Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

by Jia Tolentino

Women are genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy—two systems that, at their extremes, ensure that individual success comes at the expense of collective morality.

There are rewards for succeeding under capitalism and patriarchy; there are rewards even for being willing to work on its terms.

There is a case, as laid out by Donna Haraway in her tricky 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for understanding the female condition as essentially, fundamentally adulterated, and for seeking a type of freedom compatible with that state.

Resistance to a system is presented on the terms of the system. It’s so much easier, when we gain agency, to adapt rather than to oppose.

We have not “optimized” our wages, our childcare system, our political representation; we still hardly even think of parity as realistic in those arenas, let alone anything approaching perfection.

We have maximized our capacity as market assets. That’s all.

We have to be willing to be disloyal, to undermine. The cyborg is powerful because she grasps the potential in her own artificiality, because she accepts withou...

Is that fantastical, the idea of a selfhood undiminished by circumstance? Is it incomplete, naïve? In children’s literature, young female characters are self-evidently important, and their traumas, whatever they may be, are secondary.

In adult fiction, if a girl is important to the narrative, trauma often comes first.

The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir writes that a girl is a “human being before becoming a woman,” and she “knows already that to accept herself as a woman is to become resigned and to mutilate herself.”

Plath writes, “knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.”

de Beauvoir writes that the “drama of woman” lies in the conflict between the individual experience of the self and the collective experience of womanhood.

To herself, a woman is inherently central and essential. To society, she is inessential, secondary, defined on the terms of her relationship to men.

men, unlike women, experience no contradiction between their gender and their “vocation as a human being.”

thrill and sorrow of female adolescence—the realization that your body, and what people will demand of it, will determine your adult life.

she feels defenseless before a dull fatality that condemns her to unimaginable trials; her femininity means in her eyes sickness and suffering and death, and she is obsessed with this fate.”

Prescriptions about female behavior, Solnit notes, are often disingenuously expressed in terms of happiness—as if we really want women to be beautiful, selfless, hardworking wives and mothers because that’s what will make them happy,

models of female happiness have always tended to benefit men and economically handicap women

“There is no good answer to being a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.”

The Second Sex, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963),

Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856),

“Whence came this insufficiency in life—this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leant?”)

She turns on Vronsky, becoming erratic and manipulative, the way women do when the only path to power involves appealing to men.

“there is a hoax in marriage, since, while being supposed to socialize eroticism, it succeeds only in killing it.”

A husband gets to be “first a citizen, a producer, secondly a husband,” where a wife is “before all, and often exclusively, a wife.”

De Beauvoir glossed this as transcendence versus immanence: men were expected to reach beyond their circumstances, while women were expected to be defined and bounded by theirs.

Kate Zambreno, in Heroines (2012),

“the man allowed to go out into the world and transcend himself, the woman reduced to the kind of work that will be erased and forgotten at day’s end, living invisible...

male literary characters are written and received as emblems of the human condition ...

Female literary characters, in contrast, indicate the condition of being a woman. They are condemned to a universe that revolves around sex and family and domesticity.

Sometimes these characters manipulate the expected narratives to their advantage, as with Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (1848), Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1936), or Amy Dunne, the sociopath who narrates Gone Girl (2012).

“Woman has been assigned the role of parasite, and every parasite is an exploiter.”)

All of these women are in pursuit of basic liberty. But our culture has configured women’s liberty as corrosion, and for a long time, there was no ...

most protagonists are unhappy. But heroes are mostly unhappy for existential reasons; heroines suffer for social reasons, because of male power, because of men.

“Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement?”

Jenny Offill’s brilliant Dept. of Speculation (2014)

social conventions can become fundamental to our selfhood—and sometimes by our own design.

Elena Ferrante, who has accomplished what no other writer has been able to do at such blockbuster scale.

In Ferrante’s work, a controllable self emerges through communion with an uncontrollable one.

The Neapolitan novels, which begin with My Brilliant Friend (2011),

Identity, according to Cavarero, is not something that we innately possess and reveal, but something we understand through narratives provided to us by others.

(Audre Lorde had made this argument in 1979, framing difference as something not just to be “merely tolerated,” but a “fund of necessary polarities, between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”)

Difference was not the problem; it was the beginning of the solution. That realization, they decided, would be the foundation of their sense that they were free.

It was as ominous and comforting as a nursery rhyme, this first taste of the way that an open acknowledgment of vice can feel as divinely willed, as spiritual—even more so—than the concealment often required to be good.

The nature of a revelation is that you don’t have to re-experience it; you don’t even have to believe whatever is revealed to hang on to it for as long as you want.

mystics believe that, through attaining states of ecstatic consciousness, a person can achieve union with the divine.

she pursues love as an “absolute emptiness which is also absolute fullness.”

“Decreation,” finally, is a word that comes from Simone Weil—her term for the process of moving toward a love so unadulterated that it makes you leave yourself behind.

Real con men don’t have to ask you for your watch, or your confidence. They act in such a way that you feel lucky to give it to them

The average CEO now makes 271 times the salary of the average American worker, whereas in 1965, the ratio was twenty-to-one.