Content is the New Pornography

Why our digital voyeurism is not a reflection of what we truly desire

We’ve become digital voyeurs, aroused not by bodies but by performances of identity - and we’re mistaking that voyeurism for genuine cultural shift.

Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future

Long gone are the days when our fantasies lived behind a sticky curtain in a video store. In a frictionless world, where it’s harder to talk to a human at a call centre than to find actual porn, the pleasure of looking has fundamentally changed. Instead of connection, we’re now seeking the voyeuristic thrill of watching others perform for us, while simultaneously performing for them.

The problem with living in liquid times, where everything is measured in flow, speed, and ephemerality, is that it makes it easier to mistake mass engagement with a particular piece of content for genuine resonance with those ideas.

The momentum of the Tradwives. RichTok. Ballerina Farm’s 10.6M followers. Taking engagement with these phenomena at face value, many are concluding a conservative shift in the social sentiment - justifying it by stating even women are becoming increasingly interested in reverting into retrograde gender roles.

And yet across the world, women are simultaneously declaring en masse that having a boyfriend is embarrassing, actively seeking to decenter men, or eliminate them completely from their lives.

These movements exist in tandem because virality is not reality. It’s fantasy, consumed through algorithms.

Content as Fantasy

We are increasingly using social media as our main entertainment platform, which means we’re here looking for fiction. And much like with fiction, our consumption habits reflect our desires being acted out through a fantastical, not a literal, lens.

Both Tradwife and Richtok represent a fantasy of economic stability, of a life with a clearly defined role and purpose.

It also serves as a content-driven pendulum swing away from the disasters of Millennial Girlboss feminism, which sold an unrealistic expectation of the woman who could have it all: the career, the family, the social life, heaping failure onto her if she couldn’t.

After a decade of making women believe that if they couldn’t have all of this, they had failed as women, instead of restructuring a labour system designed for men to succeed at their expense, it’s completely normal that there’s curiosity about how the other side lives.

In fact, all trad-coded content holds a similar appeal to the entire fantasy genre. As Ursula K. Le Guin wrote:

“We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go ‘there and back again,’ and ‘there’ is always the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill... So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.”

But the appeal is in the watching, not the doing. In the performance of excess without the weight of its reality. This is pure voyeurism - deriving pleasure from observing what we’ve forbidden ourselves, or what circumstances have forbidden us.

via @thetransformedwife on Instagram

On Perversion

For the psychotherapist Lacan, the pervert isn’t simply someone with transgressive desires - they’re someone who structures their entire relationship to the world through the gaze of the Other. The pervert makes themselves an instrument of someone else’s enjoyment, constantly performing for an imagined audience.

This is precisely what social media has made universal. We’re all perverts now, in the Lacanian sense - curating, performing, and deriving pleasure not from authentic experience but from being watched experiencing it. The distinction matters because it explains why we scroll through content we claim to hate. It’s a closed loop of mutual fantasy where everyone is both exhibitionist and audience.

We are living through a complex, polarised era, and in times of uncertainty, we crave solidity. In our entertainment we seek an ordered world, where the forces of good and evil are clearly delineated; we look for a figure who can control the chaos, so that no matter if the world explodes, everything is restored before we go to sleep.

This was the formula that catapulted Marvel into the largest entertainment property on the planet: clear heroes and villains, controlled chaos, simple narratives about setting aside one’s differences to vanquish a greater foe. Influencers have simply figured out how to deliver this narrative structure in thirty-second increments.

And that’s where the magic happens. Even if, deep down, we don’t agree with what a Becca Bloom or a Nara Smith preach, we keep scrolling. It becomes a sort of thrilling escapism; not merely hate-watching, but genuine morbid curiosity, and because it’s probably better than whatever’s happening in the news.

The Content-Reality Gap

In analysing any of these movements, what’s really crucial is to observe the gap between what people watch and what we actually want. We’re not consuming these fantasies because we want to live them. We’re consuming them because they offer a momentary escape from confronting what we’ve actually lost: the basic stability that previous generations could take for granted.

Tradwife content isn’t evidence of a desire to return to subordinated life confined to the household. It’s evidence of exhaustion with a system that demands we optimise every aspect of our lives just to maintain what our parents achieved by simply showing up. The RichTok accounts aren’t proof that everyone craves disgusting wealth. They’re proof that basic financial security has become so unattainable it might as well be a fantasy - so why not dream bigger?

Alcoa Aluminum, 1953

What’s genuinely desired is not the performance, but what the performance represents: a world where things are simple, where roles are clear, where effort translates to security. A world that, for most of us, no longer exists.

Let’s normalise wanting a life, not just a lifestyle. Let’s recognise the difference between what performs and what’s actually performed. And perhaps most importantly, let’s stop mistaking our collective escapism for a roadmap to the future.