The Female Gaze, the Commodification of Desire, and the Reproduction of Gendered Power
Xindi Sun | First published October 2025 · Revised 2026
Originally published on RedNote in October 2025.
The original post received 373,000 views, 35,000 likes, 5,500 comments,
and a combined total of 6,700 shares and saves before being taken down by the platform in August 2026.
From the male strip performances of Magic Mike to male NPCs attracting crowds of female visitors at Chinese theme parks, and from otome games to AI romantic companions, male bodies and idealised images of masculinity are increasingly being packaged as cultural products for female consumers.
The growing visibility of what is often called the “male beauty economy” (男色经济) in Chinese online discourse, together with the popularisation of the female gaze, appears to signal a new configuration of gender relations. Women are no longer positioned only as those who are watched, chosen, and desired. They increasingly occupy the position of consumers who look at, choose, and desire men.
But does a reversal of positions within a consumer relationship necessarily entail a corresponding reversal of gendered power?
When male bodies become objects of visual and commercial consumption, does this mean that women have acquired an equal capacity to articulate desire, exercise bodily autonomy, and participate in determining the social meanings of intimacy?
What I question here is neither the phenomenon of women consuming representations of men, nor the reality of the pleasure and emotional satisfaction women may derive from commercialised fantasies of intimacy. What requires scrutiny is the interpretive framework that equates the capacity to consume directly with the liberation of female subjectivity.
Women gaining greater access to the consumption of male images does not necessarily mean that they have gained equal power to determine how desire itself is produced, represented, and satisfied.
1. The Permitted Gaze: The Social Legitimacy of Female Desire
The rise of the “female gaze” is often understood as a challenge to the traditional position of men as viewing subjects within visual culture. Once the male body becomes an object of visual consumption, women appear to move from the passive position of being looked at to the active position of desiring subjects.
Yet this understanding risks treating a reversal of positions within a visual relation as equivalent to a transformation of social power.
Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) did not simply use the male gaze to describe men looking at women. Her argument concerned the way classical narrative cinema organises images, viewing positions, and narrative structures so that men are constructed as active subjects of looking, while women are positioned as objects through which visual pleasure is produced.
The object of critique, in other words, was not looking as an isolated act. It was the organisation of visual relations through particular cultural forms, and their connection to existing structures of gendered power.
For this reason, women looking at male bodies cannot be understood as a symmetrical reversal of the male gaze merely because the direction of looking has changed.
We still need to ask: Who determines how the male body is displayed? Which forms of desire are permitted to enter public culture? And to what extent are the objects, narratives, and forms of interaction available to female consumers already structured by commercial systems and gendered norms?
Consider Magic Mike. Male strippers are explicitly presented as objects of female desire, and female spectators are given the opportunity to watch and consume male bodies openly.
Yet the men on screen are not simply passive objects subjected to the gaze. Through strength, technical skill, performance, and deliberate self-display, their bodies may simultaneously be constructed as desirable and as possessing agency.
This does not mean that male performers cannot experience objectification or labour exploitation. It means that bodily visibility and commodification do not automatically produce a loss of social power.
By the same token, women becoming consumers of male bodies does not automatically mean that they have acquired social power equivalent to that historically associated with men.
More importantly, the social legitimacy of the female gaze depends not only on whether women are allowed to look at men, but also on how, in what register, and for what reasons they are permitted to articulate that desire.
Within certain commercial entertainment settings, women’s desire for male bodies can find expression through humour, play, and collective joking. Enthusiasm for male NPC performers at theme parks can be framed as light-hearted tourist interaction. Appreciation of male bodies can circulate as a joke among female friends.
Yet the direct articulation of women’s sexual desire may still be constrained by social expectations surrounding shame, propriety, and appropriate femininity.
This reveals an important contradiction.
Women may be permitted to express desire publicly through commercial entertainment precisely because that desire is not always required to be taken seriously as a claim made by a desiring subject.
Women may be permitted to desire jokingly without necessarily being fully recognised as subjects who desire.
The point is not that playful expressions of desire are somehow less authentic, nor that women must express desire solemnly in order to possess subjectivity. Humour and play can themselves become active means through which women explore, negotiate, and articulate desire.
The more important question is what happens when female desire ceases to appear primarily as humour, entertainment, or consumption and instead becomes an explicit demand concerning real intimate relationships, bodily autonomy, and social norms.
Does it receive the same degree of recognition then?
The critical significance of the female gaze therefore cannot be measured simply by asking whether women are able to look at men. We must also ask whether these new relations of looking change the material conditions under which women can express desire, receive social recognition, and participate in determining the terms of intimacy.
