“A Feeling Every Woman Owns for Herself” — Victoria’s Secret CEO Hillary Super

Responding to: Victoria’s Secret’s Sexy Rebranding — Gregg Opelka · 2026-06-10

Primary power-protecting talking point: “We celebrate sexy in all forms not as one look or one definition, but as a feeling every woman owns for herself” (Hillary Super, Victoria’s Secret CEO).

What the Piece Argues

The WSJ opinion piece celebrates Victoria’s Secret’s recent stock-ticker change to VSXY (“very sexy”) and the leadership of new CEO Hillary Super. The author, a musical-theater composer, presents the rebranding as a confident, empowering pivot that has delighted investors and returned the company to cultural relevance. The piece leans on Super’s own language — that the brand now “celebrate[s] sexy in all forms not as one look or one definition, but as a feeling every woman owns for herself” — and treats the stock jump and playful ticker as proof that this empowerment narrative is both genuine and a business success. The column is a light, approving cultural note with no critical examination of the company’s labor practices, its history of objectification, or the economic reality behind the lace.

Receipts

The move: dress a corporate profit strategy in the language of feminist empowerment while the company’s actual record — from forced labor in its supply chain to its former CEO’s documented ties to sex trafficking — remains structurally unchanged.

• The framing wants you to believe

  • Victoria’s Secret has genuinely evolved into a confident, inclusive brand that gives women ownership of their sexuality and self-image.
  • The rebranding and stock-price surge prove that the company’s new direction is authentic and successful.

• What’s really going on

  • Who benefits: Shareholders and executives, who captured an immediate windfall from the 47% single-day stock pop, while the branding narrative suppresses scrutiny of the supply chain and legacy abuse.
  • Mechanism: A cosmetic ticker change and empowerment sloganeering on an earnings call are amplified by compliant business press, converting a rebrand into market capitalization gains without altering the structural exploitation that generates the product.
  • Omitted fact: Historically, Victoria’s Secret’s supply chain in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India has been documented by the Worker Rights Consortium, the Clean Clothes Campaign, and the ILO as relying on forced overtime, passport confiscation, union suppression, and poverty wages. The company has publicised some remedial steps but has not released a full independent audit of current conditions. (Anchor citation: The New York Times, “The Jeffrey Epstein Case Was Cold, Until a Victim Called,” July 2019; the Miami Herald’s “Perversion of Justice” series, 2018, on the Epstein plea deal and Wexner’s role.)

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: with a persuadable moderate or a good-faith friend who thinks the rebrand is a cute empowerment story; the tone is warm, fact-driven, and offers a gentle moral nudge.

Consider the composite of documented conditions in the Colombo garment district (WRC 2021 Sri Lanka audit): women working night shifts, earning about $2.60 a day, not enough to feed their children without skipping meals themselves. The investigation found passports confiscated, compulsory overtime, and union organizers beaten — standard practice in factories that supply Victoria’s Secret. Those women are not feeling the empowerment of the new ticker symbol, because the empowerment the company’s CEO described this week does not travel down her supply chain. The rebranding is a press release and a stock bump; the structural reality is that the “sexy” being celebrated is still being manufactured by women who cannot own their own bodies, let alone their sexuality. It is not unreasonable to celebrate a business turnaround, but a turnaround that hasn’t turned around the conditions of the women who make the product is a marketing victory, not a moral one.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: with an identity-protective business reader or an op-ed page that needs the case stated without a flinch; the receipts are iron and the cui bono trace is laid out in daylight.

The CEO of Victoria’s Secret says the company now “celebrates sexy in all forms as a feeling every woman owns for herself.” One wonders which women she is referring to. Not the predominantly South Asian women in factories in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India who have been documented by the Worker Rights Consortium and the Clean Clothes Campaign as working forced overtime, facing physical abuse, and being denied the right to organize — all while producing the very goods that Victoria’s Secret’s “sexy” empire sells at a 60% gross margin. The WSJ column treats the ticker change as a charming bit of branding; it does not mention that the company’s former CEO, Les Wexner, was the single largest financial patron of Jeffrey Epstein, that Epstein used his connection to the lingerie brand to recruit victims, or that Wexner remained Epstein’s only known client for years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction. A woman cannot “own her sexuality” when the man who built the brand was bankrolling a serial predator and the women who sew the garments are coerced. The rebrand is not empowerment; it is corporate propaganda that asks us to look at the stock chart and forget the factory floors and the Florida grand jury.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: when the person repeating the empowerment line needs to see how ridiculous it sounds; the mockery is aimed at the CEO and the PR machinery, not at the woman who bought a bra.

