The Commodification of Feminism:
A Critical Examination of Status and Wealth-Based Feminism in 2025

Terry Lawrence

Feminism in 2025 has come a long way from being a social movement that struggled for justice and equality to being a materialistic, individualistic, and superficial form of empowerment. The need for a critical examination of the commodification of feminism is brought home by the intersection of the movement with materialism, individualism, and superficial empowerment.

Feminism in 2025 has largely become a Tik Tok echo chamber of the Neo Capitalism it pretends to do battle with.

Based on scholarship, cultural critique, and living experience, this paper argues that the recent feminism wave can lose its core ideology and recopy the imbalance of society. Emulating the class-conscious and materialistic feminism wave, this essay brings into focus the importance of going back to the original aim of equality, solidarity, and mutual improvement. If feminism is to survive in the future and be more than The Valley Hunt Club, it must rid itself of class consciousness, pride, and the seven deadly sins it so richly has come to embrace.

Feminism, social justice call to arms, and men-women equality, is today a muddled and bewildered movement with numerous applications and meanings. But in 2025, there is one ugly trend: the emergence of status and wealth feminism. This form of feminism is less about personal success, consumer goods, and status, but more about mass empowerment and social change.

Although the movement has achieved some success, e.g., representation of leadership and economic empowerment of women, the trend has raised questions as to whether the movement has been genuine or not and whether the movement will continue to be successful. Bluntly put, modern feminism makes jokes about men and their phallus size while women compare the sizes of their 401K’s.

Commodification of feminism is addressed here to determine to what extent the movement has pursued consumerism, individualism, and wealth accumulation. In making fun of such a feminism's excesses, the article highlights the contradictions and risks of a cause gone astray. Arguing from scholarship, cultural criticism, and lived experience, this essay argues that the type of feminism based on wealth and status risks losing its ideals and upholding social injustice.

The 2024 Presidential Election saw many women hoping to elect Kamala Harris to the Presidency as proof positive that they themselves were vicariously empowered. Most women did not seem to notice that the empowerment of one well-to-do woman is not true empowerment for the masses and lower classes. Kamala Harris supported the Surveillance Economy Nanny-State, a mechanization of repression for the lower class. Harris’s background suggests support of the For-Profit Prison Complex and unbridled ambition for self, not unbridled ambition for others.

The Evolution of Feminism: From Collective Struggle to Individual Success The transformation of feminism from a communal struggle to individual achievement is an important change. The suffragettes of early 20th century, second-wave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, and the feminist movement have always remained about empowerment, stripping patriarchal forms, and attaining gender equality. Feminism has in recent decades more and more come to be seen as individualistic, with individual achievement and empowerment in the center. This ugly devolution from other-centric to self-centric reflects the stock-market touting, cocaine sniffing Eighties values of the generations of excess.

Several factors, including the rise of neoliberal capitalism, the influence of social media, and the commodification of feminist values, contribute to this transition. For Banet-Weiser (2018), feminism has been commodified as business and influencers borrow the language of feminism to sell commodities and personal achievement. This "marketplace feminism" is less about individual achievement and consumerism and more about group action and transformation, disempowering the movement to create change. The Neo-Capitalist flavor of feminism baits the question, when the stock market collapses, does one’s empowerment and “enlightenment” end with the devaluation of market stocks?

By 2025, the cycle had run through, and feminism had dwindled to prosperity, status, self, and material achievement. Today's feminist icon no longer is a grass-roots activist or pioneering suffragist but high-net-worth executive, social media influencer, or celebrity selling her success as a brand of empowerment. Whereas these statistics may motivate some, the emphasis they place on personal success threatens to overshadow feminism's deeper objectives, including fighting institutionalized oppression and speaking for the voiceless.

As this becomes a continuing trend, it also reflects an increasing mental health epidemic in America, and most predominantly in men. Men's suicide has been increasing, with men being nearly four times more likely to have died by suicide than women (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, 2022). Seven out of every ten suicides in America are white men (pills, hangings or self-inflicted gunshots). The overall trend is DEI for women, Hari Kari for men. The women of 2025 are so busy reading “Male Toxicity” articles they have not even noticed the plethora of deaths of their “male brothers.”

