Freedom Without a Compass
Women’s liberation began as a sober project. Its original aim was simple enough to sound almost banal today: women should not be legally, economically, or socially trapped by their sex. They should be able to work, to study, to choose partners freely, to leave bad situations, and to exist as full subjects rather than supporting characters in someone else’s life.
Early feminist thinkers were not interested in spectacle. They were interested in freedom in a classical sense: autonomy, responsibility, and the capacity to shape one’s own life without being assigned a predefined role. Sexual liberation was part of this, but it was never meant to be the center. It aimed to remove moral panic from intimacy, not to turn sexuality into a career path.
Liberation succeeded in removing constraints, but it did not replace them with a shared idea of what a good or dignified life might look like. The old rules dissolved, and nothing equally solid took their place. Into that empty space stepped the most reliable organizer modern societies have left: the market.
Once that happened, sexuality was absorbed into the same logic as everything else. Attention became a currency. Visibility became value. Desire became something that could be optimized, tracked, and monetized. What had once been private or relational turned into a performance, complete with metrics, rankings, and feedback loops.
This is not a story about women suddenly becoming superficial or dependent. It is a story about incentives. When a society repeatedly signals that youth, beauty, and sexual availability generate immediate rewards, people respond accordingly. Calling this “choice” is technically correct but incomplete. Choices are always made inside systems that reward certain paths and quietly punish others.
Platforms like OnlyFans did not invent this dynamic. They merely made it unmistakable. They removed intermediaries and framed the result as empowerment. In one sense, that is true. Control shifted from institutions to individuals. In another sense, the individual became the institution. The product, the branding, the customer service, and the depreciation schedule all collapsed into a single body.
What often looks like independence turns out to be a new kind of dependence. Not on a husband or a family, but on attention flows, algorithms, and the constant pressure to remain desirable. This dependence is harder to criticize because it wears the language of freedom, but it is no less real. It demands endless self-surveillance and turns aging into a threat rather than a phase of life.
Men are not spectators in this story. They are participants. They consume the content, reward the behavior, and are shaped by the same reduction of value to numbers. If women are encouraged to turn themselves into commodities, men are encouraged to reduce themselves to wallets, status symbols, or audiences. The degradation is symmetrical, even if it takes different forms.
None of this requires moral outrage to understand. It follows a familiar pattern. When shared meaning collapses and markets take over, everything becomes tradable. Bodies, identities, intimacy, and even rebellion itself acquire a price tag.
The strange outcome is that a movement that began by resisting objectification arrived in a world where self-objectification is often presented as the highest form of freedom. Not because anyone planned it that way, but because no one seriously asked what freedom was for once it had been achieved.
Liberation did not fail. It did its job. What failed was the refusal to think beyond it. Freedom was treated as an end rather than a condition, and so it was handed over to a system that understands value only in numbers. The result is not a scandal. It is simply what happens when freedom is left without a compass.