I said yes to living inside a house where cameras watched me 24 hours a day. Microphones dangled above my head as I slept while I was being observed in real time by strangers. The stakes were high; there was the potential of a life-altering cash prize. There was also the looming possibility that my win would make history—all at a particularly fraught time in our country’s understanding of race and equity.
Inside the Big Brother house, I understood that I was being watched. It was explicit and contractual. But even there, the psychological boundaries of consent were more fraught than they appeared. There is a difference between agreeing to be observed and being consumed. Even worse, the possibility—especially for the women in the house—that we will be reduced to just our bodies.
As such, there are corners of the internet where fragments of my naked body exist. They were clipped from live feeds by viewers who were not interested in the story I was living, but in the access this surveillance provided them. They shared images of my body in its most vulnerable moments, like changing my clothing or sleeping in the middle of the night. They commented on my form, they got off on having “caught” me off guard.
Even now, I pause at writing about this phenomenon. Technically, I consented to being filmed. Technically, I agreed to the possibility that anything could be seen. And when I left that house, I said yes again to a career that depends on being seen. I am not outside of surveillance. I am inside it. I benefit from it. I am also shaped by it. I have built my livelihood on visibility. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. My life is content now, by design. In many ways, I want to be seen.
But when someone intentionally searches for, saves, and circulates images of your body, the image becomes a version of nonconsent—exploitation, even. If your image exists publicly, it is treated as public property. The internet does not distinguish between what was offered and what was taken. It only distinguishes between what exists and what does not. And now, in the age of AI, even that distinction is being blurred.
I have found a way to negotiate my own power within this impossible dichotomy. Visibility, when maneuvered correctly, can create opportunity and financial independence. If managed with precision, it can even allow for authorship over your own narrative. That is part of the reason I am writing this story instead of having it written for me.
Once you become visible enough, the public begins to feel like a participant in your existence.
For women especially, visibility has become one of the few reliable ways to bypass traditional gatekeepers. We no longer need to be discovered through pageants or talent searches. Or, to be coy, the pages of Playboy.
But visibility also changes the terms of ownership. Once you become visible enough, the public begins to feel like a participant in your existence. Except they’re not just an audience; they’re a stakeholder as well.
Women have, in so many ways, always been at the center of this power struggle. We have long walked the tightrope between visibility and victimhood. Our bodies have always been sites of control. Surveillance intensifies this dynamic by allowing the body to be captured without participation. We’ve seen this in the paparazzi scandals of the 90s and early aughts, all the way to the creeps wearing Meta Glasses to glance down girls’ blouses, and post their findings on the internet. This disembodiment creates versions of us that circulate, unauthorized, and belong more to a database than to ourselves.
Reality TV was, in many ways, an early prototype for the world we exist in now. What was once an Orwellian premise has quietly become modern infrastructure. Cameras line our streets. Ring doorbells document our movements. We are recorded, unwittingly, in airports and on highways. We film ourselves voluntarily, narrating our routines for platforms designed to reward exposure. We are watched by institutions, corporations, and increasingly, each other. Surveillance no longer feels oppressive. It feels ordinary.
But the danger of ordinary surveillance is that it stops feeling like surveillance at all.
And yet, I continue to participate in this system. I post. I share. I monetize my own visibility. This is the contradiction of modern autonomy: the same exposure that erodes your privacy can also secure your independence.
Privacy is no longer a default condition, and this is the reality for anyone who chooses to live publicly now—whether you’re a television personality, like myself, or any girl posting videos from her bedroom on TikTok. Privacy is something we almost desperately negotiate in fragments. You quickly learn that visibility is not neutral. Boundaries shift depending on the interpretations of the public. It changes what they believe they are entitled to. The more access people have to your image, the more this access is mistaken for ownership.
Choosing to be photographed in this way, now, is a direct engagement with this new reality. It is a reminder that my body is not public property simply because it was made public before.
I am an active participant in the making of the images for this magazine. I am a collaborator. I assumed my power by becoming a co-creator. I chose the photographer, a woman who understands what I mean when I say I want these images to be something that allows me ownership over my body. I carefully selected the words you read (or maybe, that you won’t read), to explain why this moment feels so special. It’s an opportunity for reclamation—for active consent in my most vulnerable form.
Surveillance may be the defining condition of modern life. But consent, real consent, still belongs to the person being seen. This is something none of us should take for granted. And it’s something I remain committed to fighting for. Even if it took me posing in my underwear for you to think twice about it.