthetics and solidarity performances that generate media coverage and organizational energy without materially improving the lives of the most precarious women. The Day Without Women was covered everywhere that feminist media existed. It made a visual statement. It may have shifted some conversations. And for the women workers who got fired for participating, and who now must find new jobs, the honest question has to be: did they receive appropriate return on their investment?
This is not an argument against protest or symbolic action. It’s an argument about who gets to design it, who gets to execute it safely, and who pays the price when it goes wrong. Feminist organizing that doesn’t foreground the experiences of working-class women, women of color, undocumented women, women in the informal economy—is not universal feminism. It is middle-class feminism wearing the language of universality as a costume.
When the women who have the most to gain from feminist change are the ones who can least afford to participate in feminist action, what does that tell us about whose feminism we’re actually building?
The Consent Economy: On BOP Houses, Young Women, and the Limits of “My Body, My Choice”
Here’s a conversation that feminist discourse has handled with either breathless celebration or moralistic condemnation, and almost never with the kind of structural analysis it deserves: the explosion of platforms like OnlyFans and the “BOP house” model of content creation, where women monetize sexual content as an explicit act of self-determination.
The argument for it, from within a certain feminist tradition, is internally coherent: women are reclaiming control of the sexualization of their bodies, setting their own terms, retaining the revenue that previously went to an industry controlled almost entirely by men. Some of the most visible women in this space are financially independent in ways that would have been impossible a decade ago. They speak articulately about agency, consent, and the distinction between performing for the male gaze on their own terms versus performing at the direction of an industry that extracted their labor and gave them almost none of the profit.
I don’t dismiss this. The distinction between structural exploitation and negotiated participation is real, and it matters.
But here’s what the framing consistently elides: the 1% of creators at the top of these platforms earn in a week what the majority of participants earn in a year, if ever. The algorithm that determines visibility—and therefore income—is opaque, unpredictable, and controlled by the platform, not the creator. The safety infrastructure for women navigating unwanted contact, stalking, and image theft is notoriously inadequate. And perhaps most importantly: the visibility and apparent success of the top earners functions as aspirational marketing for a much larger group of young women who enter this space with very different outcomes.
The concern isn’t with adult women who understand the landscape, have resources to navigate its risks, and are making genuinely informed decisions. The concern is with the age at which these decisions are being made, the conditions under which they’re being normalized, and the gap between the emancipatory narrative at the top and the lived reality further down. Young women—some barely into legal adulthood, some crossing that line in ways that are legally murky—are being influenced by faces that are famous, financially comfortable enough to be “out of touch with the threat,” and speaking the language of body autonomy to an audience that is still forming its understanding of what consent actually means, what safety actually requires, and what “freedom” looks like when you’re still negotiating your relationship with both.
The feminist analysis of consent has always been more complex than “consenting adults, full stop.” It has always asked: consent under what conditions? With what information? With what alternatives? Feminist scholars from Catharine MacKinnon to contemporary sex work researchers have argued—without necessarily reaching the same conclusions—that the conditions under which sexual labor occurs are not separable from the analysis of whether it is freely chosen.
Neither “this is feminist empowerment” nor “this is exploitation” does justice to the range of what’s happening. What does justice to it is asking: who profits structurally from normalizing this as a path to women’s financial independence? Who benefits when the most visible faces of women’s economic freedom are selling sexual content rather than demanding equal pay and safe working conditions in every other industry? What happens to the collective bargaining power of women workers when individual body autonomy in content creation becomes the dominant feminist narrative about economic independence?
When individual freedom is the only framework we have for understanding women’s economic choices, what questions about collective power and structural conditions are we no longer able to ask?
Who Is Feminism’s Intended Audience?
There’s a line from Koa Beck that functions as a kind of diagnostic: the mainstream of modern feminism, she argues, “has largely been occupied by white women” in a context “largely defined in middle- or upper-middle-class white-lady contexts.” And the debate over feminism has remained “similarly stuck in a binary construct” along those same lines.
This is not a peripheral observation. It is a structural feature of how mainstream marketing of feminism operates. When feminism becomes a brand, it targets its most lucrative demographic. And the most lucrative demographic for aspirational feminist content is educated, professional, relatively affluent women who have discretionary income, social media presence, and purchasing power. The feminism that gets funded, platformed, and amplified is the feminism that speaks to this demographic—that concerns itself with boardroom representation, confidence gaps, work-life balance, and lifestyle empowerment.
