37 Quotes by Jia Tolentino

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. The root of this trouble is the fact that mainstream feminism has had to conform to patriarchy and capitalism to become mainstream in the first place. Old requirements, instead of being overthrown, are rebranded. Beauty work is labeled “self-care” to make it sound progressive.

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.

The final and possibly most psychologically destructive, distortion of the social internet is its distortion of scale. This is not an accident but an essential design feature: social media was constructed around the idea that a thing is important insofar as it is important to you.

Within a few years, I would begin to think that the impression I left on people was, like the weather, essentially beyond my ability to control.

But this imputation—this self—is a product of a scene that comes off, and is not a cause of it," Goffman writes. The self is not a fixed, organic thing, but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance. This effect can be believed or disbelieved at will.

People often make faces, in private, in front of bathroom mirrors, to convince themselves of their own attractiveness. The ‘lively belief that an unseen audience is present,’ Goffman writes, can have a significant effect.

Goffman observed that we need both an audience to witness our performance as well as a backstage area where we can relax, often in the company of 'teammates' who had been performing alongside us.

The model of business success in the millennial era is that of dismantling social structures to suck up cash from whatever corners of life can still be exploited.

I wonder how much harder it would be to get straight women to accept the reality of marriage if they were not first presented with the fantasy of a wedding. I wonder if women today would so readily accept the unequal diminishment of their independence without their sense of self-importance being overinflated first.