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Is this still what we fought for?
That’s the question that seems to hang quietly behind so much of the cultural discourse right now. From album covers to courtrooms, from social media trends to political movements, feminism feels at once everywhere and somehow nowhere at all. Its language has been adopted, repackaged, and monetised to the point where it’s difficult to tell where empowerment ends and regression begins.
Take, for example, Sabrina Carpenter’s recent album cover for Man’s Best Friend. On it, she’s posed playfully, or provocatively, depending on who you ask, being dangled by her hair like a puppy on a leash. The image immediately split the internet. Some applauded the hyper-feminine camp of it all, arguing that by controlling the image herself, Carpenter has the very power dynamic she portrays. Is this empowerment through self-objectification? Or have we simply rebranded the male gaze into something palatable enough to sell?
A similar debate followed Sydney Sweeney’s now-viral bath soap advertisement. Draped in soft pastels, the ad presents a hyper-sexualised fantasy of femininity, promising to sell her bathwater. But beneath the glossy veneer lies something more troubling: a product being sold in a culture already saturated with perversions of female sexuality. In a world where young girls are groomed by online algorithms and where objectification is not only normalised but monetised, it reinforces and capitalises on the very dynamics that are harming women and girls at scale. She isn’t merely selling soap, she’s selling an aesthetic rooted in submission, designed to please a gaze that has always been about power rather than beauty. She, like Carpenter, defended the campaign as her taking ownership of her own sexuality. But it raises a difficult question: does choosing to participate in your own objectification render it empowering? Or does the system simply benefit from us believing that it does?
We see the same tension in creators like Bonnie Blue, part of a growing wave of women profiting from subscription-based adult platforms. It’s often framed as empowerment: financial freedom, sexual agency, self-ownership. And on the surface, that’s convincing. But is it really liberation if the content still exists to serve male desire? If the gaze stays the same, how much has really changed? The idea that sex work equals empowerment often masks the fact that much of the power still sits with the consumer who is overwhelmingly male, whilst women are left packaging their own objectification as a product.
Dr. Susan J. Douglas, in Enlightened Sexism, argues that part of feminism’s problem today is precisely this illusion: “The media’s message seems to be that women have won equality, so now it’s safe for us to enjoy objectification.” The suggestion is that because we’ve come so far, the battle is over and anything goes.
And yes, on paper, the battle looks pretty much won. Women today hold leadership positions once thought unimaginable. They dominate industries, run companies, and helm governments. But at the same time, cracks are forming. In the U.S., the reversal of Roe v. Wade shook reproductive rights to their core. Political movements often cloaked in populist nostalgia continue to frame feminism as a radical threat to tradition, family, and stability. Donald Trump’s revived campaign is riddled with this language, tapping into a broader cultural unease with feminism’s gains.
So, where does that leave us? Have we entered a new phase of feminism? One that’s more personal than political? More symbolic than structural? Or have we simply grown too comfortable, too convinced of progress, to notice when the ground is quietly shifting beneath us?
As historian Joan Wallach Scott puts it, “Gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.” And power, of course, doesn’t disappear; it simply adapts.
Maybe this is the paradox of modern feminism: its greatest achievement may also be its greatest vulnerability. Having won so many battles, it risks being declared redundant, right as new forms of regression quietly take root. The victories of past generations have created the illusion that the project is complete, even as many of the same dynamics are simply playing out in more palatable packaging.
There may not be a simple answer. Perhaps feminism isn’t declining so much as it is being transformed for better, for worse, or for something far more complicated. As always, the real work may lie not in declaring victory or defeat, but in continuing to ask uncomfortable questions.
The real danger was never feminism’s failure; it’s how easily its language can be twisted to serve the very forces it once sought to dismantle.
