Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

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.

But I know how easily anger is displaced on this particular topic. I know that what I really resent is sexual violence itself. I resent the boys who never thought for a second that they were doing anything wrong. I resent the men they’ve become, the power they’ve amassed through subordination, the self-interrogation they ostentatiously hold at bay. I hate the dirty river I’m standing in, not the journalist and the college student who capsized in it.

Where it was once standard to call any unmanageable woman crazy or abrasive, “crazy” and “abrasive” now scan as sexist dog whistles.

Slut-shaming went from a popular practice in the early 2000s to a what-not-to-do buzzword in the late 2000s to a hard cultural taboo by 2018.

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.

Monica Lewinsky wasn’t a dumb slut, she was an ordinary twentysomething caught in an exploitative affair with the most powerful boss in America.

It’s also a personal matter, because when we reclaim the stories that surround female celebrities, stories surrounding ordinary women are reclaimed, too.

Every woman faces backlash and criticism. Extraordinary women face a lot of it.

I have wondered if we’re entering a period in which the line between valuing a woman in the face of mistreatment and valuing her because of that mistreatment is blurring; if the legitimate need to defend women from unfair criticism has morphed into an illegitimate need to defend women from criticism categorically; if

To work for the latter, you have to be willing to invoke the former: 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.

a problem that might define journalism in the Trump era: when you write against something, you lend it strength and space and time.

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.

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.

In other words, just like the difficult women, the lifestyle types fall short of an ideal. They, too, are admired and hated simultaneously. Feminist culture has, in many cases, drawn a line to exclude or disparage the Mormon mommy bloggers, the sponsored-content factories, the “basics,” the Gwyneths and Blakes. Sometimes—often—these women are openly hated:

But why would these ever be our only options?

We can analyze difficult women from the traditional point of view and find them controversial, and we can analyze bland women from the feminist point of view and find them controversial, too. 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

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.

All of this remained off-limits, however, due to the unquestioned assumption that a woman’s looks are so precious, due to sexism, that joking about them would render Wolf’s set inadmissible by default.

“You know, Ivanka,” Bee said, “that’s a beautiful photo of you and your child, but let me just say, one mother to another: Do something about your dad’s immigration practices, you feckless cunt! He listens to you!” A tidal wave of outrage descended from the right and the center—not about the migrant families, but about the use of the word “cunt.”

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.

She had drawn unreasonable hatred for pursuing her ambitions, and she had weathered this hatred to become the first woman in American history to receive a major party’s presidential nomination.

Clinton attempted to make the most of this. She turned misogynist slights into marketing tactics, selling “Nasty Woman” merchandise after Trump used the term to disparage her during a debate.

long. But if we really loved nasty women so much, wouldn’t Clinton have won the election? Or at least, if this sort of pop feminism was really so ascendant, wouldn’t 53 percent of white women have voted for her instead of for Trump?

crippling disservice of rendering her generic. Misogyny provided a terrible external structure through which Clinton was able to demonstrate commitment and tenacity and occasional grace; misogyny also demanded that she pander and compromise in the interest of survival, and that she sand down her personality until it could hardly be shown in public at all. The real nature of Clinton’s campaign and candidacy was obscured first and finally by sexism,

but also by the reflexive defense against sexism. She was attacked so bluntly, so unfairly, and in turn she was often upheld and shielded by equally blunt arguments—defenses that were about nasty women, never really about her.

Sexism rears its head no matter who a woman is, no matter what her desires and ethics might be.

when the fact of the matter is that 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

(Within a straight couple, it is universally assumed—if not actually true, as a rule—that the person who will invest the most energy in this process is the bride-to-be.)

On her wedding day, a year of planning and approximately $30,000 of spending are unleashed over the span of about twelve hours.

In 1947, the N. W. Ayer copywriter Frances Gerety coined the slogan “A Diamond Is Forever,” and ever since then, diamond engagement rings have been all but mandatory—an $11 billion industry in America as of 2012.

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 now understand that it is an extremely ordinary and unremarkable thing to feel overwhelmed by weddings, or even averse to them. As a society we do not lack for evidence that weddings are often superficial, performative, excessive, and annoying. There is a strong strain of wedding hatred in our culture underneath all the fanaticism. The hatred and fanaticism are, of course, intertwined.

Like Jane, Emma has been broken by the cultural psychosis that tells women to cram a lifetime’s supply of open self-interest into a single, incredibly expensive day.

Part of my aversion to getting married is my sense of incompatibility with the word “wife,” which—outside the Borat context, which is perfect, and will be perfect forever—feels inseparable from this dismal history to me.

At the same time, I understand that people have been objecting to inequality in marriage for centuries, from both the inside and the outside of the institution, and that, in recent years, what it means to be a wife, a married partner, has changed.

decision. “In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were….It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law.”

This is an era in which marriage is generally understood not as the beginning of a partnership but as the avowal of that partnership.

Today, only around 20 percent of Americans are married by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly 60 percent in 1960. Marriage is becoming more equal on every front.

“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.”

There is still a drastic mismatch between the cultural script around marriage, in which a man grudgingly acquiesces to a woman salivating for a diamond, and the reality of marriage, in which men’s lives often get better and women’s lives often get worse. Married men report better mental health and live longer than

single men; in contrast, married women report worse mental health, and die earlier, than single women. (These statistics do not suggest that the act of getting married is some sort of gendered hex: rather, they reflect the way that, when a man and a woman combine their unpaid domestic obligations under the aegis of tradition, the woman usually ends up doing most of the work—a fact that is greatly exacerbated by the advent of kids.)

And still I wonder how much harder it would be to get straight women to accept the reality of marriage if they were not first presented with the fantasy of a wedding. I wonder if women today would so readily accept the unequal diminishment of their independence without their sense of self-importance being overinflated first. It feels like a trick, a trick that has worked and is still working, that the bride remains the image of womanhood at its most broadly celebrated—and that planning a wedding is the only period in a woman’s life where she is universally and unconditionally encouraged to conduct everything on her 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.