2. Gentle Obedience: Female Agency in Commercialised Intimacy
Across commercial cultural forms such as interactions with male NPCs at Chinese theme parks, otome games, and AI romantic companions, female consumers are offered varying degrees of choice and interaction.
They can select idealised male figures, participate in predetermined romantic scenarios, and purchase particular forms of emotional experience.
These forms of consumption create more explicit channels through which female desire can be articulated. Compared with conventional heterosexual narratives in which women wait to be chosen, the female consumer can actively approach, select, and even reject particular male figures.
Yet the ability to choose within a system is not the same as the ability to determine the conditions under which choice becomes possible.
Women are invited onto the stage of desire, but they do not necessarily control the lighting.
The behaviour of male NPCs is organised through character design, performance protocols, and commercial operations. Romantic relationships in otome games are structured through character design, narrative branches, and interaction mechanisms. The responses of AI romantic companions are conditioned by model design, platform rules, and the commercial terms of the service.
Women can make choices within these systems, but they do not necessarily determine how the systems themselves define the ideal man, the ideal romantic relationship, or the forms that emotional fulfilment is allowed to take.
Commercialised intimacy often revolves around a particular kind of masculine figure: gentle, attentive, responsive to women’s emotional needs, and to some degree compliant with the preferences of the female consumer.
Such figures can offer alternative imaginaries of masculinity. They may also provide women with opportunities to explore forms of intimacy unavailable to them elsewhere.
But they also raise another question.
When male tenderness, obedience, and emotional responsiveness are designed in advance by a commercial system, what exactly has the female consumer acquired?
Is it the power to determine the terms of intimacy, or the right to consume a predetermined model of intimate relations?
Tenderness and obedience do not inherently amount to control.
The issue is that apparent submission at the level of the character can coexist with control at the level of the system. The consumer may be able to determine how a character responds to her, while remaining unable to determine which responses are available, which emotional needs can be accommodated, or under what conditions the interaction will end.
A commercial system can therefore offer gentle and responsive male figures while retaining control over the conditions under which intimacy is produced.
That control does not necessarily reside in the male character himself. It lies in the commercial mechanisms that design the character, organise the interaction, and determine the terms of consumption.
Zhang and Li’s (2026) study of female players of Chinese otome games further reveals the contradictory experiences embedded within commercialised romantic fantasy.
Their research examines how women negotiate idealised romantic fantasies alongside gender expectations in everyday life, and how they may develop ambivalent attitudes towards the gender norms embedded within those fantasies.
Women, then, do not simply passively absorb the models of intimacy provided by commercial systems.
They may enjoy a particular fantasy while rejecting some of its gendered assumptions. They may accept the emotional satisfaction provided by a male character without accepting everything that relationship would imply in real life.
For this reason, a critique of commercialised intimacy cannot begin by denying the reality of women’s emotional experiences.
A person can know perfectly well that an intimate encounter is scripted and still derive genuine pleasure, comfort, or emotional satisfaction from it.
The question is not whether those experiences are real.
It is how they are organised into commercial services that can be purchased, repeated, and made to generate continuing economic value.
When female desire is recognised as a consumer demand with market value, does that recognition expand women’s capacity to articulate desire autonomously?
Or does it primarily expand the capacity of commercial systems to organise and satisfy that desire?
These possibilities are not mutually exclusive.
Commercial culture may create new spaces in which women can explore desire while simultaneously limiting that exploration to forms that can be commodified.
3. The Commodification of Desire: From Emotional Satisfaction to Capital Accumulation
The expansion of the “male beauty economy” signals the increasing commercial value of female desire.
Male bodies, romantic fantasies, and emotional interactions are organised into cultural products that can be bought and sold, while women’s attention, choices, and emotional investment become important forces sustaining consumption.
In Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007), Eva Illouz examines the growing entanglement between capitalist economic relations and modern emotional life.
Emotion does not exist solely within a private sphere beyond the market. The ways intimacy is understood, articulated, and practised are themselves connected to economic exchange, consumer culture, and the institutional arrangements of modern society.
This perspective enables us to move beyond a simple opposition between “authentic emotion” and “inauthentic commodity”.
Capitalism does not first need to destroy the authenticity of emotion in order to transform it into economic value.
On the contrary, emotional investment itself can become a central source of a commodity’s attraction, the continuity of consumption, and the expansion of a market.
In commercial forms such as male NPC interactions, otome games, and AI romantic companions, women purchase specific performances, images, interactive services, or emotional experiences.
The production and circulation of these commodities nevertheless remain organised through companies, platforms, labour relations, and market competition.
