Why has the internet turned femininity into a marketplace?

Earlier this year, I wrote about the manosphere: that online swamp where male frustration got rebranded into a belief system.

Now, as if the algorithm needed a sequel, the womanosphere has arrived. And it’s come in hot. A glossy, Botox-filtered ecosystem where Tradwives, clean girls, and Onlyfans entrepreneurs sell the fantasy of peace, purpose, and perfect skin.

But the womanosphere isn’t a mere reaction to male extremism. It’s the structural counterpart, the sister system, to the same machine that gave us rebranded toxic masculinity.

It just learned to pose, smile, and stay monetised. Because the internet doesn’t really do ideology anymore. What it does do, is aesthetics. And in this economy, the market, not women themselves, decides what kind of womanhood trends, be it holy, hungry, or horny.

Let’s start with the tradwives.

You’ve seen them: the aspirational stay-at-home angels floating across our feeds in $500 linen aprons, baking bread, tending to their children, and talking about submission as self-care.

The algorithm loves them. And fair play, they offer calm in a culture that’s burning out. Their brand of femininity looks serene, safe, and well-lit. Just as long as you don’t notice that it’s patriarchy re-packaged as peace.

Because the tradwife fantasy isn’t just about domestic bliss.

It’s a soft-sold political ideology, one that feeds directly into conservative anxieties about gender, birth rates, and the “decline of the West.”

When women post “I do XYZ to please my husband” over a looping sourdough reel, it’s not just personal choice content. It’s cultural conditioning. A beautiful ad for the return of hierarchy, wrapped in a candlelit kitchen.

Her message is simple: your power is in serving.

She’s the antidote to girlboss burnout. The visual promise that if you stop resisting the “natural order of things,” life will finally make sense again.

But behind the cottagecore filter lies an old, dark story, one where female value is measured by devotion and obedience. And I have to hand it to them, submission has never looked so cinematic. It honestly has me second-guessing my own life on a daily basis.

But that’s the point.

The tradwife is designed to make feminism look exhausting, to aestheticise regression until it feels like relief.

Like all good marketing, the serenity she sells depends on selective framing. The holy woman’s nostalgia for tradition often overlaps with a quiet call for cultural regression, a fantasy that patriarchy was peaceful before feminism ruined it.

Still, her appeal isn’t wrong. Stability, routine, and meaning are real human needs. The problem isn’t that she wants order; it’s that the internet has turned that longing into an aesthetic lifestyle brand.

Then there’s SkinnyTok.

Or what I like to call “discipline p*rn.” If the tradwife sells submission, the clean girl sells self-control.

And here, control is the new spirituality. Every green juice, every 4 a.m. workout, every “clean” meal is a public performance of purity.

The hungry woman isn’t chasing male approval, at least not directly. She’s chasing mastery in a system that equates discipline with virtue. It’s productivity disguised as wellness: a neoliberal remix of purity culture, where moral worth is measured in macros and motivation.

The market loves her because she’s infinitely self-improving.

The better she performs, the more she can sell her performance back to others. She’s not starving herself for a man; she’s starving herself for the algorithm. And the algorithm rewards her with what every religion promises its devotees: validation, belonging, and purpose.

Again, the instinct isn’t wrong--who doesn’t crave control in a world that feels uncontrollable? But that hunger is easy to monetise, and nearly impossible to satisfy. And women’s pain, once again, has been aestheticised into something admirable.

Finally, we have the “empowered” sex worker.

The OnlyFans archetype. The digital siren of self-ownership.

The left hails her as liberated: my body, my choice, my income. And sure, financial autonomy matters. But let’s not ignore the fine print: she operates within a system where a woman’s value is still defined by how well she performs for paying men.

To say this isn’t empowerment isn’t to shame sex workers; it’s to call out the scam of calling commodification freedom.

The argument that women have the right to sell their bodies hides the more uncomfortable truth: that men have the right to buy them.

This is what happens when market logic eats feminism whole. Liberation becomes just another monetisable lifestyle. Depending on which audience you’re selling to.

And the “horny” woman is rewarded for visibility, just like the tradwife and the starving “wellness” influencer.

They all operate under the same economic logic: please, perform, provide.

Different aesthetic. Same algorithm.

Feeling a little dizzy? Girl me too.

What’s crucial to understand is that none of these archetypes exist in isolation. They’re strategic complements, parallel pipelines that lead women into different forms of political disengagement.

The tradwife aligns with the Christian right’s dream of a docile, domestic electorate. The clean girl serves capitalism’s dream of the endlessly self-improving worker. The OnlyFans girl reinforces neoliberalism’s dream of total market freedom.

All three archetypes funnel women away from collective power and into personal performance.

That’s the real genius of the womanosphere.

It doesn’t tell women not to be powerful. It just redefines power in ways that never threaten the system producing it.

These archetypes are data points in a single feedback loop that rewards whatever version of femininity sells best this week, to whatever audience it needs.

The tradwife, the fitness girly, the OnlyFans star, all play different roles in the same drama of digital femininity. One sells submission. One sells self-control. One sells sex.

And all three are monetised performances of womanhood that keep the internet’s attention economy humming.

The internet didn’t kill feminism; it did, however, commodify the living f*ck out of it.

And now the market decides what kind of womanhood trends: holy, hungry, or horny. These aren’t moral categories. They’re marketing ones.

Archetypes engineered for engagement, chosen by the invisible hand of a system that profits from women’s endless self-reinvention. Because the thing about archetypes is they always promise transformation, but never liberation.

The womanosphere doesn’t offer escape from patriarchy; it instead, offers aestheticised participation in it.

And in the end, whether she’s holy, hungry, or horny - the algorithm wins. Because, baby, like in any gamble, the house always does.

-Sophie Randell, Writer