Puja Nandi

The academic Shoshana Zuboff calls this “surveillance capitalism”: tech companies get us hooked through addictive design and extract huge amounts of our personal data in order to sell us hyper-targeted ads. The result is a society characterised by atomisation, alienation and the erosion of our attention spans.

Despite the occasional anecdotes you’ll hear from people claiming that a nose job or a mommy makeover “fixed them,” empirical evidence suggests that cosmetic work does not improve long-term happiness,4 and that it actually increases symptoms of depression and anxiety.5 And when the consumer fails to find the relief she was deceptively promised, she... See more

Those who wounded us were not superior, impressive beings who knew our special weaknesses and justly targeted them. They were themselves highly frantic, damaged creatures trying their best to cope with the litany of private sorrows to which every life condemns us.

I was not weak. I was just mothering in a world that expects me to raise a baby like I don’t have a job, and work like I don’t have a baby.

In these left-leaning female spaces I have observed intense social-policing from the NGG on any type of remotely critical opinion that is not sugar-coated in some bizarre “<333 aw love ya girlie” saccharine vanilla glaze. They will scold you for being rude, tell you to mind your business, and dismiss your opinions as bigoted and problematic.

This “inferiorization” is not inherent, but rather is a product of societal pressures, particularly the beauty-industrial complex which glorifies the female body while simultaneously depreciating it, forcing women into a state of perpetual self-scrutiny and control

Since women were routinely deprived of autonomy for virtually all of civilized human history, the popularity of ultra-positive “choice feminism”—the belief that any choice a woman makes is inherently empowering—is not surprising.