Date: May 23, 2025 at 21:58
It's become socially acceptable outerwear in university, high school, and even middle school. It's ubiquitous enough to raise zero eyebrows. This is in stark contrast to 20 years ago when it was considered risqué at best and offensive at worst. What does it say that what was once risqué is now neutral?
Does it mean people have become more open? Or does it mean they've become more prurient? Is this a victory for feminism or a loss? What does this all-too-fluid mass adoption signal about the structures that manage and oppress women at large?
If women can wear whatever they want without it being considered offensive or risqué, then isn't it progress?
What if someone says it isn't?
In the context of sexual assault, there's a common catchphrase used to defend against victim-blaming like this:
"Clothing doesn't cause assault. Rapists do."
It's absolutely correct in the narrowest sense: clothing doesn't cause assault and perpetrators are responsible for the harm they cause, yet it's woefully incomplete.
It ignores the entire terrain in which violence happens: societal attitudes toward women's bodies, the commodification of self-expression, and women being sold an image of freedom through aesthetics. It pretends clothes exist in some neutral bubble of choice detached from language, culture, economy, or history.
You predictably get an analogous response to the rise of ass shorts in young girls: "It's just fashion," some say. "It's just a pair of shorts; why are you so preoccupied with what she's wearing?" some ask rhetorically, as though your discomfort is the real perversion, not the fact that some socially accepted line of decision-making leads to pre-consent bodies dressed in a hypersexualized aesthetic.
Clothing doesn't just exist. It's not neutral. It signals, attracts, protects, and repels. It gets read. It's written on bodies by the culture, through the culture, through fashion, media, advertising, porn, Instagram, even feminist discourse. When you frame it as "her choice," you erase all of that. You pretend that choices arise in a vacuum and that they don't take place in a culture or a society.
"It's just fashion; don't sexualize it. Just freedom of expression."
Great, let's pretend for a second that we live in a magical void with no advertisers, no porn culture, no profit motive, no generations of codified misogyny, and no Instagram likes. Let's say then that there's absolutely nothing to read into this choice of clothing. If you can honestly say that's your world, then write me a thesis on neutral garments and how they exist completely outside of cultural context because you clearly don't live in ours.
It's difficult to unpack the layers here. Because you're dealing with a kind of societal blindness to how meaning is constructed. If your defense to the way society reads symbols is "just don't see it that way," then you're not actually addressing the problem. You're wishful thinking.
What they're really saying is "Please, for the love of God, don't make me think about the water I'm swimming in, because if I do, I might drown in the implications." ---
Here's the water: Why is "just fashion" so lucrative? Why does "freedom of expression" always seem to express itself in ways that maximize visibility, marketability, and salability? What kind of "freedom of expression" normalizes the fetishization of children? What's being expressed by pushing the envelope on how young girls dress?
You wear ass shorts? Fine. I do too. That says something about each of us. People may think differently. They may even act differently.
It's not about policing what women wear. Hell, sometimes it is, and that kind of discourse ("we must keep her from wearing that") needs to be defended against, sure, but it ends up obscuring the more nuanced issue:
If the garment itself acts as a signifier within a system that itself changes and that operates based on desire and economy... The story doesn't end at "she chose to wear it." It begins at "what did she think it meant?"
"Does she know what it means to men? To other women?"
"Did someone tell her 'this is how you matter'?"
"And if so, where did she get the idea?"
Capitalism, at its core, is about the deregulation and re-regulation of desire. Capitalism is a self-destructive cycle involving the breaking down of old social codes and norms ("decoding") and the reinstitution of new ones ("recoding") that are more easily commodified.*
This pattern can be noticed literally everywhere.
Mental health? Capitalism decodes traditional community support structures, then recodes them as antidepressants, self-help books, vacations, retreats, and therapy sessions. All of which you pay for or distract yourself with.
Relationships? Decoding leads to the decline of village matchmaking, family lineages, traditional marriage, but recoding turns dating into an industry with freemium apps and algorithms that never seem to end and date coaches who charge an arm and a leg.
Work? Bound to seasons, harvests, rituals, morals, and family. All that gets decoded, then gets recoded as clocks, office schedules, burnout, gig economy, time management, and self-care apps.
Patriarchy? Traditional codes such as control through family honor, dowries, religion, virginity, father-as-owner are turned into social media, online personalities, OnlyFans, "girlboss feminism", and 10-step skincare routines. The decodings weren't all results of capitalism, but it clearly exploited and amplified them.
It's no surprise then that dress codes have been fully incorporated.
The deregulation of social norms ("ass shorts are risqué") is followed by the reinstitution of new ones ("ass shorts are neutral now, but thongs are still trashy"). Capitalism doesn't truly liberate desire; it merely metabolizes and rechannels it according to its own structures (privatization, profit, money) at every turn.
It's a new item to buy. It's a new way to amplify desire. It's a new anxiety to manufacture. It's a new performance of liberation that loops perfectly back into the market. We are all caught within this machine.
When a trend spreads across girls before they even understand their own sexual power, when hypersexualized aesthetics become the norm at the pre-consent level, this is capitalism at work.
The structures that profit from self-expression also profit from their exploitation, and we must ask ourselves whether we're looking at "empowerment" or another example of false freedom where women are simply given more creative ways to alienate ourselves, sell our images and bodies on social media, and perform consumerism.
It depends which feminism. If your feminism is the neoliberal, choice-centric kind that says "empowerment = whatever I decide to do with my body," then yeah, sure, ass shorts are empowerment. But that's a feminism that's been stripped of its radical potential and repackaged as "you do you, girl."
It's a feminism that's perfectly amenable to capitalism because it's all surface, all consumption, all self-optimization. It doesn't question the distribution of power. It's all about the individual, allergic to anything collective, allergic to any real confrontation with the supposed self-evidence of the axioms and systems that govern our lives.
If your feminism is the kind that thinks of women as a class of people who are systematically oppressed by not only patriarchy but capitalism itself, then for you normalization isn't always progressive.
You'll think twice about calling anything "empowerment" that perfectly aligns with market logic. You'll think twice about treating aesthetic self-expression as "progression" when the platforms and algorithms that encourage this mass adoption are owned by the same structures that profit from women's alienation, sexualization, and emotional labor. You'll see this as both disappointing and par for the course.
I don't know what the future of feminism looks like. I don't know if it's possible to decouple feminism from capitalism, or if that's even desirable. I do know that there are many kinds of feminisms, and people will most often think about the kind of feminism that sees individual choice and self-expression as the ultimate end goals.
That kind--neoliberal "feminism"--is most easily absorbed by capitalism. It's the kind that says "wear what you want, do what you want," without mentioning that you still have to work for someone so that you won't starve, without mentioning that power converges in the hands of the few who are most eager to make sure you're forever under their thumb. It's the kind that focuses on individual empowerment only to the extent that it's not the empowerment to opt out, organize, and dismantle. It's complete autonomy where the definition of "complete" is quietly managed.
*I abuse Deleuze and Guattari's terms here. Many applications of the words "decode" and "recode" here are actually "deterritorialize" and "reterritorialize". The former refer actually to the management of desire itself, while the latter refer to the uprooting and re-rooting of a historically persistent structure. I decided to gloss it over a bit in favor of readability.