Catherine Rottenberg’s analysis is precise: neoliberal feminism “splits women into two distinct groups: worthy capital-enhancing women and the ‘unworthy’ disposable female ‘other’ who performs much of the domestic and care work.” The split follows racial, class, and citizenship lines. Professional women of the Global North are interpellated as the subjects of feminist aspiration. Women of color, immigrant women, working-class women, women in the Global South—they appear primarily as the objects of feminist concern, or not at all.
The #MeToo movement is the most instructive recent example. Founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke—a Black woman activist working specifically with survivors of sexual violence in marginalized communities—the movement went globally viral in 2017 when it attached to the stories of white Hollywood actresses. Burke was largely erased from the origin narrative until Black women demanded recognition. And even after she was recognized, research by Borah et al. on #MeToo discourse found that testimonies from women of color received greater skepticism and less media attention than testimonies from white women. The movement that should have centered the most vulnerable instead reproduced the hierarchies it claimed to oppose.
What’s required, as scholars of intersectionality have argued since Kimberlé Crenshaw’s foundational 1989 work, is understanding that race, class, gender, and other axes of power are not additive—they are mutually constitutive. You cannot address gender oppression while leaving racial capitalism intact. The Combahee River Collective’s 1977 statement put it with radical clarity: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”
Commodity feminism cannot hold this insight. It would destroy the product. A feminism that demands the destruction of all interlocking systems of oppression is not marketable. It is not aspirational in the lifestyle sense. It does not fit in a glossy magazine. It does not generate brand affinity. And so the version that gets marketed systematically excludes these demands, even when it borrows their language.
Today’s iteration of feminist marketing might gain wider credibility—and more importantly, greater actual impact—by centering the experiences of women whose feminism was never separable from race, class, and colonial history: not as diversity optics, but as the actual political foundation of the analysis.
If the feminism that gets the most resources, the most visibility, and the most cultural platform consistently centers the women who are already doing best, what is it actually doing—emancipating women, or legitimizing the conditions of the women at the top?
What the Market Cannot Hold: The Issues That Don’t Sell
Here is a short, incomplete, and deliberately uncomfortable list of things that are happening, right now, that feminist marketing has almost no framework for addressing:
Indigenous women remain vastly overrepresented in prison populations in Canada and Australia relative to their proportion of the general population. Human trafficking—primarily involving women and girls—operates in every country on earth and generates revenues that rival major global industries. Child marriage continues to occur at scale across South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of the Middle East, frequently with the compliance of women who are themselves trapped within the structures that demand it. Black women in the United States die in childbirth at roughly three times the rate of white women, a disparity that has been documented, studied, and named for decades without being closed. Trans women, particularly trans women of color, face epidemic levels of violence that rarely make the feminist marketing calendar.
These realities don’t translate into compelling brand narratives. They’re not aspirational. They don’t lend themselves to empowerment aesthetics. They implicate systems—capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy—that the most visible feminist brands are not only unwilling to critique, but are themselves embedded within.
The alimony debate is a useful small-scale example of how this plays out at the individual level. When a woman has spent years outside the paid workforce raising children, managing a household, enabling her partner’s career, and she finds herself economically stranded at the end of a marriage with no savings and no recent professional history—the neoliberal feminist response is frequently: she chose to leave the workforce, that’s on her. She should have maintained her financial independence. The solutions it proposes, as Rottenberg puts it, “elide the structural and economic undergirding” of what happened. They treat a structural outcome—women’s labor being economically invisible—as a personal planning failure.
There is a reason feminism becomes popular when feminism becomes sexy and untroublesome. There is a reason that mainstream media is suddenly very preoccupied with feminist movements whenever the “feminist movement” is blonde, thin, and photogenic. As one analysis from The Conversation puts it: “The stereotypes that make feminism look bad are, in fact, the reason feminism exists in the first place. The notion that ‘lesbian’ is an insult is homophobic and the ever-popular claim that feminists are all bitter and undersexed is just old-fashioned misogyny. Perhaps the problem, in terms of feminism’s image, isn’t bad marketing but sexism.”
The problem isn’t that feminism needs better packaging. The problem is that the issues feminism needs to address are not particularly glossy or sellable to begin with. Rebranding cannot address them, because these issues don’t have a branding problem. They have a capitalism problem, and how it redirects the marketing towards their own conventional paradigm. They have a structural violence problem. They have a problem that is, by definition, threatening to the interests of anyone with enough capital to fund a brand campaign.
What does it mean to ask feminism to “do better marketing” when the issues that demand the most urgent feminist attention are precisely those that marketing, by its nature, cannot touch?
The Race: On Starting Lines and Dutch Dates
One image from my notes keeps returning to me, and I think it’s worth sitting with carefully because it captures something that abstract theory sometimes misses.
