On the subversive dimensions of wanting, the economic management of women’s dissatisfaction and the case for erotic life as political life.
Content warning: This article contains references to sexual violence and abortion.
It is no coincidence that the expansion of commodity capitalism and the intensification of women’s body dissatisfaction have run on roughly parallel tracks over the past century. The correlation is not accidental but structural: a consumer culture requires consuming subjects, and a subject who feels genuinely satisfied – with herself, with her body, with her desires and with their fulfilment – makes a poor consumer. Dissatisfaction is the engine.
That is why the management of women’s pleasure – its deferral, its complication, its endless redirection towards products and projects that promise to supply what remains perpetually just out of reach – is not a side effect of capitalism’s operation in the domain of gender. It is one of its central mechanisms. And yes, I am naming it plainly: female pleasure has been treated as a resource to be controlled.
This essay makes an argument that is simple in formulation and demanding in implication: the possession and exercise of women’s desire – genuine, self-generated, pleasure-oriented desire – is politically subversive. Not because desire is inherently radical, and not because personal liberation automatically equals collective liberation (a confusion that has bedevilled certain feminist tendencies for decades), but because the conditions under which women’s desire is managed and suppressed are produced by structural power. Refusing those conditions – even in the intimate domain of desire itself – is a refusal with political content.
This argument has roots in Audre Lorde’s ‘Uses of the Erotic’, one of the most important and under-read texts in the feminist tradition. Lorde does not equate erotic pleasure with political action. She argues something more subtle, and more powerful: the capacity for full feeling – for the depth of experience she calls the erotic – is a form of knowledge and power that patriarchal societies systematically work to suppress in women. Recovering that capacity – insisting on being fully present to one’s own experience, including one’s own pleasure – is not sufficient for liberation, but it is a precondition of it.
The economy of dissatisfaction
The economic stakes of women’s dissatisfaction with the body are staggering. McKinsey puts the global beauty industry at around $450 billion, spanning the core categories of colour cosmetics, skincare, hair care and fragrance, with continued growth projected through 2030 (McKinsey & Company, 2025a; McKinsey & Company, 2025b).
In the United States, the weight-loss economy is even more startling: Marketdata estimates the total US weight-loss market reached a historic peak of about $90 billion in 2023, driven in part by the surge in prescription GLP-1 drugs (Marketdata LLC, 2024). The fitness industry, the plastic surgery industry, the broader wellness industry: each represents a massive accumulation of capital organised around a single premise – that women’s bodies, as they naturally exist, are insufficient and in need of continuous improvement.
The logic of this economy is circular and self-perpetuating. The beauty industry does not simply respond to pre-existing insecurities; it actively produces them through advertising, the circulation of idealised images and the cultural infrastructure of comparison and normalisation that makes deviation from the ideal feel like personal failure. The insecurity is the product. The cosmetic is the delivery mechanism for a cycle of temporary relief followed by renewed inadequacy. This is not a design flaw but a design feature: a product that genuinely resolves the anxiety it addresses eliminates its own market.
“The possession and exercise of women’s desire – genuine, self-generated, pleasure-oriented desire – is a politically subversive act under conditions specifically organised to suppress it”
Jean Kilbourne’s decades of research on advertising and women – documented in her Killing Us Softly series – shows the systematic ways in which advertising aimed at women operates through the production of inadequacy: the model whose skin is airbrushed to impossible smoothness; the fragrance advert that promises romantic fulfilment through chemical intervention; the diet product whose before-and-after shots promise a transformation that the statistics suggest it cannot deliver. Kilbourne’s analysis demonstrates that the cumulative effect is not merely commercial but ideological. It constructs a vision of femininity as permanently incomplete, always in need of the next product, the next procedure, the next effort of self-transformation.
What Kilbourne documents from the direction of representation, political economists document from the direction of capital: consumer industries organised around women’s bodily dissatisfaction represent a massive transfer of resources from women to corporations, mediated through the manufacture of inadequacy. Women spend disproportionate amounts of their income on maintaining their appearance, as well as time and money, in a society where time itself is a scarce and unequally distributed resource. The body becomes not only an aesthetic project but an economic one: a site of ongoing investment that yields returns measured not in pleasure or wellbeing, but in social acceptance and access.
