Author’s Note
Today, I start from two convictions that feel more geological than ideological:
- Attraction is a fact of being alive—like hunger or sleep.
- Sovereignty over one’s own body is absolute—no asterisks, no gender exceptions.
These truths never collided until the social-media timeline insisted they must. I’m a monogamous husband; the existence of strip-club stages don’t threaten my life. I’ve offered artistic advice on a friend’s OnlyFans-style set without assuming an invitation, talked through an asexual friend’s daily disconnect, and listened to the oddly precise drama of poly households.
Sexual expression, like weather, can be gentle or violent—always elemental, never dirty.
This piece isn’t a defense of men or a critique of women. It’s a map of the fault line where liberation meets monetization; where algorithms dress desire in velvet one moment and hairshirt the next; where a glance can be currency, crime, or both before the screen dims.
If you’ve ever felt that ancient spark sputter under modern rules and wondered why, what follows won’t settle the argument—but it might make the edges visible.
~Dom
Picture an ordinary night:
Emma, 27, props her phone on a ring light and hits post — a slow-motion wink, a confetti filter, a caption that says she’s just hit five figures’ worth of paying eyes. Comments crown her: Get that bag, queen. The tips roll in.
Two minutes later, John, mid-thirties, doom-scrolls on the couch, leftover noodles half-warm on his chest. Emma’s clip flickers onto his screen — equal parts invitation and accusation. Top comment cheers her hustle; replies call men like him weak, creepy, a walking punchline for even lingering. John pauses, wonders if curiosity makes him supportive or suspect, then swipes on.
Emma’s hustle isn’t rare, and neither is John’s hesitation. This dance spills out of the paywalls and onto every feed: dance-loop thirst traps farm likes, moral outrage stalks the comments, billboards still sell perfect skin by day and tweet about “body positivity” by night.
It’s a loop older than swipe culture. Liberation and monetization share a stage they didn’t build — from suffrage banners to hot-tub livestreams, from flapper hemlines to subscriber counts. This is the fault line: desire on display, the looker on trial.
What follows isn’t a verdict. Just a map of how the stare got sold, policed, and fed back to itself until even a glance could feel like freedom — or trespass.
Recommended Listening:
The Age of Liberation and Monetization
From Suffrage to the Sexual Revolution
The modern conversation about sex, power, and who gets to look at whom started when women first fought to be seen as people. The suffragists didn’t just want the vote — they wanted recognition in the public eye, as something more than property in a husband’s ledger. When the 19th Amendment cracked that wall in 1920, the gaze shifted: women were political beings in plain sight, no longer hidden behind a man’s name.
The decade that followed gave us the flappers — short hair, shorter skirts, jazz clubs at midnight. The point wasn’t just rebellion for rebellion’s sake; it was proof that if you can change the hemline, you can change the headline. But liberation always comes with backlash: World War II sent millions of women into factories, but peacetime shoved them back into kitchens, selling suburbia as the reward for service.
Second-Wave Equality — and the Pill
By the 1960s, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique called out “the problem that has no name” — the suffocating half-life behind picket fences. The second wave wanted more than ballots; it wanted the body back. Title IX cracked open classrooms, the Equal Pay Act pried at ledgers, and Roe v. Wade drew a bright line around bodily autonomy. The birth-control pill, though, was the hidden engine — a tiny chemical jailbreak that uncoupled sex from motherhood for the first time in history. Suddenly, pleasure wasn’t a bargaining chip — it was a choice.
Third-Wave Nuance — and the Right to Perform
The 1990s wrote the next clause. Riot grrrl zines and Spice Girls slogans insisted feminism couldn’t flatten difference — it had to expand: race, class, sexuality, kink. It claimed slurs as armor: “bitch,” “slut,” “hoe” — insults flipped into handles for self-display. The power wasn’t just to avoid the gaze but to aim it. Feminism didn’t just want privacy; it demanded the right to perform in public on its own terms.
