Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

In writing this I’ve started to wonder if, through refusing to identify with the heroine, I have actually entrusted myself to her—if, by prioritizing the differences between us, as the Milan women did with one another, I have been able to affirm my own identity, and perhaps hers, too.

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.

Back then, believing in God felt mostly unremarkable, sometimes interesting, and occasionally like a private, perfect thrill. Good and evil is organized so neatly for you in both childhood and Christianity.

The city is less than an hour from the Gulf Coast, with the alien-civilization oil refineries of Port Arthur and the ghost piers that rise out of Galveston’s dirty water,

For decades, Houston’s government placed its garbage dumps in black neighborhoods, many of which bordered downtown.

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.

I don’t know if I’m after truth or hanging on to its dwindling half-life. I might only be hoping to remember that my ecstatic disposition is the source of the good in me—spontaneity, devotion, sweetness—and the worst things, too: heedlessness, blankness, equivocation.

There are some institutions—drugs, church, and money—that aligned the superstructure of white wealth in Houston with the heart of black and brown culture beneath it. There are feelings, like ecstasy, that provide an unbreakable link between virtue and vice. You don’t have to believe a revelation to hold on to it,

The internet snorted each dispatch from Great Exuma like a line of medical-grade schadenfreude.

But even when Facebook isn’t deliberately exploiting its users, it is exploiting its users—its business model requires it. Even if you distance yourself from Facebook, you still live in the world that Facebook is shaping.

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

ineligible for criticism through its self-aware membership, savvy branding, and stated commitments to inclusion, community, and safe space.

The problem is that a feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective.

The blatant scammers make scamming seem simultaneously glorious and unsustainable. (In reality, the truly effective ones, like the prophets of the anti-vaccination movement, can keep going indefinitely, even after they get caught.)

Amazon is an octopus: nimble, fluid, tentacled, brilliant, poisonous, appealing, flexible enough to squeeze enormous bulk through tiny loopholes. Amazon has chewed up brick-and-mortar retail: an estimated 8,600 stores closed in 2017, a significant increase from the 6,200 stores that closed in 2008, at the peak of the recession. The company has decimated office-supply stores, toy stores, electronics stores, and sporting goods stores, and now that it owns Whole Foods, grocery stores will likely be next.

Books also gave Bezos a way to track the habits of “affluent, educated shoppers,”

To use Amazon—which I did regularly for years, with full knowledge of its labor practices—is to accept and embrace a world in which everything is worth as little as possible, even, and maybe particularly, people.

Until the company became a target of sustained criticism for its labor practices, in no small part due to a series of worker strikes, Amazon warehouses were often unheated in winter and sweltering in summer: during one heat wave in Pennsylvania, rather than bring in AC units, Amazon chose the more cost-efficient solution of parking ambulances outside the doors to collect the people who collapsed. Exhausted workers sometimes passed out on the warehouse floor, and were fired. It’s because of this approach—treating everything, including labor, as maximally disposable—that Amazon has been so successful; it was like Walmart, except beloved even by the wealthy, in large part because the degraded conditions that the company both created and depended on were conveniently concealed behind computer screens.

“If you have enough money and can make the right phone call, you can disregard whatever rules are in place and then use that as a way of getting PR.”

In his 1987 ghostwritten business book The Art of the Deal, Trump—surrounded then, as now, with an aura of cheap skyscraper glitz—coined the phrase “truthful hyperbole,” which he called a “very effective form of promotion.”

(This was a condition of filming at a Trump hotel: you were required to write him a walk-on part.)

But Trump’s con artistry runs much deeper than false advertising. He has always wrung out his profits through exploitation and abuse. In the seventies, he was sued by Richard Nixon’s Department of Justice after crafting policies to keep black people out of his housing projects. In 1980, he hired two hundred undocumented Polish immigrants to clear the ground for Trump Tower, putting them to work without gloves or hard hats, and sometimes having them sleep on-site. In 1981, he bought a building on Central Park South, hoping to convert rent-controlled apartments into luxury condos; when the tenants wouldn’t leave, he issued illegal eviction notices, cut off their heat and hot water, and placed newspaper ads offering to house the homeless in the building. He has a long history of stiffing his waiters, his construction workers, his plumbers, his chauffeurs. He once rented out his name to a couple of scammers named Irene and Mike Milin, who ran the Trump Institute, a “wealth-creation workshop” that plagiarized its materials and declared bankruptcy in 2008. He spent tens of thousands of dollars buying his own books to inflate sales numbers. His charitable foundation, which has given almost no money to charity, has repeatedly been found in violation of laws against self-dealing. The approach is hideous even when rendered in miniature: in 1997, Trump played principal for the day at a Bronx elementary school where the chess team was trying to raise $5,000 to go to a tournament. Afte...

There had been several high-profile news stories about college assault and harassment. In 2010, Yale suspended the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon for five years after their pledges chanted “No means yes, yes means anal!” in front of the school’s Women’s Center. In 2014, Emma Sulkowicz started carrying their mattress across Columbia’s campus in protest of the administration finding their alleged rapist not responsible. (They continued carrying the mattress until graduation.) In 2015, two Vanderbilt football players were found guilty of raping an unconscious woman. The struggle to adjudicate campus rape was nationwide news. The Rolling Stone article went viral within an hour of being posted, and would end up being the most-read non-celebrity story in the magazine’s history.

But they had not corroborated her story, or supported it the way a journalist should have been obligated to—the way that walls support a house.

“Were you being sincere, then, when you wrote those words? Did you believe that statement when you wrote it?” the lawyer asks. Erdely says yes. But the choice is not always between being sincere and untruthful. It’s possible to be both: it’s possible to be sincere and deluded. It’s possible—it’s very easy, in some cases—to believe a statement, a story, that’s a lie.

