There is a painful, suffocating irony I keep returning to: the very women I am fighting for are fighting me.

When I first started on TikTok, I introduced the language of sisterhood to a digital space that felt raw and hungry for truth. Together, we built something that felt so much bigger than any one person. We planned the Wicked Feminist Conference, and watching the registrations roll in through a simple Google Form felt like witnessing a revolution in real time. I was preparing to return home to Nigeria to celebrate what we had created. The fire was burning. Every live session, every comment, every conversation felt like we were laying the bricks of a house meant to shelter us all from silence. We normalized conversations around patriarchy. We taught people to identify misogyny. We embraced words like sisterhoodwith immense pride. We laughed together, argued together, learned together. Women donated their hard-earned money; women volunteered their precious time. They wanted to belong to a promise of liberation rather than a sentence of silence. Watching that community grow remains one of the greatest joys of my life.

Then came October 2025—and with it, the reopening of the Ochanya Elizabeth Ogbanje case.

Standing at the frontlines of a campaign against structural impunity, state inertia, and institutional violence forces you face-to-face with the raw, terrifying depths of systemic horror. Ochanya’s tragedy laid bare the ultimate rot: a society that protects power over the bodies of young girls. But online, deep, collective grief rarely transforms into sustained political power; the algorithm flattens tragedy into spectacle. In the wake of that crisis, TikTok mutated into a digital panopticon where outrage is the primary currency. Red-pill creators and misogynists realized they didn’t need original thought—they simply needed to stitch feminist videos, mock our pain, and monetize the backlash.

Yet, the deepest wound was not the men extracting capital from our trauma; it was the women cheering them on.

I have been called ugly. A thief. A prostitute. My work has been discredited, my intentions questioned, my character systematically dismantled by strangers who know nothing about me except carefully edited clips designed to generate engagement. Women tell me pregnancy has made my hormones irrational. Women refuse symbolic acts of solidarity—like changing a profile picture to stand against gender-based violence—while insisting feminism asks too much of them. Women repeat misogynistic talking points with a confidence that rivals the men who created them.

“The ultimate tragedy of oppression is not merely that it subjugates, but that it recruits the oppressed to become the guardians of their own prison.”

In his seminal text The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon observed that the greatest triumph of any oppressive structure occurs when the colonized internalize the consciousness of the colonizer, adopting the oppressor’s logic and enforcing it upon their own people. Applied to gender, patriarchy functions through this exact colonial dynamic. It offers women an illusionary contract: if you are quiet, if you police other women, if you publicly stone the unruly feminist, you will be spared. By attacking me, these women are performing patriarchal bargaining. They are desperately buying their own immunity, attempting to prove to male authority that they are the “good,” compliant subjects safe from execution.

Fanon also warned of horizontal violence—the devastating phenomenon where victims of systemic oppression, unable to strike upward at the massive, untouchable structure of their oppressor, direct their rage sideways at one another. Unable to dismantle state impunity or end sexual violence, the digital crowd redirects its frustration toward the most visible woman on their screen. Somewhere along the way, “holding someone accountable” became a convenient excuse for bullying women who have spent years doing movement work. Whenever I point this out, I am told that I cannot handle criticism. But criticism of what? What belief am I being asked to reconsider? Is disagreement automatically criticism? Is harassment criticism? Is misogyny criticism? Is character assassination criticism?

It forces me to confront a devastating philosophical reality: feminism has increasingly morphed from a radical political commitment into an aesthetic branding strategy. People borrow the vocabulary of liberation without embracing Fanon’s insistence on the discipline of decolonization. They reproduce the aesthetics of activism while abandoning its principles. They want the feeling of empowerment without the terrifying sacrifice of real political struggle.

Every day I ask myself whether we have actually moved forward. The more we educate, the more resistance seems to emerge—and that breaks my heart. Because I remember what was possible. I remember a community that believed another world could exist. I remember women finding language for experiences they had carried in silence for years. I remember believing that if we kept speaking, things would change.

I still believe change is possible. But I am beginning to understand that patriarchy is not sustained by men alone. It survives because it recruits women to defend it, rewards them for policing other women, and convinces them that proximity to male approval is safer than solidarity with one another. That is the hardest lesson this movement has taught me.

