If I could pick one article that reveals the deep contradictions of contemporary gender discourse, it is Tendai Ruben Mbofana’s recent piece, “Can it truly be called empowerment if women still believe their worth lies in pleasing men’s desires?”
Upon the first glance, it has all the markings of a serious intervention. That is, the concern for women’s liberation, the lament for a culture enslaved by algorithms, the suspicion that what is marketed as empowerment is in fact a clever mask for patriarchy. To many readers, this sounds noble, even radical. But look closely, and the text reveals itself to be precisely the kind of paternalistic sermon it claims to resist. If anything, Mbofana is not exposing the illusion of empowerment. He is busy constructing a new one, and demanding that women march in line with his approved definition of freedom.
With a philosophical approach to life myself, I have no patience for such moralistic disguises. It is time to dismantle this argument, brick by brick, and in so doing reveal how fragile the concept of emancipation really is.
The article rests on a grand suspicion: women who post provocative pictures, dance in revealing outfits, or capitalize on their desirability are not actually free. They are merely playing into the age-old patriarchal script of female sexuality as commodity.
In other words, their choices are not authentic choices because they occur inside a system that rewards certain behaviors and punishes others. This seems persuasive superficially, but it collapses the moment we press it.
If a choice within a system is never free, then no human being has ever made a free choice in history. The businessman who seeks profit is merely conditioned by capitalism. The priest who renounces wealth is conditioned by religion. The student who studies engineering is conditioned by economic incentives.
What is left of agency once we demand it exist outside of all structures?
Freedom then becomes a ghost, a metaphysical vapor we can gesture at but never touch. Mbofana’s logic destroys the very possibility of human decision-making.
He senses this, of course. Which is why he tries to distinguish between choices that uphold patriarchal norms and choices that supposedly resist them. Yet here the hypocrisy shines through.
To him, a woman who earns fame by dancing half-naked online is a captive, while a woman who earns recognition in a laboratory or parliament is liberated. But why should his hierarchy of value become universal law? Why is intellectual or political success real empowerment while aesthetic or sexual capital is false empowerment?
He does not realize that his critique is not an escape from patriarchy. It is merely a refurbishment of it. Instead of the patriarch demanding obedience to modesty, we now have the enlightened critic demanding obedience to respectable careers.
The voice has changed, yet the command remains. ‘Be this kind of woman, not that kind of woman.‘
What he calls liberation is simply another prison painted in brighter colors. He scoffs at women who say they are “doing it for themselves,” yet in the same breath instructs them on what doing it for themselves should look like.
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What a laughable irony it is. For all his lamentations about objectification, he is guilty of intellectual objectification. Shaping women into his preferred model of the liberated subject. The scientist, the business leader, the stateswoman: these are his saints. The dancer, the model, the influencer: these are his sinners.
Patriarchy survives not through crude commands, but through this very subtle policing of which feminine paths are legitimate.
Consider his nostalgic contrast: the female engineer who receives a fraction of the attention that a bikini-clad woman does online. He intends this as tragedy. Is that not efficiency? Why should a woman labor for decades in obscurity? Scraping for the crumbs of recognition from male-dominated institutions, when she can flip a camera on herself and generate wealth in weeks?
This is strategy and not a weakness. If capitalism rewards attention, then mastery of attention is mastery of capitalism.
To complain that sex sells is like complaining that fire burns. Yes, it does, and those who know how to wield it have power over those who merely fear it.
What Mbofana names oppression may be empire. The old fantasy of men ruling women is laughable when a half-second hip sway can drain a man’s wallet. The helplessness is not female; it is male. If men cannot resist the gaze, then they are addicts, and women are the dealers. The patriarchy he mourns looks suspiciously like male fragility dorned up as dominance.
This is why his entire argument reeks of projection. His argument fears women’s sexuality not because it enslaves women, but because it enslaves men. Of course, hecannot admit this openly. He couches it in the language of female liberation. It is a clever inversion. What is really male anxiety about desire is reframed as moral concern for women. It’s a clever disguise.
If men are so endlessly captivated by women’s bodies, then it is men who live in chains, begging for the next glimpse, the next like, the next video. Women who exploit this are not victims. Rather, they are entrepreneurs.
What makes Mbofana’s position even more dangerous is its hidden alliance with toxic feminism. The kind that claims women are only liberated if they scorn traditional roles.
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This is the same philosophy that sneers at the stay-at-home mother as backward. It mocks the woman who finds pride in nurturing as oppressed. It also dismisses beauty, desire, and domesticity as patriarchal traps.
Under this logic, feminism becomes a dictatorship of the liberated. You are free and emancipated only if you reject what previous generations of women valued. What a grotesque parody of freedom, where autonomy is measured by conformity to a single ideology. Mbofana may not phrase it so bluntly, but his entire essay breathes this spirit. The empowered woman is not the one who chooses, but the one who chooses correctly according to his script.
