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" There are, of course, real pleasures to be found in self-improvement. 'That the beauty idea is pleasurable AND demanding, and often concurrently, is a key feature,' Widdows writes. The beauty ideal asks you to understand your physical body as a source of potential and control. It provides a tangible way to exert power, although this power has so far come at the expense of most others: porn and modeling and Instagram influencing are the only careers in which women regularly outearn men. But the pleasures of beauty work and the advent of mainstream feminism have both, in any case, mostly exacerbated the situation. 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 understand relentless self-improvement as natural, mandatory, and feminist—or just, without a question, the best way to live. "
― Jia Tolentino , Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
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" And feminism has also repeatedly attempted to render certain aspects of the discussion off-limits for criticism. It has put such a premium on individual success, so much emphasis on individual choice, that it is seen as unfeminist to criticize anything that a woman chooses to make herself more successful—even in situations like this, in which women's choices are constrained and dictated both by social expectations and by the arbitrary dividends of beauty work, which is more rewarding if one is young and rich and conventionally attractive to begin with. In any case, Widdows argues, the fact of choice does not "make an unjust exploitative practice or act, somehow magically, just or non-exploitative." 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
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" The chopped salad is engineered…to free one’s hand and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious attention can be directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data: work email or Amazon’s nearly infinite catalog or Facebook’s actually infinite News Feed, where, as one shops for diapers or engages with the native advertising sprinkled between the not-hoaxes and baby photos, one is being productive by generating revenue for a large internet company, which is obviously good for the economy, or at least it is certainly better than spending lunch reading a book from the library, because who is making money from that? "
― Jia Tolentino , Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion