Trick Mirror

Author:: Jia Tolentino Tags:#media/book essay

• themes:: *
• Summary::
  • collection of personal essays
• notes::
  • Erving Goffman on performance and acting

Highlights first synced by Readwise 2021-01-06

• 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. (Location 41)

• Throughout this period, I found that I could hardly trust anything that I was thinking. A doubt that always hovers in the back of my mind intensified: that whatever conclusions I might reach about myself, my life, and my environment are just as likely to be diametrically wrong as they are to be right. (Location 45)

• I wrote this book because I am always confused, because I can never be sure of anything, and because I am drawn to any mechanism that directs me away from that truth. Writing is either a way to shed my self-delusions or a way to develop them. A well-practiced, conclusive narrative is usually a dubious one: (Location 52)

• But that’s fine. The last few years have taught me to suspend my desire for a conclusion, to assume that nothing is static and that renegotiation will be perpetual, to hope primarily that little truths will keep emerging in time. (Location 65)

• “trick mirror that carries the illusion of flawlessness as well as the self-flagellating option of constantly finding fault.” (Location 67)

• people had been gathering on the internet in open forums, drawn, like butterflies, to the puddles and blossoms of other people’s curiosity and expertise. (Location 97)

• Because there were so few search engines and no centralized social platforms, discovery on the early internet took place mainly in private, and pleasure existed as its own solitary reward. (Location 100)

• The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of texts and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens.” On Web 2.0, the structures would be dynamic, she predicted: instead of houses, websites would be portals, through which an ever-changing stream of activity—status updates, photos—could be displayed. What you did on the internet would become intertwined with what everyone else did, and the things other people liked would become the things that you would see. (Location 114)

• As more people began to register their existence digitally, a pastime turned into an imperative: you had to register yourself digitally to exist. (Location 119)

• Through the emergence of blogging, personal lives were becoming public domain, and social incentives—to be liked, to be seen—were becoming economic ones. (Location 126)

• 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. (Location 138)

• Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedom promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse. (Location 144)

• As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people. But you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet—for anyone to see you, you have to act. (Location 147)

• Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them. This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-traveled on Instagram; this is why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; this is why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself. (Location 151)

• Few of us are totally immune to the practice, as it intersects with a real desire for political integrity. Posting photos from a protest against border family separation, as I did while writing this, is a microscopically meaningful action, an expression of genuine principle, and also, inescapably, some sort of attempt to signal that I am good. (Location 156)

• These deranged takes, and their unnerving proximity to online monetization, are case studies in the way that our world—digitally mediated, utterly consumed by capitalism—makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard. You don’t end up using a news story about a dead toddler as a peg for white entitlement without a society in which the discourse of righteousness occupies far more public attention than the conditions that necessitate righteousness in the first place. (Location 168)

  • Note: What are the conditions for righteousness? How do we shift incentives to focus on the right system? Why is signaling valued. Is it just because it is tied to monetization?

• The over-woke left could only dream of this ability to weaponize a sense of righteousness. (Location 188)

• The worldview of the Gamergaters and Pizzagaters was actualized and to a large extent vindicated in the 2016 election—an event that strongly suggested that the worst things about the internet were now determining, rather than reflecting, the worst things about offline life. (Location 190)

• Mass media always determines the shape of… (Location 193)

• But lately I’ve been wondering how everything got so intimately terrible, and why, exactly, we keep playing along. How did a huge number of people begin spending the bulk of our disappearing free time in an openly torturous environment? How did the internet get so bad, so… (Location 196)

• 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. And, more important, the internet already is what it is. It has already become the central organ of contemporary life. It has already rewired the brains of its users, returning us to a state of primitive hyperawareness and distraction while overloading us with much more sensory input than was ever… (Location 199)

• Even if you avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought tbt meant “truth be told” for ages—you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose terms are set by centralized platforms that have… (Location 203)

  • Note: The world we live in is tied to the internet and so you have to be aware of its effects

• I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems: first, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our… (Location 208)

• the sociologist Erving Goffman laid out a theory of identity that revolved around playacting. In every human interaction, he wrote in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a person must put on a sort… (Location 211)

• A performer might be fully taken in by his own performance—he might actually believe that his biggest flaw is “perfectionism”—or he might know that his act is a sham. But no matter what, he’s performing. Even if he stops trying to perform, he still has an audience, his actions still create an effect. “All the world is not, of course, a… (Location 215) Erving Goffman

• To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion. A performer, in order to be convincing, must conceal “the discreditable facts that he has had to learn about the performance; in everyday terms, there will be things he… (Location 219) Erving Goffman

• everyone may still be performing, but they feel at ease, unguarded, alone. Ideally, the outside audience has believed the prior performance. (Location 232) Erving Goffman

• 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. (Location 235) Erving Goffman ^9T3xbBCvv

  • Note: Literally the philosophy for fake it until you make it. We become the people we act as

• The everyday madness perpetuated by the internet is the madness of this architecture, which positions personal identity as the center of the universe. It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection. Through social media, many people have quickly come to view all new information as a sort of direct commentary on who they are. (Location 244)

