Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act.

like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good.

Selfhood buckles under the weight of this commercial importance.

Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs, aggregated in numbers attached to your name. Worst of all, there’s essentially no backstage on the internet; where the offline audience necessarily empties out and changes over, the online audience never has to leave.

“We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever—you cannot live in a house like this anymore.”

The internet is engineered for this sort of misrepresentation; it’s designed to encourage us to create certain impressions rather than allowing these impressions to arise “as an incidental by-product of [our] activity.” This is why, with the internet, it’s so easy to stop trying to be decent, or reasonable, or politically engaged—and start trying merely to seem so.

main strategy is to make an argument that’s bad enough to attract criticism, and then to cherry-pick the worst of that criticism into the foundation for another bad argument.

writers who have fashioned themselves as brave contrarians, building entire arguments on random protests and harsh tweets, making themselves deeply dependent on the people who hate them, the people they hate.

The phenomenon in which people take more comfort in a sense of injury than a sense of freedom governs many situations where people are objectively not being victimized on a systematic basis.

hashtag is specifically designed to remove a statement from context and to position it as part of an enormous singular thought.

This is not an accident but an essential design feature: social media was constructed around the idea that a thing is important insofar as it is important to you.

“A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.”

Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self. Everything is being cannibalized—not just goods and labor, but personality and relationships and attention.

She has a personal brand, and probably a boyfriend or husband: he is the physical realization of her constant, unseen audience, reaffirming her status as an interesting subject, a worthy object, a self-generating spectacle with a viewership attached.

It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time.

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. It’s so much easier, when we gain agency, to adapt rather than to oppose.

And surely part of what I love about childhood literary heroines is the way they remind me of that bygone stretch of real innocence—the ability to experience myself however I wanted to; the long heavenly summers spent reading books on the floor, trapped in a slice of burning Texas daylight; the time when I, already a complicated female character, wouldn’t hear the phrase “complicated female character” for years.

a close, clean material attention that makes you feel like you’re reading a catalog description of a world to be entered at will.

Is that fantastical, the idea of a selfhood undiminished by circumstance?

But even when women get married, look beautiful, have children, et cetera, they are still often found deficient, Solnit writes, launching into an unforgettable sentence: “There is no good answer to being a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.”

Female literary characters, in contrast, indicate the condition of being a woman. They are condemned to a universe that revolves around sex and family and domesticity. Their stories circle questions of love and obligation—love being, as the critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis writes, the concept “our culture uses [for women] to absorb all possible Bildung, success/failure, learning, education, and transition to adulthood.”

I turned my attention inward, tried to build a church on the inside, tried to understand faith as something that could draw me closer to something overwhelming and pure.

It’s hard to draw the line between taking pleasure in God’s purpose and aligning God’s purpose with what I take pleasure in, I wrote, between entries where I tried to understand if it was inherently wrong to get drunk.

Love has caused her to abandon her body, and in this abandonment, to intensify. The green grows greener. Some essential quality deepens as the self is removed.

I’m trying to rid myself of the delusion that either type belongs to me. The sense of something is not its substance. It isn’t love, trying to make two things interchangeable, when they are not.

The two most prominent families in politics and culture—the Trumps and the Kardashians—have risen to the top of the food chain because of their keen understanding of how little substance is required to package the self as an endlessly monetizable asset.

As wealth continues to flow upward, as Americans are increasingly shut out of their own democracy, as political action is constrained into online spectacle, I have felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional—to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.

The pipe dream is becoming the dominant structure of aspiration, and its end-stage shadows—cruelty, carelessness, nihilism—are following close behind.

It would be better, of course, to do things morally. But who these days has the ability or the time? Everything, not least the physical world itself, is overheating.

We are what we do, and we do what we’re used to, and like so many people in my generation, I was raised from adolescence to this fragile, frantic, unstable adulthood on a relentless demonstration that scamming pays.

“Fraternities attract men who value other men more than women. The intimacy that develops within fraternal circles between men who care for each other necessitates a vigorous performance of heterosexuality in order to combat the appearance of homosexuality.”

Jackie’s false accusation, in this context, appears as a sort of chimera—a grotesque, mismatched creation; a false way of making a real problem visible.

Everyone was technically doing what they were supposed to, and yet it felt like a glass structure was being constructed around some unfathomable rot.

Writers take a celebrity’s life and her public narrative, shine the black light on it, and point to the sexism as it starts to glow.

turn, when presented with stories about famous women as subjects, not objects, massive numbers of ordinary women recognized themselves in what they saw.

There is a blanket, untested assumption, in feminist celebrity analysis, that the freedom we grant famous women will trickle down to us. Beneath this assumption is another one—that the ultimate goal of this conversation is empowerment.

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.

I can feel the tug of my deep and recurring suspicion that anything I might think about myself must be, somehow, necessarily wrong.