trick mirror: reflections on self-delusion
the book
I’d not heard of Jia Tolentino prior to discovering this book. She cut her teeth in the world of internet writing before graduating to more serious publications. This is her first book, a collection of essays on ‘the internet, the self, feminism and politics’.
The way the book is structured makes it very easy to pick up and read. The essays aren’t formally connected to each other, nor do they need to be read in order. It's more than possible to dip in and out, or skip essays that don't grab you without losing anything in the way of continuity.
I found the book to be inconsistently brilliant. Some of the essays left me cold while others had me highlighting like mad. Her writing is excellent, conversationally academic but it's the content that proves to be variable. Whether you'll enjoy the entirety of the book will be down to your personal taste but there are certainly things to learn for everyone here.
A should read.
Why I read the book
My previous work as a professional rugby player was as you can imagine, a very masculine environment. I’m aware that my working experience of male/female relations is unusual. Partly to counter this and partly through genuine interest, I’ve often sought out female perspectives, from my friends or in writing and culture. Now more than ever seems like a fraught time in gender relations and I’m quite bored and tired of toxic masculinity, #metoo and the general demonisation of men in general.
Tolentino’s exploration of identity and being female is of some relief, written with a healthy dose of self-awareness, exploring the contradictions of modern feminism and what people think they’re doing.
She also deftly explores authenticity as experienced through social media, the personal brand and the scam artist as American hero - essentially how fake it till you make it is now a rallying cry for everyone living their lives out online. She's interested in how people mitigate themselves and present what they think other people want to see. What this is, is often not determined by the people they think, but by the market and its demands.
ideas and quotes
the ideal woman
Tolentino is fantastic on the idea of the ideal woman as seen through Instagram. It’s so pertinent to now. When I see female friends, or former girlfriends, participate in the ritualistic poses, captions and filters of their favourite influencers, ‘copying the lessons of the market’ in an attempt at apotheosis and becoming 'an ideal woman', I feel a twinge of dread. To echo the commercial in the hope of becoming it is the lowest form of mimicry.
These quotes on what it means to pursue being an ideal women are just gold:
The ideal woman has always been generic
Showcasing herself at leisure is either the bulk of her work or an essential part of it
She has a personal brand, and probably a boyfriend or husband: he is the physical realization of her constant, unseen audience, reaffirming her status as an interesting subject, a worthy object, a self-generating spectacle with a viewership attached.
She looks like an Instagram—which is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the marketplace, which is how an ordinary woman evolves into an ideal. she can afford the impression of spontaneity… an inorganic thing engineered to look natural.the ideal woman always believes she came up with herself on her own.
Most women believe themselves to be independent thinkers.
If women start to resist an aesthetic… the aesthetic just changes to suit us; the power of the ideal image never actually wanes.
Today’s ideal woman is of a type that coexists easily with feminism in its current market-friendly and mainstream form… it has greatly over-valorized women’s individual success.
We’ve all fallen for this. Recreating the poses of people paid for their self-exposure, for free, hoping for social currency at first but secretly for ascension to the realm of the fawned over woman, one free to showcase herself at a never-ending leisure that actually requires constant hard work. Tolentino touches on the influencer lifecycle, where a girl looks less and less like a person, spends more and more time being documented, eventually railing against the strictures of the invisible prison she’s created for herself before going back for more.
She’s great on athleisure, likening it to a sort of straightjacket, one where
Self-exposure and self-policing meet in a feedback loop… They encourage you to produce yourself as the body that they ideally display the peculiar fact that beauty requirements have escalated as women’s subjugation has decreased…
One waste of time had been traded for another... improving your looks is a job that you’re supposed to believe is fun.
Athleisure is inextricable from productivity. Being able to do it all means you don’t have time to change. You’re too busy having it all, doing the work, whether that’s domestic, physical or actual career work, athleisure can free you to move between your roles, even as it prevents you from eating too much food or gaining unsightly weight.
But as she says,
What would you want… if you had succeeded in becoming an ideal woman, gratified and beloved, proof of the efficiency of a system that magnifies and diminishes you every day?
It's the same for all of us. You can complain about the deification of others, claiming to find it distasteful even as you secretly aspire to do the exact same thing. If you ascended to the state of ideal man or woman, would you resist? Would you tell people that it's not good? Or would you take advantage of your privilege to be worshipped by your peers and the market?
difference
In Sexual Difference, the Milan women write about a disagreement they had while discussing Jane Austen, during which one woman said, flatly, “We are not all equal here.” The statement “had a horrible sound, in the literal sense of the term: sour, hard, stinging,” the women wrote. But “it did not take long to accept what for years we had never registered … We were not equal, we had never been equal, and we immediately discovered that we had no reason to think we were.” Difference was not the problem; it was the beginning of the solution. That realization, they decided, would be the foundation of their sense that they were free.
For me, this realisation that we’re different and that difference is what makes us special rings so true. It works in a team environment where your team-mates teach you things that you’d have never figured out on your own. It works when you peruse Twitter and discover something to learn from someone who’s nothing like your. It works when you walk down the street and see people who’ve come from all over the world, bringing their perspectives, culture and cuisine.
Our differences make us special and give us strength. Not the other way around. Here the passage refers to difference within a group of women but I'd suggest applying it more broadly. This is as true for men and women as it is for anything else. It’s the reason I read books like this, to know that I’ll never understand truly what it’s like to be a woman but to have a go anyway.