So, do I still want to fight? Honestly, I am tired. I do not want to continue. I feel completely exhausted by it all—the relentless extraction, the endless hostility, the weight of carrying a burden that feels increasingly unwelcome by the very people it was meant to lift. Frankly, I refuse to keep performing for an internet where my life’s work is flattened into a punchline, where my vulnerability is fed to an algorithm, and where I am treated as a joke. I am walking away from the stage or seeking a rebrand for which it has been difficult to find, because my humanity is not content, and my peace is no longer up for debate.

https://displate.com/displate/8069177

There is a specific kind of violence reserved for Black women who refuse to speak in whispers. When I first started creating content in 2020, TikTok felt like a completely different world. I was living in Estonia, documenting my life, fighting for my university grades, and sharing my evolving thoughts on feminism. Back then, the digital space felt constructive, like a community where ideas could breathe. But as the platform grew, exploded in users, and shifted hands institutionally, the modalities changed entirely. Today, the internet has devolved into a den for misogynistic rhetoric and performative theater. It has become a marketplace where complex human rights are reduced to 60-second reaction videos, designed not to educate, but to harvest likes, exploit outrage, and commodify the labor of women. And for me, the internet became a battleground where my humanity was put on trial.

If I trace the exact moment the internet truly turned its collective rage toward me, it leads back to the Ochanya case. Ochanya was a young girl whose life was stolen by the horrific realities of systemic abuse. She was sexually violated by her uncle and his son until she developed Vesicovaginal Fistula (VVF) and ultimately died. It was a tragedy that broke me. As a human rights activist, I couldn’t just sit back and watch. I took the case upon myself and used my platform to solicit funds online to fight for justice, to ensure she wasn’t just another forgotten statistic. Instead of solidarity, I was met with a modern-day stoning. People piled on me, called me a thief, and said I was using a dead girl’s tragedy to feed myself. They weaponized the tool of collective grief against me, mocking my activism by claiming that any little thing meant opening a GoFundMe. I was dealing with my own intense personal challenges at the time, yet I was carrying the crushing weight of a systemic legal fight on one shoulder and the baseless hatred of thousands on the other. I channeled that pain into rigorous work, writing a formal publication on ResearchGate titled Injustice After Death, explicitly documenting these exact structures. Yet, I was left utterly perplexed by how deeply cynical a society can be when perceiving genuine help.

From that day until this very moment, the pile-on has never stopped. I have been labeled a fraud and told my feminism is pseudo-feminist. People insulted me relentlessly for telling women to collect from men and to strategically use the patriarchy to their own advantage. They twisted my words to claim that my feminism is male-centered, arguing that if I were a true feminist, I wouldn’t focus my content on men or advise women to make men do things for them. It is a laughably absurd critique that completely misunderstands basic radical feminist theory and conflict sociology. How did we even get here in the first place if not because of men? Why do we need feminism at all if not to dismantle systems upheld by men? How can I teach women to survive a structure without analyzing the very class that enforces it? Through the lens of materialist feminism, we recognize that patriarchy operates as an economic system of exploitation where women’s domestic, emotional, and social labor is extracted for male benefit. Advising women to turn that structural dynamic on its head—to subvert expectations and extract resources back from the ruling class—is not being ‘male-centered.’ It is a survival strategy. It is what sociologists call tactical agency within an oppressive framework. If we exist under a system of total institutional male supremacy, looking at the oppressor and finding ways to protect ourselves materially isn’t centering men; it is acknowledging the material reality of our chains so we can break them.

When people ask me how I manage this level of relentless online hate, the truth is simple: I look at the women who walked before me, and the women walking beside me. Black women have always borne the heaviest brunt of public malice, a reality deeply articulated by Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framework of intersectionality. We do not experience misogyny in a vacuum; it is always compounded by race and geopolitics. I look at Michelle Obama—a brilliant, graceful, sweet woman who was subjected to years of irrational, racist, and gendered hatred for simply existing in her power. I look at Megan Thee Stallion, a woman who survived the physical and emotional trauma of being shot, only for the internet to mock her, gaslight her, and hate her for being a victim. I look at Meghan Markle, who married into an institution and became one of the most systematically vilified women in the world for simply protecting her peace. I am not the first woman to be hated for refusing to be small, and I will certainly not be the last. For years, I fought to keep these spaces safe. When Twitter was sold and devolved into chaos, we migrated to TikTok thinking it would be a sanctuary. Instead, it became worse than Facebook—a space where anyone can clip your face, manufacture a lie, and ride your trauma to viral fame.

Lately, the loudest backlash hasn’t just come from obvious misogynists—it has come from the very men calling themselves male feminists. Because I dared to critique the digital economy of modern allyship, I have been accused of being jealous of their engagement. Let me be entirely clear: I am not jealous, I am disgusted by the discrepancy. Historically, true male allies stood side-by-side with women. They were the men who fought slavery, the men who stood on the front lines fighting for women’s suffrage, the abolition of discriminatory divorce laws, and the systemic protections of reproductive rights. They did dangerous, structural, unglamorous work. What we have online today is a mere caricature of that legacy.

