Ad Feminam: The "Friendly Advice" That Isn't

On rhetoric, framing, the male gaze, and why we’re still having this conversation in 2026.

Every now and then I get one in a social timeline, linkedin mostly: A successful female entrepreneur posts. She’s building something real, showing up with confidence, doing the work. And into her DMs slides a piece of unsolicited “friendly advice”: post less sexy images if you want to be taken seriously. Every time, the delivery is warm, the tone is concerned, the framing is helpful and I’m sure sent with the best intentions. Which is exactly what makes it so worth to take a deeper look. Because it is not advice. It is a rhetorical move with a name, a history, and a very specific power dynamic baked in. Let’s get into it.

That’s Not Advice

Actual professional advice engages with the work. Strategy. Brand positioning. Audience growth. Business value. Stuff that has something to do with what someone is actually building. What it does not do is redirect the entire conversation from a woman’s content to her body, her appearance.

Here’s the magic framing trick: when someone says her content is “overshadowed by her appearance,” they’re presenting that as a fact about her content. It isn’t. In fact that statement is about the viewer. The gaze (how he sees her, his reaction to her) is being quietly relocated from his responsibility onto hers. That is not neutral. That is a rhetorical act of displacement, and it happens so smoothly and is so baked in our subconsious patriarchical expectations, most people don’t even notice.

The Gaze Has a History (not new at all)

In 1975, film theorist Laura Mulvey dropped “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and named something most people had been sensing for years: dominant visual culture is built around a male gaze, a way of looking that positions women as objects to be seen, not subjects who see let alone act. The gaze is not a neutral camera angle. It is a power structure. It decides who looks, who gets looked at, and what that looking is allowed to mean (Mulvey, 1975).

Fast forward fifty years and the framework holds up uncomfortably well in the era of social media. Doring et al. (2021) found that women’s self-presentation on socials is consistently filtered through a gendered lens, with appearance-based judgements routinely overriding assessments of actual expertise. And LinkedIn, a platform literally designed around professional credibility, is not exempt. Women on LinkedIn report that their appearance gets treated as professionally relevant in ways that men’s simply doesn’t (Duffy & Hund, 2015). The platform/ medium changed. The dynamic didn’t.

So when someone tells a woman to “post less sexy images,” they are not correcting a strategic error by her. They are insisting she manage the consequences of being perceived a certain way, a way that has nothing to do with her intentions and everything to do with what her viewer brought to the scroll.

And then we built AI on top of all this. If the training data reflects the male gaze as the default, the images, the captions, the engagement signals, the content that got rewarded, then the gaze doesn’t just persist. It gets optimised. Automated. Scaled. It stops being one man’s reaction and becomes infrastructure. But that rabbit hole deserves its own blog. Coming soon.

Ad Feminam: Meet the Rhetorical Villain of the Piece

In rhetoric, ad hominem is the classic dodge: instead of engaging with someone’s argument, you attack the person making it. Their character, their credibility, their vibe. It’s a diversionary tactic dressed up as critique, and we’ve been calling it out for centuries.

Ad feminam is its gendered cousin, and honestly, the more evil one. Feminist rhetorical scholars use the term to describe moments when a woman’s credibility, expertise, or authority is undermined not by engaging with her ideas, but by drawing attention to her female body, her appearance, or what she’s “supposed” to look like (Tindale, 2007). It’s not a legitimate critique. It’s a dismissal in a concerned-face costume.

The subtext is depressingly consistent: your authority is negotiable if your female appearance is “distracting.” Always delivered helpfully. Always with the best of intentions. And always, always, making HER responsible for HIS reaction. The message is never “your content is weak.” The message is: your visibility as a woman is the problem and it’s yours to fix.

Control: The Plot Twist That Was There All Along

Here’s where it gets really interesting. Foucault’s (1977) panopticon concept showed that you don’t need an actual warden to enforce control; once people believe they might be watched, they police themselves. Bartky (1990) applied this directly to women’s bodies: women internalise a “critical observer” so completely that the self-surveillance becomes automatic. The unsolicited adviser doesn’t need to be everywhere. One well-timed “friendly reminder” is enough to activate the whole system.

And this control runs deeper than any one interaction. Women navigating professional visibility face a double bind that’s been rigorously documented: too feminine and you lack gravitas, too direct and you’re aggressive, leaving a corridor of “acceptable” so narrow it could give anyone a panic attack (Heilman, 2012; Eagly & Karau, 2002). Platforms scale this rather than solve it, Marwick (2013) shows how social media simultaneously demands that women be visible and authentic while the attention economy punishes them for exactly that visibility. And when unsolicited advice enters the chat? Kleinman et al. (1997) are clear: advice nobody asked for is not generosity. It is a dominance behaviour, a claim that the adviser has the standing to evaluate and correct. Translation: I have the right to define how you show up.

Newsflash: Women Already Know, duh.

Here’s the part that makes the “helpful advice” framing particularly exhausting: women are already hyper-aware of how visibility, professionalism, desirability, algorithms, and judgement collide, online and offline. This isn’t a blind spot that well-meaning strangers are helpfully illuminating. It is the background hum of every professional decision women in public-facing roles make, every single day.

Research on emotional labour and self-presentation confirms it: women expend significant cognitive and emotional resources managing perception, anticipating and pre-empting the exact appearance-based judgements the “advice” claims to warn them about (Gill & Orgad, 2018). They’ve already done the calculus. They don’t need the reminder. What needs to change is the dynamic producing the need for the reminder in the first place.

So. What Are We Actually Asking Here?

The question on the table is never really “should women post differently?” That question is doing a lot of misdirection work. The more interesting and more honest  question is: why are we still so invested in policing how women show up, especially when they’re successful, visible, and completely unapologetic about it?

Because here’s what I’ve noticed: the advice doesn’t cluster around women who are struggling. It clusters around women who are thriving and clearly succesfull. The discomfort isn’t about their content or business strategy. It’s about their presence, confident, visible, unbothered, and the centuries-old reflex to make women responsible for managing other people’s discomfort with that presence.

Naming it matters. Calling it ad feminam matters. Not because labels win arguments, but because once you see the rhetorical structure, you can’t unsee it and you stop mistaking control for concern. That’s where the conversation gets good. And that’s exactly where we should be having it.

References

Bartky, S. L. (1990). Femininity and domination: Studies in the phenomenology of oppression. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Femininity-and-Domination-Studies-in-the-Phenomenology-of-Oppression/Bartky/p/book/9780415901864 

Döring, N., Reif, A., & Poeschl, S. (2021). How gender-stereotypical are selfies? A content analysis and comparison with magazine adverts. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, 955–962. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.10.001

Duffy, B. E., & Hund, E. (2015). “Having it all” on social media: Entrepreneurial femininity and self-branding among fashion bloggers. Social Media + Society, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604337

Eagly, A. H., & Karau, S. J. (2002). Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. Psychological Review, 109(3), 573–598. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.109.3.573

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1975)

Gill, R., & Orgad, S. (2018). The amazing bounce-backable woman: Resilience and the psychological turn in neoliberalism. Sociological Research Online, 23(2), 477–495. https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780418769673

Heilman, M. E. (2012). Gender stereotypes and workplace bias. Research in Organizational Behavior, 32, 113–135. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2012.11.003

Kleinman, S., Ezzell, M. B., & Frost, A. C. (1997). Knowing and doing: Toward a feminist praxis in sociology. Michigan Feminist Studies, 11, 1–27.

Marwick, A. E. (2013). Status update: Celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social media age. Yale University Press.

Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6

Tindale, C. W. (2007). Fallacies and argument appraisal. Cambridge University Press.