Obedient Goddesses of the Dark City: Postfeminism and the Seduction of Control
“The metropolis is a realm of pessimism, not hope; a greedy industrial city that strips its inhabitants of freedom, poisons their bodies and minds...”
— Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention
Little Sparks in a Vast Dark City: The Seduction of the Metropolis
The luxurious fabrics of megacities wrap around the body of the planet. In the ornate drapery of Earth’s divine toga, the luminous silhouettes of capitals and urban agglomerations shimmer. In the neon veins of transport arteries, one can trace the pulse of a history rooted in humanity’s eternal attraction to urban images of success, luxury, and glory.
But glory is fleeting, wealth is perishable, and success is transient. From the primordial void of the Universe, the glow of cities seems alluring and full of promise. Yet upon closer inspection, the sprawling luminous cloud reveals only scattered, fragile sparks — flickering like candles exposed to the world's turbulent winds. “We are just little sparks in a vast dark City”
Far from dreams and romantic illusions, the city is dark and laden with meaning. The components of comfort in the modern metropolis include futuristic airbuses drifting slowly among towering skyscrapers; passenger drones and high-tech trains ferrying workers and their dreams of fortunes and dizzying careers through the city.
The transport system sets a calm, deliberate rhythm — the cadence of respectable life. The interiors of the skyscrapers that dominate the city skyline are lit with cinematic precision. In the urban air lingers a sense of mystery — a mystery impossible to grasp, yet whose allure becomes the implicit meaning of existence.
Mystery is synonymous with power, a force that seemingly awaits only the chosen — those most devoted and loyal to its ideological manifestation.
The Tedious Luxury of the Dark City: Female Beauty, Emotional Void, and Urban Aesthetics
Dark City is perfect.
It’s a soul-chilling place of lifeless comfort — a paradoxical disconnection wrapped in unity, beauty, and success. The city seems veiled in sleep and twilight. Look closer, and you’ll see how loneliness and inevitability fill to the brim the glasses held by the mysterious and exquisite women who inhabit Dark City.
Blueberry cocktails shimmer with the opulence of smoky topaz and black diamonds — symbolic stones that for centuries adorned the crowns of rulers of cities and lands, eternal emblems of chosen lineage and authority.
The icy sparkle of diamonds later reappears in the tears of precious necklaces, motionless beneath glass cloches, exhibited like rare relics for public display.
Ice in necklaces and tiaras, in perfume flacons, in cocktail glasses and the slender fingers that hold them; ice in the eyes, ice in the hearts. The beauty of form frozen in elegance conjures a hypnotic sense of emotional void.
The women of the dark city are flawless: their silhouettes, extravagant corsets and masks, the petroleum sheen of latex, veils of lace, and their provocatively perfect beauty leave no room to look away — yet conceal a deep internal emptiness, a weariness born of luxury.
Within this excess lies a conceptual substitution: what if, in Dark City, desire is mistaken for reality? What if behind the perfect form and ideal appearance hide false values — and the absence of freedom?
Women’s Independence Is a Marketing Tool: Postfeminism, Objectification, and Biopolitical Control
The Divas of Dark City. No one knows their names. They are beautiful and voiceless, like the nymphs of Hebe, goddess of eternal youth and cupbearer of Olympus, who quenches their thirst for beauty and timeless youth with the magical nectar of ambrosia. The cinematic bar for clandestine gatherings of the chosen ones resembles a modern-day Icarium — a source of pleasures, joys, and the illusion of eternal life. The women of the Dark City have gathered — or perhaps life itself, the city’s regime of existence, has summoned them — to this symbolic Icarium, drawn together to nourish and reaffirm the ideological foundation around which their values, goals, and collective mental architecture are built.
Behind the closed doors of luxury apartments unfolds a kind of secret supper: a silent and aesthetically perfected initiation, evoking the mood of contemporary women’s circles and curated feminine rituals. The essence of the gathering is convergence — a passive cultivation of female freedom, self-worth, and symbolic equality; a reinterpretation of postfeminist principles. The women of Dark City become a living manifesto of postfeminist philosophy, in which loyalty to classical feminism is viewed as outdated and subversive. Their beauty no longer reflects a strong, independent, imperfect-yet-alive identity. Instead, what unites them is self-objectification — the transformation of the self into a visual asset within the economy of expensive attention.