Today’s digital male feminist is an influencer. He steps into a space built by women’s trauma, repeats a basic phrase feminists have been crucified for saying for thirty years, or types a single word of agreement like “gbam,” and the world treats him like a prophet. Applying a critical political economy lens to social media shows us exactly what is happening: the algorithm commodifies feminist discourse, but because the digital architecture is still deeply patriarchal, it disproportionately allocates social capital and visibility to men. He commands more engagement, more platforms, and more applause in a single week than the women who have dedicated their entire lives, safety, and academic careers to the grassroots movement. When these men receive pushback, they send DMs or leave comments detailing how they face death threats, how they are targeted by cultists, and how they are losing their accounts. I see your risk, and no one deserves violence. But if a man’s allyship is conditional upon women being polite to him, then he is not an ally to a cause—he is a customer looking for a transaction of praise. When male feminists join the pile-on against me because I refuse to coddle them, they prove my point. They are not trying to dismantle the patriarchy; they are trying to manage it so they remain the most comfortable people in the room.

It is deeply pathetic how these digital male creators demand maternal empathy from the very movement they claim to support, crying over hateful comment sections, online backlash, and the bruises on their egos. If men are complaining about being abused by misogynistic peers or being pushed back by male-centered women, I have to ask: what about the women who are the entire reason feminism exists in the first place? What about the women who have been systematically raped, physically abused, cursed, and stripped of their personhood? What about us who carry the actual weight of this gendered warfare? They want a standing ovation for speaking online while women in Afghanistan are literally losing their basic rights to exist in public, while girls face the trauma of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Gambia, and while children are forced into child marriages in Nigeria. The sheer asymmetry of their grievance is astonishing. To center a man's digital discomfort over the brutal, global, material realities of women’s oppression is the ultimate expression of patriarchal privilege.

My work cannot be minimized. My legacy cannot be reduced. I have educated, advocated, researched, and taken feminism to the grassroots, to the baseline, to the places where it actually matters. I have dug into my own pockets to fund the survival of other women even when I had nothing to spare. I am blessed, I am highly capable, and I will no longer refuse to take my flowers. Controversy is an excellent teacher. It forces you to sit down, look at the landscape clearly, and re-strategize. Many people have used grassroots content just to climb to the top, and many have used comedy to pivot into government positions. For me, my passion for the liberation of women will never waver. But the digital landscape has become an unsafe, toxic environment—especially now as I embark on the sacred journey of becoming a mother. My priority is no longer trying to educate an algorithm that thrives on my destruction.

The time for a total rebrand is here. I know I am going to lose followers, and to be quite frank, I do not care. The vast majority of people who follow me on these platforms are there for entertainment, for the spectacle, or for the opportunity to throw stones. They do not love the cause; they love the drama. I am stepping away from the caricature that TikTok has become. I am moving above the noise. From this moment on, my intellect, my research, and my advocacy will only be accessible in spaces that respect the gravity of the work. Thank you to the ones who have truly listened. The baseline has always been change, and it’s time I build that change on my own terms.

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When TikTok arrived, democratizing conversations and flinging open the doors to broader audiences, feminism became my primary focus. Not because it was the only issue I cared about, but because it was—and remains—one of the most urgently misunderstood conversations in Nigeria.

As my audience swelled into the hundreds of thousands, the weight of responsibility grew with it. Women were listening. They were sharing my videos, saving my audio, and engaging with radical ideas they had never encountered before. Yet, I quickly realized a glaring disconnect: theoretical feminism—the kind canonized in university lecture halls through the texts of Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Audre Lorde—was fundamentally inaccessible to the majority of women around me.

The barriers however, were not intellectual but were structural.

So, I made a deliberate, political choice.

Rather than anchoring my advocacy in abstract philosophical debates, I translated feminism into the language of the everyday. I spoke about domestic violence. I spoke about casual, insidious misogyny. I spoke about economic dependence, coercion, emotional abuse, reproductive autonomy, and the routine ways women are diminished in their own homes.

I practiced what I call “grassroots feminism”—a movement rooted in lived experience rather than academic terminology.

The results were electrifying.

Women began recognizing abuse they had previously normalized as “the lot of a woman.” Some packed their bags and left violent marriages. Others started businesses to secure their financial freedom. For the first time, words like patriarchy and misogyny left the ivory towers and entered everyday Nigerian living rooms.

Yet, as my influence deepened, a quiet, suffocating shift occurred. People stopped seeing me as a person. They began seeing me as a symbol.

And symbols, unlike human beings, are not allowed complexity. They are not allowed to bleed, change their minds, or evolve.

Over time, my audience molded me into their own projection of the ideal feminist. They strapped expectations to my back that I never agreed to carry. My humanity was collateral damage; the role they assigned me was all that mattered.

