Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

(Both-sides arguments like this are always appealing to people who wish to seem both contrarian and intellectually superior;

or attempt to make themselves genuinely desirable, in the same way that women have been socialized

Mark Ruffalo tweeting that he said a prayer and God answered as a black woman—often hints at a bizarre need on the part of white people to personally participate in an ideology of equality that ostensibly requires them to chill out.

This is what the online expression of solidarity sometimes feels like—a manner of listening so extreme and performative that it often turns into the show.

The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us.

In real life, women are so much more obedient. Our rebellions are so trivial and small.

we still hardly even think of parity as realistic

We have maximized our capacity as market assets. That’s all.

notes that men, unlike women, experience no contradiction between their gender and their “vocation as a human being.”

But even when women get married, look beautiful, have children, et cetera, they are still often found deficient,

husband gets to be “first a citizen, a producer, secondly a husband,” where a wife is “before all, and often exclusively, a wife.”

they also seem prone enough to using rape in a reductive, utilitarian way.)

a figure that she uses, cruelly and lovingly and gratefully, as the base from which to become something more.

He was elected for the same reason that people buy lottery tickets. It’s not the actual possibility of victory that you pay for; it’s the fleeting vision of victory.

where I can really behave thoughtfully, where some imaginary future actions will cancel out all the self-interested scrabbling that came before. This is a useful fantasy, I think, but it’s a fantasy.

This was, in the context of UVA’s long record of apathy and inaction, an extreme success story.

When Sage Smith, a black trans woman, went missing in the fall of 2012, the police department waited eleven days before requesting external support. In contrast, as Emma Eisenberg noted in a piece for Splinter, nearly every law enforcement agency in Virginia knew Graham’s name and face within forty-eight hours,

The school’s self-conception will never become completely true until it can admit

the extent to which it has always been false:

glass structure was being constructed around some unfathomable rot.

For women, authenticity lies in difficulty:

Every bit of hardship these difficult women experienced

was an indication of their worth and humanity.

in ways that are unexpectedly destructive, obscure her actual, particular self.

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.

what are we all ever doing except playing a part that fulfills a role at its appropriate time?

But I was terrified of what it meant to depend on someone else’s money. I was afraid of making myself useful through sex and dinner. I

A 2014 study of Harvard Business School alumni—a group of people primed for high ambitions and flexibility—showed that more than half of men from their thirties to their sixties expected that their careers would take priority over their spouses’ careers: three quarters of these men had their expectations fulfilled. In contrast, less than a quarter of their female peers expected their spouses’ careers to take precedence over theirs, but this nonetheless happened 40 percent of the time. Biology

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.

I don’t want to be diminished, and I do want to be glorified—not in one shining moment, but whenever I want.

the more I try to uncover whatever I’m looking for, the more I feel that I’m too far gone.

recurring suspicion that anything I might think about myself must be, somehow, necessarily wrong.