Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by
Jia Tolentino
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
Jia Tolentino may well be the voice of her generation. Her generation is not my generation, though, and I found some of her subject matter to be things I don't struggle with now, but things I did, or might, when I was her age (late 20s, early 30s). If I am to guess, these essays are arranged chronologically by order of when she wrote them, because I see her writing style mature as I go through the book. The first essays are interesting subject-wise, and well-researched, but I don't find a lot of original thought. Her choice of subjects is interesting because she lambasts society norms that she participates in (internet, barre classes, reality shows), couches her participation as necessary evil, and consoles herself with the fact that she, at least, is aware of futility, posturing, ridiculousness. Towards the end, the essays show more originality and opinions, even if I don't agree with them all. Still, her opinions are so forceful, I wonder if she ever changes them, if she will be able to retract them. The problem perhaps of being a social commentator while still being shaped by society. I gained a couple of interesting facts and gained some perspectives of the millennials.
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Writing is either a way to shed my self-delusions or a way to develop them.
The I in the Internet
Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious.
You don’t end up using a news story about a dead toddler as a peg for white entitlement without a society in which the discourse of righteousness occupies far more public attention than the conditions that necessitate righteousness in the first place.
To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion.
Goffman observed that we need both an audience to witness our performances as well as a backstage area where we can relax, often in the company of “teammates” who had been performing alongside us.
The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the center of the universe.
Under these circumstances, opinion stops being a first step toward something and starts seeming like an end in itself.
People wrote about women “speaking out” with prayerful reverence, as if speech itself could bring women freedom—as if better policies and economic redistribution and true investment from men weren’t necessary, too.
Having a mutual enemy is a quick way to make a friend—we learn this as early as elementary school—and politically, it’s much easier to organize people against something than it is to unite them in an affirmative vision. And, within the economy of attention, conflict always gets more people to look.
And, because there is no room or requirement in a tweet to add a disclaimer about individual experience, and because hashtags subtly equate disconnected statements in a way that can’t be controlled by those speaking, it has been even easier for #MeToo critics to claim that women must themselves think that going on a bad date is the same as being violently raped.
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.
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.
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.
Rats will eventually stop pressing the lever if their device dispenses food regularly or not at all. But if the lever’s rewards are rare and irregular, the rats will never stop pressing it. In other words, it is essential that social media is mostly unsatisfying. That is what keeps us scrolling, scrolling, pressing our lever over and over in the hopes of getting some fleeting sensation—some momentary rush of recognition, flattery, or rage.
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. I had started to feel that the internet would only ever induce this cycle of heartbreak and hardening—a hyper-engagement that would make less sense every day.
Reality TV Me
Knowing that I was seen got rid of my desire to see myself, to analyze myself as a character.
Always Be Optimizing
an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the marketplace, which is how an ordinary woman evolves into an ideal.
Wolf wrote that a woman had to believe three things in order to accept the beauty myth. 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.
We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite—de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less.
Pure Heroines
The stories are episodic rather than accumulative, and so sadness and fear are rooms to be passed through, existing alongside mishap and indulgence and joy.
In The Second Sex (1949), 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.”
a wedding signifies the end of individual desire.
Esther, Plath writes, “knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.”
To society, she is inessential, secondary, defined on the terms of her relationship to men. These are not “eternal verities,” de Beauvoir writes, but are, rather, the “common basis that underlies every individual feminine existence.”
models of female happiness have always tended to benefit men and economically handicap women
A husband gets to be “first a citizen, a producer, secondly a husband,” where a wife is “before all, and often exclusively, a wife.”
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.”
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.
Ecstasy
“The situations in my life when I have been sympathetic to desperation are the situations when I have felt sure I was encountering God.”
The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams
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.
We Come from Old Virginia
Under oath, in her deposition testimony, Jackie doesn’t admit outright to lying. She is an unreliable narrator, and to some degree, so is Erdely. (And, given that here I’m choosing to see certain things and discard others, as a person does anytime she tells a story, so am I.) But what strikes me in reading the two women’s testimonies is the way that the structure of the original violation, the language of force and betrayal, filters into the way that they interacted with each other—in the same way that Title IX procedures often end up replicating the patterns of invasion they set out to address and negate. Jackie remembers Erdely telling her “that there was no way… to pull out at that point.” She tells the court, “I was under the impression that [the details of my assault] were not going to be published…. I wasn’t—you know, I was 20 years old. I had no idea that there was an off the record or on the record. I—I was naïve.” In her own deposition, Erdely says, “I mean, she was aware it was entirely up to her whether she was going to participate.”
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.
This is the story I’ve come up with, about the story Jackie told: she did it out of rage. She had no idea she was enraged, but she was. Something had happened, and she wanted to tell other people, so that they would know what happened and how she felt. But when she tried to tell it—maybe to somebody else, maybe to herself—the story had no power. It didn’t sound, in the telling, anything like what it felt like in the living. 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.
The Cult of the Difficult Woman
I have wondered if we’re entering a period in which the line between valuing a woman in the face of mistreatment and valuing her because of that mistreatment is blurring;
“By what means, but by screaming, knocking, and rioting, did men themselves ever gain what they were pleased to call their rights?”
As a category, unruliness is also frustratingly large and amorphous. 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.
But if men placed women on pedestals and delighted in watching them fall down, feminism has so far mostly succeeded in reversing the order of operations—taking toppled-over women and re-idolizing them. Famous women are still constantly tested against the idea that they should be maximally appealing, even if that appeal now involves “difficult” qualities.
I Thee Dread
There’s the glorified bride, looming large and resplendent and almost monstrously powerful, and there’s her nullified twin and opposite, the woman who vanishes underneath the name change and the veil. These two selves are opposites, bound together by male power. The advice book chirping “You are privileged to have all eyes center on you” and
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