From Changsha to the Crossroads of Empowerment

When Ms. Zhou Yuan’s “gan ma?” video went viral in January 2026, the self-styled “Godmother of Sexual Intelligence” probably didn’t anticipate that her coquettish body twist would precipitate the collapse of her 24-million-yuan empire. The subsequent backlash, regulatory crackdown, and platform bans transformed what seemed like a straightforward case of provocative marketing into a complex referendum on female agency, sexual expression, and the boundaries between empowerment and exploitation.

But this is not merely a Chinese story. Ms. Zhou’s rise and fall illuminates deeper tensions that societies across the world grapple with: How do we distinguish between sexual liberation and sexual commodification? When does the marketplace empower women, and when does it simply repackage patriarchal expectations as feminine choice? And what happens when economic vulnerability masquerades as sexual freedom?

The American Mirror: Madonna, Taylor Swift, and the Evolution of Female Sexual Agency

To understand the Ms. Zhou phenomenon, it helps to examine how Western societies—particularly the United States—have navigated similar terrain, albeit under vastly different economic and cultural conditions.

Madonna and the Invention of Sexual Self-Authorship

When Madonna burst onto the American scene in the 1980s, she weaponized sexuality in ways that fundamentally challenged existing paradigms. Her 1990 “Justify My Love” video was banned by MTV. Her “Sex” book was simultaneously celebrated and condemned. But crucially, Madonna positioned herself as the author of her own sexual narrative—not as someone teaching women how to please men, but as someone claiming the right to express desire on her own terms.

Madonna’s revolution was fundamentally economic as much as cultural. She controlled her image, her production, and increasingly, her business empire. When she provoked with sexuality, she retained ownership—both literally and figuratively. This created a template: sexual expression as self-determination rather than market commodity designed for male consumption.

The distinction matters. Madonna didn’t sell courses teaching women how to contort their bodies into X-shapes to attract male attention. She modeled—however imperfectly—the possibility of women expressing sexuality for their own purposes, even when that expression was commercially successful.

Taylor Swift and the Post-Liberation Paradox

Four decades later, Taylor Swift represents both the fruits and the complications of that earlier liberation. Swift has navigated slut-shaming, public relationship scrutiny, and industry sexism to build a billion-dollar empire on her own terms. She has reclaimed her masters, controlled her narrative, and used her platform to support other women.

Yet Swift’s career also reveals the contradictions embedded in American-style sexual “empowerment.” Her performances incorporate sexuality—strategic costume choices, choreographed intimacy with dancers, lyrics exploring desire—but within carefully calibrated boundaries that preserve her marketability. She has mastered the delicate balance between sexual expression and commercial palatability, between appearing empowered and remaining consumable.

This is not a criticism of Swift personally, but rather an observation about the constraints even the most powerful women navigate. American sexual liberation has created space for women to express sexuality publicly, but it hasn’t dismantled the economic structures that make female sexuality a commodity—whether sold by women themselves or extracted by others.

The Fundamental Difference: Liberation vs. Instruction

What distinguishes Ms. Zhou’s academy from the Madonna-Swift continuum is precisely where agency resides and what’s being sold.

Madonna and Swift, whatever their complications, are fundamentally selling their own sexual expression. Women who consume their work may be inspired, may emulate, may buy merchandise, but the transaction is relatively straightforward: artistic expression for commercial consumption.

Ms. Zhou, by contrast, sells instruction in performing sexuality for others’ benefit. The progression from 10-yuan introductory courses to expensive hands-on seduction training and trauma therapy creates a dependency model: women perpetually inadequate, perpetually in need of the next upgrade to successfully attract or retain male attention.

This shifts sexuality from expression to labor—specifically, uncompensated emotional and physical labor performed to secure economic stability through relationships. Former employees’ reports that the academy amplified anxiety about aging and failing marriages to drive purchases reveals the mechanism: manufacturing insecurity, then selling temporary relief.

The Dangers of Excess Permissiveness: When Liberation Becomes Exploitation

Both conservative critics and progressive feminists worry about excess sexual permissiveness, though for vastly different reasons. Understanding these concerns requires acknowledging that “permissiveness” can mask very different phenomena.