Then, I showed up pregnant.

The digital whiplash was astonishing.

Followers expressed profound disappointment, treating my pregnancy like a moral lapse. They questioned my authenticity, as if a positive pregnancy test was proof of a fraudulent life. The comment sections devolved into a circus of interrogation: How could a feminist get pregnant? Who did this to her? Is the father one of the very men she critiques?

What shocked me was not the venom—the internet is rarely short on venom. It was the staggering intellectual poverty behind the critique.

Many had confused feminism with a wholesale hatred of men.

Throughout my years of work, I had never argued that men were the enemy simply by virtue of existence. My target has always been structures, not chromosomes. My enemy is misogyny, patriarchy, and the systemic distribution of power that privileges one gender while subordinating another. I have always challenged patriarchal behavior, not biological presence.

But nuance is a casualty of the scroll. Somewhere along the way, a complex critique of power was flattened into a convenient caricature: “She hates men.”

My pregnant belly disrupted that lazy narrative. Suddenly, people could not reconcile the fire-spitting feminist of their imagination with the pregnant woman standing before them.

The irony was staggering. Some of the most radical, revolutionary feminists in global history were mothers. Countless women built the foundations of feminist thought while nursing babies and balancing the heavy mental load of child-rearing. Motherhood has never been antithetical to feminism.

Yet, a frightening number of people seemed convinced that to be a liberated woman, one must reject motherhood entirely.

In conversations with my therapist, I began to unravel this contradiction. She observed that contemporary digital feminism can become so myopically focused on policing women’s choices that it forgets the massive, institutional systems it was created to dismantle.

The movement risks turning inward, cannibalizing its own. Instead of confronting patriarchal institutions, it trains its binoculars on individual women, scrutinizing every decision, every outfit, and every life milestone.

This does not mean all choices are inherently liberating. The critics of “choice feminism” are correct: women can, and often do, choose paths that reinforce their own oppression. However, the autonomy to make that choice remains the bedrock of feminist liberation.

For me, motherhood was a conscious, deliberate choice. Marriage was not.

I chose to become a mother; I did not choose to become a wife. The two are not a package deal, though society desperately tries to market them as such. Women must be allowed to navigate them as entirely separate entities.

My decision to have a child emerged from the quietest, most tender parts of my history. Having lost both of my parents young and having witnessed just how fragile family structures can be, I wanted to build a family of my own. I did not do it because society demanded it, or because a biological clock was ticking, or to appease a patriarchal standard. I did it because it aligned with my personal values, my hopes, and my vision for my future.

Yet, the internet projected a narrative of defeat onto my body. They assumed motherhood was a surrender. They assumed I had been “tamed,” that I had abandoned my principles, and that I had finally bowed down to the very system I spent years tearing down.

In reality, motherhood changed absolutely nothing about my commitment to gender equality. If anything, it set it on fire.

My experience exposed a massive, aching gulf in our discourse, particularly within the Nigerian digital landscape. While grassroots feminist education has made incredible strides, deep theoretical engagement remains dangerously scarce. People have learned the slogans, but they haven’t always absorbed the philosophy. They know the punchlines of feminism, but not the paragraphs that build them.

This is not a failure of intelligence but the consequence of inequality. It is the result of unequal access to education, resources, and the safety required for deep intellectual reflection.

The challenge ahead of us is no longer just teaching women what feminism is. It is creating the material conditions that allow deep, critical feminist thinking to flourish.

Despite the backlash, I look back at the trail blazed with immense pride.

• I am proud of the women who learned to name their pain.

• I am proud of the women who found the courage to pack their bags and leave violent relationships.

• I am proud of the shifts we forced in conversations about patriarchy and gender-based violence across Nigeria.

The impact is real, measurable, and permanent. It cannot be erased by a toxic comment section.

But my pregnancy was a stark reminder that our work is far from finished. And the next frontier of that work is not just against patriarchy out there—it is within our own feminist communities.

We must stop turning women into statues. We must allow women to be complex, contradictory, evolving, imperfect, and beautifully human.

Feminism was never intended to replace the old patriarchal handbook with a new, progressive set of rules for women to obey. It was meant to burn the rulebook entirely. It was supposed to create a world where women could finally, safely, choose their own lives. And that includes the woman who chooses motherhood. Just as it fiercely includes the woman who does not.

Over the past few days, I’ve watched a familiar cycle unfold online: a deeply emotional story emerges, timelines split into sides, creators step in as commentators or investigators, and suddenly the algorithm becomes the loudest authority in the room.

What strikes me most is not just the specifics of any one controversy, but the structure beneath it. We are living in an era where social media has quietly assumed roles it was never designed to hold: investigator, judge, jury, and sometimes executioner. And while these platforms can amplify voices and surface urgent issues, they are fundamentally incapable of delivering justice.

The question we should be asking is not “Who is right?” but “Why are we outsourcing justice to systems built for engagement?”

The architecture of social media rewards speed, certainty, and emotion. Justice, by contrast, requires patience, ambiguity, and care.

When a serious allegation appears online, the timeline moves faster than truth ever can. People feel pressure to declare allegiance immediately, to believe, to doubt, to defend, to expose. Silence is interpreted as complicity; nuance is interpreted as weakness.

But harm does not become clearer because thousands of strangers are debating it. In many cases, it becomes harder to address. Survivors can be retraumatized by public scrutiny, while misinformation spreads faster than corrections ever will.

Virality gives the illusion of accountability without the safeguards that real accountability requires.

Feminism in the age of the feed

Digital feminism has done extraordinary work over the past decade. It has shifted public language, created solidarity across borders, and made it harder for violence and discrimination to be ignored.

But the platform era has also introduced a tension: advocacy now coexists with performance.

When every issue unfolds in public, activism risks becoming reactive rather than strategic. Instead of focusing on structural change, conversations can collapse into debates about individuals. Instead of building long-term solutions, we become trapped in cycles of outrage that feel urgent but rarely transform the conditions that produced the harm in the first place.

The danger of influencer justice

Influencer culture has created a new figure in public life: the digital watchdog. In theory, this role can democratize accountability. In practice, it often blurs the line between scrutiny and spectacle.

When creators become investigators, two things happen simultaneously:

1. Serious issues are translated into content.

2. The pursuit of truth competes with the pursuit of engagement.

This does not mean questioning is inherently wrong, nor that advocacy should be silent. It means that the tools we are using are poorly suited for the stakes involved. Public timelines cannot replicate due process, and audiences cannot verify what they cannot fully see.

Moving from reaction to responsibility

If we accept that the algorithm cannot deliver justice, then the next step is to ask what responsibility looks like in a digital age.

First, we need to rebuild a cultural norm that separates awareness from adjudication. Social media can spotlight patterns, mobilise support, and push institutions to act. But it should not be where evidence is crowdsourced or verdicts are declared.

Second, we need to practice what I call slow opinion. This means resisting the pressure to respond instantly, acknowledging uncertainty, and allowing space for facts to emerge. In a culture that rewards immediacy, restraint becomes a form of care.

Third, we must shift our focus from winning narratives to reducing harm. Not every conversation needs a hero and a villain; sometimes what people need most is privacy, support, and time.

Rebuilding trust beyond the timeline

Ultimately, the reason people turn to the internet as a courtroom is simple: they do not trust institutions to deliver justice.

So the long-term solution is not better discourse alone — it is stronger systems. Accessible reporting channels, survivor support services, transparent investigations, and accountable institutions reduce the need for public trials by hashtag.

When people believe there is somewhere to go offline, they are less likely to seek a resolution online.

Choosing care over certainty

We are at a cultural crossroads. The tools that allow us to speak also tempt us to oversimplify. The speed that connects us also pressures us to judge.

If we want a digital culture that is genuinely feminist, genuinely just, and genuinely humane, we have to resist the seduction of certainty. We have to choose care over clout, process over performance, and responsibility over reaction. The algorithm may shape the conversation, but it does not have to define our values. Justice has never been instant. And it was never meant to be viral.

What has happened since isn’t a quiet resolution. Many women have publicly condemned the act of AI. I was vocal about it, and so were many women who wrote, spoke, protested and held hearings in different institutions and senate hearings on this atrocious tool, but it was an action that still fell short of justice

Governments are Responding, But Not Fast Enough

Several governments and legal institutions have taken steps, signalling that the world won’t just watch anymore. California has issued a cease-and-desist to xAI, Musk’s AI company, demanding it halt the production and distribution of sexualized AI images, especially involving minors, calling such imagery “shocking” and potentially illegal. A major lawsuit was filed by the mother of Elon Musk’s child, alleging Grok enabled users to create sexualized deepfakes of her, and accusing the company of retaliation when she complained. Countries like Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked access to Grok, citing threats to women’s dignity and digital safety. In the UK and other nations, public officials are condemning the misuse of AI imagery and urging new legislation to outlaw sexually explicit AI content without consent.

While these are important steps, real pressure and regulation. But they are just the start, not the finish. Even beyond this specific controversy, lawmakers have moved to curb AI-enabled image abuse. In the United States, the TAKE IT DOWN Act was passed, requiring platforms to remove non-consensual intimate and deepfake imagery and empowering victims to force removal. States like Texas enacted laws against possession or promotion of obscene AI-generated material resembling minors, criminalising the very kind of images being spun up on Grok. These measures show lawmakers recognise the harm, but enforcement and real prevention remain ongoing battles.