Fourth-Wave Hashtags — and the Backlash in Real Time
The smartphone put that performance on blast. Hashtags like #YesAllWomen and #MeToo showed that behind every claim to autonomy lived a seam of unpaid, unseen fear — harassment, abuse, control. Consent, microaggressions, intersectionality — new words for old bruises. A digital march made private reckonings public. But a new tension crept in: if the gaze was still mostly male, did controlling it mean selling it back, pixel by pixel?
Liberation Meets the Algorithm — and Becomes Content
Then came the feeds. Instagram rewarded the fit-tea hourglass. Tumblr romanticized soft grunge and pouty stares. TikTok looped the dance, the wink, the accidental slip of a shirt strap. OnlyFans cut out the middleman and slapped a price tag on the glance itself. This wasn’t just exploitation — it was self-monetization. Performers wrote the script and paid the rent with it. The same gaze that once caged them could be rented back by the hour, or the post.
And yet the irony stuck: in theory, the performer owned the audience. In practice, the algorithm owned the stage. The more skin, the more clicks; the more clicks, the more moral panic in the comment thread. The same timeline that congratulated a woman for cashing in on her sexuality also called her cheap, manipulative, a sellout. The same swipe that praised her hustle shamed the looker for paying attention.
So the century-long march didn’t end in clean freedom. It ended in a strip mall where liberation and self-objectification hawk the same wares. Some wield it as power, some see a trap — often, it’s both at once. And that’s the mess: the same performance that frees one person pins another to a contradiction. The algorithm didn’t invent that double bind; it just automated it for profit.
This is the fault line: desire on display, the looker on trial. Same as it ever was — just higher resolution.
The Origins of the Gaze
Seeing, Power, and Permission
Before algorithms, before magazines, even before the printing press, to look was already an act loaded with meaning. In ancient Athens, philosophers drew a line between the kosmos — the visible order of the world — and the aidos — the sense of modesty that shields private things from public eyes. Plato warned that the passions stirred by beauty could unseat reason; the Stoics advised mastering one’s gaze lest desire master the self. In those traditions, looking was never neutral — it implicated ethics, control, even the shape of the soul.
By the Renaissance, sight was elevated to sovereign sense. Painters like Titian and Botticelli turned the naked body into theology, politics, and commerce all at once. The church condemned voyeurism while commissioning frescoes of saints with thighs carved from light. Here the double standard took root: sanctioned admiration under the guise of art, condemnation everywhere else.
Fast‑forward to 1972. John Berger publishes Ways of Seeing, arguing that in Western art “men act and women appear.” Two years later, Laura Mulvey coins the male gaze in film theory, exposing how camera angles replicate patriarchal eyes: women framed for consumption, men granted narrative agency. Their critique electrified feminist discourse because it named what countless viewers felt but lacked words for — that looking can be a form of possession when only one side controls the lens.
Yet Berger also noted a quieter truth: To be seen is a human hunger, too. Infants seek eye contact; lovers become real in each other’s gaze; performers crave the chorus of applauding eyes. The feminist project never sought to abolish desire — only to balance the power it rides on.
But when that balance snaps, looking can turn brutal. A stolen nude, a revenge porn leak, a stalker’s hidden camera — proof that a gaze without permission isn’t just rude, it’s theft. The same eyes that thrill can threaten, pinning someone down where they never asked to be seen.
Evolutionary Impulse, Social Contracts
Biologists remind us that attraction pre‑dates language. Pupils dilate at symmetrical faces long before a conscious thought fires. But culture erects a filtering membrane atop biology — a social contract that decides when looking is courtship, when it is commerce, and when it is threat. In patriarchal systems, that contract was drafted without women present; the feminist waves fought (and, since we’re being honest, still fight) for co‑authorship.
The Paradox Today
Here lies the paradox that troubles the timeline now: the yearning to be visible colliding with the trauma of being objectified. One stream of feminism declares: I am more than my body; do not reduce me. Another replies: My body is mine to display; do not reduce my autonomy by policing my exhibition. Both statements are true — and entirely incompatible when flattened into a single swipeable moment.