There is therefore an important distinction between the choice granted through consumption and the power to determine the conditions under which the commodity is produced.
A female consumer may purchase in-game items, unlock storylines, or pay for interactive services in order to obtain a more personalised romantic experience.
Yet the design of the character, the emotional needs that can be translated into paid services, and the duration and limits of the interaction remain organised by the commercial system.
Women’s expectations of romance and their emotional investments can thereby become resources from which economic value is continuously extracted.
This does not mean that capital can completely determine female desire.
Nor does it mean that consumers passively accept the meanings supplied to them by commercial systems.
Women can actively choose, reinterpret, appropriate, and reject commercial narratives.
But individual agency within consumption does not automatically dissolve the commercial relations within which that agency is exercised.
This is the central contradiction revealed by the consumption of male beauty.
The public visibility and commercial value of female desire may continue to increase without producing a corresponding redistribution of economic resources, bodily autonomy, or institutional power towards women in society more broadly.
When female desire is transformed into a profitable market demand, the market’s recognition of that desire cannot be treated as equivalent to society’s recognition of female subjectivity.
An expansion of consumer choice and the power to determine how consumption itself is organised are not the same thing.
4. Fantasy and Reality: How Do Women Reinterpret Their Own Desire?
If commercialised intimacy provides women with spaces in which to explore desire, then the question of how those experiences return to everyday life becomes unavoidable.
A woman may choose her ideal partner in an otome game while continuing to encounter unequal emotional labour in real relationships.
She may openly express desire for a male character at a theme park while still living under social norms that constrain women’s expressions of sexuality outside that space.
She may pay for idealised forms of emotional responsiveness without necessarily receiving comparable respect, understanding, or autonomy within her offline intimate relationships.
Yet there is no simple causal relationship between commercial fantasies of intimacy and gender relations in everyday life.
Zhang and Li’s (2026) research on Chinese otome-game players provides one way of understanding how women negotiate romantic fantasy, gender expectations, and real-world intimacy.
Women may derive emotional satisfaction from idealised relationships in games while simultaneously questioning the gender norms embedded within them and developing complex interpretations across the boundary between fantasy and everyday life.
A critique of the consumption of male beauty should therefore not stop at asking whether women have been manipulated by commercial culture.
It should examine how women themselves interpret their experiences of consumption and how those experiences enter into their subsequent understanding of real intimate relationships.
A woman may enjoy an idealised masculine figure while simultaneously recognising the gendered expectations that figure embodies.
She does not necessarily need to arrive at a perfectly consistent position of either acceptance or rejection.
She can value the emotional satisfaction offered by an experience while refusing to adopt all of its gendered assumptions as a model for real life.
Such contradiction should not be treated as evidence that female subjectivity has somehow failed.
On the contrary, it offers an important point of entry into understanding how women negotiate their desires within existing social relations.
The analytical question therefore changes.
Rather than asking simply whether consumption has given women subjectivity, we can ask how women use existing cultural forms to understand their own desires, how they negotiate between competing interpretations of those desires, and how these interpretations subsequently enter into expression and action.
Conclusion: Who Has the Power to Organise Desire?
The rise of the “male beauty economy” reveals the growing visibility and commercial value of female desire within contemporary consumer culture.
But women’s ability to consume male bodies does not mean that existing gendered relations of power have been reversed.
Nor does the ability to purchase idealised forms of intimacy mean that women have acquired the power to determine how intimacy is organised in everyday life.
Commercial culture may expand the spaces in which women can articulate desire while simultaneously transforming those desires into commodities available for consumption.
Women may experience genuine pleasure and emotional satisfaction within those spaces. They may also question, negotiate, and reinterpret the gendered narratives presented to them.
The question, then, is not whether consuming male beauty constitutes real liberation or false illusion.
It is why a change in position within a consumer relationship is so readily interpreted as a transformation of social power.
Women are invited onto the stage of desire. They are given opportunities to look at, choose, and consume idealised images of men.
But being invited onto the stage does not mean that they control the lighting, write the script, or determine the rules of the performance.
The more important questions are these:
Can women articulate their desires outside existing commercial forms?
Can they refuse predetermined models of intimacy?
And can they participate in transforming the social relations that determine how desire is understood, represented, and satisfied in the first place?
The realisation of female subjectivity cannot be measured solely by what women are permitted to consume.
We must also ask:Who has the power to define, organise, and interpret women’s desire?
References
Illouz, E. (2007). Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press.
Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18.
Zhang, H., & Li, H. (2026). Perfect love or illusory hope? Female players’ ambivalent fantasies concerning Chinese otome games. Women’s Studies in Communication.