Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

There’s a phenomenon, Weigel noted, called “enclothed cognition,” in which clothes that come with cultural scripts can actually alter cognitive function. In one experiment, test subjects were given white coats to wear. If they were told it was a lab coat, they became more attentive. If they were told it was a painter’s coat, they became less attentive. They felt like the person their clothes said they were.

Frowning, I went online and bought a $98 “Haute Contour® High-Waisted Thong.” It arrived a few days later, and I tried it on with the dress: I couldn’t breathe properly, I immediately started sweating, and everything looked even worse. “What the fuck,” I said, staring at my reflection. I looked like a bad imitation of a woman whose most deeply held personal goal was to look hot in pictures. And of course, in that moment, in a $98 punishment thong and a dress designed for an Instagram model, that’s exactly what I was.

Susan G. Cole wrote that the best way to instill social values is to eroticize them.

with the president attaching his dominance politics to a repulsive projection of sexual ownership—over

over passive models, random women, even...

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.

And I remain extremely suspicious of our old friend barre.

Barre is a bizarrely and clinically eroticized experience.

But there’s an aspect to a barre class that actually resembles porn, specifically a casting-couch video.

Your instructor is the third party, a hot woman who tells you to switch positions every thirty seconds and keep your legs over your head. She squeaks, coyly, “Yes, right there, dig into it, I like seeing those legs shake—now it’s really getting juicy—that’s it, you look so-o-o good, you look a-ma-zing, yes!!!!!!” She reminds you that when it hurts, that’s when it’s about to feel good.

It’s as if barre picks up two opposite ends of the spectrum of female sexual expression: one porny and performative, the other repressed.

The expense is important, and does a lot to perpetuate the fetish. We pay too much for the things we think are precious, but we also start to believe things are precious if someone makes us pay too much.

This mechanism is clearest in the wedding industry,

Athleisure, by nature, also eroticizes capital. Much like stripper gear, athleisure frames the female body as a financial asset:

The internet codifies this problem, makes it inescapable; in recent years, pop culture has started to reflect the fractures in selfhood that social media creates.

Not coincidentally, these stories usually center on women, and usually involve a protagonist driven to insanity by the digital avatar of an ideal peer.

There is an exaggerated binary fatalism to these stories, in which women are either successes or failures, always one or the other—and a sense of inescapability that rings more true to life.

The anti-Instagram statement is now a predictable part of the model/influencer social media life cycle: a beautiful young woman who goes to great pains to maintain and perform her own beauty for an audience will eventually post a note on Instagram revealing that Instagram has become a bottomless pit of personal insecurity and anxiety. She’ll take a weeklong break from the social network, and then, almost always, she will go on exactly as before.

Resistance to a system is presented on the terms of the system.

The realm of what is possible for women has been exponentially expanding in all beauty-related capacities—think of the extended Kardashian experiments in body modification, or the young models whose plastic surgeons have given them entirely new faces—and remained stagnant in many other ways. We still know surprisingly little about, say, hormonal birth control pills, and why they make so many of the one hundred million women around the world who take them feel awful. We have not “optimized” our wages, our childcare system, our political representation; we still hardly even think of parity as realistic in those arenas, let alone anything approaching perfection. We have maximized our capacity as market assets. That’s all.

It’s possible if we want it. But what do we want? What would you want—what desires, what forms of insubordination, would you be able to access—if you had succeeded in becoming an ideal woman, gratified and beloved, proof of the efficiency of a system that magnifies and diminishes you every day?

naïve? In children’s literature, young female characters are self-evidently important, and their traumas, whatever they may be, are secondary. In adult fiction, if a girl is important to the narrative, trauma often comes first. Girls are raped, over and over, to drive the narrative of adult fiction—as in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), or V. C. Andrews’s My Sweet Audrina (1982), or John Grisham’s A Time to Kill (1989), or Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), or Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), or Stephen King’s The Green Mile (1996), or Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), or Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), or Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! (2011), or Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling (2017).

She describes the definitive thrill and sorrow of female adolescence—the realization that your body, and what people will demand of it, will determine your adult life.

In the best-known romance series, the future’s opacity (and subsequent inevitability) is a matter of the heroine’s personality—these girls are as passive and blank as tofu, waiting to take on the pungency of someone else’s life.

commercial fiction: in a sense, they’re the same character, as E. L. James wrote Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) as fan fiction after Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005). Bella and Anastasia are both so paper-doll-like that they can barely make choices; they

We know what that one way looks like: marriage, motherhood, grace, industriousness, mandatory bliss. Prescriptions about female behavior, Solnit notes, are often disingenuously expressed in terms of happiness—as

“We are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives,” she writes. “We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower—and wither—all around us.”

“We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home,’ ” Friedan wrote.

Why all the affairs? De Beauvoir, who famously stated that “most women are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not being,” writes that “there is a hoax in marriage, since, while being supposed to socialize eroticism, it succeeds only in killing it.”

Traditionally, male literary characters are written and received as emblems of the human condition rather than the male one.

Female literary characters, in contrast, indicate the condition of being a woman.

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. Ecstasy The church I grew up in was so big we called it the Repentagon.

Osteen’s children attended my school, which my parents persuaded to accept me within a few months of us moving to Texas—and to place me in first grade, even though I was four years old.

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 violence of Christianity came with great safety: under a pleasing shroud of aesthetic mystery, there were clear prescriptions about who you should be.

Toward the end of elementary school, the impression of wholeness started slipping.

We were told not to watch Disney movies, because Disney World had allowed gay people to host a parade.

In fifth grade, my Rapture-obsessed Bible teacher confiscated my Archie comics and my peace-sign notebook, replacing this heathen paraphernalia with a copy of the brand-new bestseller Left Behind. A girl at our school died by electrocution when a pool light blew out into the water, and the tragedy was deemed the absolute will of the Lord. Around this time, television screens were installed all over campus, and the face of our folksy, robotic pastor bobbed around on them, preaching to no one. At chapel, we were sometimes shown religious agitprop videos, the worst of which featured a handsome dark-haired man bidding his young son farewell in a futuristic white chamber, and then, as violins swelled in the background, walki...

In middle school, I became aware of my ambivalence—just distant enough to be troubled by th...

didn’t want to be a bad person, and I especially didn’t want to spend eternity in hell.

Or maybe Houston just crossed too many of my signals. It wasn’t long until the city’s music permeated even my sheltered environment.

I was thirteen, at cheerleading camp, where we got measured for navy bell skirts with high slits that barely cleared our underwear, which we were required to wear on football game days to our modesty-preaching Christian school.

Some nights I went with my girlfriends to youth group and sang about Jesus, and sometimes I would go with them to the club on teen night, driving past the Repentagon into the thicket of liquor stores and strip clubs a mile up on Westheimer, entering another dark room where all the girls wore miniskirts and everyone sought amnesty in a different form. Sometimes a foam machine would open up in the ceiling and soak our cheap push-up bras, and we’d glue ourselves to strangers as everyone chewed on the big mouthfuls of Swishahouse in the room.

I have been walking away from institutional religion for a

dismantling what the first fifteen built. But I’ve always been glad that I grew up the way I did.

It gave me a leftist worldview: a desire to follow leaders who feel themselves inseparable from the hungry, the imprisoned, and the sick.

made me want to investigate my own ideas about what it means to be good.

I lost interest in trying to reconcile big-tent Southern evangelicalism with my burgeoning political beliefs.

“some kind of religion that is basically godless.” In 2019, the Houston Chronicle published an investigation into seven hundred sexual assault cases at Southern Baptist churches over the previous two decades.

Public demonstrations of faith often doubled as performances of superiority and dominance.