And beneath both is an itch no one quite admits out loud: for some, the friction is the thrill. The blurry line — the tension between invitation and transgression — can be as charged as the desire itself. The culture says “don’t look,” the body says “look closer,” the timeline punishes and profits in the same breath.
Enter the modern gaze: no longer a male monopoly, but still a site of asymmetry. Everyone wields a lens, yet the inherited scripts of shame, entitlement, and fear remain. So we toggle between craving validation and condemning the person providing it, between broadcasting and bristling, between wanting to be seen and insisting no one should look without explicit, timestamped consent.
Recognizing this tangle is not capitulation to cynicism; it is the first honest step. The gaze will never disappear, because consciousness itself is a kind of seeing. The question is whether we can rewrite the social contract so that sight becomes recognition rather than possession, invitation rather than trespass — a shared verb that enhances, instead of extracts, our humanity.
The Shifting Line
We like to pretend there’s a bright‐painted boundary between appreciation and intrusion, but most days it feels more like fog on a glass door. Step into a bar on Friday and a lingering glance can be an invitation; share an elevator on Monday and the same look curdles into threat. Context keeps flipping the sign while you’re mid‑gesture, and no one sends a push notification when the rules refresh.
Online the ground moves faster. A dancer posts a thirst‑trap reel because views pay her rent; the app beams it to the widest audience it can find; the viewer who lingers is thanked by the algorithm and scolded by the comments. It’s the social equivalent of being waved into a house and then lectured for wiping your feet on the wrong mat. Everyone insists they only want respectful eyes, yet no one agrees on the calibration settings for respect.
Men are told, politely or with memes, to “read the room.” Trouble is, the room is enormous and the lights keep blinking. Women, for their part, juggle the competing scripts of untouchable queen and approachable hustler. The result is a nervous improv routine in which both actors guess their lines while hoping the audience isn’t livestreaming their mistakes.
Because certainty is scarce, shame takes over as referee. We trade thoughtful correction for public call‑outs, viral stitches, stitched‑on morals. Fear of becoming a screenshot muting men who might have offered a kind word; fear of being called an attention seeker silencing women who might have said, plainly, yes, I like being admired. We end up defaulting to silence, eyes fixed on phones, letting the same apps that muddled the etiquette sell us tutorials on how to fix it.
And yet beneath the static there’s something stubbornly human—a flash of eye contact that doesn’t misfire, a compliment that lands clean, a laugh shared over held breath. Those moments are still possible, proof that the line may wobble but isn’t entirely lost. Maybe the way forward isn’t another rulebook but a habit of quick honesty: “Is this okay?” “Let me know if it’s not.” A conversational breadcrumb trail that allows two people, or two million, to reset the context in real time.
The line will keep shifting; culture is a living thing. Some people even lean into the fog on purpose — the thrill for them is in being half-invited, half-rebuked. But we can choose not to turn every misstep into a moral mugshot. We can give each other room to be awkward, to clarify, to retreat with dignity. And if we manage that, the fog on the glass might lift just enough for the next pair of eyes to meet without fear.
Feeding the Machine
Scroll long enough and the pattern appears: tease, tap, outrage, repeat. The platforms insist they are neutral plazas, but the plaza is ringed with slot machines and every lever is labeled engage. A half‑second linger over a dance clip tells the algorithm you might want more skin; an indignant comment tells it you might want more conflict. Either way, the feed smiles and serves another round.
It feels personal, but it’s math. A model compares you to a million other micro‑profiles and predicts which cocktail of desire and disgust will keep your thumb moving. Sex is reliable fuel, shame is its oxygen, and morality is the garnish that lets everyone pretend it’s juice instead of jet fuel.
Creators learn the loop quickly. A spike in likes after a low‑cut top becomes a performance note: Do that again. The next post is edgier, the caption a touch more confrontational, because controversy inflates reach. Viewers, meanwhile, discover that outrage grants them temporary status. A cutting put‑down can rack up its own likes, turning disapproval into a side hustle. The house wins twice—once on the tease, once on the recoil.
