Naughty Feminism and the Weird Business of Being Desired Online

I’ve been thinking about something lately, and the more I think about it, the more uncomfortable it gets.

What if the internet has convinced us that attention and empowerment are the same thing?

Not just for women. For everyone.

But women seem to be stuck right in the middle of this conversation.

A few years ago, posting a thirst trap was just posting a thirst trap.

Now it's often wrapped in the language of empowerment, self-expression, confidence, and feminism.

And look, sometimes it genuinely is.

I'm not interested in telling grown adults what they should or shouldn't post online.

That's not the point.

What interests me is the environment we're all posting in.

Because social media isn't some neutral space where people freely express themselves and nothing else is happening.

There are algorithms.

There are incentives.

There is money.

And there are millions of people competing for the same thing: attention.

That's where things start getting messy.

We like to talk about choice as if it exists in a vacuum.

But none of us make choices in a vacuum.

If a certain type of content gets rewarded over and over again, people naturally create more of it.

That's not weakness. That's human nature.

Writers do it.

Influencers do it.

Businesses do it.

I do it.

You probably do it too.

The thing that bothers me is how quickly attention gets mistaken for validation.

And how validation gets mistaken for empowerment.

They're not always the same thing.

Sometimes they overlap.

Sometimes they don't.

A million views can make someone feel powerful.

A million views can also make someone feel trapped in a version of themselves they no longer enjoy performing.

The internet rarely talks about that part.

We celebrate the attention.

We celebrate the growth.

We celebrate the engagement.

But we don't spend much time asking what happens when your identity starts depending on those things.

Maybe that's why the whole conversation around "naughty feminism" feels so complicated.

Because the answer isn't that women are being manipulated.

And the answer isn't that every provocative post is a revolutionary act of empowerment either.

Reality is usually somewhere in the middle.

Most people are just trying to navigate a system that rewards visibility.

Some are making money from it.

Some are enjoying it.

Some are exhausted by it.

And many are probably feeling all three at the same time.

The more I look at social media, the less interested I become in judging individual choices.

What interests me is the machine behind them.

The system that quietly teaches all of us what gets attention and what gets ignored.

Because maybe the real question isn't why people perform.

Maybe the real question is why the performance is so heavily rewarded.

And whether any of us would behave differently if it wasn't.

I don't know the answer.

I'm still trying to figure it out myself.