Grok tried to regulate itself, but the problem remains in response to backlash. Grok restricted image generation and editing to paying users and blocked it in some regions where it’s illegal. The platform said it was implementing safeguards to prevent generating sexualised images of real people. But in practice, researchers and users have still been able to generate undressing and bikini imagery, including deepfakes of women and children, even after the announced restrictions.

So far, these changes mostly mean you have to pay to violate someone. The harm hasn’t gone away; it’s been monetised and siloed, no longer in everyone’s hands but now in the hands of those willing to pay for it.

So What Do Men Actually Want?

We see men who preach modesty in public still using Grok to put women in bikinis. We see the logic fall apart: on social media, they enforce moral rules, but when technology lets them violate those same rules anonymously, they seize the chance. That contradiction exposes a deeper issue about power, objectification, and consent. And while steps are being taken, governments are acting, lawsuits are being filed, women speaking up, this truth remains. Stopping casual nudification is not the same as stopping AI-facilitated violations of dignity and consent

What Grok appears to have done is not eliminate the ability to undress women, but restructure it. The harm didn’t disappear. It was rerouted so that men themselves support Elon and made excuses like other AI can undress anyone as well, and I wonder why men are obsessed with nudity, why the need to put someone in a bikini is even a concept and is defended.

Elon now makes money off men's perverted desires. The violation hasn’t ended; it has simply been privatised. What was once visible and chaotic is now controlled, gated, and profitable. And it seems like the government is not even in a hurry to regulate, it takes nothing to stop it, but we see men in power positions argue that Grok and other ai shoudnt be banned, and one wonders what in the “I did not give consent and i dont wanna be put in a bikini, does anyone not understand?”?'

This raises an uncomfortable truth, regulation didn’t remove the behaviour-It removed who could do it and who could see it. Yes, some governments acted. Yes, lawsuits were filed. Yes, Grok changed features. But as of today, reports still surface that undressing and sexualised manipulation still occur.

The core question remains unanswered, can the non-consensual sexualisation of women be eliminated? The honest answer is no. What has been eliminated is plausible deniability. What has been reduced is public outrage. What has been preserved is the underlying power dynamic where men still get to do whatever they want.

Read my prior work “hey grok, put her in a bikini” on Medium

https://medium.com/@obidiojochide/hey-grok-put-her-in-a-bikini-38af44e601e8

@unsplashimages

I do not find any of this surprising.

I, Obidi, have always been aware that the majority of people who engaged with me online were not engaging with my work. What appeared as attention, affirmation, or resonance was, in most cases, consumption. At least 95% of the interactions I received were not participatory, reflective, or transformative. It was spectatorship. I was not a collaborator in collective learning. I was a surface onto which learning could be projected.

Most people were not learning with me. They were watching me learn.

That difference matters. Learning is not passive. It requires responsibility, friction, risk, and practice. What took place on platforms like TikTok and Instagram was something else entirely. People watched me think in public. They watched me articulate uncertainty, translate complexity, and refine ideas in real time. Because this process resulted in clarity, it felt like an educational experience. But the labour was mine. The transformation was not shared.

Over time, my presence became a tool for emotional regulation. People arrived seeking reassurance, coherence, and hope. They came for the comfort of proximity to someone who appeared grounded and articulate during periods of social and political instability. My optimism, carefully framed and aesthetically legible, became evidence that things were not entirely broken. It allowed people to feel aligned without being implicated and concerned without being responsible.

My appearance, my articulation, my composure, and my ability to render chaos intelligible were not incidental qualities. They were central to how I became consumable. These traits functioned as signals that allowed others to experience moral orientation without action and awareness without cost. I became useful precisely because I was legible and contained.

This arrangement worked until it no longer did.

The moment I stopped performing clarity in the ways the platform rewarded, the shift was immediate. Engagement declined. Discomfort surfaced. Affection thinned into distance. This did not happen because my values changed or because the analysis weakened. It happened because my utility expired.

Short-form media does not reward people. It rewards symbols. Over time, I watched myself move from being a person who shared thoughts online to being transformed into an object. I became inspirational, safe to consume, and easily recognisable. I functioned as a proxy for courage and a stand-in for conscience. I became a way for others to feel awake without having to fundamentally alter how they lived.

I want to state this plainly. I never intended to become a symbol.

I began sharing my thoughts publicly to improve the material conditions of my life. I did it to survive. I did it to build safety, stability, and a future for myself and my family. But platforms like TikTok flatten intention. They collapse humanity into performance. They turn living, thinking people into endlessly extractable affect.

