Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

As more people began to register their existence digitally, a pastime turned into an imperative: you had to register yourself digitally to exist.

Adult heroines commit suicide for different reasons than teenage heroines do. Where the teenagers have been drained of all desire, the adults are so full of desire that it kills them.

that argues for identity as “totally expositive and relational.” Identity, according to Cavarero, is not something that we innately possess and reveal, but something we understand through narratives provided to us by others.

But what happens once it becomes common knowledge that these boundaries are outdated?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. Women are not always—I’d argue that they’re now rarely—most interesting when breaking uninteresting restrictions.

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

Feminists have worked so hard, with such good intentions, to justify female difficulty that the concept has ballooned to something all-encompassing: a blanket defense, an automatic celebration, a tarp of self-delusion that can cover up any sin.