As feminism continues to trend towards individualistic, material forms of empowerment, it may be perpetuating the gendered disparities in well-being unintentionally. While women are urged to be rich and successful, men are forced to grapple with masculinity and expectations of success that do not provide space for emotional response or vulnerability. The commodification of feminism can forget this single fact: real empowerment must serve all genders' common, intersectional interests, not individual success.

The Commodification of Feminism: Empowerment as a Consumer Product The most shocking aspect of status and wealth feminism is perhaps just how commodified it has become. In 2025, empowerment is a consumer commodity bought and hawked through every avenue possible. From designer houses hawking "feminist" t-shirts to self-help gurus selling empowerment seminars, the movement has been distilled down to a catalog of marketable catchphrases and products.

This commodification is at its most subtle in social media, an arena where celebrities and influencers are feminist icons in order to market themselves. Social media has produced a 'culture of visibility labor', as Duffy and Hund (2019) had asserted, where the subject subjects himself to perform his empowerment in order to be consumed by the other. Typically, it manifests itself as material success, physical beauty, and professional achievement, re-centering the site where empowerment is synonymous with personal success.

The fault of such an approach is that it renders feminism elitist and superficial. In reducing empowerment to status and wealth, this type of feminism shuts out the oppressed from sharing them. True feminism, according to Hooks (2000), should be intersectional and inclusive and address all women, including on the topic of socioeconomic status.

Commodification of feminism, though, can disempower fighting for equality by conflating the existence and success of the privileged minority as superior. Also problematic is the effect this limited definition of success has on overall social wellbeing. With growing suicides among men, a society fixated on personal wealth and individual victory has the potential to worsen the sense of isolation and disconnection that some, especially men, might experience. Such individuals do not see a path to success on the basis of authentic personal development as compared to accumulating wealth, and this contributes to an increased mental health crisis in society.

The Paradox of Wealth-Driven Feminism: Empowerment or Entrapment? Even in form, status and capitalist feminism is contradictions and riskful. Perhaps one of the very core paradoxes of this kind of feminism is that it is inclined to double down on those same institutions which it wishes to overthrow. Through advocating for personal success and monetary success, it aligns itself with the neoliberal capitalist spirit, a system long used to carry on gender subordination.

For example, career success and economic autonomy are the top priority at the expense of other feminist goals, such as work-life balance, care work, and community. Fraser (2013) contends that neoliberal feminism's emphasis on individual success can risk ignoring the structural barriers to many women's gaining actual equality.

It is in 2025 that the paradox comes most into focus in elevating women's expectations to "have it all"-successful careers, perfect families, and envied lives-while ignoring the institutional realities that render such achievement inaccessible or undesirable to so many. "Have it all" women are virtually impossible to live with, their frenetic dozens of irons in too many fires and worship of wealth over family and love makes them insufferable. Their “perfect family” members can never live up to the ideals they themselves fall so short of.

Further, money and prestige can be brutally isolating and generate emptiness and disillusion. As Ehrenreich (2018) writes, never-ending pressure to perform and do better can be a poisonous effect on mental health, leading to burnout, depression, and anxiety. Hence, wealth feminism could be more entrapment than empowerment, trapping women in a vicious circle of continuous striving and consumerism.

Likewise, the same cycle of unattainable ideals can occur with men's mental illness, where the inability to live up to idealized constructs of masculine accomplishment, more than likely supported by consumer culture, does indeed translate into worthlessness and isolation. The plight of American men, vastly inequal to meteoric Neo-Capitalist women, breeds a deep contempt, indeed a hatred of 2025 faux-feminism.

The Social Media Role: Creating the Ideal Feminist Icon Social media has played a crucial role in constructing the status-and wealth-feminism brand. Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn were in 2025 spaces where the performative ideal of the feminist self was enacted through intentionally constructed images, motivational quotes, and success stories. Although these sites raise people's awareness and mobilize them, they make feminism superficial and commodified.

