37 Quotes by Jia Tolentino

Has anyone ever written a great novel about a woman who is happy in her marriage? Of course, most protagonists are unhappy. But heroes are mostly unhappy for existential reasons; heroines suffer for social reasons, because of male power, because of men.

This shift partly reflects basic social physics. Having a mutual enemy is a quick way to make a friend—we learn this as early as elementary school—and politically, it's much easier to organize people against something than it is to write them in an affirmative vision. And, within the economy of attention, conflict always gets more people to look.

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.

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...

The heroine's journey, or her lack of one, serves as a reminder that whatever is dictated is not eternal, not predestined, not necessarily "true." The trajectory of literary women from brave to blank to bitter is a product of material social conditions. The fact that the heroine's journey is framed as a default one for women is proof of our failure to see, for so long, that other paths were possible, and that many other ones exist.

The ideal woman looks beautiful, happy, carefree, and perfectly competent. Is she really? To look any particular way and to actually BE that way are two separate concepts, and striving to look carefree and happy can interfere with your ability to feel so.

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.

Figuring out how to 'get better' at being a woman is ridiculous and often 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.

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.