Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

“Self-exposure and self-policing meet in a feedback loop,” Weigel wrote. “Because these pants only ‘work’ on a certain kind of body, wearing them reminds you to go out and get that body. They encourage you to produce yourself as the body that they ideally display.” This is how athleisure

How is it possible that so much of contemporary life feels so arbitrary and so inescapable? Thinking about weddings has not been very useful to me: developing an understanding of the material conditions that produced the wedding ritual, its basis in inequality and its role in perpetuating that inequality, hasn’t really meant a thing. It doesn’t rem

you’re the kind of person who thinks that putting in expensive hard work for a high-functioning, maximally attractive consumer existence is about as good a way to pass your time on earth as there

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

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.

More recently, the ideal woman has been whatever she wants to be as long as she manages to act upon the belief that perfecting herself and streamlining her relationship to the world can be a matter of both work and pleasure—of “lifestyle.”

It can be hard, of course, to draw a precise line between a scam and a product with a highly exaggerated sales pitch.

We are what we do, and we do what we’re used to, and like so many people in my generation, I was raised from adolescence to this fragile, frantic, unstable adulthood on a relentless demonstration that scamming pays.

If you can’t escape the market, why stop working on its terms?

If Wolf in 1990 criticized a paradigm where a woman was expected to look like her ideal self all the time, we have something deeper burrowing now—not a beauty myth but a lifestyle myth, a paradigm where a woman can muster all the technology, money, and politics available to her to actually try to become that idealized self, and where she can unders