We Need To Talk About Activewear...
How the aesthetics of softcore porn became wellness branding, and the female body became a stage for profit, performance, and survival.
By Nick Holt
There was a time—not so long ago—when you had to pay good money to see this sort of thing. Glossy magazines, passed between teenage hands like a church collection plate—furtive, sacred, a little shameful.
Then the internet arrived. The process was more covert, but just as tedious. He’d wrap a towel around the modem to muffle its screech. Forty-five minutes later, a single image of a woman in a bikini would materialise—line by agonising line.
This was the price the modern man paid for a coup d'œil of the female body.
Now? Just go outside.
We’ve adopted the visual language of softcore porn and restyled it as lifestyle. The sculpted, seamless activewear cuts high across the hips and vanishes between the cheeks.
It’s not lingerie, technically—but it’s closer to a g-string than it is to exercise clothes. Brands call it “contour,” “second skin,” “body-hugging.” They sell the illusion of nudity with the plausible deniability of fitness.
It’s a uniform now. Designed not just to reveal the body, but to frame it—strategically. High-gloss glutes, cinched waists, razor-sharp tan lines. The fabric doesn’t just stretch—it lifts, shapes, defines.
Every curve is accounted for. Every fold is smoothed. The result is an algorithmically refined generation—Non player characters dropped into the simulation for sex appeal, not story. They're not dressed to move, but to be seen. Not created for complexity, but for visual reward.
In other words, the body no longer belongs to the self—it belongs to the gaze. It exists not to be, but to be seen. Its role is symbolic, not lived. As Guy Debord warned, we are living not in a society, but in a spectacle—a world where the image precedes and replaces reality. Here, the female body has become a unit of aesthetic currency, stripped of subjectivity and traded for attention.
This is not simply objectification—it’s a kind of self-objectification that masquerades as autonomy. The subject becomes both the sculptor and the sculpture, the producer and the product.
What Foucault described as the internalisation of power is at work here: surveillance no longer needs an oppressor. The gaze has been absorbed. It is now self-directed, self-administered, self-publicised.
Social media accelerates this process, but didn’t create it. The groundwork was laid long before—when femininity was equated with appearance, and appearance with worth.
The softcore aesthetic of activewear isn’t just fashion—it’s ideology. It’s the commodification of empowerment, where liberation is measured by visibility, and visibility is measured by attention.
In this sense, the modern woman performs a strange double role.
She is both the subject of the image and its audience.
She crafts herself for the gaze, then consumes that crafted self in a loop of validation. As Simone de Beauvoir might put it, she becomes the object through which she seeks to become a subject—relying on external recognition to anchor an internal identity.
And so the self becomes porous. Curated. Contingent.
Before we rush to mock or moralise, we should be clear about one thing: this isn’t vanity—it’s an economy. And like all modern economies, it runs on visibility, clicks, and profit.
Women aren’t driving this alone. Behind every sculpted midsection and filtered selfie stands a machine. It’s built by marketers, powered by algorithms, and owned by men who know exactly what sells. It sells leggings. It sells supplements. It sells empowerment in monthly instalments. And it sells her—again and again—under a new label.
This is not liberation. This is monetised insecurity.
The system flatters her with slogans—self-love, wellness, boss babe—but only as long as her body remains marketable. It rewards her for turning herself into content and punishes her the moment she stops performing. It is not freedom; it is a treadmill dressed as a platform.
What looks like exhibitionism is often adaptation. A survival strategy in a world where being seen is confused with being valued. And beneath the sculpted poses lies a question older than capitalism: Do I matter?
Compassion begins here—not by excusing the system, but by understanding the cost it demands. The pressure to perform. The fatigue of always being on. The loneliness of being admired, but never known.
These women are not avatars. Not brands. Not influencers by nature. They are people—doing what they must to survive in a culture that confuses exposure with empowerment and identity with display.
We can understand the impulse without endorsing the outcome. Compassion doesn’t mean silence. It means asking: Who profits from this? And who pays?
Much of modern beauty culture is driven not by male desire, but by intrasexual competition—women measuring themselves against one another. The goal isn’t necessarily to attract men, but to outperform other women in the economy of appearance.
Social media has intensified this, turning status into a visual hierarchy: skin, symmetry, waistlines, and lifestyle aesthetics are now quantifiable via likes, comments, and followers. In this context, activewear becomes less clothing and more currency.
De Beauvoir would call this a survival strategy in a world where woman is both object and judge.
At the same time, the shaping of the female body for external consumption—especially male desire—is deeply embedded in cultural memory.
Even when women claim they're dressing “for themselves,” what counts as beautiful or confident has already been mediated by centuries of visual standards shaped by patriarchy, advertising, and entertainment.
The influencer archetype is still the curated ideal of male fantasy, just rebranded through the language of agency.
As Baudrillard might say, it’s no longer about sex—it’s about the simulation of sex as power.
Then there’s the market logic: in a culture where your value depends on how effectively you package yourself, the body becomes a brand. Dressing becomes performance. Desire, strategy. You’re not just seen—you’re selling something: your lifestyle, your discipline, your worth.
So yes—women are competing with each other, and yes—they’re shaping themselves for the gaze. But more than that, they’re surviving a system that rewards the image over the individual.
That’s the true tragedy.
Meanwhile, in parts of the Islamic world, women cover themselves—sometimes by choice, sometimes by force—but the message is consistent: the flesh is powerful. It is private. Sacred, or dangerous, or both.
In the West, we deliver the same message—only in reverse. The flesh is powerful. And it must be seen.
Different doctrine. Same dogma.
We call it freedom. But when a culture insists—relentlessly—that covering up signals weakness, we’re not looking at liberation. We’re looking at a costume change. The veil has become neon lycra. The scripture is written by Gymshark, Alo Yoga, Lululemon, and Nike. And the high priestess is the influencer with 200,000 followers and a discount code.
They’ve turned the body into a billboard.
Not for sex, but for ideology. Health is virtue. Beauty is character. Visibility is agency. And modesty? That’s just trauma with bad branding.
We’d like to think this is just about fashion. But fashion is never just fashion. Fashion is story. And the story we’re telling now is one where performance is personhood, and the body is the entire plot.
We haven’t outgrown shame—we’ve outsourced it. To algorithms. To branding. To the crowd. What was once private has become public, then packaged, then praised. All under the banner of authenticity.
It’s not freedom. It’s survival—branded, exhausted, and performed.