Money makes the loop self‑sealing. TikTok’s Creator Fund, Instagram’s ad rev shares, OnlyFans payouts: all are pegged to impressions. Impressions demand attention. Attention, studies show, skews toward content that spikes arousal or anger. The market thus values moments that are half red‑light district, half witch‑trial gallery. The performer cashes in even as she denounces objectification; the critic gains clout by decrying the performance while linking to the clip. Everyone eats from the same trough and calls their portion virtuous.
It is tempting to blame individuals—thirst‑trappers, simps, pick‑me’s, incels—but the architecture predates any account. Silicon Valley discovered long ago that moral friction extends watch‑time better than pure pleasure. A gentle kiss scene won’t hold you as long as a love triangle tear‑down. The machine optimizes for intensity, not harmony. So liberation rhetoric and purity policing are squeezed into one infinite scroll, each animating the other like pistons in the same engine.
Where does that leave ordinary desire? Often in hiding. People confess in DMs what they’re afraid to say in public comments, splitting their identities into Performer Me and Respectable Me. The platform, of course, sees both selves and sells the composite to advertisers. Your shame is metadata; someone’s ad spend depends on it.
Can we starve the machine? Probably not while using it—the casino runs on our chips. But we can at least notice the circuitry. Every click is a vote; every drag of attention extends the lease on whatever contradiction was onscreen. Choosing when to disengage is the modern form of civil disobedience. Choosing to engage with curiosity instead of reflexive shame is a small rebellion too.
If enough people treat the feed like a farmer’s market instead of a buffet—pick, savor, pay, leave—the algorithm will adjust. It always does. It cares only about what keeps us there; change what keeps us and the machine will serve something else. Until then, it’s wise to remember: the house is not your friend, and selling virtue is just another upsell.
The Belief in Beauty
If you’ve read this far, you’ve proven it: we’re drawn to beauty, to looking — even when we pretend not to. The question is whether we own that spark or keep selling it to someone else.
Beauty is older than commerce, older than doctrine, older than shame. Long before the first ad sold a fantasy or the first algorithm sold a habit, someone knelt in a cave and traced a curve on stone because the curve itself felt true. We’ve been chasing that quickening ever since — the soft gasp when a face, a song, a silhouette lines up with something inside us that says yes, that.
Bodies belong to that same lineage of wonder. They’re not commodities by default; they become commodities when someone slaps on a price tag or an algorithm files them under content. Strip away the hashtags and promo codes, and what remains is what’s always been there: form, movement, pulse — the same raw material a dancer shapes into a solo or a sculptor frees from marble. Seeing beauty in another person isn’t a trespass by nature. It becomes one only when the gaze forgets the subject is also a sovereign mind — an inner life as alive as the beholder’s own.
Modern culture rarely pauses at wonder. It lunges straight for ownership or guilt, stuck between Add to Cart and I’m sorry for noticing. But there’s always been a middle ground — looking that doesn’t take, admiring that doesn’t assume. A glance, like a compliment, is only clean when permission underpins it. We dress for how we want to be seen; we share what we want witnessed; we look back because we want to see too.
That truth needs no apology — just respect. Consent is what keeps beauty a gift instead of a threat. Without it, the glance curdles into extraction. But piling cheap labels — creep, tease, simp, prude — onto every look, every like, only poisons what could be mutual. Curiosity turns to shame; pleasure turns to panic; the gaze, which should connect, divides instead.
Believing in beauty means protecting the freedom to share it — and the freedom to say no when the sharing ends. It means trading reflexive suspicion and cheap moral hashtags for quick honesty: Is this okay? It means remembering that being looked at, and looking back, are both part of what makes us human — not something the timeline needs to keep weaponizing for clicks.
We can see each other as wonders — even when we choose to package that wonder for sale — so long as consent draws the line. If we start there, the boundary between compliment and trespass clears. The gaze stops being a threat and becomes what it was before profit, shame, and algorithms got involved: a moment of shared spark, freely given, freely received.
And that, if we practice it, is a beauty worth seeing — and being seen for.
(Couldn’t decide between these two for the conclusion, so you get both.)
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