Digital Girlhood: On Sydney Sweeney's "Bathwater Bliss"

Is it "girlboss" or "setting feminism back 100 years"?

The Internet is always the problem.

Every few months the internet serves up a new extravaganza that feels at once absurd but perfectly engineered for the new “attention economy”. Early June this year Sydney Sweeney delivered her limited-edition "Bathwater Bliss” soap, marketed as literally infused with the actresses’ bathwater. Within hours, bars sold out and even resold on EBay, priced up to $3000.

If this feels familiar, it should be. Remember in 2019 when internet star Belle Delphine pioneered the bathwater trend with “Gamer Girl Bath Water”? (which sold out in a couple of days to some thirsty online creeps). Again, this incident was memed, ridiculed and demonized by the public back then – but it also set a precedent: that a woman’s bodily residue could be packaged and easily sold for up to thousands of dollars, with the correct marketing that caters to a male audience. Sydney Sweeney’s soap today is not a deviation from Belle Delphine’s provocation, it is simply a corporate-friendly sequel, proving that what began as trolling now travels comfortably through mainstream retail channels.

This isn’t just about bathwater. It’s about what it means to be a woman online in 2025, in a digital economy that trades intimacy, image, and sex.

#Digital_Girlhood

Take the Bop House, for example, a collection of OnlyFans models on Tiktok who lean into hyper feminine, girlypop aesthetics. Sex work has been historically looked down upon as an exploitative industry and a job not to be encouraged in young girls, yet these influencers have been praised high and low in online spaces (they even have a podcast!). Some parts of the internet call them entrepreneurs, some even call them feminists.

That isn’t to say women don’t have the freedom to do whatever they want. But these cases again and again expose a tension at the heart of digital “empowerment.” On one side stands the argument that women exercising agency over their images are simply reclaiming ownership from their patriarchal counterparts. On the other side lies the fact that these gestures trend only because of voracious consumer demand that objectifies women.

This contradiction lies at the heart of digital girlhood: empowerment in the algorithm age often looks indistinguishable from exploitation. On the one hand, these creators make money, build an audience of viewers, and enjoy a level of creative control that would have been unthinkable in the 1970s-1980s era of media. On the other, their success is still contingent on how well they aligned with the algorithm, including consumer-approved ideas of femininity: hyper-sexualized but still marketable, provocative but not “too political,” always desirable, and always clickable.

#Autonomy_is_dead

Hence, female agency in digital spaces cannot be dismissed as either wholly empowering or entirely exploitative. Rather, it operates within a capitalist structure. Women online may appear to exercise full autonomy by selling their bathwater, lingerie, and exclusive content, but that autonomy is incentivized by consumer demand and algorithms. A woman’s ability to garner attention depends largely on how well she conforms to the platforms' preferred forms of femininity: curated vulnerability, sexual accessibility, aesthetic consistency. This is what Sarah Banet-Weiser refers to as “market-ready feminism,” where female empowerment becomes another product in the attention economy.

There’s something rebellious about this but not in the traditional 1990s feminism sense. It’s not about rejecting the system – it’s about using it to your advantage. Think of Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian, the “theorists” of the postmodern era: they may seem superficial or bimbo-like, but they’ve turned that image into power, money, and clicks. In a way, it shows their business intelligence and how they are deeply aware of how the internet works.

Why is this so harmful?

Because it disguises structural inequality as personal choice.

The ability to “choose” to sell one’s image, body, or persona in the digital space is constantly framed as empowerment. But what often gets disregarded is why those choices are made, and who profits from them. While individual women may gain short-term economic rewards, the damage done to Digital Girlhood in the long term is irreversible. The patriarchy remains intact, continuing to serve these large platforms and corporations (that are, by the way, owned by men)

This creates a feedback loop: the more certain versions of femininity are rewarded online, the narrower the range of acceptable femininity becomes. Women and girls are taught – implicitly and explicitly – that visibility equals value, and that value comes most easily when they perform sex in front of a screen. The Tiktok algorithm has already started to amplify certain body types and aesthetics over others. The result is a digital culture where appearing “empowered” often means reproducing the very patriarchical norms that feminism aims to dismantle. This is particularly dangerous for young girls, who are socialized in an environment where the line between self-expression and self-exploitation is nearly invisible.

Furthermore, the attention economy is not evenly distributed. The bathwater economy does not work the same for an Asian or trans creator as it does for a white cis actress. Structural privilege determines which forms of visibility are profitable and which are punished. In this sense, “empowerment” as it’s marketed online often requires pre-existing desirability, capital – beauty, whiteness, thinness, youth.

#Get_that_Bag

Sydney Sweeney, Sabrina Carpenter, Belle Delphine, etc. These women aren’t naïve ingénues; they know exactly what they’re doing. Despite people on the internet throwing accusations of “setting feminism back by 100 years”, one might argue they’re simply playing the game better than the men who wrote the rules. Still, we should resist the urge to blame these women. The same system that rewards objectification also punishes those who retaliate. Take Megan Fox for instance, who was publicly shamed and hyper-sexualized in the 2000s – only to be later shamed for stepping away from the spotlight and speaking out against her treatment.

That’s why it’s unfair to single out individual women for succeeding. We can’t hold them responsible for thriving inside a society they didn’t design. In today’s horrifying digital age, the most radical thing a woman can do is make bank.