The Aesthetic Trap of Liberation: When Education Becomes Soft Pornography

Sunday, March 30, 2025

In a post-#MeToo era where visibility has become currency, the representation of women’s bodies on social media is no longer framed solely by the male gaze — it is now encrypted in a more elusive, self-congratulatory matrix of “empowerment”, “education”, and “art”. Accounts like contenu_inapproprie, curated by a gay man, exemplify this aesthetic shift: here, the half-nude female body is no longer “objectified” — it is “explained.” The viewer is not “consuming” — they are “learning.” Yet this veneer of ethical consumption does not deconstruct the gaze; it rebrands it.

What we are witnessing is not emancipation, but the hyper-modern version of what Laura Mulvey called the to-be-looked-at-ness of women — masked in pedagogical discourse. The woman is still posed, still choreographed, still edited — but this time, she is accompanied by a quote, a reflection, a backstory. The performative intimacy of these staged confessions is meant to grant the viewer permission to watch — but really watch. This imperative to “look without preconception” is a lie. There is no neutral gaze. Framing these images as “education” does not undo their erotic economy — it stabilizes it under new terms: the woke consumption of suffering and self-exposure.

Preciado reminds us that pornography is not a genre, but a system — a regime of visibility and control that configures bodies according to the technical codes of the apparatus that captures them. In this context, the camera — and the Instagram algorithm — function as instruments of normalization, even when they pretend to be tools of subversion. The woman speaks, yes — but through a cut, a crop, a filter, a male-curated edit. Her narrative is framed by someone who, though outside the straight male category, is still embedded in a structure of looking, staging, and mediating that consolidates his own symbolic power.

What this content produces is not agency, but curated legibility. These women are allowed to speak and show their bodies as long as they remain digestible within the soft aesthetic politics of Instagram. The “messy”, the opaque, the unfuckable, the ugly, the fragmented — all are excluded. The selection is deliberate. These are not disruptions of the system — they are its most seductive simulations.

From my position — not as a woman, nor as a man, nor as a “non-binary” identity, but as a subject in permanent displacement — I see clearly the trap of this aesthetic-political dispositif. It pretends to center the voice of the Other, while maintaining full control over its contours. This is not education. This is not liberation. This is an upgraded form of voyeurism, marketed as ethical consumption.

To truly rupture the gaze, we must remove the scaffolding of representation altogether. We must reject legibility. We must create spaces where the body is not a commodity, not even a pedagogical one. We must refuse to be understood on their terms.

Not everything must be seen.
Not everything should be shown.
Some truths rot under the light.