Selling Intimacy in the Age of Likes: How the Internet Monetized the Female Body (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798269956398)

by Anna Lysandre

In a culture where visibility defines existence, Selling Intimacy in the Age of Likes examines how the internet transformed self-expression into self-exploitation. Drawing on social psychology, digital economics, and cultural theory, Anna Lysandre dismantles the illusion that online exposure equals empowerment.

Across eight chapters and an epilogue, the book traces the evolution of "digital sex work" from apparent liberation to a sophisticated system of control. It analyses how algorithms reward self-objectification, how agencies and investors industrialize desire, and how entire generations are educated by the logic of visibility. Through interviews and composite testimonies, Lysandre reveals the hidden costs-psychological fatigue, loss of privacy, and the erosion of interior life-behind the glossy promise of freedom.

Part social commentary, part psychological essay, this work maps the emotional and economic architecture of the attention economy. It concludes not with moral panic but with a clinical philosophy of recovery: boundaries as cognitive technology, attention as ethical resource, and privacy as a modern form of dignity.

Selling Intimacy in the Age of Likes is a lucid meditation on autonomy in a world that confuses exposure with power.