Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

A doubt that always hovers in the back of my mind intensified: that whatever conclusions I might reach about myself, my life, and my environment are just as likely to be diametrically wrong as they are to be right.

I wanted to see the way I would see in a mirror. It’s possible I painted an elaborate mural instead.

While I was writing this, a stranger tweeted an excerpt of a Jezebel piece I wrote in 2015, highlighting a sentence about what women seemed to want from feminist websites—a “trick mirror that carries the illusion of flawlessness as well as the self-flagellating option of constantly finding fault.” I had not remembered using that phrase when I came up with a book title, and I had not understood, when I was writing that Jezebel piece, that that line was also an explanation of something more personal. I began to realize that all my life I’ve been leaving myself breadcrumbs. It didn’t matter that I didn’t always know what I was walking toward. It was worthwhile, I told myself, just trying to see clearly, even if it took me years to understand what I was trying to see.

Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse.

Mass media always determines the shape of politics and culture.

But lately I’ve been wondering how everything got so intimately terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along. How did a huge number of people begin spending the bulk of our disappearing free time in an openly torturous environment? How did the internet get so bad, so confining, so inescapably personal, so politically determinative—and why are all those questions asking the same thing?

asking the same thing?

you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource,

People often make faces, in private, in front of bathroom mirrors, to convince themselves of their own attractiveness. The “lively belief that an unseen audience is present,” Goffman writes, can have a significant effect.

This system persists because it is profitable. As Tim Wu writes in The Attention Merchants, commerce has been slowly permeating human existence—entering our city streets in the nineteenth century through billboards and posters, then our homes in the twentieth century through radio and TV. Now, in the twenty-first century, in what appears to be something of a final stage, commerce has filtered into our identities and relationships. We have generated billions of dollars for social media platforms through our desire—and then through a subsequent, escalating economic and cultural requirement—to replicate for the internet who we know, who we think we are, who we want to be.

As Tim Wu writes in The Attention Merchants, commerce has been slowly permeating human existence—entering our city streets in the nineteenth century through billboards and posters, then our homes in the twentieth century through radio and TV. Now, in the twenty-first century, in what appears to be something of a final stage, commerce has filtered into our identities and relationships. We have generated billions of dollars for social media platforms through our desire—and then through a subsequent, escalating economic and cultural requirement—to replicate for the internet who we know, who we think we are, who we want to be.

There is less time these days for anything other than economic survival. The internet has moved seamlessly into the interstices of this situation, redistributing our minimum of free time into unsatisfying micro-installments, spread throughout the day. In the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us brief moments of pleasure and connection, tied up in the opportunity to constantly listen and speak. Under these circumstances, opinion stops being a first step toward something and starts seeming like an end in itself.

“The representation of an activity will vary in some degree from the activity itself and therefore inevitably misrepresent it,” Goffman writes.

The Gamergaters’ worldview was not actually endangered; they just had to believe it was—or to pretend it was, and wait for a purportedly leftist writer to affirm them—in order to lash out and remind everyone what they could do.

The internet can make it seem that supporting someone means literally sharing in their experience—that solidarity is a matter of identity rather than politics or morality, and that it’s best established at a point of maximum mutual vulnerability in everyday life.

Of course I understand the difficulty of shopping as a woman who is overlooked by the fashion industry because I, myself, have also somehow been marginalized by this industry. This framework, which centers the self in an expression of support for others, is not ideal.

for women it is something approaching a universal experience to have placated a man out of the real fear that he will hurt you.

It’s telling that the most mainstream gestures of solidarity are pure representation, like viral reposts or avatar photos with cause-related filters, and meanwhile the actual mechanisms through which political solidarity is enacted, like strikes and boycotts, still exist on the fringe.

Facebook’s goal of showing people only what they were interested in seeing resulted, within a decade, in the effective end of shared civic reality.

being cannibalized—not just goods and labor, but personality and relationships and attention. The next step is complete identification with the online marketplace, physical and spiritual inseparability from the internet: a nightmare that is already banging down the door.

where I was under constant surveillance, I was unable to get far enough away from myself to think about the impression I was leaving.

Within a few years, I would begin to think that the impression I left on people was, like the weather, essentially beyond my ability to control.

I was learning that in the twenty-first century it would sometimes be impossible to differentiate between the pretext for an experience, the record of that experience, and the experience itself.

pragmatic self-delusion—in the same way that being trained to smile

First, she had to think about beauty as a “legitimate and necessary qualification for a woman’s rise in power.” Second, she had to ignore the beauty standard’s reliance on chance and discrimination, and instead imagine beauty as a matter of hard work and entrepreneurship, the American Dream. Third, she had to believe that the beauty requirement would increase as she herself gained power. Personal advancement wouldn’t free her from needing to be beautiful. In fact, success would handcuff her to her looks, to “physical self-consciousness and sacrifice,” even more.

which women are either successes or failures, always one or the other—and a sense of inescapability that rings more true to life. If you can’t escape the market, why stop working on its terms? Women are genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy—two systems that, at their extremes, ensure that individual success comes at the expense of collective morality.

There are rewards for succeeding under capitalism and patriarchy; there are rewards even for being willing to work on its terms. There are nothing but rewards, at the surface level. The trap looks beautiful. It’s well-lit. It welcomes you in.

