Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

“Obviously, Doctor,” says Cecilia, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”

If the childhood heroine accepts the future from a comfortable distance, and if the adolescent is blindly thrust toward it by forces beyond her control, the adult heroine lives within this long-anticipated future and finds it dismal, bitter, and disappointing. Her situation is generally one of premature and artificial finality, in which getting married and having children has prevented her from living the life she wants.

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. Their stories circle questions of love and obligation—love

The Repentagon trained me to feel at ease in odd, insular, extreme environments, a skill I wouldn’t give up for anything, and Christianity formed my deepest instincts. It gave me a leftist worldview: a desire to follow leaders who feel themselves inseparable from the hungry, the imprisoned, and the sick. Years of auditing my own conduct in prayer gave me an obsession with everyday morality. And Christian theology convinced me that I had been born in a compromised situation. It made me want to investigate my own ideas about what it means to be good.

I read the Gospel to be constantly preaching economic redistribution—John the Baptist commands, in the book of Luke, “Let him who has two tunics share with him who has none,” et cetera—but everyone around me seemed mainly to believe in low taxes and the unconditional righteousness of war.

abstinence education led to abortions, for rich people, and for poor people to children who would be loved and supported until the day they were born.

One year, a troupe of Christian bodybuilders regularly appeared at chapel to rip apart phone books as a demonstration of the strength we could acquire through Jesus. At Halloween, the church put on a “Judgment House,” a walk-through haunted-house play in which the main character drank beer at a party and then kept sinning and wound up in hell.

Like many people before me, I found religion and drugs appealing for similar reasons. (You require absolution, complete abandonment, I wrote, praying to God my junior year.) Both provide a path toward transcendence—a way of accessing an extrahuman world of rapture and pardon that, in both cases, is as real as it feels.

On Screwtape’s terms, the fact that everything feels like God to me ensured that I would not remain a Christian. Church never felt much more like virtue than drugs did, and drugs never felt much more sinful than church.

“In this pleasure I was filled with eternal certainty….This feeling was so joyful to me and so full of goodness that I felt completely peaceful, easy and at rest, as though there were nothing on earth that could hurt me.” The high is then followed by a comedown: “This only lasted for a while, and then my feeling was reversed and I was left oppressed, weary of myself, and so disgusted with my life that I could hardly bear to live.”

Aeon,

Erowid,

exceptional presence—a vibrancy and change of color, an expansive quality rather than a fearful, contracted quality—and with a beaming sort of aura. I felt expansive, physically exhausted but full of love and a deep feeling of peace.”

Another subject identifies the drug as a religious pathway to “allow, invite, surrender God into my own body.”

The attainment of chemical ecstasy—empathogenesis—occurs in stages. The drug

first places the attention on the self, stripping away the user’s inhibitions. Second, it prompts the user to recognize and value the emotional states of others. Finally, it makes the user’s well-being feel inseparable from the well-being of the group.

Ecstasy is in no way a casual drug, but if the substance was legal, its death rate would be dwarfed by that of tobacco or alcohol.)

But still, each time, it can feel like divinity. It can make you feel healed and religious; it can make you feel dangerously wild.

This is what it feels like to be a child of Jesus,

in a dark chapel, with stained-glass diamonds floating on the skin of all the people kneeling around you. This is what it feels like to be twenty-two, nearly naked, your hair blowing in the wind as the pink twilight expands into permanence, your body still holding the warmth of the day. You were made to be here. You are depraved, insignificant; you are measureless, and you will never not be redeemed.

once you got the message, as they put it, you could hang up the phone. You would be better for having listened. You would be changed. They don’t say this about religion, but they should.

The first time I did mushrooms, I felt perfect and convicted and rescued, like someone had just told me I was going to heaven. I walked down a beach and everything coalesced with the cheesy, psychotic

logic of “Footprints in the Sand.” The first time I did acid, I saw God again immediately—the trees and clouds around me blazing with presence, like Moses’s burning bush. Completely out of my mind, I wrote on a napkin, “I can process nothing right now that does not terminate in God’s presence—this revelation I seem ready to have forever in degraded forms.”

“The situations in my life when I have been sympathetic to desperation are the situations when I have felt sure I was encountering God.”

What began as a way for Zuckerberg to harness collegiate misogyny and self-interest has become the fuel for our whole contemporary nightmare, for a world that fundamentally and systematically misrepresents human needs.

