Home > Author > Jia Tolentino
81 " Prescriptions about female behavior, Solnit notes, are often disingenuously expressed in terms of happiness - as if we really want women to be beautiful, selfless, hardworking wives and mothers because that's what will make them happy, when models of female happiness have always tended to benefit men and economically handicap women. "
― Jia Tolentino , Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
82 " We have not "optimized" our wages, our childcare systems, our political representation; we still hardly even think of parity as realistic in those arenas, let alone anything approaching perfection. We have maximized our capacity as market assets. That's all "
83 " In children's literature, young female characters are self-evidently important, and their traumas, whatever they may be, are secondary. In adult fiction, if a girl is important to the narrative, trauma often comes first. Girls are raped, over and over, to drive the narrative of adult fiction... "
84 " The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving. "
― Jia Tolentino
85 " In the turbulence that followed the Harvey Weinstein revelations, women’s speech swayed public opinion and led directly to change. People with power were forced to reckon with their ethics; harassers and abusers were pushed out of their jobs. But even in this narrative, the importance of action was subtly elided. People wrote about women “speaking out” with prayerful reverence, as if speech itself could bring women freedom—as if better policies and economic redistribution and true investment from men weren’t necessary, too. "
86 " she had that rich-girl demeanor, treating life like a video game she’d already played through twice. "
― Jia Tolentino , I Would Be Doing This Anyway
87 " In 1991, Naomi Wolf wrote, in 'Beauty Myth,' about the peculiar fact that beauty requirements have escalated as women's subjugation has decreased. It's as if our culture has mustered an immune system response to continue breaking the fever of gender equality—as if some deep patriarchal logic has made it that women need to achieve ever-higher levels of beauty to makeup for the fact that we are no longer economically and legally dependent on men. "
88 " success is a lottery—just as survival today can look like a lottery, too. If you’re super lucky, "
89 " they made money by constantly mining personal data on the users who downloaded the company’s appealing minimalist app. "
90 " To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion. "
91 " All of these women are in pursuit of basic liberty. But our culture has configured women's liberty as corrosion, and for a long time, there was no way for a woman to be both free and good. "
92 " In the introduction to The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir writes that the “drama of woman” lies in the conflict between the individual experience of the self and the collective experience of womanhood. "
93 " I was shocked at first by how intrusive all of this was, but then again, Seraphina had always come off mildly impervious; she had this carelessness that allowed her to do things that I would’ve berated myself for in the shower for years. "
94 " show. I have wondered if we’re entering a period in which the line between valuing a woman in the face of mistreatment and valuing her because of that mistreatment is blurring; if the legitimate need to defend women from unfair criticism has morphed into an illegitimate need to defend women from criticism categorically; if it’s become possible to praise a woman specifically because she is criticized—for that featureless fact alone. "
95 " Figuring out how to “get better” at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project—a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity. Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach. "
96 " no way to teach ourselves to separate the banal from the profound. "
97 " I sat dead eyed in the pool house, wondering if I was in fact wrong about everything, if visibility was actually just like money, where if you had enough of it there was a threshold of security below which you would never really fall. "
98 " As a category, unruliness is also frustratingly large and amorphous. So many things are deemed unruly in women that a woman can seem unruly for simply existing without shame in her body - just for following her desires, no matter whether those desires are liberatory or compromising, or, more likely, a combination of the two. A woman is unruly if anyone has incorrectly decided that she's too much of something, and if she, in turn, has chosen to believe that she's just fine. "
99 " The con is in the DNA of this country, which was founded on the idea that it is good, important, and even noble to see an opportunity to profit and take whatever you can. The story is as old as the first Thanksgiving. Both the con man and his target want to take advantage of a situation; the difference between them is that the con man succeeds. The financial crisis of 2008 was an extended, flamboyant demonstration of the fact that one of the best bids a person can make for financial safety in America is to get really good at exploiting other people. This has always been true, but it is becoming all-encompassing. And it’s a bad lesson to learn the way millennials did--just as we were becoming adults. "
100 " 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. "