  • Note: Personalization second hand effects of making us think everyone else on the internet is like us. We need diversity got update our opinions but right now we see our own little slice. We’re all wearing custom lenses that color the world for our preference but in real life, everyone sees the same world beautiful or ugly

• Now, in the twenty-first century, in what appears to be something of a final stage, commerce has filtered into our identities and relationships. We have generated billions of dollars for social media platforms through our desire—and then through a subsequent, escalating economic and cultural requirement—to replicate for the internet who we know, who we think we are, who we want to be. (Location 249)

• In real life, the success or failure of each individual performance often plays out in the form of concrete, physical action—you get invited over for dinner, or you lose the friendship, or you get the job. Online, performance is mostly arrested in the nebulous realm of sentiment, through an unbroken stream of hearts and likes and eyeballs, aggregated in numbers attached to your name. Worst of all, there’s essentially no backstage on the internet; where the offline audience necessarily empties out and changes over, the online audience never has to leave. (Location 255)

• Identity, according to Goffman, is a series of claims and promises. On the internet, a highly functional person is one who can promise everything to an indefinitely increasing audience at all times. (Location 265)

• 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; (Location 269)

  • Note: Opposites can have lots of similarities

• To try to write online, more specifically, is to operate on a set of assumptions that are already dubious when limited to writers and even more questionable when turned into a categorical imperative for everyone on the internet: the assumption that speech has an impact, that it’s something like action; the assumption that it’s fine or helpful or even ideal to be constantly writing down what you think. (Location 283)

• started to feel that there was almost nothing I could do about ninety-five percent of the things I cared about other than form an opinion—and that the conditions that allowed me to live in mild everyday hysterics about an unlimited supply of terrible information were related to the conditions that were, at the same time, consolidating power, sucking wealth upward, far outside my grasp. (Location 291)

• There is less time these days for anything other than economic survival. The internet has moved seamlessly into the interstices of this situation, redistributing our minimum of free time into unsatisfying micro-installments, spread throughout the day. In the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us brief moments of pleasure and connection, tied up in the opportunity to constantly listen and speak. Under these circumstances, opinion stops being a first step toward something and starts seeming like an end in itself. (Location 297)

• Forming an opinion was also framed as a sort of action: blog posts offered people guidance on how to feel about online controversies or particular scenes on TV. Even identity itself seemed to take on these valences. Merely to exist as a feminist was to be doing some important work. (Location 305)

• Goffman observes the difference between doing something and expressing the doing of something, between feeling something and conveying a feeling. “The representation of an activity will vary in some degree from the activity itself and therefore inevitably misrepresent it,” (Location 313)

• The internet is engineered for this sort of misrepresentation; it’s designed to encourage us to create certain impressions rather than allowing these impressions to arise “as an incidental by-product of [our] activity.” This is why, with the internet, it’s so easy to stop trying to be decent, or reasonable, or politically engaged—and start trying merely to seem so. (Location 316)

• (Both-sides arguments like this are always appealing to people who wish to seem both contrarian and intellectually superior; this particular one required ignoring the fact that liberals remained obsessed with “civility” while the Republican president was actively endorsing violence at every turn. (Location 336)

• Fury at the terribleness of other people had started to consume us a lot….In fact, it felt weird and empty when there wasn’t anyone to be furious about. The days between shamings felt like days picking at fingernails, treading water.” (Location 355)

• Web 2.0 had curdled; its organizing principle was shifting. The early internet had been constructed around lines of affinity, and whatever good spaces remain on the internet are still the product of affinity and openness. But when the internet moved to an organizing principle of opposition, much of what had formerly been surprising and rewarding and curious became tedious, noxious, and grim. (Location 357)

• it’s much easier to organize people against something than it is to unite them in an affirmative vision. And, within the economy of attention, conflict always gets more people to look. (Location 362)

• an open-ended, affinity-based, generative online identity is hard to keep alive. (Location 367)

• That opposition looms so large on the internet can be good and useful and even revolutionary. Because of the internet’s tilt toward decontextualization and frictionlessness, a person on social media can seem to matter as much as whatever he’s set himself against. (Location 368)

• as the sexual marketplace began to equalize, they suddenly found themselves unable to obtain sex by default. Rather than work toward other forms of self-actualization—or attempt to make themselves genuinely desirable, in the same way that women have been socialized to do at great expense and with great sincerity for all time—they established a group identity that centered on anti-woman virulence, (Location 393)

• My column about trolling would, of course, attract an influx of trolling. Then, having proven my point, maybe I’d go on TV and talk about the situation, and then I would get trolled even more, and then I could go on defining myself in reference to trolls forever, positioning them as inexorable and monstrous, and they would return the favor in the interest of their own ideological advancement, and this whole situation could continue until we all died. (Location 404)

  • Note: Actually a very symbiotic relationship even if directly oppositional on the surface. Feed off one another to survive

• There is a version of this mutual escalation that applies to any belief system, which brings me back to Bari Weiss and all the other writers who have fashioned themselves as brave contrarians, building entire arguments on random protests and harsh tweets, making themselves deeply dependent on the people who hate them, the people they hate. (Location 407)

• Trolls and bad writers and the president know better than anyone: when you call someone terrible, you just end up promoting their work. (Location 412)

