
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

purchased $90 leggings in the waiting room after class. I was not, at the time, on their level: I had been taking giardia
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
The timidity in mainstream feminism to admit that women’s choices—not just our problems—are, in the end, political has led to a vision of “women’s empowerment” that often feels brutally disempowering in the end.
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence.
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
The first, best chronicler of the chopped-salad economy’s accelerationist nightmare was Matt Buchanan, who wrote at The Awl in 2015:
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
Chopped salad and smoothie economy
And still, on occasion, I’ll disable my social media blockers, and I’ll sit there like a rat pressing the lever, like a woman repeatedly hitting myself on the forehead with a hammer, masturbating through the nightmare until I finally catch the gasoline whiff of a good meme.
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
When you are a woman, the things you like get used against you. Or, alternatively, the things that get used against you have all been prefigured as things you should like. Sexual availability falls into this category. So does basic kindness, and generosity. Wanting to look good—taking pleasure in trying to look good—does, too.
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
don’t want to be diminished, and I do want to be glorified—not in one shining moment, but whenever I want.
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
Provided with a feminist praxis of individual advancement and satisfaction—two concepts that easily blur into self-promotion and self-indulgence—women happily bit. A politics built around getting and spending money is sexier than a politics built around politics.