Class operates powerfully in this economy. The more elaborate and expensive body-maintenance regimes associated with professional-class femininity remain inaccessible to women with fewer economic resources, who face the same aesthetic demands with less ability to meet them. This produces a double burden: the symbolic ‘failure’ of bodies that cannot afford to perform middle-class femininity, compounding the economic pressures that limited those resources in the first place. The beauty economy is not only organised by gender; it is also organised by class, race and their intersections, distributing costs and benefits unevenly along the axes of existing inequality.
Audre Lorde and the erotic as political power
Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ – originally delivered as a speech at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women – makes a unique contribution to feminist political theory. It insists on the political significance of the intimate and the pleasurable at a depth most political theory does not reach.
Lorde’s claim is not simply that pleasure is good and should be pursued (a relatively uncontroversial point). It is that the capacity for depth of feeling – the erotic – is a form of knowledge: information about what is right, nourishing and alive. Patriarchal systems, she argues, work to suppress that knowledge in women precisely because of the threat it poses.
Crucially, Lorde distinguishes the erotic from the pornographic. The pornographic, she argues, is the suppression of feeling – the reduction of experience to sensation without depth or meaning. The erotic, by contrast, is characterised by fullness: being present in one’s own life, acting from the deepest place of one’s own knowledge and feeling. It is what happens when someone does work she genuinely cares about, moves through the world in alignment with her values, or experiences physical pleasure with her full self present rather than watching from a distance.
The political implication is sharp. A woman who lives erotically, in Lorde’s sense – who trusts her own feelings, acts from her own deepest knowledge and refuses the numbness that patriarchal management of women’s experience produces – is harder to manipulate and harder to control. She has access to a standard of evaluation independent of external approval. She knows, from inside her own life, what nourishes and what diminishes. That knowledge is not infallible, but it is sovereign.
This is why, Lorde argues, the suppression of women’s feelings – the training that teaches women to distrust their sensations, prioritise others’ comfort over their own and perform emotional states rather than experience them – is a political project as much as a personal one. It not only harms individuals (though it does). It serves systems that benefit from women’s docility, compliance and disconnection from their own power.
Lorde writes from a position that is both Black and lesbian, and she is explicit that her analysis draws on experiences mainstream white feminism has often ignored or minimised. The erotic knowledge she describes is knowledge developed under multiple marginalisations – forged in the gap between dominant cultural fantasies of what is desirable and possible, and the experience of living in a body that culture excludes or degrades. From that position, the erotic is not only a source of pleasure but a form of epistemological resistance: what you know that cannot be taken away.
The suffragette’s body, the protester’s body, the body in the street
The history of feminist politics is, in a concrete and irreducible sense, a history of bodies in space. The suffragettes who march, chain themselves to railings and go on hunger strike in prison perform a politics of the body – insisting, through physical presence and physical suffering, on the political significance of their existence. Civil rights marchers who walk to work during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and sit at lunch counters and hold their ground under physical assault enact a politics in which the body’s presence in space is itself a statement. Abortion rights demonstrators who fill streets across the world after the fall of Roe v. Wade are bodies insisting on sovereignty over themselves.
The connection between bodily autonomy in the intimate sense – sovereignty over desire, pleasure and reproductive life – and political autonomy in the broader sense is not metaphorical. It is material. The legal, medical and cultural regulation of women’s bodies is continuous with women’s political subordination. Reproductive rights are not separate from economic rights or political representation; they are constitutive of the capacity for full political participation. A person whose reproductive life is controlled by the state, whose bodily autonomy is conditional on others’ approval, who must seek permission for medical procedures affecting their own body, has a citizenship that is conditional and incomplete.
Angela Davis, Kate Millett, Ti-Grace Atkinson and other feminist thinkers of the late 1960s and 1970s make this link explicitly. They argue that sexual politics – the politics of reproduction, desire and bodily autonomy – is not secondary to ‘real’ politics, but a primary site of power and struggle. That argument is contested by some on the left who treat sexual politics as a distraction from class struggle; the feminist response is that the sexual division of labour and the regulation of bodies are central to the reproduction of class relations. A left politics that ignores gender is not only incomplete – it risks reproducing the very conditions it claims to oppose.
The argument remains live. Contemporary socialist feminist organisations – from the Bread and Roses caucus to formations within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and the international Socialist Feminist Alliance – insist on holding together analysis of capitalism and analysis of gender, refusing the false choice between economic and feminist politics. Reproductive rights, in this framework, are labour rights: the right to control one’s reproductive labour, decide whether and when to have children and access the material conditions necessary for that decision to be genuinely free. The politics of pleasure is inseparable from the politics of economic life.
