There is a new fantasy woman drifting through culture right now and it looks an awful lot like a woman who wears cream cashmere in the middle of the afternoon, knows how to arrange peonies in expensive glass vases, speaks softly enough to be considered emotionally intelligent, and has somehow transformed financial dependence into a personality trait. She is “in her feminine energy.” She receives instead of chases. She has traded ambition for alignment, exhaustion for ease, girlboss burnout for divine softness. And apparently, we are all supposed to want to become her. 

You can find fragments of her everywhere. In TikTok sermons disguised as self-care advice. In luxury wellness branding, repackaging passivity as transcendence, and, primarily, in dating discourse that treats masculine provision and feminine submission as biological inevitabilities rather than social scripts with very expensive consequences.

What makes this particular cultural moment so strange is that it arrives after decades of feminist struggle centred around economic freedom. Women fought, loudly and relentlessly, for the right to own property, access education, open bank accounts, earn independent incomes, and exist beyond domestic obligation. This shift in focus feels so much more raw, given how recent it is that women received these rights, and, not to mention, how in many countries women still don’t even have these rights. Yet somewhere between burnout culture and algorithmic femininity, liberation began to be rebranded as exhaustion, and dependence began to look seductive again.

And maybe that is precisely why this aesthetic has landed so successfully. Because women are tired. The kind of tiredness that comes from performing modern womanhood as a permanently optimised state. The neoliberal woman must work like she has no children, be a parent like she has no job, remain desirable and stay emotionally available while economically productive, and somehow still follow a ten-step skincare routine. In other words, women are expected to perform a ‘triple shift’, coined by Duncombe and Marsden, where we now are afforded the right to have a job; however, all the unpaid labour behind the scenes, where women must undertake the bulk of domestic labour and emotional work, must still be performed.  ’The fantasy of being “taken care of” feels less like regression and more like relief.

But relief is not the same thing as freedom, especially when it is short-lived. 

The current obsession with femininity feels fascinating because it rarely defines femininity beyond aesthetics and receptivity. Femininity becomes softness, beauty, silence, emotional intelligence, domestic grace, sexual availability without overt sexuality and ambition without intimidation (this one is very important, of course, because God forbid you intimidate a man). It is a highly edited moodboard version of womanhood. Something filtered through beige interiors, quiet luxury, and “old-money” aspiration (a common rephrasing of higher-class supremacy). There is very little room within this framework for rage, intellectual aggression, financial authority, messiness, contradiction, or even genuine complexity.

Gender theorist Judith Butler famously argued that gender is performative, something repeatedly enacted through rituals, behaviours, and expectations rather than something naturally fixed. Looking at contemporary femininity online, it becomes impossible not to see performance everywhere. The voice changes. The styling changes. The language changes. Women speak about “softness” as though it is both a moral achievement and a marketable asset. Femininity becomes less an identity and more a discipline.

And disciplines always come with punishments.

The punishment for failing femininity today is subtle but brutal. Women who are financially independent are accused of emasculating men. Women who are assertive become “hard.” Women who prioritise career are framed as spiritually disconnected from their “natural essence.” Even success itself has become suspicious unless it is softened through palatable femininity. A woman can be powerful, but only if she remains consumable while doing it.

Fashion magazines have long understood this contradiction. Publications like Vogue and Dazed frequently flirt with the tension between empowerment and aesthetic submission. One month, the modern woman is celebrated for her ambition; the next, she is photographed sprawled across satin sheets in an article about surrendering to softness. The visual language changes, but the underlying obsession remains the same: femininity must still be pleasing.

Even the rise of “tradwife” aesthetics feels less like a return to tradition and more like performance art designed for capitalism. The polished domesticity. The hand-whisked pancake batter. The linen aprons and antique kitchens. None of it resembles the actual historical labour of women in domestic spaces, which was physically punishing, economically invisible, and socially isolating. Instead, it resembles a luxury fantasy version of dependence, one available mostly to women already cushioned by wealth.

Because this is the uncomfortable truth hidden beneath the “receiving energy” discourse: dependence is only romantic when there is money underneath it.

Take the infamous ‘ballerinafarm’ on TikTok, for instance, a well-known content creator who centres her content on preaching Mormon values, catering to her family of eight children and her husband, and making all their food organic and from scratch. Her natural, simple, idealistic life, whilst appearing to be a humble American dream, is actually an extortionately expensive one that is not feasible for the average person. Just her oven is a 20k cast-iron oven. This just goes to show that this idealised fantasy for women is just that, a fantasy, and it is certainly not representative of the economic disrepair that many are finding themselves in due to the current political climate, where not even a well-sought-after degree can get you a job, and where many are pursuing ‘side-hustles’ just to pay their rent.

Economic dependency has always left women vulnerable. Sociological and feminist research consistently shows that financial control is one of the strongest predictors of power imbalance within heterosexual relationships. Studies surrounding domestic abuse repeatedly identify economic abuse as a mechanism through which women become trapped. According to research published in journals such as Violence Against Women and reports by organisations like UN Women, financial dependence significantly reduces a woman’s ability to leave unhealthy or abusive relationships.

