Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

Even as women have attempted to use #YesAllWomen and #MeToo to regain control of a narrative, these hashtags have at least partially reified the thing they’re trying to eradicate: the way that womanhood can feel like a story of loss of control. They have made feminist solidarity and shared vulnerability seem inextricable, as if we were incapable of building solidarity around anything else. What we have in common is obviously essential, but it’s the differences between women’s stories—the factors that allow some to survive, and force others under—that illuminate the vectors that lead to a better world. And, because there is no room or requirement in a tweet to add a disclaimer about individual experience, and because hashtags subtly equate disconnected statements in a way that can’t be controlled by those speaking, it has been even easier for #MeToo critics to claim that women must themselves think that going on a bad date is the same as being violently raped.

At one point in The Presentation of Self, Goffman writes that the audience’s way of shaping a role for the performer can become more elaborate than the performance itself. This is what the online expression of solidarity sometimes feels like—a manner of listening so extreme and performative that it often turns into the show.

In front of the timeline, as many critics have noted, we exhibit classic reward-seeking lab-rat behavior, the sort that’s observed when lab rats are put in front of an unpredictable food dispenser. Rats will eventually stop pressing the lever if their device dispenses food regularly or not at all. But if the lever’s rewards are rare and irregular, the rats will never stop pressing it. In other words, it is essential that social media is mostly unsatisfying. That is what keeps us scrolling, scrolling, pressing our lever over and over in the hopes of getting some fleeting sensation—some momentary rush of recognition, flattery, or rage.

There was no limit to the amount of misfortune a person could take in via the internet, I wrote, and there was no way to calibrate this information correctly—no guidebook for how to expand our hearts to accommodate these simultaneous scales of human experience, no way to teach ourselves to separate the banal from the profound. The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us. I had started to feel that the internet would only ever induce this cycle of heartbreak and hardening—a hyper-engagement that would make less sense every day.

The ideal chopped-salad customer is himself efficient: he needs to eat his twelve-dollar salad in ten minutes because he needs the extra time to keep functioning within the job that allows him to afford a regular twelve-dollar salad in the first place. He feels a physical need for this twelve-dollar salad, as it’s the most reliable and convenient way to build up a vitamin barrier against the general malfunction that comes with his salad-requiring-and-enabling job.

Widdows argues, the fact of choice does not “make an unjust or exploitative practice or act, somehow, magically, just or non-exploitative.” The timidity in mainstream feminism to admit that women’s choices—not just our problems—are, in the end, political has led to a vision of “women’s empowerment” that often feels brutally disempowering in the end.

The root of this trouble is the fact that mainstream feminism has had to conform to patriarchy and capitalism to become mainstream in the first place. Old requirements, instead of being overthrown, are rebranded. Beauty work is labeled “self-care” to make it sound progressive. In 2017, Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote a story for The New York Times Magazine about the new vocabulary of weight loss, noting the way women’s magazines replaced cover lines like “Get lean! Control your eating!” with “Be your healthiest! GET STRONG!” People started “fasting and eating clean and cleansing and making lifestyle changes,” Brodesser-Akner wrote, “which, by all available evidence, is exactly like dieting.” It sometimes seems that feminism can imagine no more satisfying progress than this current situation—one in which, instead of being counseled by mid-century magazines to spend time and money trying to be more radiant for our husbands, we can now counsel one another to do all the same things but for ourselves.

We can decode social priorities through looking at what’s most commonly eroticized: male power and female submission, male violence and female pain. The most generically sexual images of women involve silence, performance, and artificiality: traits that leave male power intact, or strengthened, by draining women’s energy and wasting our time.

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.