Visibility is not neutral. It creates an asymmetry that is rarely acknowledged. When someone scrolls past my work, their engagement ends. When I log off, my life continues with consequences. I move through the world with this face, this voice, this body, and a permanent public record. What others experience as momentary inspiration, I experience as ongoing exposure. The projection, entitlement, scrutiny, and risk that accompany visibility are not abstract concepts. They are lived realities.

My feminist journey sharpened this awareness.

Feminism taught me to recognise extraction when I see it. It taught me to notice how women, particularly Black women, are encouraged to give endlessly while being denied rest, privacy, and safety. It taught me how care work, emotional labour, and intellectual labour are romanticised when they are unpaid and penalised when they become bound.

For a long time, I believed that enduring this extraction was part of the work. I believed that constant availability, clarity, and composure were necessary sacrifices in the pursuit of collective liberation. I believed that if I could just remain generous enough, hopeful enough, and accessible enough, something meaningful would come of it.

Feminism eventually disabused me of that belief.

I learned that exhaustion is not evidence of commitment and that self-erasure is not a revolutionary virtue. I learned that women are often pressured to frame their suffering as service and their depletion as purpose. I learned that being endlessly available does not build power. It dissipates it.

I also learned that peace is not apathy. Peace is not withdrawal from the world. Peace is a refusal to live in a constant state of reaction. It is a decision to stop allowing one’s nervous system, labour, and identity to be organised around the demands of extraction.

Choosing peace is not a retreat from politics. It is a feminist act.

In a culture that rewards urgency, exposure, and perpetual performance, choosing peace is a form of resistance. It is a refusal to allow platforms to dictate the terms of one’s humanity. It is a commitment to sustainability over spectacle and depth over virality.

So no, I did not leave TikTok.

TikTok left me the moment I stopped being optimally consumable. It left me when I refused to compress complexity into comfort and when I rejected the expectation that my visibility should remain endlessly available for others’ emotional use.

I am not a mood. I am not a mascot. I am not a moral accessory.

I am a person making deliberate choices about how I live, how I work, and where I place my energy. I am choosing forms of engagement that do not require my function reduction. I am choosing spaces where thought is allowed to be dense, where growth is not punished for being uncomfortable, and where engagement implies responsibility rather than passive affirmation.

This is not a disappearance. It is a boundary.

It is a feminist decision to prioritise peace, sustainability, and material well-being over perpetual visibility. It is a refusal to confuse being seen with being free.

If you are here to think seriously, to practice what you learn, and to take responsibility for how ideas shape your life, then this work remains available to you. If you are here to watch, consume, or outsource your conscience, then this was never meant to sustain you.

Peace, for me, is not the absence of struggle. It is the presence of choice. And choosing it is the most revolutionary thing I am doing right now.

You’ve seen the headlines: Billionaire biohackers. Longevity Labs. Cryogenic fantasies. Men are actively trying to upgrade themselves into “superhumans,” investing fortunes in testosterone optimisation, neuroenhancement, and gene-editing.

And yet, here we are.

While half of humanity is focused on building a better future for their biology, the other half is still struggling to get doctors to take their pain seriously. This isn’t just a funding gap; it’s a crisis of curiosity, and women are tired of being the afterthought.

The Cost of Being the Afterthought

For centuries, nearly every major medical breakthrough, psychological theory, and biological study has centred on the male body as the default human. This historical bias means the scientific world has a massive, gendered blind spot.

Look at Endometriosis. This devastating disease affects one in ten women, yet if you ask most doctors, they’ll tell you it’s “mysterious” or “poorly understood.” It’s not mysterious. It has just never been properly studied. You need look no further than where the money and minds are already flowing. Consider Parkinson’s Disease. It disproportionately affects men, and guess what? It is overflowing with research grants, ambitious pipelines, and dedicated scholars. It is a disease with a fully operational, highly-funded infrastructure. Yet, diseases that systematically destroy women’s lives, like Endometriosis, PMDD, and chronic autoimmune disorders , are still dismissed as “mysterious.” They are underfunded and under-researched, simply because they are our diseases.

The reality is stark: The world is already committed to studying men. They are building their own “superhuman” labs, securing their own longevity, and ensuring their health is the pinnacle of scientific focus.

Women lose careers, organs, and years of life to this pain; some even collapse, but the system hesitates. Why? Because historically, women’s bodies were dismissed as “too hormonal” or “too variable” for serious scientific inquiry. The pattern is painfully clear across the board. In my master’s days as a Bioengineer, women were used solely for data analysis, men were affected more, and, well, people who were affected more were simply researched. As the numbers stood against women, I wondered why the more a disease affects women, the less the world invests in understanding it. But for men, it was the opposite.

