Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection—this feverish, electric, unlivable hell.

not all men have made women fearful, but yes, all women have experienced fear because of men.

the ideal woman has been whatever she wants to be as long as she manages to act upon the belief that perfecting herself and streamlining her relationship to the world can be a matter of both work and pleasure—of “lifestyle.” The ideal woman steps into a stratum of expensive juices, boutique exercise classes, skin-care routines, and vacations, and thereby happily remains.

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.”

even if I criticize its emptiness; I am complicit no matter what I do.

The Trump administration is so baldly anti-woman that the women within it have been regularly scanned and criticized for their complicity, as well as for their empty references to feminism.

I was afraid of making myself useful through sex and dinner.