And yet contemporary femininity discourse often sanitises this reality. The provider man becomes aspirational without acknowledging the structural imbalance that can emerge when one partner controls access to resources. There is a reason second-wave feminists were so preoccupied with wages, labour, and unpaid domestic work. Economic autonomy was never just about career ambition. It was about survival.

Still, it would be dishonest to dismiss the desire for softness altogether. Women are not irrational for wanting rest. The modern economy extracts everything from people, particularly women, and then asks them to remain beautiful while collapsing. There is something deeply human about wanting care. About wanting gentleness. About wanting partnership instead of endless performance.

The problem begins when care becomes conditional upon obedience to gender roles.

Social media has accelerated this issue by turning identity into content. Femininity now functions almost like a subscription model. There are tutorials for how to sit femininely, eat femininely, text femininely, argue femininely, even heal femininely. Women are encouraged to curate themselves into hyper-legible archetypes because algorithms reward recognisable performances. Complexity does not trend. Simplicity does.

So femininity gets flattened into digestible symbolism. Silk dresses. Lowered voices. Deference. Emotional labour disguised as intuition. Women become brands of themselves.

French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex that womanhood is constructed through social conditioning rather than innate destiny. Decades later, her observations feel almost disturbingly relevant. Contemporary femininity is still heavily tied to usefulness. Women are valuable when they soothe, nurture, flatter, support, and beautify. Even empowerment is often reframed through desirability. A woman succeeding is admirable; a woman succeeding while remaining decorative is ideal.

You can see this contradiction most clearly in dating culture. Men are encouraged to become providers while women are encouraged to become receivers, but both roles are deeply transactional. The provider fantasy often depends on control masquerading as protection. Meanwhile, the receiving fantasy frequently requires strategic helplessness. Neither role allows for genuine equality because equality is inherently less cinematic.

And perhaps that is part of the issue. We have aestheticised gender to such an extent that many people now mistake visual coherence for emotional truth.

The internet loves binaries because binaries are easy to market. Masculine versus feminine. Soft versus hard. Provider versus independent woman. But real life has always been more porous than that. Human beings move through multiple energies depending on circumstance, survival, culture, and personality. The insistence that women exist naturally in passive receptivity feels less like spirituality and more like branding.

There is also something particularly ironic about how commercialised femininity has become. Women are told to reconnect with their “natural feminine essence” through products, courses, supplements, luxury skincare, embodiment coaching, and expensive retreats. Even softness has become labour. Even healing has become monetised. The feminine woman of today is expected to perform ease while engaging in endless self-surveillance.

And underneath all of this sits capitalism, quietly delighted.

Because prescribed femininity is profitable. Insecurity always is. If women remain preoccupied with perfecting themselves into ideal feminine subjects, they are less likely to question the structures exhausting them in the first place. A woman worried about whether she appears soft enough is not necessarily thinking about wage gaps, unpaid labour statistics, or institutional inequality. Patriarchy has always adapted itself beautifully to consumer culture. It simply changes outfits.

Still, there are women resisting this flattening of femininity entirely. Writers, artists, and thinkers are increasingly reclaiming womanhood as something expansive rather than prescriptive. Contemporary feminist scholarship has shifted toward multiplicity, towards the idea that femininity can contain contradiction instead of purity. A woman can be nurturing and ambitious. Soft and assertive. Emotionally open and financially autonomous. There is no ideological prize for self-erasure.

What feels most urgent now is the need to separate femininity from obedience.

Because femininity itself is not the enemy. Nor is beauty or domesticity and wanting love, care, and partnership is certainly not the enemy. The danger begins when these desires are transformed into prescriptions rather than choices. When womanhood becomes valuable only within narrow performances that benefit others more than ourselves.

The fantasy woman currently haunting culture looks beautiful because she has been designed to. She is elegant, effortless and composed. But beneath the soft-focus imagery sits an older expectation women know intimately: be desirable, accommodating, and above all, do not become too independent.

Maybe that is why this moment feels less like liberation and more like repetition wearing expensive perfume. The frightening thing about prescribed femininity is not that it asks women to be soft. It is that it quietly punishes or ridicules them for being anything else.

And women have spent far too long fighting for the right to become fully human just to shrink themselves back into archetypes again.

References

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Vintage Books, 2011.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.

Federici, Silvia. Wages Against Housework. PM Press, 2012.

Fraser, Nancy. “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History.” New Left Review, no. 56, 2009.

Gill, Rosalind. “Postfeminist Media Culture.” European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2007.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press, 1983.

Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press, 2007.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. Harper Perennial, 2002.

Articles and cultural commentary referenced stylistically and contextually from Vogue and Dazed.

Research and reporting on economic abuse and financial dependency referenced from UN Women and peer-reviewed articles published in Violence Against Women journal.