The high cost of empowerment: How brands sell feminism back to women

There’s a shot I keep seeing. It returns like a bad habit, like an opening scene a director can’t stop re-cutting because they know exactly where the audience will look.

A bathroom. 2:13 a.m. Cold LED light that makes skin look like paperwork. A phone screen glowing the way confession booths used to glow, before confession became content.

A woman leans in. Too close. The camera catches what mirrors never used to demand: pores, lines, texture, and evidence. Scroll. Compare. Pause. Flinch. Add to cart.

That’s the shame economy. Not a “vibe”. The market operates through a supply chain. And its most profitable raw material has never changed: the female body.

Branding used to sell aspiration. The ladder. The dream with better lighting. Now it sells absolution. A temporary permit to feel normal. Twelve hours, maybe. Then the wound quietly reopens and gets renamed “progress”.

The old insult was blunt: you’re not enough. The new one wears cashmere: you’re almost there.

Almost is where the money lives.

Cruelty didn’t disappear. It got upgraded. It learnt manners. It learnt therapy language. It learnt feminism. Shame doesn’t arrive as an attack anymore; it arrives as care.

It doesn’t say: fix yourself. It says, 'Love yourself'; here’s what to buy to prove you mean it.

Feminism, once a battering ram, has been turned into a design system. A palette. A tone of voice. A campaign arc with “brave” music under it.

The vocabulary of liberation is now printed on bottles and stitched onto cotton like a moral label: empowerment. Confidence. Sisterhood. Words with blood history, sold in 30 millilitres.

The body is still the battlefield. The flags just got prettier.

In the old model, women were punished for not fitting the ideal. In the new one, they’re punished for not performing freedom correctly.

Strong, but not difficult. Natural, but perfected. Sexy, but never needy. Independent, but still desirable. Ageing, but quietly, like a luxury hotel that renovates overnight and swears nothing happened.

The shame economy survives on contradictions you can’t solve. Only manage. Only shop through. It doesn’t even need you to hate yourself openly. That’s too vulgar. It needs you to maintain yourself. Optimise yourself. Keep the project running.

And the market’s favourite disguise for this is “self-care”.

Self-care was supposed to mean rest. Boundaries. Refusal. Politics in the intimate sphere. Now it often means upkeep. Maintenance. Compliance with a softer face.

It’s not a revolution. It’s housekeeping with a credit card.

Social media didn’t invent this machinery. It automated it. It turned shame into metrics and feminism into content. The body is no longer just judged; it’s tracked.

Likes. Saves. Comments. DMs. The algorithm’s little holy signals. You don’t just exist. You perform. You don’t just age. You update.

Your worth becomes a dashboard. Your face becomes a storefront. And brands made the smartest move of the decade: they stopped playing the villain.

If a brand shames women directly, it gets backlash, screenshots, outrage, and the whole moral theatre. So, it doesn’t shame. It “supports”. It “listens”. It “sees you”. Then it hands you the instruments of self-surveillance and calls them tools.

Before and after. “Your journey.” “Your glow.”

A courtroom with UX.

The genius, and also the horror, is that the shame is now self-administered. The brand doesn’t have to say you’re failing. The interface implies it. The feed confirms it. Comparison finishes the sentence for free.

And feminism becomes the coating. The alibi.

Because feminism, in the hands of branding, is most useful when it’s aesthetic. When it’s safe. When it asks for better storytelling instead of structural change.

A brand can say “women empowerment” and still keep women out of the room where money and decisions are made. It can sell “body positivity” and still profit from the panic it pretends to heal. It can celebrate “real bodies” while the algorithm rewards only the ones that look “real” in the correct way.

That’s the pornographic paradox of modern authenticity: the more candid it looks, the more staged it usually is.

And let’s not pretend the audience is innocent. We collaborate. We like redemption arcs. We love confession. We share “raw” posts. We reward tears and discount codes in the same breath. We demand bravery, then punish it the moment it’s uncomfortable, messy, or imperfect.

So, the system stays balanced: guilt and grace, sold together.

Which brings me to the question no one in a boardroom wants to ask, because once you ask it, the whole machine looks obscene.

Are we building a customer, or are we building a wound?

The next era won’t belong to the loudest purpose or the prettiest feminist copy. It will belong to the rare brand that refuses to turn the female body into inventory.

A dignity brand doesn’t monetise insecurity, even politely. It doesn’t sell women the right to feel human. It equips. It respects. It steps back.

That will feel radical now, not because it screams, but because it stops the transaction mid-sentence.

And if you work in branding, you already know the final twist, the one we don’t put in decks, the one we don’t say out loud on the Monday status call while the Slack pings and someone shares a “Q1 empowerment campaign” deck link:

We sell empowerment for a living. And we keep financing an economy that feeds on women’s doubt.

The most provocative move left might be the simplest and the hardest: stop making women feel smaller just to make them buy.

(Ercole Egizi is a Global Brand Transformation Leader with over 15 years of experience helping international brands and agencies navigate growth, repositioning, and digital reinvention. Connect with him on LinkedIn)