Sextivism™: The Pornographication of Feminism and the Collapse of Critical Thought

Sunday, March 30, 2025

There is nothing radical about spreading your legs in front of a ring light and calling it resistance. Yet that is precisely the delusion sold by Arina Smetanina in her master’s thesis—a grotesque apology for a movement that mistakes exhibitionism for subversion, and neoliberal branding for feminist struggle. “Sextivism,” as she names it, is not paradoxical. It is perfectly coherent with the logics of late capitalism: aestheticized self-exposure as emotional labour, femininity as spectacle, and the corpse of feminism reanimated as clickbait.

Smetanina’s thesis is not just intellectually bankrupt—it is politically dangerous. It peddles the idea that one can “reclaim” patriarchal codes by mimicking them louder, shinier, and more nakedly. As Angela McRobbie warned, postfeminism functions by hollowing out feminist ideals and re-injecting them with commodified individualism. What we see here is a textbook case: the feminist “subject” replaced by a hyper-feminized persona optimized for digital performance.

Her taxonomy of “artists,” “illuminators,” and “militants” is a joke. These aren’t political categories—they’re branding niches. Whether through pastel-tinted “self-love” reels or pseudo-poetic vulva selfies, these women are not dismantling the system; they are feeding it new content. Smetanina attempts to frame these gestures as a “mutation” of feminism. In truth, they are its degradation: a glossy necrosis of meaning dressed up in hashtags and filtered through nostalgia-core.

bell hooks warned us about this too: representation without a politics of liberation is mere replication. When the “empowered” subject still seeks validation through the gaze—albeit rebranded as a “selfie gaze”—she is not in control. She is compliant. The thesis fails to grasp this. It fetishizes the Instagram grid as a site of empowerment, when in fact it is a factory of aesthetic conformity and eroticized self-surveillance.

Let us be clear: the sextivist does not “resist” the male gaze—she curates herself for it, then claps back at critique with the confidence of someone who just discovered a Judith Butler quote on Pinterest. Smetanina’s faith in “choice feminism” is a tragic symptom of ideological collapse. As Sara Ahmed notes, the rhetoric of “empowerment” is often mobilized to obscure structures of domination. It is easier to say “I choose this” than to confront that one is only “choosing” from within a matrix of consumable femininity.

Even worse is the invocation of Madonna and Emily Ratajkowski as icons of complex feminism. That alone should have disqualified this thesis. These figures are not subversive—they are the very engine of what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism: the inability to imagine alternatives. They rehearse sexual provocation within a tightly policed domain of visibility. There is no risk, no rupture, no violence to their gestures—only the performance of “being bold,” packaged for mass digestion.

Smetanina’s entire project rests on a central illusion: that visibility equals power. This is a fatal misunderstanding. Visibility, in our age, is the most sophisticated mechanism of capture. As Tiqqun wrote in Theory of the Young-Girl, the social body is now restructured through the compulsive production of self-images. The “sextivist” is not a rebel—she is an unpaid intern of the Spectacle.

She turns herself into content, erotic capital, and affective labour, all under the guise of liberation. But as Preciado reminds us, the pharmacopornographic regime does not dominate by repression—it dominates by stimulation. These women are not breaking chains. They are polishing them into accessories.

What Smetanina fails to consider is that true feminist thought requires negation: a refusal of what has been made available. A refusal of legibility. A refusal of circulation. Instead, she offers a cheerful compliance, mistaking glossy semi-nudity for revolution. This is not feminism—it is aestheticized obedience. A feminism that flatters the system, that asks nothing of it, that poses nude before it and calls that critique.

In the end, sextivism is not a feminist paradox. It is the logical endpoint of a feminism that has ceased to think.