The Pornification Problem

In the United States, increasing sexual permissiveness since the 1960s has coincided with the mainstreaming of pornographic aesthetics. What researchers call “raunch culture”—the normalization of strip club aesthetics, pornographic poses, and commodified sexuality—has arguably narrowed rather than expanded the range of acceptable female sexual expression.

Studies suggest that young women increasingly feel pressure to perform hypersexuality: sending intimate images, engaging in sexual acts they’re uncomfortable with, or conforming to pornographic scripts in their own intimate lives. This isn’t liberation but conformity to a commercialized sexual template.

The danger isn’t sexuality itself, but the industrialization of desire according to market logic. When sexual expression becomes indistinguishable from sexual performance for others’ consumption, agency evaporates even as “choice” remains rhetorically available.

The Relationship Recession

Paradoxically, increased sexual permissiveness in the West has coincided with what some researchers call a “relationship recession.” Young people are having less sex, forming fewer relationships, and reporting higher levels of loneliness than previous generations.

Various factors contribute: economic precarity making partnership feel risky, dating apps reducing people to swipeable commodities, smartphone addiction displacing in-person connection. But the therapeutic rhetoric of “sexual empowerment” may also play a role—transforming intimacy into self-optimization projects (“Am I sexy enough?” “Am I performing correctly?”) rather than genuine connection.

Ms. Zhou’s courses embody this pathology in concentrated form: relationships reimagined as technical problems solvable through correct performance rather than emotional connection, mutual respect, and shared values.

The Vulnerability Economy

Perhaps the most insidious danger isn’t sexual permissiveness per se, but the creation of commercial ecosystems that profit from insecurity about sexuality.

In the United States, this takes the form of a multi-billion-dollar industry: cosmetic surgery marketed as empowerment, Instagram filters that normalize impossible beauty standards, “wellness” influencers selling confidence through consumption. Women are told that empowerment means choice, but the choices offered increasingly require purchasing something: procedures, products, programs.

China’s Ms. Zhou and America’s wellness industrial complex operate on similar logic: identify a vulnerability (aging, relationship insecurity, sexual inadequacy), amplify the anxiety, then sell progressively expensive solutions that never quite resolve the underlying problem because the problem is structural, not individual.

The Singapore Question: Navigating Between Repression and Exploitation

Singapore’s position offers a useful vantage point precisely because it hasn’t fully embraced either American-style permissiveness or Chinese-style regulatory crackdowns.

Singapore’s Pragmatic Middle Path

Singapore has historically taken a pragmatic approach to sexuality: legal restrictions coexist with relatively liberal social practices among educated elites, while public morality campaigns target perceived excesses without attempting comprehensive control.

This creates space for nuanced conversations about sexual agency that avoid both extremes. Singaporean women aren’t subject to the regulatory paternalism that shut down Ms. Zhou’s platforms, but neither do they face the same pressure toward performative hypersexuality that characterizes some American social media environments.

The question for Singapore is whether this middle path remains viable as global digital culture flattens distinctions. Young Singaporeans consume the same TikTok trends, Instagram aesthetics, and YouTube influencers as peers worldwide. The Ms. Zhou video reached Singapore through Mr. Brown’s parody—demonstrating how viral phenomena transcend borders.

Economic Vulnerability and Relationship Strategies

Singapore’s specific economic context creates its own pressures. Despite high GDP per capita, the cost of living, particularly housing, makes economic stability a genuine concern for many young adults. The pragmatic calculation some Chinese women make—that finding a high-earning partner offers more security than career precarity—isn’t entirely foreign to Singapore.

But Singapore’s stronger social safety nets, higher baseline economic security for women, and more equal access to education create different baseline conditions. Singaporean women have more structural support for genuine economic independence, reducing (though not eliminating) the pressure to view relationships primarily through an economic lens.

Still, Singapore isn’t immune to the broader regional pattern of women “marrying up” economically or the persistent gender pay gap that makes such strategies rational. The question is whether Singapore’s institutions can maintain sufficient economic equality that women’s relationship choices genuinely reflect preference rather than constrained necessity.

The Influencer Economy and Manufactured Insecurity

Perhaps the more immediate Singapore impact comes through social media influencer culture, which operates on similar psychological mechanisms as Ms. Zhou’s academy: identifying insecurities, amplifying them through carefully curated content, then monetizing the resulting anxiety.

