Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

by Jia Tolentino

Our social potential is compressed to our ability to command public attention, which is then made inextricable from economic survival.

Facebook has solidified the idea that selfhood exists in the shape of a well-performing public avatar.

we got, instead of expanded reproductive protections and equal pay and federally mandated family leave and subsidized childcare and a higher minimum wage, the sort of self-congratulatory empowerment feminism that corporations can get behind, the kind that comes with merchandise—mugs that said “Male Tears,” T-shirts that said “Feminist as Fuck.”

We got, instead of the structural supports and safety nets that would actually make women feel better on a systematic basis, a bottomless cornucopia of privatized nonsolutions: face serums, infrared saunas, wellness gurus

to get through it without routinely descending into an emotional abyss—a person’s best strategy is to think mostly of himself, herself.

I have felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional—to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.

People are so busy just trying to get back to zero, or trying to build up a buffer against disaster, or trying to enjoy themselves, because there’s so little else to count on

“Fraternities attract men who value other men more than women. The intimacy that develops within fraternal circles between men who care for each other necessitates a vigorous performance of heterosexuality in order to combat the appearance of homosexuality.”

fraternity men prove their heterosexuality through “aggressive homophobia and the denigration of women”

The fraternity environment doesn’t create rapists as much as it perfectly obscures them: every weekend is organized around men giving women alcohol, everyone getting as drunk as possible, hookups as the performative end goal, and a lockable bedroom only a handful of steps away.

there is no primordial wellspring of masculine violence that forces wolf boys to kill or frat boys to rape.

Institutions, by definition, are not natural or primal. They are not what just happens when you let boys be boys. They are created and sustained for a reason. They do work.

Rape is an inescapable function of a world that has been designed to give men a maximal amount of lawless freedom, she argues.

It “cannot, logically, be just a vile anomaly in an ethical system otherwise ...

“There is, as yet, nothing and no one to make us know [the injustice of rape], nothing to make it public knowledge, knowledge that we all share and that we all acknowledge that we share. To create that kind of knowledge, you must have more power than whatever forces are working to maintain oblivion.”

(Spousal rape was not criminalized in Virginia until 2002,

Kafkaesque Title IX

??

There is no glorified interpersonal behavior that can be used to explain robbery or murder the way that sex can be used to explain rape.

The best-case scenario for a rape victim in terms of adjudication is the worst-case scenario in terms of experience: for people to believe you deserve justice, you have to be destroyed. The fact that feminism is ascendant and accepted does not change this.

The truth about rape is that it’s not exceptional. It’s not anomalous. And there is no way to make that into a satisfying story.

Analyzing sexism through female celebrities is a catnip pedagogical method: it takes a beloved cultural pastime (calculating the exact worth of a woman) and lends it progressive political import.

Women were able to articulate facts that often previously went unspoken: that entering a relationship with someone doesn’t preclude being victimized by them, but sometimes follows it,

From the biblical perspective, these women are cautionary tales. From the feminist one, they demonstrate the limits of a moral standard that requires women to be subservient.

Women claiming the power and agency that historically belonged to men is both the story of female evil and the story of female liberation.

The suffragettes were written about as if they were wild animals,

In 1906, the Daily Mirror wrote in sympathy: “By what means, but by screaming, knocking, and rioting, did men themselves ever gain what they were pleased to call their rights?”

women have to slog through so many obstacles to become successful that their success is forever refracted through those obstacles.

Attention is in many respects constrictive.

There is a blanket, untested assumption, in feminist celebrity analysis, that the freedom we grant famous women will trickle down to us.

if men placed women on pedestals and delighted in watching them fall down, feminism has so far mostly succeeded in reversing the order of operations—taking toppled-over women and re-idolizing them.

Famous women are still constantly tested against the idea that they should be maximally appealing, even if that appeal now involves “difficult” qualities.

Feminists are still looking for idols—just ones who are idolized on our ...

unruly women “compete against a far more palatable—and, in many cases, more successful—form of femininity: the lifestyle supermom.”

a sort of countervailing feminist distaste for them has arisen—a displeasure at the lack of unruliness, at the disappointment of watching women adhere to the most predictable guidelines of what a woman should be.

The freedom I want is located in a world where we wouldn’t need to love women, or even monitor our feelings about women as meaningful—in which we wouldn’t need to parse the contours of female worth and liberation by paying meticulous personal attention to any of this at all.

womanhood has been denied depth and meaning for so long that every inch of it is now almost impossibly freighted. Where female difficulty once seemed perverse, the refusal of difficulty now seems perverse.

We can analyze difficult women from the traditional point of view and find them controversial, and we can analyze bland women from the feminist point of view and find them controversial, too.

We have a situation in which women reject conventional femininity in the interest of liberation, and then find themselves a...

Feminists have worked so hard, with such good intentions, to justify female difficulty that the concept has ballooned to something all-encompassing: a blanket defense, an automatic celebration, a tarp of self-delusion that can cover up any sin.

hagiography.

The pattern—woman is criticized for something related to her being a woman; her continued existence is interpreted as politically meaningful—is so ridiculously loose that almost anything can fit inside it.

Misogyny insists that a woman’s appearance is of paramount value; these dogged, hyper-focused critiques of misogyny can have an identical effect.

wunderkind,

The idea—impeccable in the abstract—was that we could and should critique Hicks without invoking patriarchy. But women are shaped by patriarchy:

factotum,”

discursive

ouroboros

feckless

praxis

It’s as if what’s signified—sexism itself—has remained so intractable that we’ve mostly given up on rooting out its actual workings.