Against the privatisation of desire
One of the most effective mechanisms for neutralising the political content of desire is its privatisation – confining it to personal life, individual psychology and consumer choice. In dominant cultural discourse, desire becomes a private matter: what this particular woman, with her particular psychology and history, happens to want. The structural conditions that shape and limit that wanting – the beauty economy, the management of women’s appetite, reproductive labour, the prevalence of sexual violence – are bracketed out. The woman is left alone with her wants and the market’s offers.
This privatisation is paired with commodification. The feminist demand for bodily autonomy is met, in part, by a consumer feminism that translates that demand into purchases: the feminist lipstick, the woman-founded lingerie company, the wellness app that promises to reconnect women with their bodies. These are not without value. Representation matters, and products designed with women’s genuine pleasure – even female pleasure, in the blunt, searchable sense – in mind are preferable to those designed for women’s aesthetic performance alone.
But framing desire as a consumer problem that requires a consumer solution is itself a political move. It evacuates structural analysis and replaces it with the market’s choice architecture. It turns liberation into branding.
Reasserting desire as political – as shaped by conditions that require structural change – is not an argument against pleasure. It is an argument against isolating pleasure from what makes it possible. Women’s erotic lives become richer, freer and more fully expressed not through better products or more enlightened self-talk alone, but through material conditions that reduce coercion: economic security, freedom from violence, access to healthcare, an equitable distribution of care work and cultural environments that value women’s experience across the full range of their lives.
Pleasure matters. The quality of women’s sensory and erotic lives is a legitimate political concern – not because it produces better workers, more compliant citizens or more content consumers, but because women are people, and people’s capacity for pleasure and full experience is bound up with dignity and freedom. But pleasure secured only for some, or purchased at the cost of others’ labour and subordination, or manufactured by an industry that depends on suppressing genuine satisfaction, is not what desire fully realised looks like.
What it could look like is harder to specify, because the conditions for its full expression do not yet exist. A world in which women’s desire is structurally supported rather than managed – in which the material conditions for genuine bodily autonomy are in place, care is shared, and the aestheticisation of women’s existence is no longer a growth industry – can only be fully imagined from inside those conditions.
For now, the task is political and intellectual: name the conditions that constrain desire for what they are, insist on their transformation and hold open the space – however contested – in which something new might grow.
That is the politics of pleasure, stripped of consolation: not a promise of immediate liberation, but a sustained, collective, structurally informed project of making conditions in which liberation becomes materially possible. It is less dazzling than the rhetoric of reclamation. It is also, arguably, the only approach that takes the problem seriously enough to have a chance of actually changing it.
References
Bread & Roses (n.d.) Bread and Roses (DSA caucus). Available at: https://breadandrosesdsa.org/ (Accessed: 28 February 2026).
Democratic Socialists of America (n.d.) Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Available at: https://www.dsausa.org/ (Accessed: 28 February 2026).
Kilbourne, J. (2010) Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women [Film]. Directed by S. Jhally. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation.
Lorde, A. (1984) ‘Uses of the erotic: the erotic as power’, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press.
Marketdata LLC (2024) The US Weight Loss Market: 2024 Status Report & Forecast. Tampa, FL: Marketdata LLC. Available via: Research and Markets. Available at: https://www.researchandmarkets.com/report/united-states-weight-loss-industry-market (Accessed: 28 February 2026).
McKinsey & Company (2025a) ‘State of Beauty 2025: Solving a shifting growth puzzle’. 9 June. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/state-of-beauty (Accessed: 28 February 2026).
McKinsey & Company (2025b) ‘A close look at the global beauty industry in 2025’. 28 August. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/a-close-look-at-the-global-beauty-industry-in-2025 (Accessed: 28 February 2026).
McKinsey & Company (2025c) The State of Fashion: Beauty (June 2025) [PDF]. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/industries/consumer%20packaged%20goods/our%20insights/state%20of%20beauty/2025/the-state-of-fashion-beauty-june-2025-f.pdf (Accessed: 28 February 2026).
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Stanford University, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute (n.d.) ‘Montgomery bus boycott’. Available at: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/montgomery-bus-boycott (Accessed: 28 February 2026).
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