Bodies and souls, attachments and personalities, are gradually dissolved as subjective features. All are equally flawless — and equally meaningless. Day after day, uniqueness is standardized in service of fleeting trends. Face control and dress code are non-negotiable: smoky eyes, elite jewelry, and the eternally sexualized black dress serve as required entry keys to the inner circle. The algorithmic logic of it all — the precisely tuned biopolitical script — is betrayed by the rows of near-identical dresses awaiting their next wearers.
An invisible hand of power orchestrates the nymphs of Dark City. As if Hebe herself — now a symbol of supervision and hypercontrol — tirelessly ensures that the nymphs are refreshed generation after generation, fed with biopolitical ambrosia: young girls equally pulled toward the cult of wealth, happiness, and inexhaustible beauty. Conformity becomes the dominant ideal: the image of a woman so sexually magnetic and visibly prosperous that society immediately forgets her interiority, her ideas. Freedom becomes illusion; choice, a fabrication. Their self-image and thoughts are not self-directed — but preconfigured by an external behavioral script. Postfeminism turns the female body into a screen — a surface for the projection of sexual trends.
Youth and beauty are once again traded on the stock exchange of time, racing far ahead of life’s brevity and any notion of destiny. This trade, like sacred nectar, triggers a ritual of assimilation — a biopolitical metabolism that fuels the machinery of control and depersonalization in the name of submission.
Biopolitical Perfection: How the Smart City Becomes a Machine for Shaping Souls
The feminine circle of Dark City’s radiant nymphs shall never break, nor let a single one slip beyond the reach of control. Each woman’s well-being will be granted in proportion to her belief — not in postfeminism as a failure of feminism, but rather as its cultural triumph. The velvet of black dresses will adorn new bodies, the organizers of initiations will once again light their candles, and the loyal cupbearers of the biopolitical Olympus will refill the glasses. It will happen. It will happen again and again in Dark City.
The metropolis will become a flawless biopolitical model — a design meticulously maintained by the ruling power, which labors tirelessly over its infrastructure, crafting its architectural, stylistic, and aesthetic codes to tune its residents into a regime of order. Obedience to this regime — to its rhythm, to its subtle internal logic of development — is no obvious coercion but rather a finely executed biopolitical narrative. Freedom of choice, gender equality, individuality — these will remain nothing more than resonant words, instruments to lure in new adherents to the biopolitical doctrine.
This indoctrination will operate through inversion — by the method of negative reinforcement. The algorithm of double negation — the path to the desired result through its apparent opposite — becomes a potent ideological weapon: new discipline masked as progress, conformity disguised as freedom. Inhabitants of Dark City will never appear as oppressed or submissive — the classic image of authoritarian rule. On the contrary, they will remain eternally young and beautiful. They will be granted the illusion of choice, they will possess a high-tech smart environment, and their synergy with it will form the perfect symbiotic pair.
The gods of biopolitics will grant them the thought of their own significance — the belief that they set trends and use technology to their advantage. But Dark City is not a utopia — it is a sentient billboard, a living trend that everyone subconsciously longs to join. And in this case, aestheticization is not a pathway to freedom but a precise mechanism of external hypercontrol. Dark City is a massive biolaboratory experimenting on humanity. The final shot — stark and unsettling — reveals the grim truth of biopolitical cognitivism. Yet “Baby... never know life...” — and so life in Dark City becomes a scattering of fates, fading one by one, transforming into the glowing aura of the metropolis. A futuristic soul-processing machine, precise and refined in its ultra-modern form. To race forward toward the inevitable edge of life within this splendid cage — that is the city’s constant, its embedded meaning of existence.
Further Reading & Concepts:
Ben Wilson. Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention. Doubleday, 2020.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, entry for “narrative”. Oxford University Press, www.oed.com. Accessed [27.04.2025].
Ariola, Zena M., and Hugo Herbelin. “Minimal Classical Logic and Control Operators.” Proceedings of the 30th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2003), Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 2003.
McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. SAGE, 2008.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. SAGE, 1998.
———. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Schmadel, Lutz D. Dictionary of Minor Planet Names. 5th ed., Springer, 2003.
Cain, Susan. “The Rise of the New Groupthink.” The New York Times, 13 Jan. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html. Accessed [27.04.2025].
03.05.2025Designed for thinkers.