This research gap isn’t just about grants; it’s about where our collective intellectual energy is focused. For decades, women have been socially conditioned to spend an incredible amount of time and effort studying men. We analyse men’s psychology, decode men’s commitment issues, and try to predict men’s patterns like weather forecasts. We are taught that “understanding men” is essential for our survival and happiness.

But look at the cost of that redirected focus. The intellectual disparity is now starkly evident: while male curiosity is strategically deployed on the foundational frontiers, interpreting genomic data, decoding the complexity of AI architecture, and securing the future with patent filings, female intellect remains systematically diverted toward ephemeral pursuits and relational survival. We are left to analyse subjective commitment issues and interpret transient text messages, while the other half of humanity engages in the foundational biological and technological engineering of the future. This is not a difference in capability, but a disastrous and intentional misdirection of genius. Men have always been encouraged to study themselves. Women have been denied that same opportunity and affirmation.

This ends now!

The time has come for a massive, global intellectual redirection. We must perform a wholesale, unapologetic shift of focus from the external world to the internal world, to the profound, magnificent, and neglected universe of female biology, psychology, and experience.

The Mandate is Simple: Research Ourselves.

The most radical act of self-respect is to make our own lives the primary subject of our curiosity. We must stop expending our finite intellectual and emotional capital trying to predict, understand, or optimise men. Let them pursue their “superhuman” laboratories. Our mission is infinitely more urgent: to finally and fully understand the humans we already are.

Every woman is called to participate in this redirection:

1. If you are a scientist, turn your grant proposal into women’s pain. Make the underfunded female-centric disease your life’s work.

2. If you are an academic, make your next paper about women’s cyclical energy, hormonal brain chemistry, or the social structures that sustain our suffering.

3. If you are a writer, stop analysing dating patterns and start translating medical data. Stop interpreting text messages and start interpreting genomic sequences.

4. If you are a curious mind, educate yourself on women’s chronic illnesses, not on relationship dynamics. Redirect your curiosity from decoding commitment issues to decoding cellular architecture.

We must make ourselves the most intensely, rigorously, and generously studied population on the planet.

We must become our own scientific centre.

If Not Us, Then Who?

The historical neglect of women’s health, the dismissal of Endometriosis, the confusion over autoimmune disorders, and the silence around hormonal pain were not accidental. It was a systemic choice. Waiting for the system to correct itself is a luxury we can no longer afford. Our intellectual self-reliance is not a project of competition; it is a necessity for survival. If the male-centric medical world will not hear us, we will hear ourselves. If the funding bodies will not prioritise us, we will prioritise ourselves. If we do not research ourselves, no one will research us.

The Revolution of the Female Focus begins now. Redirect your work, your studies, your conversations, and your curiosity. Our bodies, our minds, and our health deserve the highest form of scientific respect , and it is our generation’s mandate to claim it.

No more researching men. All women should research women.

And if they are already studying them, why are we still studying them?

Redirection is Revolution

The most radical act of self-respect is to reclaim our intellectual sovereignty. We must perform a total, unapologetic shift in focus.

The mandate is immediate and absolute:

• We will no longer research men.

• We will no longer decode men’s psychology.

• We will no longer analyse men’s patterns or interpret their text messages.

• We will no longer prioritise their illnesses or ambitions.

Our mission is to study ourselves.

Our Future is Self-Centred

Every woman with a mind, whether you are a scientist, a student, a journalist, or a curious observer, must pivot. You must redirect your work, your passion, and your analytical genius into Women’s Pain. Making our chronic suffering the most urgent research subject on the planet. Women’s Cycles must also be decoded to understand the complexity of our hormonal and energetic states. Women’s Diseases should be funded, researched, and solved, the illnesses that have been dismissed for centuries.

Finally, the pervasive gender bias in research has created a systemic crisis that threatens women’s well-being, manifesting across public health, safety, and intellectual focus. This imbalance is tragically proven by the existence of over 60 different contraceptives for women compared to virtually only the condom for men, and in subtle yet life-threatening ways, such as the design of CPR training dummies often lacking breasts, which contributes to lower survival rates for women experiencing cardiac arrest. Concurrently, while men’s intellectual focus is strategically devoted to genomic data, patent filings, and AI architecture, women’s analytical genius remains tragically diverted to relationship advice and interpreting text messages, confirming a research ecosystem that treats the male experience as the default priority. This demonstrable negligence necessitates an immediate, comprehensive mandate for women to stop researching men and entirely redirect their collective curiosity and resources inward, focusing all future scientific and intellectual energy exclusively on female health, biology, and previously neglected chronic conditions.