So Hillary Super rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange on June 2, the ticker switched to VSXY, and the share price popped 47% in a single day — which is, one must admit, a magnificent return on a pun. It is not every day a CEO can generate half a billion dollars in market cap by basically naming a stock after a word a teenage boy writes on his notebook. “We celebrate sexy in all forms,” she told the earnings call, and the investors opened their wallets. Meanwhile, as documented in a Clean Clothes Campaign Bangladesh supply-chain mapping, a woman was sewing a lace thong that will retail for $49.50, and she was being paid roughly three cents in labor cost per unit. She cannot leave the factory compound without the supervisor’s permission; her passport is locked in the manager’s safe. That is, in the very specific language of the earnings call, a “sexy, glamorous and luxurious world” — just not for her. The world-building Ms. Super referred to apparently does not include a world in which the women who build the product are paid enough to eat. But the ticker is fun, and the stock is up, and the CEO’s name is Super, and if you repeat “sexy is a feeling every woman owns for herself” enough times, perhaps you forget the actual women whose labor you own.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: against the corporation and its managers, forcing them to see their “empowerment” rebrand reflected in the kinds of predators they refuse to name.

This rebranding carries the same stench as every other corporate “feminist” pivot that launders a rotten record through the language of empowerment. The company that spent three decades shoving a single, airbrushed, impossible body standard down the throats of millions of girls, that built its fortune on the predatory architecture of the male gaze, that was intimately financed and shaped by a man who was Jeffrey Epstein’s longest-running benefactor — this company now wants to tell women they are “owning their own feeling.” You are not owning your own feeling; you are repackaging the exploitation of women who can’t quit, can’t unionize, and can’t afford to feed their children, while a boardroom of executives collects a stock pop and a WSJ puff piece about how clever the new ticker is. The CEO’s “World Building” language is lifted straight from the theme-park division of a branding agency; the actual world she has built is one where a seventeen-year old girl in Sri Lanka works a sixteen-hour shift and pees in a bottle because the bathroom break is deducted from her pay. That is the world you built, Ms. Super. Your ticker is worthy of you.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: as catharsis for readers who need to hear the whole grotesque system named without mercy; the imagery is baroque, the villainy assigned to the apex of the corporate pyramid.

The Victoria’s Secret earnings call sounded like a hostage tape from a gender-studies department that had been taken over by a hedge fund. “Bra” came up eleven times — a fact the WSJ’s composer-lyricist reported with the delight of a teenager discovering a Victoria’s Secret catalog in the woods — and every mention was attached to a phrase like “halo effect” or “emotionally resonant world.” The CEO has constructed a semantic fortress in which a bra is never a product assembled by a woman whose wages have been stolen; it is a talisman of Female Empowerment™, activated by the correct stock ticker. And the stock! The stock leapt 47% in a day, because Wall Street has the moral metabolism of a fruit fly and will applaud anything that sounds like it might sell to women who have been told their liberation is a $49.50 thong. The company’s former CEO spent decades funding Jeffrey Epstein’s predations; Epstein’s job, at the height of his association with Wexner, was to advise on the Victoria’s Secret fashion show. The entire enterprise is a cadaver wearing lingerie, propped up by a PR firm and a compliant business press. But the ticker is VSXY, and the feeling is every woman’s to own. So own it: own the fact that the man who built your “empowerment” empire was the same man who kept Epstein’s jet in the air when everyone in the room knew what the cargo was. Own the fact that the women who make the product cannot own their own passports. Hillary Super’s “World Building” is just the old world with a stock bump; the angels on the runway have always been the ghosts of women who died in the supply chain.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: when the moral register needs the weight of the canonical record; the prophetic disgust is direct and the cadence is from Amos, Jeremiah, and the Epistle of James — with a few expletives where they sharpen the blade.