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

In his 2009 history of white fraternities, The Company He Keeps, Nicholas Syrett writes, “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.”

Syrett writes that fraternity men prove their heterosexuality through “aggressive homophobia and the denigration of women”—through using homoerotic hazing rituals to humiliate one another, and through framing sex with women as something engaged in “for one’s brothers, for communal consumption by them.”

In 1971, William Inge wrote a novel called My Son Is a Splendid Driver, based on his experience in a University of Kansas frat in the twenties. The characters go on dates with sorority girls, take them home, and then go back out to solicit sex from prostitutes. One night they participate in a “gang-bang” in the frat basement. “I felt that to have refused,” the narrator thinks, “would have cast doubts upon my masculinity, an uncertain thing at best, I feared, that daren’t hide from any challenge.” The woman at the center of the event yells, resigned and aggressive, “Well, go on and fuck me….That’s what I’m here for.”

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. 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.

The reframing of female difficulty as an asset rather than a liability is the result of decades and decades of feminist thought coming to bear—suddenly, floridly, and very persuasively—in the open ideological space of the internet.

Britney Spears, initially glossed as a vapid, oversexed ingénue-turned-psycho, now seems perfectly sympathetic: the public required her to be seductive, innocent, flawless, and bankable, and she crumbled under the impossibility of these competing demands. In life, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston were often depicted as strung-out monsters; in death, they are understood to have been geniuses all along. Monica Lewinsky wasn’t a dumb slut, she was an ordinary twentysomething caught in an exploitative affair with the most powerful boss in America. Hillary Clinton wasn’t a shrill charisma vacuum incapable of winning the trust of ordinary people, but rather an overqualified public servant whose ambitions were thwarted by her opponents’ bigotry and rage.

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

liberation is often mistaken for evil as it occurs.

Rewriting a woman’s story inevitably means engaging with the male rules that previously defined it. To argue against an ideology, you have to acknowledge and articulate it. In the process, you might inadvertently ventriloquize your opposition. This is a problem that kneecaps me constantly, a problem that might define journalism in the Trump era: when you write against something, you lend it strength and space and time.

women who become famous for pushing social boundaries do the work of demonstrating how outdated these boundaries are. But what happens once it becomes common knowledge that these boundaries are outdated? We’ve come into a new era, in which feminism isn’t always the antidote to conventional wisdom; feminism is suddenly conventional wisdom in many spheres.

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.

kakistocratic

lifestyle bloggers, beauty and wellness types, generic influencers with long Instagram captions and predictable tastes. These women are so incredibly successful that 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.

We have a situation in which women reject conventional femininity in the interest of liberation, and then find themselves alternately despising and craving it—the pattern at work in Massey’s spiritual journey away from Gwyneth and then back to her, as well as in the message-board communities where random lifestyle bloggers are picked apart.

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.

similarly suspicious: despite the prevailing liberalism of Hollywood, the values of celebrity—visibility, performance, aspiration, extreme physical beauty—promote an approach to womanhood that relies on individual exceptionalism in an inherently conservative way.)

But it doesn’t seem coincidental that a president who has married three models, was averse to his first wife’s professional ambitions, and is upsettingly proud of his daughter’s good looks picked a young, beautiful, conventionally socialized woman to be his favored aide. Of course, Hicks was hardworking, and had legitimate political instincts and abilities. But with Trump, a woman’s looks and comportment are inseparable from her abilities. To him, Hicks’s beauty and silence would have translated as rare skills.

I felt as if a feminist praxis was turning to acid and eating through the floor. 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. Instead, to the great benefit of people like Ivanka, we’ve been adjudicating inequality through cultural criticism. We have taught people who don’t even care about feminism how to do this—how to analyze women and analyze the way people react to women, how to endlessly read and interpret the signs.

Clinton’s loss, which I will mourn forever, might reiterate the importance of making space for the difficult woman. It might also point toward the way that valuing a woman for her difficulty can, in ways that are unexpectedly destructive, obscure her actual, particular self. Feminist discourse has yet to fully catch up to the truth that sexism is so much more mundane than the celebrities who have been high-profile test cases for it. Sexism rears its head no matter who a woman is, no matter what her desires and ethics might be. And a woman doesn’t have to be a feminist icon to resist it—she can just be self-interested, which is not always the same thing.

the whole thing is just transparently ridiculous, starting from the idea that a man just proposes to a woman and she’s supposed to be just lying in wait for the moment he decides he’s ready to commit to a situation where he statistically benefits and she statistically becomes less happy than she would be if she was single, and then she’s the one who has to wear this tacky ring to signify male ownership, and she’s supposed to be excited about it, this new life where doubt becomes this thing you’re supposed to experience in private and certainty becomes the default affect for the entire rest of your life…”

The white wedding dress didn’t become popular until 1840, when twenty-year-old Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, her cousin, in a formal white gown trimmed with orange blossoms. The event was not photographed—fourteen years later, after the appropriate technology had developed, Victoria and Albert would pose for a reenactment wedding portrait—but British newspapers provided lengthy descriptions of Victoria’s wedding crinolines, her satin slippers, her sapphire brooch, her golden carriage, and her three-hundred-pound wedding cake. The symbolic link between “bride” and “royalty” was forged with Victoria, and would eventually intensify into the idea of a wedding as “a sort of Everywoman’s coronation,” as Holly Brubach wrote in The New Yorker in 1989.

In All Dressed in White: The Irresistible Rise of the American Wedding, Carol Wallace writes that “a white dress in pristine condition implied its wearer’s employment of an expert laundress, seamstress, and ladies’ maid.”