Patriarchy: The woman on the album cover stares straight into the camera, kneeling, in a puff-sleeved dress the colour of strawberry milk, kitten heels poised, lips in a pout that could be playful or predatory. The song promises a takedown of fragile masculinity, but the image also sells something else: the comfort of a woman arranged to look at.
She becomes both a 1950s fantasy and a 21st-century feminist icon — it’s easy to sell nostalgia and empowerment at once.
In posing this way, even as she claims rebellion, she becomes part of the very machinery that objectifies women. Pop culture presents her defiance as a consumable fantasy, transforming empowerment into a pose and satire into a commodity for purchase, sharing, and admiration.
It raises the question: if resistance has to be prettified, how much does it really challenge the system?
From coquette-core’s lace-trimmed rebellion to album covers that pair pink ribbons with barbed lyrics, there’s a trend of dressing up feminist critique in the same packaging patriarchy has always loved. It’s a protest in satin gloves. Mockery in cherry gloss lipstick. The rebellion is neatly gift-wrapped, and in the wrapping, something gets lost.
The Double Game of Hyper-femininity
Today, rebellion often comes dressed as hyperfemininity — lace, lipstick, baby-doll poses, a coy bend of the wrist — meant to mock the gaze that has long confined women. As Bell Hooks observed, “the commodification of otherness… is offered as a new delight.” Here, the “other” is the ornamental, hyper-feminine woman marketed as fresh, thrilling, and endlessly consumable, whether her performance is ironic or sincere.
Once filtered through high production values, soft lighting, and the machinery of marketing, the imagery is easily consumed as straightforward glamour. Audiences don’t need to engage with any critique to enjoy it; capitalism doesn’t care whether the appeal is parody or obedience. The result is a product that can sell rebellion and submission in the same breath — turning the wink into wallpaper and the jab into a hashtag.
Because the imagery still mirrors the same power-pleasing poses that have historically reduced women to ornaments, it risks dragging those old scripts back into fashion under the guise of critique.
Cages With a Choice of Colors
Choice feminism — the idea that any choice a woman makes is inherently feminist because she made it — has been both a rallying cry and a convenient shield. In theory, it dismantles the “one right way” to be a feminist. In practice, it can be used to sidestep uncomfortable truths about structural power.
Under this lens, even choices that uphold patriarchal expectations can be reframed as liberation. Selling bathwater soap, posing like a mid-century pin-up, or cultivating a coquettish “doll” persona are not neutral acts in a culture still built on women’s sexual commodification; they are choices that profit precisely because they fit neatly into pre-existing male fantasies.
This doesn’t mean women should be shamed for what they choose. Autonomy matters. But feminism is not only about individual expression — it’s also about dismantling inequality. When the dominant visual language of “liberated” womanhood is one that still caters to heterosexual male desire, it reinforces the same narrow scripts that keep women’s worth tethered to attractiveness. Such an approach doesn’t dismantle the male gaze; it feeds it new and shinier content.
Desire Always Eats First
Satire and the male gaze are incompatible companions. The gaze is built for instant gratification — quick hits of attraction, consumption without question. Satire, on the other hand, thrives on distance and reflection; it asks the viewer to slow down, step back, and think.
The problem arises when beauty serves as the delivery system, causing desire to bypass analysis. The viewer may leave feeling entertained rather than challenged, treating the image like a postcard while neglecting its underlying politics.
Consider Lolita: prose so richly evocative that many readers momentarily overlook its status as a horror narrative. In the same way, sugar-pink “subversive” shoots can overshadow their own politics.
The problem is that this isn’t harmless misreading — it reinforces the same archetypes that have long been used to sexualise girls, blur consent, and turn women into collectibles. The imagery allows the gaze to continue consuming as it always has, while simultaneously celebrating its acceptance of the joke.
Even pretending not to cater to male fantasies, as Margaret Atwood wrote in The Robber Bride, can still be a male fantasy. This implies that rebellion, when presented in ways that ensure it does not genuinely disturb the audience, may not be true rebellion at all — it is merely rebellion on a leash.
Satire for Sale
Once irony becomes a marketing tool, it follows the same market rules as everything else. An album cover with sugar-pink bows, criticising fragile masculinity, sells largely for its visual appeal. A cover-girl spread that mocks objectification continues to profit from the clicks, likes, and merchandise generated by the very dynamic it claims to oppose.
Here, protest doesn’t just become product — it becomes a sales pitch for the status quo, wearing rebellion as seasonal styling.
The Audience Divide
Satire dressed like a pin-up doll is always playing to a split audience. One half sees the wink, hears the bite in the lyrics, and feels the steel under the silk. The other half just sees a pretty picture and consumes it exactly as it was conditioned to, politics optional.
That’s the uneasy truth: you can bash the patriarchy in stilettos, but stilettos are still a fetish object. You can lace rebellion in baby-pink ribbon, but ribbons tie just as easily into a bow as into a noose.
The more the performance pleases the gaze, the more it risks being pinned to the mood board of the very world it set out to dismantle, and the more it re-legitimises the pin-up doll ideal.
If It’s Pretty Enough to Sell, It’s Not Protest
This isn’t just about whether the audience “gets” the joke — it’s about what this aesthetic trend is teaching us about protest itself. Consistently packaging rebellion in soft focus, wrapping it in romantic colours, and selling it as an aesthetic also softens the politics behind it. Urgency is replaced by vibe. Dissent becomes another curated look in the cultural shop window.
Over time, this environment trains us to expect our activists, artists, and dissidents to be beautiful first and political second. Unphotogenic anger, unfiltered grief, protest that is plain or even ugly — these forms of resistance become harder to platform, harder to sell, and easier to ignore. The raw, confrontational work that cannot be flattened into a pleasing visual risks vanishing from the mainstream altogether.
And that has real stakes. A movement that must be dressed up to be heard is a movement that can be dressed down to be silenced. When beauty becomes the entry ticket to legitimacy, we not only dilute the message, but we also create an unspoken rule that rebellion must be palatable to be valid.
The protest is posed; the smile is knowing — but if the power you mock can still hang your picture on its wall, the joke was never on them.
