Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

I wrote this book because I am always confused, because I can never be sure of anything, and because I am drawn to any mechanism that directs me away from that truth.

for a conclusion, to assume that nothing is static and that renegotiation will be perpetual, to hope primarily that little truths will keep emerging in time.

(Both-sides arguments like this are always appealing to people who wish to seem both contrarian and intellectually superior; this particular one required ignoring the fact that liberals remained obsessed with “civility” while the Republican president was actively endorsing violence at every turn. Later on, when Tablet published an investigation into the Women’s March organizers who maintained disconcerting ties to the Nation of Islam, these organizers were criticized by liberals, who truly do not lack the self-policing instinct; in large part because the left does take hate seriously, the Women’s March effectively splintered into two groups.)

When you are a woman, the things you like get used against you. Or, alternatively, the things that get used against you have all been prefigured as things you should like.

It wasn’t until third grade or so that I grasped the fact that identity could govern our relationship to what we saw and what we read. It happened on one afternoon in particular, when I was sitting on the floor of my dim pink room, next to my pink polka-dot curtains, playing Power Rangers with my friend Allison, who insisted, over and over, that I had to play the Yellow Ranger. I didn’t want to, but she said there was no other way we could play. When I realized she wasn’t kidding—that she genuinely believed this to be something like a natural law—the anger that hit me was almost hallucinatory. She was saying, in effect, that I had failed to understand my own limits. I couldn’t be the Pink Ranger, which meant I couldn’t be Baby Spice. I couldn’t be Laura Ingalls, rocking her bench until she got kicked out of the classroom; I couldn’t be Claudia Kincaid, taking baths in the fountain at the Met. A chasm opened up between us. I told Allison I didn’t want to play anymore. She left, and I sat still, shimmering with rage.

Those girls are all so brave, where adult heroines are all so bitter, and I so strongly dislike what has become clear since childhood: the facts of visibility and exclusion in these stories, and the way bravery and bitterness get so concentrated in literature, for women, because there’s not enough space for them in the real world.

Identity, according to Cavarero, is not something that we innately possess and reveal, but something we understand through narratives provided to us by others.

If women were not allowed to be seen as emblematic of the human condition, I wouldn’t even get to be seen as emblematic of the female condition. Even worse was the fact that the female condition in literature—one of whiteness and confinement—remains so unsatisfying. I was shut out of a realm that I didn’t even really want to enter. The heroine’s text tells us that, at best, under a minimum of structural constrictions, women are still mostly pulverized by their own lives.

Good and evil is organized so neatly for you in both childhood and Christianity.

Conservatives were once again weaponizing a borrowed argument.

Sexism rears its head no matter who a woman is, no matter what her desires and ethics might be. 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.