Such arguments are poison. They masquerade as liberation while erasing the very plurality of lives women might wish to live. A woman who wishes to dedicate herself to family, who finds joy in domestic life, is branded unliberated. A woman who trades in beauty and sexuality is called a slave to patriarchy.
The only acceptable models are the ones that mimic masculine patterns of success: careers, public recognition, visible achievement. But what if emancipation is precisely the right to refuse those scripts altogether? What if freedom is not rejecting the bikini or the home or the dance, but claiming them on one’s own terms? The toxic strand of feminism Mbofana echoes cannot allow this, for it depends on maintaining a hierarchy of good and bad choices. It needs to sneer at some women in order to elevate others.
The digital economy only makes this clearer. Algorithms amplify what excites desire. Mbofana complains that they do not reward the scientist’s discovery as much as the influencer’s performance. But why should they? Algorithms do not create desire; they reflect it.
Human beings crave beauty, spectacle, sensation. To imagine that society will suddenly shift to reward only intellectual labor is a utopian fantasy. The attention economy is brutal, but it is honest. And in this brutal honesty, women who learn to command the gaze wield a form of power unthinkable in previous centuries. They do not beg for seats in boardrooms designed by men; they build empires out of pixels and desire. If this is enslavement, is it not a strange kind? One where the prisoner holds the key and the jailer kneels at the bars.
Of course, this is not to say that all is well. Exploitation exists, manipulation exists. The predatory structures of media and commerce exist. But the problem is not that women leverage sexuality. It is that society continues to pathologize whichever form of female agency it does not approve. First the puritans banned it, then the critics mocked it, and now the feminists delegitimize it. Each time, the message is the same: your choice is wrong unless it is our choice.
What Mbofana exposes is not the emptiness of empowerment but the emptiness of our definitions of empowerment. We demand that women be free, but only in ways that flatter our theories.
What is emancipation itself, if every system redefines it to suit its moral horizon? Is the woman in a laboratory free, or is she a captive of neoliberal meritocracy, chasing recognition that will always be withheld by male institutions? Is the woman on Instagram free, or is she a captive of the algorithm? Is the housewife free, or is she chained to domestic expectation? The answer is obvious: all are trapped, and all are free, depending on how one frames the system.
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To demand that freedom exist outside of all conditioning is absurd. To live is to live in systems. The only meaningful question is whether one learns to manipulate those systems to one’s advantage.
This is why Mbofana’s lament rings hollow. He condemns women for embracing roles as sex objects with vigor. But what he calls vigor might just be intelligence. The intelligence of survival, of efficiency, of wielding what one has in a world that rewards what it always has. He asks whether this is truly progress. The reality is that progress is irrelevant. There is only power, and its distribution. If women command the gaze, profit from the gaze, and weaponize the gaze, then they have achieved something previous generations could scarcely imagine. That it unsettles men is not evidence of failure. That is evidence of success.
In the end, Mbofana’s article is not a liberation manifesto but a plea for respectability politics. He wants women to be celebrated for their leadership, their inventions, their courage. Anything but their beauty. He cannot accept that beauty itself can be leadership, that sexuality itself can be invention, that courage sometimes looks like flaunting what society insists you hide. He mistakes his own discomfort for universal truth. And in so doing, he becomes what he fears: a man dictating to women how they should define themselves.
So let us strip away the disguise. His critique of empowerment is not emancipation but control. His concern for women is concern for a world where women act in ways he approves. His vision of liberation is a mirror of the old chains, polished with new vocabulary. Men are not the rulers here, they are the supplicants. The male gaze is not power; it is addiction. Women who monetize it are not captives; they are dealers.
And so we return to the fundamental question. What is emancipation? If it means conformity to a prescribed model of womanhood, whether traditional or progressive, then emancipation is a lie.
If it means the freedom to choose. Even to choose paths others despise, then perhaps emancipation is possible. But it will never look the same for every woman. The scientist, the mother, the dancer, the influencer, the housewife, the entrepreneur: all are free when they claim their paths without apology. Liberation has no single face, no respectable uniform, no guaranteed dignity. It is messy, contradictory, and often scandalous. But it is real.
In the final analysis, Mbofana’s article reveals less about women than it does about the fragility of our cultural imagination. We cannot tolerate the thought that empowerment may look vulgar, or easy, or profitable in ways we dislike. So we dress our anxieties in the costume of morality. Yet power does not care for our sensibilities. It flows where desire flows, and those who harness it rule. The future will not belong to those who sneer at women’s choices, but to those who recognize that choice itself: messy, compromised, strategic, self-serving: is the only freedom we have ever known.
And if that freedom terrifies us, perhaps it is because it reveals the truth we cannot face: that emancipation was never about escaping systems, but about learning how to dominate them.
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Zealous Thierry 
Wonderful write up
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Thanks
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