And surely part of what I love about childhood literary heroines is the way they remind me of that bygone stretch of real innocence—the ability to experience myself however I wanted to; the long heavenly summers spent reading books on the floor, trapped in a slice of burning Texas daylight; the time when I, already a complicated female character, wouldn’t hear the phrase “complicated female character” for years. Those girls are all so brave, where adult heroines are all so bitter, and I so strongly dislike what has become clear since childhood: the facts of visibility and exclusion in these stories, and the way bravery and bitterness get so concentrated in literature, for women, because there’s not enough space for them in the real world.

Childhood heroines aren’t always fearless, but they are intrinsically resilient. The stories are episodic rather than accumulative, and so sadness and fear are rooms to be passed through, existing alongside mishap and indulgence and joy.

After her suicide attempt, a doctor chides her: she isn’t old enough to understand how bad life really gets, he says. “Obviously, Doctor,” says Cecilia, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”

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, when models of female happiness have always tended to benefit men and economically handicap women (and are still, as with the term “girlboss,” often defined in reference to male power even when theorized in an ostensibly emancipatory way). But even when women get married, look beautiful, have children, et cetera, they are still often found deficient, Solnit writes, launching into an unforgettable sentence: “There is no good answer to being a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.”

The struggle and correspondence between the two friends—the mirroring, the deviation, the contradiction, the cleaving, all enacted simultaneously—reflects, more precisely than anything I have ever encountered, the negotiations between various forms of female authority, which themselves negotiate a structure of male authority. Lenu and Lila enact the endlessly interweaving relationship between the heroines we read about, the heroines we might have been, the heroines we are.

In Sexual Difference, the Milan women write about a disagreement they had while discussing Jane Austen, during which one woman said, flatly, “We are not all equal here.” The statement “had a horrible sound, in the literal sense of the term: sour, hard, stinging,” the women wrote. But “it did not take long to accept what for years we had never registered….We were not equal, we had never been equal, and we immediately discovered that we had no reason to think we were.” 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.

I cling to the Milan women’s understanding of these literary heroines as mothers. I wish I had learned to read them in this way years ago—with the same complicated, ambivalent, essential freedom that a daughter feels when she looks at her mother, understanding her as a figure that she simultaneously resists and depends on; a figure that she uses, cruelly and lovingly and gratefully, as the base from which to become something more.

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.

A politics built around getting and spending money is sexier than a politics built around politics. And so, at a time of unprecedented freedom and power for women, at a time when we were more poised than ever to understand our lives politically, 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.” (In 2017, Dior sold a “We Should All Be Feminists” shirt for $710.)

As wealth continues to flow upward, as Americans are increasingly shut out of their own democracy, as political action is constrained into online spectacle, 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.

“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.”

Women’s bodies have always been test sites upon which governing hierarchies are broken down and reiterated.

I’ve begun to think that there is no room for writing about sexual assault that relies on any sense of anomaly. 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.

I was twenty-one, and I was trying my hardest to be permeable, to be alive to other people’s suffering, but I didn’t know how to stop being permeable when it was pointless, when it was ultimately narcissistic, when it did no good. I felt, monstrously, that there was no boundary between my situation and the larger situation, between my tiny injustices and the injustices everyone faced.

There is a blanket, untested assumption, in feminist celebrity analysis, that the freedom we grant famous women will trickle down to us. Beneath this assumption is another one—that the ultimate goal of this conversation is empowerment. But the difficult-woman discourse often seems to be leading somewhere else. Feminists have, to a significant degree, dismantled and rejected the traditional male definition of exemplary womanhood: the idea that women must be sweet, demure, controllable, and free of normal human flaws. But 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 own complicated terms.

It occurs to me that I crave independence, that I demand and expect it, but never enough, since I was a teenager, to actually be alone. It’s possible that, just as marriage conceals its true nature through the elaborate ritual of the wedding, I have been staging this entire production to hide from myself some reality about my life. If I object to the wife’s diminishment for the same reason that I object to the bride’s glorification, maybe this reason is much simpler and more obvious than I’ve imagined: I don’t want to be diminished, and I do want to be glorified—not in one shining moment, but whenever I want.