• Sally Scholz separates solidarity into three categories. There’s social solidarity, which is based on common experience; civic solidarity, which is based on moral obligation to a community; and political solidarity, which is based on a shared commitment to a cause. (Location 414)

• The internet can make it seem that supporting someone means literally sharing in their experience—that solidarity is a matter of identity rather than politics or morality, and that it’s best established at a point of maximum mutual vulnerability in everyday life. (Location 420)

  • Note: Have to bring yourself into it. Even people who are driving the movements push this sometimes

• This framework, which centers the self in an expression of support for others, is not ideal. (Location 427)

• The phenomenon in which people take more comfort in a sense of injury than a sense of freedom governs many situations where people are objectively not being victimized on a systematic basis. For example, men’s rights activists have developed a sense of solidarity around the absurd claim that men are second-class citizens. (Location 428)

• Conversely, and crucially, the dynamic also applies in situations where claims of vulnerability are legitimate and historically entrenched. The greatest moments of feminist solidarity in recent years have stemmed not from an affirmative vision but from articulating extreme versions of the low common denominator of male slight. (Location 433)

• And, because there is no room or requirement in a tweet to add a disclaimer about individual experience, and because hashtags subtly equate disconnected statements in a way that can’t be controlled by those speaking, it has been even easier for MeToo critics to claim that women must themselves think that going on a bad date is the same as being violently raped. (Location 456)

• What’s amazing is that things like hashtag design—these essentially ad hoc experiments in digital architecture—have shaped so much of our political discourse. Our world would be different if Anonymous hadn’t been the default username on 4chan, or if every social media platform didn’t center on the personal profile, or if YouTube algorithms didn’t show viewers increasingly extreme content to retain their attention, or if hashtags and retweets simply didn’t exist. (Location 459)

• At one point in The Presentation of Self, Goffman writes that the audience’s way of shaping a role for the performer can become more elaborate than the performance itself. This is what the online expression of solidarity sometimes feels like—a manner of listening so extreme and performative that it often turns into the show. (Location 471)

  • Tags: pink

• What resulted was a situation where we—first as individuals, and then inevitably as a collective—are essentially unable to exercise control at all. Facebook’s goal of showing people only what they were interested in seeing resulted, within a decade, in the effective end of shared civic reality. (Location 479)

  • Tags: orange

• today we mostly consume news that corresponds with our ideological alignment, which has been fine-tuned to make us feel self-righteous and also mad. (Location 482)

• In The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu observes that technologies designed to increase control over our attention often have the opposite effect. (Location 484)

  • Tags: pink

• In front of the timeline, as many critics have noted, we exhibit classic reward-seeking lab-rat behavior, the sort that’s observed when lab rats are put in front of an unpredictable food dispenser. Rats will eventually stop pressing the lever if their device dispenses food regularly or not at all. But if the lever’s rewards are rare and irregular, the rats will never stop pressing it. In other words, it is essential that social media is mostly unsatisfying. That is what keeps us scrolling, scrolling, pressing our lever over and over in the hopes of getting some fleeting sensation—some momentary rush of recognition, flattery, or rage. (Location 488)

• And in front of this backdrop, there were all of us—our stupid selves, with our stupid frustrations, our lost baggage and delayed trains. It seemed to me that this sense of punishing oversaturation would persist no matter what was in the news. There was no limit to the amount of misfortune a person could take in via the internet, I wrote, and there was no way to calibrate this information correctly—no guidebook for how to expand our hearts to accommodate these simultaneous scales of human experience, no way to teach ourselves to separate the banal from the profound. (Location 502)

• The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us. (Location 506)

• 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. (Location 511)

  • Tags: blue

• The internet is governed by incentives that make it impossible to be a full person while interacting with it. In the future, we will inevitably be cheapened. Less and less of us will be left, not just as individuals but also as community members, as a collective of people facing various catastrophes. Distraction is a “life-and-death matter,” Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing. “A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.” (Location 515)

• In 1985, Neil Postman observed that the American desire for constant entertainment had become toxic, that television had ushered in a “vast descent into triviality.” The difference is that, today, there is nowhere further to go. Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self. Everything is being cannibalized—not just goods and labor, but personality and relationships and attention. The next step is complete identification with the online marketplace, physical and spiritual inseparability from the internet: a nightmare that is already banging down the door. (Location 523)

• 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. (Location 530)

• I needed my dad’s twenty dollars not as motivation but as cover for my motivation. It wasn’t my egotism that got me to the casting booth, I could tell myself: it was merely the promise of a new flammable halter top to pair with my prize Abercrombie miniskirt and knockoff Reefs. (Location 603)

• This is, I write, an attempt to be more honest: I want to act in a way that reflects how I feel; I want to live the way that I “really am.” But I also worry that I’m more interested in narrative consistency than anything. I worry that all this self-monitoring has made me, as I wrote in 2004, too conscious of what “Jia” would do in this situation—that I’m in danger of becoming a “character to myself.” (Location 704)

• On the show, where I was under constant surveillance, I was unable to get far enough away from myself to think about the impression I was leaving. When everything was framed as a performance, it seemed impossible to consciously perform. (Location 708)

