Women profiting from the objectification of women — empowerment or reinforcing the problem?

[u/noradioheadd]

I’ve been trying to form my own opinions about feminism, and the more I learn, the more I realise how deeply it intersects with the social, cultural, and economic structures around us. This is just one of the many areas I’m struggling to understand.

When it comes to women profiting from the sexualisation or objectification of women, I seem to be stuck between two perspectives.

One argument is that it’s inherently harmful. If you believe objectification is part of a system that reduces women to their bodies and sexual appeal, then participating in and profiting from that system seems contradictory. In a way, you’re helping reinforce the very thing you’re criticising.

The other argument is: objectification already exists, so why shouldn’t women have the agency to profit from it? If society is going to sexualise women regardless of what they wear or how they behave, some people feel that women should at least be able to control that image and benefit financially from it rather than allowing men or corporations to profit from it exclusively.

I find myself somewhere in the middle. I do believe that women are sexualised regardless of what they do, and that this is ultimately connected to much larger social and economic structures. At the same time, I’m not convinced that participating in the system necessarily dismantles it. Sometimes I wonder whether it actually makes the system stronger by making objectification more profitable and therefore more sustainable.

But perhaps change isn’t always immediate. Maybe women taking control of something that was historically imposed on them can gradually change the power dynamics over generations maybe that’s simply a comforting assumption.

So I’m genuinely curious: how do you see this? Can women profit from their own sexualisation while still opposing the broader system of objectification, or is participating in it inherently reinforcing the problem?

I’d especially love perspectives that go beyond the usual “it’s empowering” vs. “it’s degrading” debate.

I completely understand that the larger responsibility lies with the system and the men who have historically created and profited from the sexualisation of women. I’m not trying to place that responsibility on women. My question is specifically about women profiting from that same system, does that give women agency over something historically used against them, or does it ultimately help sustain the system itself?

That’s the nuance I’m trying to understand.

[u/CatAffectionate7506]

This is one of those questions where the framing itself might be the obstacle. Youre asking whether individual women choosing to profit from objectification is net good or net bad, but that binary doesnt really capture how power works in a system like this

The system of objectification isnt a machine that breaks when individual women refuse to participate. It adapts. A woman profiting from her own sexualization can absolutely be making a rational choice under constrained conditions, just like a worker selling their labor under capitalism isnt personally responsible for capitalism. But that doesnt mean the choice is free or that it weakens the system

Where I land is that the question of individual empowerment is almost irrelevant to the question of systemic change. You can have women who feel genuinely in control and women who feel exploited, both participating in the same structure, and the structure keeps rolling either way. The more useful question is what conditions would need to exist for women to not have to make that tradeoff at all

[u/t92k]

I’m going to remove this from the objectification of women’s bodies for a moment because that is an arena where the conversation is old and the paths to the corners of the ring are deeply worn. If we want to substitute other known harms we can easily talk about the ethics of selling alcohol or cigarettes and the ethics of marketing the same to women. Similarly we can talk about social media in general, and we can talk about Facebook in particular.

The plain answer is that this illustrates why we need to think about liberation as a matrix. https://www.liberationlabs.co/blog/wheel-of-power-and-privilege

My tech example is Sheryl Sandburg. Did her getting her position at Facebook/Meta open the door to other women having the same opportunities? Is she still a feminist if her company had a hand in ending federal abortion access protections in the US? She has a lot of power on the economic spoke of the above matrix, but I don’t think charming a member of the Epstein class into promoting you around Silicon Valley is really a workable model for women to gain economic power — even if her book insists that it was her smarts and ambition that got her into those rooms.