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How the Female Body Became the Most Profitable Fantasy

  • Writer: Vicenta Wheatley
    Vicenta Wheatley
  • 1 day ago
  • 4 min read

From Hollywood archetypes to viral TikTok stars, the female body has always been a commodity, traded on desire and rarity. Empowerment often wears the mask of choice, but in reality it is performance measured in profit and attention. 


Fetishisation of the Forbidden and Rare

For over a century the media has taken what society insists must remain off-limits and turned it into spectacle. Hollywood’s Code-era “virginal ingénues” like Judy Garland, the provocative high school tropes of contemporary anime, and even Catholic iconography like nuns have all been eroticised in ways that highlight the tension between morality and desire. Sociologist Rosalind Gill notes that the sexualisation of the forbidden functions as a form of cultural containment that ensures women remain simultaneously desirable and morally constrained so that their perceived power is always contingent on male approval. 


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Source: ‘Black Narcissus’, MGM


This principle of scarcity-driven desire extends beyond age or religious archetypes to racialised and ethnicised fantasies as well. Women who are coded as rare, exotic, or foreign (particularly Asian or “Wasian” women in Western media) are fetishised in ways that reduce complex identities to a set of digestible fantasies - submissive, hypersexual, or  mysterious - so that their representation serves the desires of others rather than their own narratives.  This operates on the same market logic: rarity inflates value, and the fetish becomes profitable. In both cases, whether innocence, taboo, or ethnicity, the market rewards what is scarce and forbidden and so creates a pipeline where desire, fantasy and economic gain are inseparable. 


Modern Empowerment as Performance

In the digital marketplace, empowerment has become a kind of theatre that rewards those who can make self-expression profitable. Cardi B’s and Megan Thee Stallion’s song ‘WAP’ was hailed as a cultural victory for female sexuality and creative freedom, a declaration that women could own and celebrate their desires without apology. Yet its success depended on the same commercial infrastructure that has long monetised women’s bodies. The song’s virality generated millions of dollars in advertising revenue for streaming platforms and social media companies whose algorithms amplify whatever provokes the strongest reaction. This system is powered by demand, an overwhelming share of which comes from male audiences who consistently drive engagement toward sexualised content. The market simply follows its most reliable consumers. What appears to be empowerment does not liberate women so much as it capitalises on male attention, extracting value from visibility itself. The more controversial or erotic a performance appears, the more attention it receives, and the more profitable it becomes - not just for the performer but for the entire digital ecosystem built around engagement metrics. 


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Source: Cardi B’s “WAP” [ft. Megan Thee Stallion] , Atlantic Records


A similar logic governs platforms like Instagram and OnlyFans, where women are encouraged to convert intimacy into income. On the surface this does look like autonomy: creators set their own prices, control their content, and profit directly from their labour. An improvement from traditional forms of exploitation in advertising and entertainment, no doubt. But is just an improvement enough? These platforms are not neutral marketplaces. Their algorithms, interface designs, and audience demographics subtly dictate what kinds of content perform best, rewarding repetition of familiar tropes (like youth, beauty and eroticism) while penalising deviation. Even the supposed empowerment of influencers like Kim Kardashian, who transformed her image into a billion-dollar brand, rests on the careful maintenance of desirability within the limits of mass appeal. Kardashian has invested enormous effort into curating and preserving her public persona, from meticulous styling and branding decisions to repeated cosmetic procedures costing thousands of dollars that reinforce the image her audience expects. Love her or hate her, her success is a study in labour as spectacle, with every post, every product launch, and every reshaped curve a part of a calculated performance designed to maximise visibility and market value. What is sold as self-determination is often an illusion shaped by markets that track and monetise male desire with ruthless efficiency. Visibility becomes a stage, and those who wish to survive on it must learn to perform the version of empowerment that sells best. The women appear to be entrepreneurs, but their success depends on playing by rules written to maximise male attention. Is this “empowerment” really liberation? Or is it just labour measured in clicks, likes, and the time people spend looking?


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Source: Dimitros Kambouris, Getty Images


The Price of Being Seen

The evolution from taboo archetypes to sexualised media content highlights a persistent tension between autonomy and social prescription. Philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of women as “Other” and Judith Butler’s theory of performative gender reveal how visibility is never neutral: even when women appear to choose, their actions are interpreted through cultural expectations and moral frameworks. Contemporary empowerment therefore is always conditional, shaped by the norms, fantasies, and structures that determine which expressions of femininity are recognised and rewarded.


The result is a cultural feedback loop in which women perform empowerment for an audience whose desire determines their market value. Autonomy is real only insofar as it aligns with profitability, and rebellion is legible only when it is consumable. In the end, the female body remains the most profitable product not because of inherent agency but because the market has perfected a system in which scarcity and desire intersect to produce a commodity that is endlessly desirable and infinitely monetisable. The promise of liberation is seductive, but it comes with a price: the labour of constantly performing oneself, measured not in achievement or fulfillment, but in clicks, likes, and the relentless gaze of a paying audience. 


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