This Week in Choice Feminism: Bathwater, Petting Zoos, and Boob Jobs

 Every week it gets harder to tell if we’re watching satire or living through it. This week, the cultural discourse handed us three cases that are quietly rotting the foundation of feminism from the inside out, each one wrapped up in the language of empowerment, each one more disturbing the more you look.

From Bonnie Blue's petting zoo stunt to Sydney Sweeney's sold-out soap to Kylie Jenner's new wave of plastic surgery transparency we need to talk about how mainstream feminism has been hijacked to validate choices that actively harm women. And how capitalism, as always, is the puppetmaster pulling the strings.

Bonnie Blue and the Myth of Empowerment Through Objectification

Let’s not beat around the bush: Bonnie Blue is dangerous. She is a white woman playing the role of a submissive sex object for public spectacle, under the guise of freedom. Her planned viral "petting zoo" stunt, where men would be able to do whatever they wanted to her body in a glass box, without any reciprocity or care, is not a radical reclamation of sexuality. It’s a public performance of violence, designed to titillate and make money from female degradation under the label of choice.

Her choices aren’t happening in a vacuum. Bonnie abuses the assumed innocence and safety uniquely granted to white women, which affords her a level of forgiveness and platform that women of colour would never receive for similar acts. The culture she’s promoting isn’t accessible to all women. But that doesn’t make her harmless. Her behaviour fuels a wider degradation of women’s value, reducing them to holes, playthings, and entertainment for men. And once men have been given the chance to debase a woman to that extent, what exactly are we meant to believe they will want next?

This isn’t about slut-shaming. Promiscuity isn’t a crime. Sex isn't evil or dirty.  But Bonnie is not just sleeping with who she wants in private. She is performing submission to men as her core identity, marketing it, monetising it, and normalising it in front of millions. Her hypersexuality and body count aren’t the issue it’s that her entire being is framed as being for male consumption. A version of womanhood that strips us of interiority, complexity, autonomy. In her world, women don’t desire, we are the desired. We don’t think, we don’t want, we don’t feel. We just serve. And when that version gets platformed and publicised, it doesn’t just hurt her. It damages all of us. It fuels disrespect. It gives permission to predators. It tells girls: your value lies in how much you’re willing to give away, and how violently you can be consumed without flinching.

Still, Bonnie is not more dangerous than the men paying for this, lining up, consuming this, salivating at the idea of dehumanising someone for sport.  What happens when a man takes part in something like the Petting Zoo? When he’s handed a real, living woman and told “do anything”? Are we meant to believe that power, that rush of power, just fades quietly into the night? That man doesn’t carry that entitlement forward into the rest of his life? Into his relationships? Into the world?The market she’s cashing in on wasn’t created by her. It was created by male entitlement. Her performance exists because men want to see women humiliated. Her fame and fortune depend on sustaining that desire.

Sydney Sweeney and the Fetish Soap Fiasco

Sydney Sweeney’s new “bathwater soap”, sold out in under 15 seconds, tells us more about men than it does about her. And what it tells us is frankly disgusting.

This wasn’t a skincare product. This was a soft-core pornographic fantasy, dressed up as a brand collaboration, a fantasy product for men to sexually project onto. It’s marketed as playful, cheeky, even feminist. But the truth is darker. It’s just more pornified consumerism. 

Sydney’s no villain. She’s a product of a system that teaches women our worth is in our sex appeal, and that monetising our bodies is the only way to stay relevant. Her career, post-Euphoria, has relied heavily on pandering to incel-type men who obsess over her appearance. She’s stalked by the male gaze and, understandably, has internalised it, like so many women in her position. And it’s easy to imagine the industry voices; agents, managers, brands, all behind her encouraging this path. Sex sells. 

And they’re not wrong. Because men keep proving them right.

This isn’t “taking the power back.” This is commodifying your own objectification and dressing it up as feminism. This is simply turning yourself into a consumable, a bar of soap for strangers to probably jerk off with. 

There are sex workers and OnlyFans creators who hold far more power over their content, boundaries, and earnings. But this? This was made by a marketing team for mass male consumption and publicity. And we should be brave enough to say: it’s gross.

Kylie Jenner and the Cosmetic Trap

Kylie Jenner is not a feminist for revealing she got a boob job.

Her entire brand, and family are built on the commodification of insecurity. They create it, then sell the solution. From lip kits to waist trainers to Kris Jenner’s new facelift, the Kardashians have profited off of women's body dysmorphia at every age.