When women talk about equal rights—equal pay, protection from sexual violence, freedom from trafficking, the right to education—a predictable counter-argument arrives from men who have decided this is all a negotiation: If you want equality, go Dutch on the first date. Don’t expect me to open doors. Chivalry is dead.
I understand the internal logic. If we’re equal, then the social rituals that positioned women as in need of special treatment should dissolve. Fine. I’m not particularly attached to door-opening as a feminist project.
But notice what’s happening: the argument about who pays for dinner is being used to deflect the argument about women’s right to safely walk home after dinner. The question of whether women should expect chivalry is being deployed as a response to the question of whether women should expect not to be raped. These are not equivalent conversations. Treating them as equivalent is not intellectual engagement. It is strategic evasion, undermining the root, underestimating the violence and chain created by misogyny, society, and men.
This is the race metaphor: if we’re already starting from a mile behind on the track, arguing about what shoes we all wear doesn’t fix the starting position. Equal rules mean nothing without equal starting conditions. First you make the race start from equal footing—then you negotiate the finer points of competition.
Feminism that has been successfully marketed into palatability has largely abandoned this argument. It’s too confrontational. It makes men defensive. It doesn’t build the coalition of people who feel good about buying the cause. And so it focuses on the shoes. On the parts of equality that can be discussed without anyone in the room having to acknowledge that the race has never been fair.
But the women who are still at the starting mile—the single mothers, the trafficking survivors, the girls who dropped out of school because their brother’s degree was the priority, the women in the factories sewing the feminist T-shirts—they are not served by the conversation about shoes. They need the conversation about starting positions. And that conversation is not in the marketing budget.
An Ending That Doesn’t Resolve
I want to be honest about something: this essay has no clean conclusion to offer. Not because I lack conviction, but because the tensions are real, and I’m suspicious of anyone who resolves them too neatly in either direction.
Commodity feminism has real effects. The Always campaign that made a girl in Jakarta question why “like a girl” is an insult—that matters. The representation of diverse bodies in mainstream advertising—that shifts something in how some girls see themselves. The celebrity who uses her platform to name sexual harassment—that grants language and permission to women who needed both. These are not nothing. The women who experienced them as meaningful are not mistaken.
And simultaneously: commodity feminism systematically evacuates the most threatening demands. It centers the most privileged women. It mistakes representation for redistribution. It confuses the aesthetic of liberation with actual freedom. It sells the image of a movement to fund the machinery that makes the movement necessary. It is, to borrow Nancy Fraser’s phrase, in a “dangerous liaison with neoliberalism”—and it has been for long enough that many people can no longer see where one ends and the other begins.
We need—and this is my genuine conviction, not a rhetorical gesture—a feminism that can hold both of these truths without collapsing them into either naive celebration or cynical dismissal. A feminism that can take the representation seriously without pretending it’s enough. A feminism that can engage with the market without being captured by market logic. A feminism that can talk about individual choices without losing the ability to analyze the structures that constrain them.
But more than any framework: we need feminisms that are accountable to the women they claim to speak for. Not women in the abstract—women in the garment factories. Women whose cases don’t make the news cycle. Women whose oppression is not photogenic. Women whose liberation would require dismantling something that someone with a marketing budget actively profits from.
The feminism that survives its own marketing will probably not be the one that gets the best campaign. It will be the one that refuses, stubbornly, to be sellable. It will be the one that is inconvenient and unglamorous and structurally serious and uncomfortable to be around if you benefit from things staying as they are.
That feminism exists. It always has. It’s just been doing its work in places that don’t photograph well.
And the question I leave you with—genuinely, not rhetorically—is this: What are you willing to be uncomfortable for? Not what cause looks good on your feed. Not what label you’re willing to wear. What discomfort—real, structural, costly discomfort—are you willing to sit with in the name of someone else’s freedom?
Research for this essay draws on: Nancy Fraser’s political economy of feminism; Catherine Rottenberg’s analysis of neoliberal feminism; Goldman, Heath, and Smith’s concept of commodity feminism; Kimberlé Crenshaw’s foundational work on intersectionality; Koa Beck’s analysis of white feminism; research on #MeToo by Borah et al.; Michaele Ferguson on choice feminism; Arlie Hochschild on emotional labor; Deniz Kandiyoti’s patriarchal bargain; the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 Black Feminist Statement; documented reporting on feminist T-shirts and garment worker conditions by the Mail on Sunday, The Guardian, and South China Morning Post; and academic research on gender, labor, and honor systems in Bangladesh from others stories.
The personal observations about South Asian family structures, Bengali public feminism, and the weight of “what will people say”—those come from a more immediate place.