• I forget everything that I don’t need to turn into a story, and in Puerto Rico, making sense of what happened every day was someone else’s job. (Location 740)

• Reality TV is notorious for constructing stories out of nothing. The Bachelor franchise famously engages in “Frankenbiting,” manipulating audio and inserting false context to show contestants saying things they never said. (Location 741)

• in the twenty-first century it would sometimes be impossible to differentiate between the pretext for an experience, the record of that experience, and the experience itself. (Location 749)

• I think, in a way, that people in high school were jealous that I felt so free to be myself. Because you’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to worry about people looking at you and judging you.” (Location 888)

• The ideal woman, in other words, is always optimizing. (Location 993)

• by our peers, and nearly impossible to get us to suspect the images we produce of ourselves, for our own pleasure and benefit—even though, in a time when social media use has become broadly framed as a career asset, many of us are effectively professionals now, too. (Location 1014)

• 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. (Location 1019)

• But the worse things get, the more a person is compelled to optimize. (Location 1026)

• The ritualization and neatness of this process (and the fact that Sweetgreen is pretty good) obscure the intense, circular artifice that defines the type of life it’s meant to fit into. (Location 1035)

• The first, best chronicler of the chopped-salad economy’s accelerationist nightmare was Matt Buchanan, who wrote at The Awl in 2015: The chopped salad is engineered…to free one’s hand and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious attention can be directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data: work email or Amazon’s nearly infinite catalog or Facebook’s actually infinite News Feed, where, as one shops for diapers or engages with the native advertising sprinkled between the not-hoaxes and baby photos, one is being productive by generating revenue for a large internet company, which is obviously good for the economy, or at least it is certainly better than spending lunch reading a book from the library, because who is making money from that? (Location 1039)

• On today’s terms, what he’s describing—a mechanically efficient salad-feeding session, conducted in such a way that one need not take a break from emails—is the good life. It means progress, individuation. It’s what you do when you’ve gotten ahead a little bit, when you want to get ahead some more. (Location 1050)

• (In 1958, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, “It can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-around higher level of production than a lower one….The higher level of production has, merely, a higher level of want creation necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction.”) (Location 1053)

• It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time. (Location 1061)

• At that moment, my soul having been flayed by secondhand vaginal exhalation, I wanted nothing more than to jump out of my skin. I wanted to land in a new life where everything—bodies, ambitions—would work seamlessly and efficiently. Trapped in corpse pose, in a motionlessness that was supposed to be relaxing, I felt the specter of stagnation hovering over my existence. (Location 1104)

  • Tags: blue

• Was it health I was investing in? In a very narrow way, it was. Barre has made me stronger and improved my posture. It has given me the luxury—which is off-limits to so many people, for so many stupid reasons—of not having to think about my body, because it mostly feels good, mostly works. But the endurance that barre builds is possibly more psychological than physical. What it’s really good at is getting you in shape for a hyper-accelerated capitalist life. It prepares you less for a half marathon than for a twelve-hour workday, or a week alone with a kid and no childcare, or an evening commute on an underfunded train. Barre feels like exercise the way Sweetgreen feels like eating: both might better be categorized as mechanisms that help you adapt to arbitrary, prolonged agony. As a form of exercise, barre is ideal for an era in which everyone has to work constantly—you can be back at the office in five minutes, no shower necessary—and in which women are still expected to look unreasonably good. (Location 1175)

• And so an exercise method even nominally drawn from ballet has the subtle effect of giving regular women a sense of serious, artistic, professional purpose in their pursuit of their ideal body. This is a good investment, or more precisely, a pragmatic self-delusion—in the same way that being trained to smile and throw my shoulders back for crowds and judges, ostensibly as a show of genuine cheerfulness, was also “good” for me. (Location 1195)

• Learning how to function more efficiently within an exhausting system: this seems to me to be the thing, with barre, that people pay $40 a class for, the investment that always brings back returns. (Location 1198)

• When you are a woman, the things you like get used against you. Or, alternatively, the things that get used against you have all been prefigured as things you should like. Sexual availability falls into this category. So does basic kindness, and generosity. Wanting to look good—taking pleasure in trying to look good—does, too. (Location 1200)

• 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 make up for the fact that we are no longer economically and legally dependent on men. One waste of time had been traded for another, Wolf wrote. Where women in mid-century America had been occupied with “inexhaustible but ephemeral” domestic work, beating back disorder with fastidious housekeeping and consumer purchases, they were now occupied by inexhaustible but ephemeral beauty work, spending huge amounts of time, anxiety, and money to adhere to a standard over which they had no control. Beauty constituted a sort of “third shift,” Wolf wrote—an extra obligation in every possible setting. (Location 1205)

• Wolf wrote that a woman had to believe three things in order to accept the beauty myth. First, she had to think about beauty as a “legitimate and necessary qualification for a woman’s rise in power.” Second, she had to ignore the beauty standard’s reliance on chance and discrimination, and instead imagine beauty as a matter of hard work and entrepreneurship, the American Dream. Third, she had to believe that the beauty requirement would increase as she herself gained power. Personal advancement wouldn’t free her from needing to be beautiful. In fact, success would handcuff her to her looks, to “physical self-consciousness and sacrifice,” even more. (Location 1212)