It’s so relatable and obvious, even as it’s beautifully explained and elucidated.
the personal brand
In the age of the individual where the power of oneself can be infinitely leveraged, the personal brand has become more important. Tolentino explores the contradictions and emptiness behind the concept.
The two most prominent families in politics and culture—the Trumps and the Kardashians—have risen to the top of the food chain because of their keen understanding of how little substance is required to package the self as an endlessly monetizable asset. In fact, substance may actually be anathema to the game.
#GIRLBOSS is an extended exercise in motivational personal branding, in which Amoruso strives to idealize herself while denying that she’s interested in any such thing.
There's an amazing argument about identity being relational. We define ourselves through others, through the stories that are told by others, like Odysseus crying on hearing his own story sung to him having never cried during his 20 years away from home.
the hero suddenly becomes aware not just of his own story but also of his own need to be narrated.
Relating Narratives, by Adriana Cavarero: a dense and brilliant tract, translated into English in 2000, that argues for identity as “totally expositive and relational.” Identity, according to Cavarero, is not something that we innately possess and reveal, but something we understand through narratives provided to us by others.
feminism
Tolentino explores the distance between real, authentic, hard work feminism and the commodifiable, easy feminism that has a corporate seal of approval, one where demonstrating commitment to the cause is literally buying in.
the spurious, embarrassing, and limitlessly seductive sales pitch that feminism means, first and foremost, the public demonstration of getting yours.
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. And so, at a time of unprecedented freedom and power for women, at a time when we were more poised than ever to understand our lives politically, we got, instead of expanded reproductive protections and equal pay and federally mandated family leave and subsidized childcare and a higher minimum wage, the sort of self-congratulatory empowerment feminism that corporations can get behind, the kind that comes with merchandise—mugs that said “Male Tears,” T-shirts that said “Feminist as Fuck.”
my own career has depended to some significant extent on feminism being monetizable. As a result, I live very close to this scam category, perhaps even inside it—attempting to stay on the ethical side, if there is one, of a blurry line between “woman who takes feminism seriously” and “woman selling her feminist personal brand.” I’ve avoided the merchandise, the cutesy illustrated books about “badass” historical women, the coworking spaces and corporate panels and empowerment conferences, but I am a part of that world—and I benefit from it—even if I criticize its emptiness; I am complicit no matter what I do.
On the one hand, sexism is still so ubiquitous that it touches all corners of a woman’s life; on the other, it seems incorrect to criticize women about anything—their demeanor, even their behavior—that might intersect with sexism.
the scam life - how we're all complicit
How our love for reinvention and rags to riches stories begets the scammer as hero - if you make it and stay at the mountaintop you fulfil the hero's journey narrative. If you don't, you become entertainment for the rest of us where we get to enjoy your Icarus tale from the sidelines.
popular identification often begins to slide toward the scammer, who, once identified, can be reconfigured as a uniquely American folk hero—a logical endpoint of our national fixation on reinvention and spectacular ascent.
Stories about blatant con artists allow us to have the scam both ways: we get the pleasure of seeing the scammer exposed and humiliated, but also the retrospective, vicarious thrill of watching the scammer take people for a ride. The blatant scammers make scamming seem simultaneously glorious and unsustainable.
“We’re selling a pipe dream to your average loser,” Billy McFarland said, on camera, while he was in the Bahamas filming the video ad for Fyre Fest.
the era of compromise
The idea that it's impossible to participate in modern life without moral compromise is powerful and largely true. Any economic decision has an adverse impact on someone, is abetting sweatshop labour or repressive regimes. Each time you take a journey not powered by your own two feet you contribute to ecological disaster, as you do when you put food in your mouth. Tolentino extends this metaphor to how she feels about her work, work that interests, elevates and pays her but makes her feel slightly grubby all the same.
I have felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional—to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.
It would be better, of course, to do things morally. But who these days has the ability or the time?
while we do this—because we do this—the honest avenues keep contracting and dead-ending. There are fewer and fewer options for a person to survive in this ecosystem in a thoroughly defensible way.
I still believe, at some inalterable level, that I can make it out of here.
one day I will ascend to an echelon where I won’t have to compromise anymore, where I can really behave thoughtfully, where some imaginary future actions will cancel out all the self-interested scrabbling that came before. This is a useful fantasy, I think, but it’s a fantasy. We are what we do, and we do what we’re used to, and like so many people in my generation, I was raised from adolescence to this fragile, frantic, unstable adulthood on a relentless demonstration that scamming pays.
Related Ideas
#Girlboss - Sophia Amoruso - someone first rejecting the implicit idea of commodified feminism in their brand, then pivoting upon its failure to monetise said personal brand. Fantastically meta.
Fyre Festival - the Netflix documentary about the ultimate scam story for our time - can event that never existed, sold to people using influencers, by definition people that kind of don’t exist and were nowhere to be seen when the event actually happened.
Anna Delvey - high society scammer who spent a couple of years living the influencer/socialaite lifestyle in New York, dodging hotel bills and committing cheque fraud. The book is a bit tedious but it’s an interesting confluence of Trick Mirror’s interests.
The Good Place - Don't Let the Good Life Pass You By - episode where even a man who has forsaken all personal comforts to get into The Good Place won’t make it as every possible human action has a negative consequence.