Singapore has a thriving influencer economy where beauty, lifestyle, and relationship content generate significant revenue. The progression from aspirational content to affiliate marketing to premium courses parallels Ms. Zhou’s model. While the content may be less explicitly about seduction techniques, the underlying logic—that purchasing products or programs will resolve fundamental insecurities about worth and desirability—remains similar.

The regulatory question Singapore faces isn’t whether to ban such content (likely impractical and potentially counterproductive), but how to protect consumers from predatory practices while respecting agency. This means focusing less on sexual morality and more on commercial standards: truth in advertising, qualified practitioners for therapeutic services, transparency about pricing structures.

Beyond the Binary: Toward Genuine Sexual Agency

The Ms. Zhou controversy reveals that familiar binaries—empowerment vs. exploitation, liberation vs. repression, choice vs. constraint—inadequately capture the complexity of sexuality in market societies.

What Genuine Empowerment Requires

Authentic sexual empowerment requires more than rhetorical choice. It demands:

Economic foundation: Women need genuine economic alternatives to relationships as survival strategies. This means pay equity, robust social safety nets, accessible childcare, and protections against workplace discrimination. Sexual choices made from positions of economic desperation aren’t meaningfully free.

Educational equity: Understanding sexuality, consent, pleasure, and relationships requires comprehensive education that treats these topics seriously rather than reducing them to techniques for attracting partners or avoiding disease. Both American abstinence-only education and Chinese silence on sexuality leave young people vulnerable to commercial exploitation by those promising forbidden knowledge.

Media literacy: In an environment where commercial interests shape sexual norms through advertising, pornography, and influencer content, critical media literacy becomes essential. People need tools to recognize when insecurity is being manufactured to drive consumption.

Relationship models beyond commodification: Genuine intimacy requires seeing partners as whole people rather than resources to be secured through correct performance. This means resisting both traditional patriarchal models (women as property) and newer commercial models (relationships as optimization projects).

The Role of Regulation

The Chinese government’s shutdown of Ms. Zhou’s platforms likely had more to do with controlling public discourse than protecting consumers. But legitimate regulatory concerns exist around:

• Unqualified practitioners offering therapy for trauma
• False advertising about course outcomes
• Predatory pricing structures that exploit vulnerability
• Medical procedures offered without proper oversight

Effective regulation would focus on these consumer protection issues rather than policing sexual morality. The goal isn’t to prevent women from exploring sexuality or even learning seduction techniques if they choose, but to ensure that commercial enterprises don’t exploit vulnerability through deceptive practices.

Singapore’s regulatory model—focused on consumer protection, qualified practitioners, and truth in advertising rather than moral policing—offers a more promising template than either American laissez-faire or Chinese morality campaigns.

The Unresolved Tension

Ultimately, the Ms. Zhou controversy illuminates an unresolved tension at the heart of market societies: the marketplace can offer women tools for agency, but it can also commodify that very agency, transforming liberation into another product to be purchased.

Madonna’s provocations, Taylor Swift’s billion-dollar empire, and Ms. Zhou’s seduction academy all exist along this continuum. The differences matter—ownership, agency, purpose—but they all unfold within economic systems that assign value to female sexuality according to market logic rather than intrinsic worth.

The path forward isn’t obvious. Returning to traditional models of sexual repression clearly isn’t the answer—these were never liberating for women. But uncritical celebration of any sexual expression as empowering, regardless of context or consequence, abandons women to market forces that profit from their insecurities.

What’s needed is a more nuanced understanding: one that defends women’s right to sexual expression while maintaining critical scrutiny of commercial systems that exploit vulnerability; one that distinguishes between choices made from genuine freedom and choices made from constrained circumstances; one that builds economic and social structures enabling authentic agency rather than merely rhetorical choice.

For Singapore, navigating this terrain means resisting both the authoritarian impulse to control sexual expression and the neoliberal impulse to reduce all value to market transactions. It means building robust economic foundations for genuine independence while maintaining critical attention to how commercial interests shape intimate life.

Ms. Zhou Yuan is neither crusader nor corrupting force. She is an entrepreneur who identified a market—women’s insecurity in a system that ties their worth to male approval—and built a business exploiting it. The question isn’t whether authorities should have shut her down, but why that market exists in the first place, and what would need to change for it to disappear.