For the way out, I think, we have to follow the cyborg. We have to be willing to be disloyal, to undermine. The cyborg is powerful because she grasps the potential in her own artificiality, because she accepts without question how deeply it is embedded in her. “The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment,” Haraway wrote. “We can be responsible for machines.” The dream of the cyborg is “not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia”—a form of speech contained inside another person’s language, one whose purpose is to introduce conflict from within.

Simone de Beauvoir writes that a girl is a “human being before becoming a woman,” and she “knows already that to accept herself as a woman is to become resigned and to mutilate herself.” This is part of the reason these childhood characters are all so independent, so eager to make the most of whatever presents itself: they—or, more to the point, their creators—understand that adulthood is always looming, which means marriage and children, which means, in effect, the end.

She describes the definitive thrill and sorrow of female adolescence—the realization that your body, and what people will demand of it, will determine your adult life.

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.” So it goes with a certain type of blockbuster YA heroine—the series protagonist who either doubles down on her sense of isolated exceptionalism, if she’s in a dystopian universe, or superficially attempts to reject it before acquiescing, if she’s in a romantic one.

In 1997, the psychologist and theorist Mary Gergen wrote about the contrast between the two gendered narrative lines. On the one hand, there’s the “autonomous ego-enhancing hero single-handedly and single-heartedly progressing toward a goal,” and on the other, the “long-suffering, selfless, socially embedded heroine, being moved in many directions, lacking the tenacious loyalty demanded of a quest.” De Beauvoir glossed this as transcendence versus immanence: men were expected to reach beyond their circumstances, while women were expected to be defined and bounded by theirs. Kate Zambreno, in Heroines (2012), nods to de Beauvoir while writing about the existential horror of traditional gender roles—“the man allowed to go out into the world and transcend himself, the woman reduced to the kind of work that will be erased and forgotten at day’s end, living invisible among the vestigial people of the afternoon.”

But heroes are mostly unhappy for existential reasons; heroines suffer for social reasons, because of male power, because of men.

Difference was not the problem; it was the beginning of the solution. That realization, they decided, would be the foundation of their sense that they were free.

I don’t know if I’m after truth or hanging on to its dwindling half-life. I might only be hoping to remember that my ecstatic disposition is the source of the good in me—spontaneity, devotion, sweetness—and the worst things, too: heedlessness, blankness, equivocation.

There are some institutions—drugs, church, and money—that aligned the superstructure of white wealth in Houston with the heart of black and brown culture beneath it. There are feelings, like ecstasy, that provide an unbreakable link between virtue and vice.

Fyre Fest sailed down Scam Mountain with all the accumulating force and velocity of a cultural shift that had, over the previous decade, subtly but permanently changed the character of the nation, making scamming—the abuse of trust for profit—seem simply like the way things were going to be.

It came, finally, after the 2008 financial crisis, the event that arguably kick-started the millennial-era understanding that the quickest way to win is to scam.

The financial crisis was a classic con—a confidence trick, carried off by confidence men.

Real con men don’t have to ask you for your watch, or your confidence. They act in such a way that you feel lucky to give it to them—eager to place a sure bet on a horse race or park your money in an impossibly successful investment fund, eager to fly to the Bahamas for a party that doesn’t exist.

The con is in the DNA of this country, which was founded on the idea that it is good, important, and even noble to see an opportunity to profit and take whatever you can.

The problem is that a feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective. The problem is that it is so easy today for a woman to seize upon an ideology she believes in and then exploit it, or deploy it in a way that actually runs counter to that ideology. That is in fact exactly what today’s ecosystem of success encourages a woman to do.

White fraternities have historically existed for the purpose of solidifying elite male power and entitlement. In the nineteenth century, wealthy men separated themselves from their poorer classmates through the frat system.

Boys who join frats today are mostly conscious of wanting good parties, funny friends, hot girls around every weekend. Underneath this lies the thrill of group immunity, of being able to, on the wholesome end, throw a sink out the window without being written up for property destruction. On the unwholesome end, frats provide social cover to engage in extraordinary interpersonal violence, through the hazing process; to purchase and consume as much alcohol and as many drugs as one wants to; and to throw parties at which everyone is there at the pleasure of the “brothers”—particularly the girls.

Rape is an inescapable function of a world that has been designed to give men a maximal amount of lawless freedom, she argues. It “cannot, logically, be just a vile anomaly in an ethical system otherwise egalitarian and humane.”

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 not the world that exists.

that 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.

So many things are deemed unruly in women that a woman can seem unruly for simply existing without shame in her body—just for following her desires, no matter whether those desires are liberatory or compromising, or, more likely, a combination of the two. A woman is unruly if anyone has incorrectly decided that she’s too much of something, and if she, in turn, has chosen to believe that she’s just fine.

In the midst of the outrage about family separation at the southern border, Melania boarded a plane to visit the caged children in Texas wearing a Zara jacket emblazoned with the instantly infamous slogan “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” It was a transparent act of trolling: a sociopathic message, delivered in the hopes of drawing criticism of Melania, which could then be identified as sexist criticism, so that the discussion about sexism could distract from the far more important matters at hand.

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