We see the dismantling of workplace protections in a celebratory blog post about a Lyft driver who continued to pick up passengers while she was in labor. We see the madness of privatized healthcare in the forced positivity of a stranger’s chemotherapy GoFundMe campaign. On Facebook, our basic humanity is reframed as an exploitable viral asset. Our social potential is compressed to our ability to command public attention, which is then made inextricable from economic survival.

Now children are going viral on TikTok; gamers make millions streaming their lives on Twitch. The two most prominent families in politics and culture—the Trumps and the Kardashians—have risen to the top of the food chain because of their keen understanding of how little substance is required to package the self as an endlessly monetizable asset.

most people still find false accusation much more abhorrent than rape.

In the Bible, Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce Joseph, who has been enslaved by her rich husband, and cries rape after Joseph resists her advance. In Greek mythology, Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, does the same to Hippolytus. These stories, and the many others like them, are framed as obscene anomalies. Rape itself, though, is sanctioned in the same texts. In Numbers, Moses commands his army to kill all the men and the nonvirgin women, and save all the virgin women for themselves. In

Greek myth, Zeus rapes Antiope, Demeter, Europa, and Leda. Poseidon rapes Medusa. Hades rapes Persephone. For centuries, rape was viewed as a crime against property, and offenders were often punished by the imposition of a fine, payable to the victim’s father or husband. Until the 1980s, most rape laws in America specified that husbands could not be charged with raping their wives. Rape, until very recently, was presented as a norm.

January 2015,

Sally Hemings was thirty years younger than Jefferson, and she was an infant when she became his property, courtesy of his wife, Martha. Hemings was Martha’s slave, and her half sister; she was three quarters white. When she was fourteen, she was put in charge of one of Jefferson’s daughters on an overseas voyage. Jefferson met them in Paris, and by the time he left, Hemings was sixteen and pregnant. (At the time, the

age of consent in Virginia was ten.) Hemings considered staying in Paris, where the French freedom principle had emancipated her by default. But, according to her son Madison, Jefferson persuaded her to return by promising her “extraordinary privileges,” and assuring her that he would free her children once they turned twenty-one.

No crime is confounding and punitive the way rape is. No other violent offense comes with a built-in alibi that can instantly exonerate the criminal and place responsibility on the victim. 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.

even the suggestion that I was making something out of nothing made me wonder if I was, in fact, making something out of nothing. I started wanting things to happen to me, as if to prove to myself that I wasn’t crazy, wasn’t hallucinating.

“By what means, but by screaming, knocking, and rioting, did men themselves ever gain what they were pleased to call their rights?”

In a chapter about Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, and Marilyn Monroe, Doyle writes, “By dying, a trainwreck finally gives us the one statement we wanted to hear from her: that women like her really can’t make it, and shouldn’t be encouraged to try.”

So many things are deemed unruly in women that a woman can seem unruly for simply existing without shame in her body—just for following her desires, no matter whether

those desires are liberatory or compromising, or, more likely, a combination of the two. A woman is unruly if anyone has incorrectly decided that she’s too much of something, and if she, in turn, has chosen to believe that she’s just fine.

Today, Instagram encourages people to treat life itself like a wedding—like a production engineered to be witnessed and admired by an audience.

Brides recommends that its affianced readers take healing naps in salt chambers and cleanse themselves with crystals. Martha Stewart Weddings prices out a fireworks show at your reception ($5,000 for three to seven minutes). The Knot recommends underarm Botox ($1,500 per session). A friend of mine was recently quoted $27,000 for a single day of wedding photography. There are social media consultants for weddings; there are “bridal boot camp” fitness programs all over the nation; there is a growing industry for highly staged, professionally photographed engagements. One day these will probably seem traditional, too.

I fantasized about being Belle, swinging around ladders in the library; Ariel, swimming around the deep ocean with a fork; Jasmine, alone in the starlight with her phenomenal tiger; Cinderella, getting a makeover from the mice and the birds.

“the green plaid taffeta, frothing with flounces and each flounce edged in green velvet ribbon,” because, relatably, there was “unmistakably a grease spot on the basque.”

“In part, that’s because when we delay marriage, it’s not just women who become independent,” Rebecca Traister writes in All the Single Ladies. “It’s also men, who, like women, learn to clothe and

feed themselves, to clean their homes and iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases.”