Saved by Keely Adler
Post-Election, Beware 'Self-Care'
As journalist Amanda Hess writes in the New York Times, “Shopping, decorating, grooming and sculpting are now jumping with meaning. And a purchase need not have any explicit social byproduct—the materials eco-friendly, or the proceeds donated to charity—to be weighted with significance.
Tara Isabella Burton • Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World
Locked in the terrifying prison of one’s neuroses, where the increasingly narrowing paths to liberation always seem to invoke the language of individual healing, flourishing or self-improvement (therapy is wonderful, but it’s strange that a private, commodified exchange seems to have become synonymous with practising a public ethics of care), the m
... See moreRebecca Liu • The Making of a Millennial Woman
Self-care is late-stage capitalism’s solution to the problem it created. How convenient that after turning your neck into a tangle of knots or creating pathological levels of anxiety and exhaustion, the "solution" is for you to spend money you don't have so you can just feel normal.
Kirsten Powers • The way we live in the United States is not normal.
- "the concrete practices of the tech industry now structure identity and individuality in ways that support its own hegemony. While it presents endless avenues for expression, it sees us as wholly reducible to market logic, where we are real to the degree that our consumption habits are rational. This vision of selfhood promotes uniformity and bou... See more
Emma Stamm • Who Can It Be Now — Real Life
The root of this trouble is the fact that mainstream feminism has had to conform to patriarchy and capitalism to become mainstream in the first place. Old requirements, instead of being overthrown, are rebranded. Beauty work is labeled “self-care” to make it sound progressive.
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
White women, especially white feminists, need me to lean in to pseudoreligious consumerist teachings that beauty is democratic and achievable. Beauty must be democratic. If it is not, then beauty becomes a commodity, distributed unequally and, even worse, at random.