• In her 2018 book, Perfect Me, the philosopher Heather Widdows argues persuasively that the beauty ideal has more recently taken on an ethical dimension. Where beauty has historically functioned as a symbol for female worth and morality—in fairy tales, evil women are ugly and beautiful princesses are good—beauty is now framed, Widdows writes, as female worth and morality itself. (Location 1217)

• Under this ethical ideal, women attribute implicit moral value to the day-to-day efforts of improving their looks, and failing to meet the beauty standard is framed as “not a local or partial failure, but a failure of the self.” (Location 1222)

• Mainstream feminism has also driven the movement toward what’s called “body acceptance,” which is the practice of valuing women’s beauty at every size and in every iteration, as well as the movement to diversify the beauty ideal. These changes are overdue and positive, but they’re also double-edged. A more expansive idea of beauty is a good thing—I have appreciated it personally—and yet it depends on the precept, formalized by a culture where ordinary faces are routinely photographed for quantified approval, that beauty is still of paramount importance. 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. (Location 1230)

  • Note: Can we ever get people to not desire beauty?

• 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.” (Location 1237)

• It sometimes seems that feminism can imagine no more satisfying progress than this current situation—one in which, instead of being counseled by mid-century magazines to spend time and money trying to be more radiant for our husbands, we can now counsel one another to do all the same things but for ourselves. (Location 1248)

• 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 question, the best way to live. (Location 1255)

• The question of optimization dates back to antiquity, though it wasn’t called “optimization” back then. In the Aeneid, Virgil describes what’s come to be known as Dido’s Problem, in which the queen Dido strikes a bargain in founding the city of Carthage: she will be allowed as much land as she can enclose with a bull’s hide. (Location 1259)

• The next decade brought a wave of optimization to economics, with the Marginal Revolution: economists argued that human choice is based in calculating the marginal utility of our various options. (Location 1266)

• As with all optimization experiences and products, athleisure is reliably comfortable and supportive in a world that is not. In 2016, Moira Weigel wrote, at Real Life magazine, “Lululemons announce that for the wearer, life has become frictionless.” She recalls putting on a pair of Spanx shapewear for the first time: “The word for how my casing made me feel was optimized.” (Location 1288)

• It feels comforting to wear high-quality spandex—I imagine it’s what a dog feels like in a ThunderShirt—but this sense of reassurance is paired with an undercurrent of demand. (Location 1293)

• This is how athleisure has carved out the space between exercise apparel and fashion: the former category optimizes your performance, the latter optimizes your appearance, and athleisure does both simultaneously. It is tailor-made for a time when work is rebranded as pleasure so that we will accept more of it—a time when, for women, improving your looks is a job that you’re supposed to believe is fun. And the real trick of athleisure is the way it can physically suggest that you were made to do this—that you’re the kind of person who thinks that putting in expensive hard work for a high-functioning, maximally attractive consumer existence is about as good a way to pass your time on earth as there is. (Location 1299)

• There’s a phenomenon, Weigel noted, called “enclothed cognition,” in which clothes that come with cultural scripts can actually alter cognitive function. (Location 1303)

• The historian Susan G. Cole wrote that the best way to instill social values is to eroticize them. (Location 1314)

• The expense is important, and does a lot to perpetuate the fetish. We pay too much for the things we think are precious, but we also start to believe things are precious if someone makes us pay too much. (Location 1351)

• From my corner I had a clear view of the street below us, where tourists were taking pictures in front of the Wall Street bull, and it was hypnotic: the iridescent sunset flooding the paving stones, and then dusk chasing it out. The light changed in the studio—cherry red, snow-cone blue—and we swiveled our hips in silence. We were the kind of women who accumulated points at Sephora, who got expensive haircuts. We were lucky, I thought, dissociating, to even be able to indulge these awful priorities, to have the economic capital to be able to accrue more social capital via our looks. And then our looks, in some way, would help us guard and acquire economic capital—this was the connective tissue of our experience, an unbreakable link between the women who didn’t work, who were married to rich men, and the women who did work, like me. (Location 1376)

  • Tags: blue

• 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. The internet codifies this problem, makes it inescapable; in recent years, pop culture has started to reflect the fractures in selfhood that social media creates. Not coincidentally, these stories usually center on women, and usually involve a protagonist driven to insanity by the digital avatar of an ideal peer. (Location 1385)

• There is an exaggerated binary fatalism to these stories, in which women are either successes or failures, always one or the other—and a sense of inescapability that rings more true to life. If you can’t escape the market, why stop working on its terms? 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. (Location 1408)

• Haraway imagined that women, formed in a way that makes us inextricable from social and technological machinery, could become fluid and radical and resistant. We could be like cyborgs—shaped in an image we didn’t choose for ourselves, and disloyal and disobedient as a result. “Illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential,” Haraway wrote. The cyborg was “oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.” She would understand that the terms of her life had always been artificial. She would—and what an incredible possibility!—feel no respect whatsoever for the rules by which her life played out. (Location 1421)

• Resistance to a system is presented on the terms of the system. It’s so much easier, when we gain agency, to adapt rather than to oppose. (Location 1443)

