122
" the internet collapses identity, opinion, and action—and that I, as a writer whose work is mostly critical and often written in first person, have some inherent stake in justifying the dubious practice of spending all day trying to figure out what you think. As a reader, of course, I’m grateful for people who help me understand things, and I’m glad that they—and I—can be paid to do so. I am glad, too, for the way the internet has given an audience to writers who previously might have been shut out of the industry, or kept on its sidelines: I’m one of them. But you will never catch me arguing that professional opinion-havers in the age of the internet are, on the whole, a force for good. "
― Jia Tolentino , Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
129
" Barring that, we’ve got nothing except our small attempts to retain our humanity, to act on a model of actual selfhood, one that embraces culpability, inconsistency, and insignificance. We would have to think very carefully about what we’re getting from the internet, and how much we’re giving it in return. We’d have to care less about our identities, to be deeply skeptical of our own unbearable opinions, to be careful about when opposition serves us, to be properly ashamed when we can’t express solidarity without putting ourselves first. "
― Jia Tolentino , Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
131
" Today's ideal woman is of a type that coexists easily with feminism in its current market-friendly and mainstream form. This sort of feminism has organized itself around being as visible and appealing to as many people as possible; it has greatly overvalorized women's individual success. Feminism has not erradicated the tyranny of the ideal woman but, rather, has entrenched it and made it trickier. These days, it is perhaps even more psychologically seamless than ever for an ordinary woman to spend her life walking toward the idealized mirage of her own self-image. She can believe - reasonably enough, and with the full encouragement of feminism - that she herself is the architect of the exquisite, constant, and often pleasurable type of power that this image holds over her time, her money, her decisions, her selfhood, and her soul. "
― Jia Tolentino , Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
133
" The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite - de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less. But then again, nothing today ever de-escalates. 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 or 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
138
" The rise of trolling, and its ethos of disrespect and anonymity, has been so forceful in part because the internet’s insistence on consistent, approval-worthy identity is so strong. In particular, the misogyny embedded in trolling reflects the way women—who, as John Berger wrote, have always been required to maintain an external awareness of their own identity—often navigate these online conditions so profitably. It's the self-calibration that I learned as a girl, as a woman, that has helped me capitalize on "having" to be online. My only experience of the world has been one in which personal appeal is paramount and self-exposure is encouraged; this legitimately unfortunately paradigm, inhabited first by women and now generalized to the entire internet, is what trolls loathe and actively repudiate. "
― Jia Tolentino , Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
139
" I wrote this book between the spring of 2017 and the fall of 2018—a period during which American identity, culture, technology, politics, and discourse seemed to coalesce into an unbearable supernova of perpetually escalating conflict, a stretch of time when daily experience seemed both like a stopped elevator and an endless state-fair ride, when many of us regularly found ourselves thinking that everything had gotten as bad as we could possibly imagine, after which, of course, things always got worse. "
― Jia Tolentino , Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion