Jia Tolentino Quotes

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.

Now I'm thirty, and most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and its mazes of incessant forced connection - this feverish, electric, unlivable hell.

Women are genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy - two systems that, at their extremes, ensure that individual success comes at the expense of collective morality. And yet there is enormous pleasure in individual success. It can feel like license and agency to approach an ideal, to find yourself - in a good picture, on your wedding day, in a flash of identical movement - exemplifying a prototype. There are rewards for succeeding under capitalism and patriarchy; there are rewards even for being willing to work on its terms. There are nothing but rewards, at the surface level. The trap looks beautiful. It's well-lit. It welcomes you in.

Not all men have made women fearful, but yes, all women have experienced fear because of men.

But even when Facebook isn't deliberately exploiting its users, it is exploiting its users - its business model requires it. Even if you distance yourself from Facebook, you still live in the world that Facebook is shaping. Facebook, using our native narcissism and our desire to connect with other people, captured our attention and our behavioral data; it used this attention and data to manipulate our behavior, to the point that nearly half of America began relying on Facebook for news. Then, with the media both reliant on Facebook as a way of reaching readers and powerless against the platform's ability to suck up digital advertising revenue - it was like a paperboy who pocketed all the subscription money - Facebook bent the media's economic model to match its own practices: publications needed to capture attention quickly and consistently trigger high emotional responses to be seen at all. The result, in 2016, was an unending stream of Trump stories, both from the mainstream news and from the fringe outlets that were buoyed by Facebook's algorithm. What began as a way for Zuckerberg to harness collegiate misogyny and self-interest has become the fuel for our whole contemporary nightmare, for a world that fundamentally and systematically misrepresents human needs.

And still, on occasion, I'll disable my social media blockers, and I'll sit there like a rat pressing the lever, like a woman repeatedly hitting myself on the forehead with a hammer, masturbating through the nightmare until I finally catch the gasoline whiff of a good meme.

It was the first time that I fully understood myself to be subsumed within a social system that was unjust, brutal, punitive--that women were suffering because men had dominion over them, that men were suffering because they were expected to perform this dominion, that power had been stacked so unevenly, so long ago, that there was very little I could do.

In doing this, I have sometimes felt the same sort of unease that washed over me when I was a cheerleader and learned how to convincingly fake happiness at football games - the feeling of acting as if conditions are fun and normal and worthwhile in the hopes that they will just magically become so.

There's a saying we have in reality," Jess, the producer, told me, while we were sitting in Midtown. "Everyone signs. Most people want to be famous. Everyone thinks they could be a better Kardashian than the Kardashians. You see it now, with these apps, everyone likes to have an audience. Everyone thinks they deserve one.

I have always accommodated everything I wish I were opposed to. Here, as in so many other things, the "thee" I dread may been the "I" all along.

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.

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.

[W]e've been adjudicating inequality through cultural criticism. We have taught people who don't even care about feminism how to do this - how to analyze women and analyze the way people react to women, how to endlessly read and interpret the signs.

Punk teaches the same inversion of power as the Gospel," the singer said. "You learn that the coolest thing about having a microphone is turning it away from your own mouth.

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.

At a basic level, Facebook, like most other forms of social media, runs on doublespeak: advertising connection but creating isolation; promising happiness but inculcating dread.

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.

Adult heroines commit suicide for different reasons than teenage heroines do. Where the teenagers have been drained of all desire, the adults are so full of desire that it kills them. Or, rather, they live under conditions where ordinary desire makes them fatally monstrous.