• We have not “optimized” our wages, our childcare system, our political representation; we still hardly even think of parity as realistic in those arenas, let alone anything approaching perfection. We have maximized our capacity as market assets. That’s all. (Location 1448)

• For the way out, I think, we have to follow the cyborg. We have to be willing to be disloyal, to undermine. The cyborg is powerful because she grasps the potential in her own artificiality, because she accepts without question how deeply it is embedded in her. “The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment,” Haraway wrote. “We can be responsible for machines.” The dream of the cyborg is “not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia”—a form of speech contained inside another person’s language, one whose purpose is to introduce conflict from within. (Location 1451)

• It wasn’t until third grade or so that I grasped the fact that identity could govern our relationship to what we saw and what we read. (Location 1476)

• The stylistic combination of economy and indulgence accrues into something addictive, a cognitive equivalent of salty and sweet: think of Laura Ingalls’s pioneer snow globe full of calico and petticoats, horses and cornfields; the butter mold with a strawberry pattern, the maple-syrup candy, the hair ribbons, the corncob doll, the pig’s tail. We remember her childhood possessions and mishaps as well as, if not better than, our own. (Location 1493)

• Childhood heroines aren’t always fearless, but they are intrinsically resilient. The stories are episodic rather than accumulative, and so sadness and fear are rooms to be passed through, existing alongside mishap and indulgence and joy. (Location 1510)

• Her life is a stretch of devastating disappointments studded with moments of wonder—and yet Francie remains solid, tenacious, herself. Is that fantastical, the idea of a selfhood undiminished by circumstance? Is it incomplete, naïve? In children’s literature, young female characters are self-evidently important, and their traumas, whatever they may be, are secondary. (Location 1514)

• the man allowed to go out into the world and transcend himself, the woman reduced to the kind of work that will be erased and forgotten at day’s end, living invisible among the vestigial people of the afternoon.” (Location 1817)

• 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. (Location 1833)

• organized a strike at her workplace, she imagines Lila “triumphant, admired for her achievements, in the guise of a revolutionary leader, [telling] me: You wanted to write novels, I created a novel with real people, with real blood, in reality.” The struggle and correspondence between the two friends—the mirroring, the deviation, the contradiction, the cleaving, all enacted simultaneously—reflects, more precisely than anything I have ever encountered, the negotiations between various forms of female authority, which themselves negotiate a structure of male authority. (Location 1907)

• Identity, according to Cavarero, is not something that we innately possess and reveal, but something we understand through narratives provided to us by others. (Location 1915)

• The two women were acting within the framework of affidamento, or “entrustment,” that the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective developed in the seventies. When two women “entrusted” themselves to each other, they prioritized not their similarities but their differences. They recognized that the differences between their stories were central to their identities, and in doing this, they also created these identities and affirmed this difference as strength. (Location 1929)

• (Audre Lorde had made this argument in 1979, framing difference as something not just to be “merely tolerated,” but a “fund of necessary polarities, between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”) (Location 1932)

• They imagined themselves in the place of the novelists, in the place of their heroines, attempting to see what they could learn by this exchange of roles. The result, they wrote, was “to wipe out boundaries between life and literature.” The hope was that, somewhere in the midst of all these characters, somewhere within this grand experiment of identification, they might access an original source of authority. They might find a female language that could “speak starting from itself.” (Location 1941)

• My hesitation, as an adult, to find myself within the heroine universe has been rooted in a suspicion that that identification would never be truly reciprocal: I would see myself in Jo March, but the world’s Jo Marches would rarely, if ever, be expected or able to see themselves in me. (Location 1958)

• with the same complicated, ambivalent, essential freedom that a daughter feels when she looks at her mother, understanding her as a figure that she simultaneously resists and depends on; a figure that she uses, cruelly and lovingly and gratefully, as the base from which to become something more. (Location 1981)

  • Note: Women have always been represented in literature as emblematic of what roles in society that they are expected to play. This has frequently been a role that relies on men via marriage and they are defined by that definition whereas men can be emblematic of the human condition.
  • Identity is always entangled with narration. Narration even helps you understand yourself better, especially when you entrust someone else to tell it to you and highlight your differences. Sometimes you even have the desire to be narrated. You can use literary figures in this same way, highlighting your differences to better understand yourself.

• The weather in Houston is frequently scorching, and as with much of Texas, an undercurrent of proud, ambitious independence thrums through the air. As a result, there isn’t much of a true public sphere in Houston. (Location 2053)

• Like religion, it provided both ends of a total system. Its sound entangled sin and salvation; it held a tug of unease, a blanket of reassurance. It was as ominous and comforting as a nursery rhyme, this first taste of the way that an open acknowledgment of vice can feel as divinely willed, as spiritual—even more so—than the concealment often required to be good. (Location 2112)

  • Tags: blue

• We still went to church twice a week, and it all started to seem interchangeable. Some nights I went with my girlfriends to youth group and sang about Jesus, and sometimes I would go with them to the club on teen night, driving past the Repentagon into the thicket of liquor stores and strip clubs a mile up on Westheimer, entering another dark room where all the girls wore miniskirts and everyone sought amnesty in a different form. (Location 2121)

  • Tags: blue

• The fear of sin often seemed to conjure and perpetuate it: abstinence education led to abortions, for rich people, and for poor people to children who would be loved and supported until the day they were born. There was so much beatific kindness, and it was so often undergirded by brittle cruelty. (Location 2147)

• I stood between both sides of my life, holding the lines that led to them, trying to engage with a tension that I stopped being able to feel. Eventually, almost without realizing it, I let one side go. (Location 2171)

  • Tags: blue

• Like many people before me, I found religion and drugs appealing for similar reasons. (You require absolution, complete abandonment, I wrote, praying to God my junior year.) Both provide a path toward transcendence—a way of accessing an extrahuman world of rapture and pardon that, in both cases, is as real as it feels. The word “ecstasy” contains this etymologically, coming from the Greek ekstasis—ek meaning “out” and stasis meaning “stand.” To be in ecstasy is to stand outside yourself: a wonderful feeling, one accessible through many avenues. The Screwtape demon tells his nephew, “Nothing matters at all except the tendency of a given state of mind, in given circumstances, to move a particular patient at a particular moment nearer to the Enemy or nearer to us.” (Location 2188)

• The nature of a revelation is that you don’t have to re-experience it; you don’t even have to believe whatever is revealed to hang on to it for as long as you want. In the seventies, researchers believed that MDMA treatment would be discrete and limited—that once you got the message, as they put it, you could hang up the phone. You would be better for having listened. You would be changed. They don’t say this about religion, but they should. (Location 2273)

• “Decreation,” finally, is a word that comes from Simone Weil—her term for the process of moving toward a love so unadulterated that it makes you leave yourself behind. (Location 2307)

  • Tags: pink

• To grasp at the type of self-erasure that Carson’s three women become fixated upon is to approach a cognitive limit, a place of instinct and unconsciousness, a total annihilation that can be achieved only once. (Location 2320)

• I don’t know if I’m after truth or hanging on to its dwindling half-life. I might only be hoping to remember that my ecstatic disposition is the source of the good in me—spontaneity, devotion, sweetness—and the worst things, too: heedlessness, blankness, equivocation. Sunday in church isn’t the same as Sunday on the radio. I’m trying to rid myself of the delusion that either type belongs to me. The sense of something is not its substance. It isn’t love, trying to make two things interchangeable, when they are not. (Location 2356)

• that sound he’d created that approximated the feel of a drug binge, no matter what Screw told reporters; the sound that mimicked the flow of all these substances, darkening the wide, anonymous, looping highways, a secret and sublime desecration that seeped through the heart and the veins of a city, that set the pace and the rhythm of its people slipping past one another in their cars. (Location 2368)

  • Tags: blue

• There are feelings, like ecstasy, that provide an unbreakable link between virtue and vice. You don’t have to believe a revelation to hold on to it, to remember certain overpasses, sudden angles above and under the cold and heartless curves of that industrial landscape, a slow river of lights blinking white and red into the distance, and the debauched sky gleaming over the houses and hospitals and stadium churches, and your blood thrumming with drugs or music or sanctity. It can all feel like a mirage of wholeness: the ten thousand square miles around you teeming with millions of people who do the same things, drive under the same influences, respect the same Sundays, with the music that sounds like their version of religion. (Location 2375)

• “Our life is impossibility, absurdity,” wrote Simone Weil. “Everything we want contradicts the conditions or the consequences attached to it….It is because we are a contradiction—being creatures—being God and infinitely other than God.” (Location 2380)

  • Note: What is defined as divine is unclear and can be found in drugs or religion. There are certain feelings that’s you can’t feel without these things and that you only know when you experience them. There is something enlightening and scary about these experiences and they are always tied up with virtue and vice

• Fyre Fest sailed down Scam Mountain with all the accumulating force and velocity of a cultural shift that had, over the previous decade, subtly but permanently changed the character of the nation, making scamming—the abuse of trust for profit—seem simply like the way things were going to be. (Location 2465)

• Holy shit, that’s just fucking crazy. That’s fraud. Maybe you can’t prove it in a court of law. But it’s fraud.” (Location 2492)

• Upward mobility felt like oxygen—unremarkable, ubiquitous. (Location 2497)

• I’d been writing about immigrants, and how uncertainty was central to the magic spell of America. But the backdrop had suddenly changed from prosperity to collapse. (Location 2500)

• The financial crisis was a classic con—a confidence trick, carried off by confidence men. (Location 2508)

• The con is in the DNA of this country, which was founded on the idea that it is good, important, and even noble to see an opportunity to profit and take whatever you can. (Location 2531)

• The financial crisis of 2008 was an extended, flamboyant demonstration of the fact that one of the best bids a person can make for financial safety in America is to get really good at exploiting other people. This has always been true, but it is becoming all-encompassing. And it’s a bad lesson to learn the way millennials did—just as we were becoming adults. (Location 2533)

• Healthcare costs are staggering—per capita health spending has increased twenty-nine times over the past four decades—and childcare costs are rising like college tuition, even as the frontline workers in both healthcare and childcare often receive poverty wages. (Location 2573)

• but plenty of them also liked the idea of an online directory, which would allow you to compare yourself to your peers in a more acceptable way. (Location 2604)

