Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance. Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end. (You can essentially be on a job interview in perpetuity.) In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance often plays out in the form of concr

But the psychological parasite of the ideal woman has evolved to survive in an ecosystem that pretends to resist her.

heteroglossia”—a form of speech contained inside another person’s language, one whose purpose is to introduce conflict from within.

Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are.

But the endurance that barre builds is possibly more psychological than physical. What it’s really good at is getting you in shape for a hyper-accelerated capitalist life. It prepares you less for a half marathon than for a twelve-hour workday, or a week alone with a kid and no childcare, or an evening commute on an underfunded train.

I value control almost as a matter of etiquette—as an aesthetic—even when I can feel that instinct tipping into cruelty and reflexive disgust.)

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

The process requires maximal obedience on the part of the woman in question, and—ideally—her genuine enthusiasm, too.

We have not “optimized” our wages, our childcare system, our political representation; we still hardly even think of parity as realistic in those arenas, let alone anything approaching perfection. We have maximized our capacity as market assets. That’s all.

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.