Free will is celebrated as the last sacred truth of liberal modernity; yet, it survives precisely because no one stops to examine it. Strip away the slogans about personal choice and self-expression, and a quieter reality appears: every impulse already bears the watermark of the culture that produced it. To live in society is to be drafted into a lifelong apprenticeship of imitation. Family, school, law, entertainment, advertising, algorithm — each supplies instructions disguised as opportunities until the difference between wanting and being told to want dissolves.
“I dress sexy for myself.” The sentence sounds radical because it centres the self as beneficiary, but the very metric of “sexy” was built to often service the male gaze. Long before any individual outfit is chosen, centuries of visual culture have rehearsed what counts as desirable: silhouettes that accentuate curves, fabrics that hint at skin, colours that promise softness or submission. Depart too far from that script and compliments dry up, stares turn hostile, service staff suddenly ignore requests. Social feedback silently nudges the wearer back toward shapes and palettes that flatter the default spectator: the heterosexual male consumer. By the time the mirror approves an outfit, the gaze is already inside the room, ventriloquising approval in first person: “I look good because I want to look good.” Autonomy becomes a ventriloquist’s dummy mouthing lines it never wrote.
Makeup follows the same choreography. Beauty influencers insist foundation and contour empowers women to craft identities on their own terms. But empowerment marketed in bottles still traces the contours of a face judged against patriarchal aesthetics. The claim that no one even needs to see the finished look, that the pleasure is purely personal, ignores the decades of advertising, peer reinforcement, and algorithmic imagery that trained the pleasure centres to fire only when certain proportions appear. A private thrill is still a social artifact if the neural wiring that produces it was welded by outside hands.
Sex-work discourse offers an even clearer view of how choice is weaponized. The twenty-first-century rallying cry “Sex work is work” frames participation as a rational, autonomous decision within a free market. Yet the market itself is unbalanced: demand is overwhelmingly from hetrosexual males, supply is overwhelmingly female or feminised, and profit gravitates toward platforms and managers who do not share the risks borne by performers. When a woman chooses to monetise desire, she steps into a structure designed long before she arrived, one that converts her labour, self-presentation, and sometimes trauma into revenue streams controlled elsewhere. However these women often are choosing to utilise their femininity to make money in an industry that is fundamentally patriarchal and that in itself is a decision which gives them autonomy but may often also replicate the system. Capitalist patriarchy can tolerate many surface freedoms so long as the underlying flow of profit and attention remains undisturbed.
The pattern repeats wherever “living free under capitalism” becomes a slogan. Capitalism promises boundless options, brands, careers, and lifestyles, while quietly restricting the field to what can be monetised. Every avenue toward liberation loops back to consumption, ensuring that dissatisfaction funds the very engine that caused it. Choice multiplies, but only inside a marketplace that sells back pre-selected versions of independence.
The differing argument presents that even if we recognise social influence that does not negate agency. Yes, but agency within a field entirely structured by external incentives resembles a chess move where every square except one has been removed from the board. Technically, the pawn still chooses its path; practically, the path was decided when the board was designed. Acknowledging this constraint does not mean abandoning responsibility; it means locating responsibility in the redesign of the board, not the heroic myth of the individual piece.
Supporters of the counter-view insist that individuals are not passive tunnels of ideology: we reflect, improvise, and sometimes weaponise the very norms that police us. Feminist, queer, and creative spaces hold numerous examples of breaking norms and critiquing the systems. Regardless, people reproduce systems even while subtly altering them. Such micro-resistances matter, they create cracks where new possibilities generate, but they are also precarious. Agency is undeniably real yet intrinsically relational, bounded by the cultural, economic, and legal scaffolding that grants certain moves visibility, safety, and reward. Genuine emancipation demands both celebrating these everyday renegotiations and expanding the scaffolding itself so that creativity is no longer a survival tactic but a freely chosen act.
Still, even the boldest departures can leave the scaffold intact. A drag performer who exaggerates femininity to parody it, or a makeup artist who wears exaggerated, colourful makeup as protest, both rely on the very beauty codes they reject; the audience must recognise the patriarchal template for the subversion to register. A body-hair activist posting unshaven armpits on Instagram must first photograph the “offending” hair, reinforcing that female smoothness is the norm being violated. Outside beauty, an OnlyFans creator branding explicit content as “self-managed empowerment” still depends on markets where hetrosexual male desire converts to cash. Each gesture bends the rules, but by speaking the system’s language it simultaneously re-inscribes the grammar of power. Genuine emancipation demands both celebrating these renegotiations and expanding the scaffolding itself so creativity is no longer a survival tactic but a freely chosen act, and so resistance becomes more than a mirror held to power, but a doorway out of it.
Additionally, this recognition also punctures the moral complacency that often accompanies “progressive” self-presentation. Declaring solidarity with sex workers while ignoring the economics that coerces many into the trade, or celebrating body-positivity campaigns funded by beauty conglomerates, merely adds ‘woke’ branding to old hierarchies. True progress begins by mapping how pleasure, labour, and visibility are still routed through male desire and corporate profit, then rerouting the circuits, even when the new paths feel awkward, unflattering, or unmarketable.
At the end of the day, this conspiracy has an Achilles heel: awareness. Breaking out of this trap begins with naming the forces that shape us. We must recognize that our individual will is not formed in a void but is the product of influence, influence so deep that it feels like our own idea. We are always being shaped and watched, even in solitude.
Such recognition can be uncomfortable. It means admitting that some of our most cherished “choices” were never just ours alone. It means grappling with the history and intent behind our habits: how women’s labor has been exploited, how our bodies have been objectified, how our aspirations have been guided toward certain ends. But this honest reckoning is profoundly empowering in the truest sense. It replaces false consciousness with clear sight. And from clear sight, we can move toward collective solutions. Rather than simply declaring “This is my choice” and leaving it at that, we can ask, “Who benefits from this choice? Do I truly benefit, do other women benefit, or am I perpetuating a harm?” Those are political questions, not just personal ones. By asking them, we reconnect personal choices to the larger project of ending oppression. True freedom will come not from insisting we already are free in a fundamentally unfree system, but from collectively changing that system. And the first step is to stop believing the lie that patriarchy and capitalism want us to believe: that everything we do, we do of our own pure free will. As the feminist aphorism goes, “the personal is political”. Our task now is to remember that, and turn our personal awakenings into political action.