Maybe one of the central issues with social media feminism is that it's performativist. Banet-Weiser (2018) argues that social media makes individuals perform their empowerment for other people to see at the cost of richness and authenticity. The performance typically takes the form of material privilege and status since celebrities and influencers exhibit their affluent life and professional achievements publicly. Think of the inner sanctum of a health club, people working out in $2000 jogging suits, wanting to be pronounced perfect-now substitute TikTok performative feminism with biceps.

This performative social media feminism is also deeply exclusionary, offering unattainable ideals of power and achievement. As Duffy and Hund (2019) show, the labor of appearing on social media in a manner that allows one to gain one's agency is, per se, out of reach for women without time, money, or privileged access to perform such labor. This then promotes elitism for feminists, whereby those who can afford to do most of their agency work are celebrated, while others are marginalized or ignored.

Satire Critique of Wealth-Oriented Feminism To demonstrate the illogic of status and wealth feminism, it is helpful to use a satirical critique to its extremes. Consider a world where feminism has become consumer choice: the correct purse, Instagram selfie, and perfect job. Empowerment in this case is not articulated through structural transformation and collective progress but through individual achievement, brand choices, and capital.

Think of the "feminist" celebrity Twitter personality putting up a carefully photoshopped picture of herself taking an outrageously costly vacation with a message on self-acceptance, self-love, and empowerment hashtagged. Or the businesswoman announcing she has smashed the glass ceiling without wanting to talk about the exploitative conditions in her business. They are hyper events, but they correspond to the reality of feminism, which is reduced to narcissism and consumerist culture. There is no room in such an image for the chocolate-smeared faces of children or a sun-burned husband with a pot-belly. Empowerment is self, self is empowerment. The goal is four hotels on Boardwalk and Baltic Avenues, there is no room for a spouse or children.

The irony, naturally, is that the sort of feminism that it advocates on occasion actually reenforces precisely the systems which it claims to challenge. Its promotion of status and wealth conforms to neoliberal capitalist ideology of a system long perpetuating gendered disparities. Wealth-based feminism is thus less an articulation of the prevailing order than a call to transform rather than to reverse what presently is.

The wealth- and status-obsessed 2025 model of feminism is a salutary departure from the original ideology of the movement. Its emphasis on individual success and material prosperity risks leaving the poor behind and consolidating social stratification. Its sympathy with consumerism and social media also dilutes its radicalism and commercializes feminism as a sloganized commodity.

The consumer-driven version of commercial feminism is transactional, friends, boyfriends, husbands are steppingstones to wealth and success (business networking) – each cog in the wheel easily replaced for a more lucrative version. This is, at its core, feminism as a Monopoly Board Game.

In trying to reclaim feminism's initial values, it is necessary to unhook from personal accomplishment and scale towards human empowerment. That includes fighting against structural injustices, resisting subordinated groups, and resisting systems that facilitate gendered oppression. It also means resisting feminism's commodity capture and adopting intersectional and expansive practice.

As Hooks (2000) reminds us, feminism is neither economic nor individual success but the creation of a world where everyone, not just women, has the chance to thrive. In 2025, that dream more desperately needs reassertion than ever before. By lampooning decadence of wealth-and-status feminism, this essay challenges us to return to the movement's initial ideals of fairness, solidarity, and collective advance.

Desired Attributes: Success, beauty, intelligence, balance, independence, fulfillment in career, family, and personal growth.

Alternate Reality: Family disintegration, societal imbalance, selfishness, egomania, matriarchal dominance, loss of traditional values, and emotional isolation. Mental, emotional, and spiritual atrophy.

References:

Banet-Weiser, S. (2018). Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Duke University Press.

Duffy, B. E., & Hund, E. (2019).

Gendered Visibility on Social Media: Navigating Instagram's Authenticity Bind. International Journal of Communication, 13, 4983–5002.

Ehrenreich, B. (2018). Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer. Twelve.

Fraser, N. (2013). Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. Verso Books.

Hooks, B. (2000). Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics-South End Press.

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. (2022). Suicide Statistics.

 

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