It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time.

Adult heroines commit suicide for different reasons than teenage heroines do. Where the teenagers have been drained of all desire, the adults are so full of desire that it kills them.

“trick mirror that carries the illusion of flawlessness as well as the self-flagellating option of constantly finding fault.” I

Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse. Even as we became increasingly sad

The ideal woman has always been conceptually overworked, an inorganic thing engineered to look natural.

all made, or were trying to make, enough money to afford this expensive class, which would give us the strength and discipline that would ensure that we would be able to afford this expensive class again. We were embracing, with some facsimile of pleasure, our era of performance and endless work. “I

Trolls and bad writers and the president know better than anyone: when you call someone terrible, you just end up promoting their work.

But the psychological parasite of the ideal woman has evolved to survive in an ecosystem that pretends to resist her. If women start to resist an aesthetic, like the overapplication of Photoshop, the aesthetic just changes to suit us; the power of the ideal image never actually wanes.

It’s possible if we want it. But what do we want? What would you want—what desires, what forms of insubordination, would you be able to access—if you had succeeded in becoming an ideal woman, gratified and beloved, proof of the efficiency of a system that magnifies and diminishes you every day?