In today’s patriarchal society, women are constantly portrayed, marketed, and perceived as objects and products. Advertisements, film, art-- they all rely on and perpetuate the constant overt objectification and sexualization of the female body. This is news to no one-- female objectification has been going on for hundreds of years, since the Biblical era, since the beginning of time itself. However, in discussions of this phenomenon, I think there is a tendency to underestimate women’s intelligence. Yes, we are constantly sexualized. Yes, we are turned into a product for society to consume. Yes, we are forced to buy into the heteronormative gender roles being imposed upon us by society. But I don’t think it’s that simple anymore, or even that it ever really was.

In Johanna Oksala’s “The Neoliberal Subject of Feminism,” she asserts that women are “constructed as subjects who are dependent on others, who must suppress their aggression, egotistical interests and ambitions and demonstrate caring and nurturing qualities.” Moving forward, Oksala speaks on the point that women are “subjugate[d] by normalisation, by constructing them as particular kinds of subjects.” However, rather than women becoming “docile and useful,” I would like to assert that women as subjects learn to use the circumstances of their existence within society not to suppress but to actively pursue their own egotistical interests and ambitions. In understanding the conditions of their subjugation, they are able to use the qualities society has imposed upon them to advance their own personal interests.

Take, for example, the Kardashians. This family is unbelievably wealthy, and as far as circumstances in life go, they’re living in much more comfort than the vast majority of the population. And what do they do? They sell their images and their lifestyles. They make and publish entire books of nothing but selfies, and those books make them money. Kim Kardashian became famous when a sex tape of hers was published, and instead of allowing it to ruin her life, she turned a massive profit on it. She used her circumstantial existence in a sex-obsessed society to make money off exactly what the American audiences wanted: her body, her image, her life. Now, Kim Kardashian has a net worth of over $85 million, and she makes $40,000 for every episode of “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” That money alone gives her more power in a capitalistic society than most of us will ever have, and it all came from her body and her femininity. In this, she both exemplifies and defies the traditional feminine gender roles. She is worshiped for her beauty, her sex appeal, and now her role as a wife and a mother, which are all in accordance the expectations for women of which Oksala speaks. However, this has brought her much more power than it has oppression. In the end, doesn’t she win? She has learned, as Oksala says of neoliberal feminists, that “women no longer have to feel so worried about getting their hands dirty, because it is clear now that many good things can be built with dirty hands.”

Kim K isn’t the only one profiting from her womanhood, either. More and more, women in the workplace are learning to capitalize on the feminine attributes society has pushed onto them. They can emphasize their supposed predisposition for the ability to resolve conflicts, their nurturing side, the benefits the employer would gain by hiring or promoting a woman-- this woman-- for the job. Oksala argues this as well when she says “women no longer have long, manicured nails because their male partners find this sexually attractive and arousing, but because manicured nails have now become a sign of professional and financial success, a sign that is likely to help them move forward in their career. Similarly, in interviews with cosmetic surgery patients, for example, one of the main arguments women state for undergoing the operations is the fact that it can be a career move.” Sure, maybe this is playing dirty, but it’s playing smart. Beyond this, I firmly believe that the overwhelming majority of women have at one point or another benefited from their femininity, be it underage girls getting into a bar or an unfit mother being granted custody of her children-- not that these behaviors are condonable, but no one can say they aren’t real.

However, with this consciousness comes a choice. As women and as humans, the choices we make are inevitably political, whether or not we mean for them to be. Just because we have some freedom of choice doesn’t mean we have achieved autonomy; we are still confined by the barriers the patriarchy has created. After all of this, we are still economic subjects who are trained to react in certain ways to our environments. We can choose to defy or embrace gender norms and view that as a progressive political statement, but the paradigm is not broken: The fact remains that the gender norms exist to be defied or embraced. So, we turn ourselves into both subject and object, simultaneously the consumers and the consumed. We learn to use our femininity to our advantage.