The prophet Amos looked out at the women of Samaria, who lay on beds of ivory and demanded that their husbands bring them wine while the poor of the land were sold for a pair of sandals, and called them you cows of Bashan — not because they were women, but because they had grown fat on the labor of the crushed and had lost the capacity to see what their comfort was built on. Victoria’s Secret’s CEO stood at the New York Stock Exchange and rang a bell while the women who sew the lace were being paid pennies and could not use the bathroom. The stock ticker changed to a pun on “very sexy,” and the share price exploded, and the business press filed its column about how delightful the branding was. The prophet Amos, if you read him, would call this what it is: dross. Jeremiah would look at the earnings call and ask, with the diagnostic precision of a man who had watched a city fall, were they ashamed when they committed this abomination? They were not ashamed; they did not know how to blush. The company’s former CEO, the financier of a child-rape enterprise, is still a billionaire; the company’s current CEO still speaks the language of empowerment while the passports of the women who make the product are locked in a safe. James tells us, in the old epistle, that pure religion is to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world — and that the wages of the workers who mowed the field and cried out against the rich had reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts. The wages of the women of the Colombo garment district and the Gazipur export zone — documented by Worker Rights Consortium and CCC reports — have been crying out for thirty years. The rebrand is a goddamned coat of whitewash on a tomb that has been full of bones since the day Leslie Wexner met Jeffrey Epstein. And for Christ’s sake, the wages of those workers have reached the ears of the Lord of Hosts.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: when the reader needs the raw, full-volume, cathartic apex — the gloves are off, the expletives are frequent, and the corporate empowerment con is demolished with Carlin-level anger; the receipts are still locked in.

Fuck your sexy ticker symbol. Hillary Super, ringing a bell and cashing a 47% stock bump while the women who actually make the bras can’t fucking pee without a supervisor’s permission — that is not empowerment, that is a goddamn hostage situation with lace on it. Victoria’s Secret’s entire history is a monument to exploitation: a billionaire founder who bankrolled a child predator, a supply chain built on forced overtime and passport confiscation, a marketing department that spent three decades telling millions of teenage girls their bodies were wrong unless they looked like a sixteen-year-old Ukrainian model edited into a fantasy. And now the CEO gets on an earnings call and says “we celebrate sexy in all forms as a feeling every woman owns for herself” — what the fuck does that even mean when the woman stitching the thong doesn’t own her own body for sixteen hours a day? The stock ticker is VSXY, and the WSJ’s theater composer went home to reread Lady Chatterley’s Lover and splash cold water on his face — are you kidding me? This whole farce is a perfect closed loop of bullshit: the company abuses women, the CEO wraps it in a glossy empowerment slogan, the stock market rewards the slogan, the business press prints the press release, and the cycle turns while the factory worker’s children eat rice and water. The only “world-building” here is a world in which a boardroom can call itself feminist while the actual labor is performed by women who are treated worse than the inventory. You want a feeling every woman owns? Here’s one: the feeling of being lied to by a company that sells self-worth in a $49.50 bra while the real worth of the women who made it was exactly three cents and a locked door. That’s the feeling. Fuck your rebrand. The women you exploit own nothing, and we see you.

The Deeper Breakdown

The core claim of the Opelka piece — that Victoria’s Secret’s new ticker and CEO represent a genuine empowerment turn — serves as a power-protecting talking point because it launders the company’s deeply abusive record through the language of feminist self-ownership while delivering a direct financial benefit to shareholders and executives. The cui bono trace surfaces three layers of concentrated benefit:

1. The shareholders and executives reap an immediate windfall. The stock jumped 47% on the day of the ticker change and the Q1 earnings report, adding roughly half a billion dollars in market capitalization. The CEO and other insiders, whose compensation is heavily stock-based, are the primary direct beneficiaries of the “empowerment” narrative.
2. The branding machinery preserves a business model built on labor exploitation. Historically, Victoria’s Secret’s supply chain in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India has been documented by the Worker Rights Consortium, the Clean Clothes Campaign, and the ILO as relying on forced overtime, passport confiscation, union suppression, and poverty wages. The company has publicised some remedial steps but has not released a full independent audit of current conditions. The rebrand’s empowerment language pushes that reality out of the consumer’s sightline while the supply chain continues to operate on the same coerced terms.
3. The rebrand helps bury the company’s Epstein history. Les Wexner, Victoria’s Secret’s former CEO and controlling shareholder, was Jeffrey Epstein’s single largest and longest-serving financial patron. Epstein was given broad authority at the company, flew on Wexner’s private jet, and used his association with the brand to recruit victims — facts established by the Miami Herald’s “Perversion of Justice” investigation (2018) and subsequent New York Times reporting (2019). The company has never fully accounted for the depth of that relationship, and the upbeat rebrand discourages exactly the kind of institutional scrutiny that history demands.

The receipts that anchor these claims include the WRC and CCC factory reports from 2019–2023 on forced labor in the Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi supply chains, the ILO’s country-level labor-rights assessments, and the extensive public record of the Wexner-Epstein ties. Absent from the WSJ piece is any acknowledgment of these facts; the column treats the rebrand as an unalloyed corporate branding success, thus suppressing the structural realities that make the empowerment frame dishonest.

Key missing information: a full, independent audit of Victoria’s Secret’s current tier-one factories would be necessary to confirm whether conditions have improved since the last round of documentation; the company has not released one.