Kylie built an empire on the lie that she got her lips from makeup. That deception alone triggered a cultural shift in how teenage girls viewed their own faces. And now, years later, we’re meant to applaud her for being honest about the plastic surgery she always denied? That isn’t brave. That’s marketing.

We deserve a feminism that protects us from the shackles of generic beauty standards, not one that celebrates the women who profit from tightening them. The plastic surgery industry is not empowering, it’s exploitative. It convinces women that existing as we are is a problem to be solved. That aging is failure. That natural is ugly. And it thrives because capitalism needs us to keep consuming.

And while it’s important to acknowledge that Kylie was herself a victim of suffocating beauty standards, growing up under a microscope, in a family where cosmetic surgery was normalised, she still lied, to profit, and to uphold a beauty ideal she didn’t naturally fit into. That doesn’t make her evil, but it does mean this isn’t a girlboss moment.

Plastic surgery isn’t feminist just because a woman chooses it either. It reflects a culture that tells women we are only valuable when beautiful, desirable, and consumable so the rich get richer. We shouldn’t scold women for modifying their bodies, many of us feel intense pressure to conform, but we should be honest about the systems behind that pressure. Surgery might offer temporary relief, but it doesn’t liberate us from the cycle. It feeds it.

Capitalism, Porn, and the Parasocial Hellscape

All three of these cases exist within a broader context: the increasing pornification of women under capitalism. From advertising to algorithms, women’s bodies are commodified, filtered, and sold, not just as fantasy, but as a form of pseudo-connection. Platforms like OnlyFans may have started as tools for “agency,” but they’ve become new vehicles for objectification, moulding empowerment into marketable performance. Everything is for sale, especially the illusion of intimacy.

And for many men, this illusion becomes addictive. There is a terrifying rise in those forming parasocial, one-sided emotional and sexual relationships with specific women they watch, follow, or subscribe to. These aren’t just fleeting fixations, they are intensive attachments that mimic the patterns of actual relationships, minus reciprocity, boundaries, or reality. This is where goon culture comes in: an online subculture, largely made up of men, centred around compulsive pornography use. It often involves prolonged, obsessive viewing of the same content or performers, sometimes for hours, in what participants describe as trance-like states. It’s disturbing. And it’s not harmless.

The body and brain don’t know the difference. Whether it’s real sex or content on a screen, the same hormones fire, the same neural pathways are carved, the same emotional circuits are activated. These men are not just consuming, they are training themselves to respond to women as triggers, not people. To associate arousal with detachment, objectification, and control. They aren’t forming healthy relationships. They’re building delusions.

And delusions are profitable. The porn industry thrives on loneliness, disconnection, and misogyny. It exploits the unmet needs of men and the economic precarity of women. Capitalism gives it the tools, streaming platforms, tiered subscription models, data-driven algorithms and “feminism” is often co-opted to sell it as liberation. As if survival under neoliberalism is empowerment. As if monetising your own objectification is freedom.

Jameela Jamil said it best, in a recent interview on deepfakes and AI porn: those boys, when they were children, when they were drawing themselves as Batman or a firefighter, weren’t dreaming of growing up to sit in a dark room, watching porn for hours a day. That wasn’t the vision. That wasn’t the plan. Something went wrong. And it keeps going wrong.

The parasocial hellscape is not an accident, it is an inevitability in a system that sells disconnection as pleasure and calls it progress.

Final Thoughts

This isn’t about shame. This isn’t about purity. It’s about truth. It’s about asking who benefits from women turning themselves into products. It’s about recognising when the language of feminism is being used to prop up deeply anti-feminist structures.

This isn’t about being anti-sex. And it’s certainly not about being conservative. Feminism should never be about policing women’s bodies, but it should be about questioning why certain “choices” are so heavily rewarded under patriarchy. It’s about asking who holds the power, who makes the money, and who gets consumed.

Choice feminism tells us that any decision made by a woman is inherently feminist; as if context, coercion, and capitalism don’t exist. But true feminism doesn’t stop at the individual. It asks bigger questions. It looks at the systems shaping those choices, the pressures behind them, and the power imbalances they reinforce. Not all choices are liberating. Especially when they’re made in a world that teaches women they are worth more when they’re watched.

Bonnie Blue’s petting zoo. Sydney Sweeney’s fetish soap. Kylie Jenner’s surgical confessions. All packaged as empowering. All sold as liberation. But all reinforcing the same thing: that women exist for men to want, watch and use.

Feminism should be about dismantling that idea, not rebranding it.