Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

We like our young heroines, feel as close to them as if they’d been our best friends. Plenty of these girls are sweet, self-aware, conventionally likable. But we like them even when they’re not.

“First of all,” her mother tells her, cracking a beer, “what makes you so sure you want to get married at all? Lots of women never do and are perfectly happy.”

I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

“If I had to wait on a baby all day, I would go mad.”

She is repulsed by the idea of marriage—days spent cooking and cleaning, evenings “washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s.”

the “drama of woman” lies in the conflict between the individual experience of the self and the collective experience of womanhood. To herself, a woman is inherently central and essential. To society, she is inessential, secondary, defined on the terms of her relationship to men.

After her suicide attempt, a doctor chides her: she isn’t old enough to understand how bad life really gets, he says. “Obviously, Doctor,” says Cecilia, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”

The teenage girl, wrote de Beauvoir, is bound up in a “sense of secrecy,” a “grim solitude.” She is “convinced that she is not understood; her relations with herself are then only the more impassioned: she is intoxicated with her isolation, she feels herself different, superior, exceptional.”

Katniss is brave in a grim, fatalistic way: her courage comes from her certainty that the future is a nightmare, and her romantic decisions are driven by her sense that everything has already been lost.

As with so many other nineteenth-century novels, the main narrative engine is the inability of a woman to access economic stability without the protection of a man.

“there is a hoax in marriage, since, while being supposed to socialize eroticism, it succeeds only in killing it.”

You don’t have to believe a revelation to hold on to it, to remember certain overpasses, sudden angles above and under the cold and heartless curves of that industrial landscape, a slow river of lights blinking white and red into the distance, and the debauched sky gleaming over the houses and hospitals and stadium churches, and your blood thrumming with drugs or music or sanctity.

“Our life is impossibility, absurdity,” wrote Simone Weil. “Everything we want contradicts the conditions or the consequences attached to it….It is because we are a contradiction—being creatures—being God and infinitely other than God.”

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 world that we believe in, that we’re attempting to make real and tangible, is still ...

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.

It sounded ordinary, mundane, eminently forgettable, like a million things that had happened to a million other women—but that wasn’t what it felt like to her.

It “can’t be said reasonably,” she writes. “It must be said melodramatically. Something like: Look at this. Don’t you fucking dare not look….You’re going to know what we’ve decided is worth sacrificing, what price we’ve decided we’re willing to pay to maintain this league of men, and this time, you’re going to remember.”

I had always believed that unwanted sexual aggression was a sign of humiliating weakness in the aggressors;

I was trying my hardest to be permeable, to be alive to other people’s suffering, but I didn’t know how to stop being permeable when it was pointless, when it was ultimately narcissistic, when it did no good.

I felt, monstrously, that there was no boundary between my situation and the larger situation, between my tiny injustices and the injustices everyone faced.

It was the first time that I fully understood myself to be subsumed within a social system that was unjust, brutal, punitive—that women were suffering because men had dominion over them, that men were suffering because they were expected to perform this dominion, that power had been stacked so unevenly, so long ago, that there was very little I could do.

the story didn’t need to be clean, and it didn’t need to be satisfying; that, in fact, it would never be clean or satisfying, and once I realized that, I would be able to see what was true.

Women were able to articulate facts that often previously went unspoken: that entering a relationship with someone doesn’t preclude being victimized by them, but sometimes follows it, and that being sexually harassed or assaulted can ruin your career.

Every woman faces backlash and criticism. Extraordinary women face a lot of it. And that criticism always exists in the context of sexism, just like everything else in a woman’s life.

From the biblical perspective, these women are cautionary tales. From the feminist one, they demonstrate the limits of a moral standard that requires women to be subservient.

The admission of hatred is an acknowledgment of her power.

By nature, difficult women cause trouble, and that trouble can almost always be reinterpreted as good.

Women claiming the power and agency that historically belonged to men is both the story of female evil and the story of female liberation. To work for the latter, you have to be willing to invoke the form...

when you write against something, you lend it strength and space and time.

what illuminates Kim as unruly in this situation is less her actual size than her unflagging commitment to eroticizing and monetizing the body. Her adherence to the practice of self-objectification is the instinct that makes her, as Petersen puts it, an “accidental activist” but an “activist nonetheless.”

There is a blanket, untested assumption, in feminist celebrity analysis, that the freedom we grant famous women will trickle down to us.

the ultimate goal of this conversation is empowerment.

Feminists have, to a significant degree, dismantled and rejected the traditional male definit...

Girls are trained in childhood to take an interest in bridal matters, through Barbies (which I didn’t care about) and make-believe (I mostly fantasized through reading) and feature-length Disney musicals, in which a series of beautiful princesses enchant a series of interchangeable men. I loved these movies except for the love interests.

When I curled up to him in the mornings I felt like a baby sea lion climbing on a sunlit rock.

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.

becoming a bride still means being flattered into submission: being prepared, through a rush of attention and a series of gender-resegregated rituals—the bridal shower, the bachelorette party, and, later, the baby shower—for a future in which your identity will be systematically framed as secondary to the identity of your husband and kids.

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