• Once I got to college, people joked about coming home drunk and staring at their own Facebook pages—a precursor of today’s endless social media scroll. The concept was entrancing from the beginning: a bona fide, aesthetically unembarrassing website, seemingly devoted to a better version of you. (Location 2613)

• 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 the 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. (Location 2627)

• 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. The Facebook idiom now dominates our culture, with the most troubling structural changes of the era surfacing in isolated, deceptive specks of emotional virality. We see the dismantling of workplace protections in a celebratory blog post about a Lyft driver who continued to pick up passengers while she was in labor. We see the madness of privatized healthcare in the forced positivity of a stranger’s chemotherapy GoFundMe campaign. On Facebook, our basic humanity is reframed as an exploitable viral asset. Our social potential is compressed to our ability to command public attention, which is then made inextricable from economic survival. Instead of fair wages and benefits, we have our personalities and stories and relationships, and we’d better learn to package them well for the internet in case we ever get in an accident while uninsured. (Location 2635)

  • Tags: orange

• 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. (Location 2647)

• The basic idea here is that, for women, photogenic personal confidence is the key to unlocking the riches of the world. (Location 2685)

• 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.” (In 2017, Dior sold a “We Should All Be Feminists” shirt for $710.) We got conferences, endless conferences—a Forbes women’s conference, a Tina Brown women’s conference, a Cosmopolitan Fun Fearless Females conference. (Location 2705)

• The problem is that a feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective. The problem is that it is so easy today for a woman to seize upon an ideology she believes in and then exploit it, or deploy it in a way that actually runs counter to that ideology. That is in fact exactly what today’s ecosystem of success encourages a woman to do. (Location 2721)

• Stories like this—and the gleeful scorn they engender—are ostensibly a sort of scammer prophylaxis. Those idiots, we think, those morons drinking their tapeworm water: we would never be so dumb as to buy that. These stories crop up often in the food space, where it is easy for entrepreneurs to capitalize on the endless well of magical thinking that surrounds health and authenticity in our deeply unhealthy and inauthentic environment. Then, once they cross some line of absurdity or ineptitude, we get to make fun of the suckers who fell for the pitch. (Location 2736)

  • Note: Way to make ourselves feel better

• The story broke in another enormous schadenfreude tsunami, with the joke falling first on the Mast Brothers and then, ultimately, as it always does, on the dummies who bought their product. This is what you gentrifiers get with your hard-ons for artisanal garbage! the tweets and blog posts cackled. This is what you Instagram addicts get for paying three months’ rent money for a festival no one had ever heard of! This is what you get for being so rich that you need a QR code to make a glass of fucking juice! (Location 2753)

• 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. (Location 2759)

• On today’s terms, figures like Malachi Love-Robinson and Anna Delvey are highly inspirational. As women’s conference after women’s conference might have told me had I attended them, it’s precisely that kind of self-delusion—deciding beyond all reason that you should have something, and then going for it—that will get you somewhere in this world. (Location 2766)

• The absurd length of time that it took for Holmes to be exposed illuminates a grim, definitive truth of our era: scammers are always safest at the top. (Location 2792)

• Amazon is an octopus: nimble, fluid, tentacled, brilliant, poisonous, appealing, flexible enough to squeeze enormous bulk through tiny loopholes. Amazon has chewed up brick-and-mortar retail: an estimated 8,600 stores closed in 2017, a significant increase from the 6,200 stores that closed in 2008, at the peak of the recession. The company has decimated office-supply stores, toy stores, electronics stores, and sporting goods stores, and now that it owns Whole Foods, grocery stores will likely be next. (Location 2805)

• Efficiency at this scale requires extreme devaluation. To use Amazon—which I did regularly for years, with full knowledge of its labor practices—is to accept and embrace a world in which everything is worth as little as possible, even, and maybe particularly, people. (Location 2819)

• It’s because of this approach—treating everything, including labor, as maximally disposable—that Amazon has been so successful; (Location 2836)

• With Uber and Airbnb, the aesthetic of rapid innovation—and, crucially, the sense of relief these cheap experiences provide to consumers who are experiencing an entirely related squeeze—obscures the fact that these companies’ biggest breakthroughs have been successfully monetizing the unyielding stresses of late capitalism, shifting the need to compete from the company itself to the unprotected individual, and normalizing a paradigm in which workers and consumers bear the company’s rightful responsibility and risk. (Location 2842)

• In any case, everything is so expensive that you might find yourself reading about the recent rash of suicides among New York taxi drivers as you take a slightly cheaper VC-subsidized ride from the company that has destroyed the taxi industry. You might find yourself routinely taking advantage of warehouse workers who have to pee in water bottles to get two-day shipping on a box of doggie poop bags you could’ve bought down the street. This is, in any case, mostly how things have worked out for me, even though my life is so easy, relatively speaking: I don’t have dependents, I don’t live with a disability—I never needed the reliability of Amazon to do what our current social contract won’t. (Location 2862)

• Aside from this dead-end sense of my own ethical brokenness, what bothers me most about this situation is the idea that our cut-out-the-middleman era has somehow made everyone more equal—that a lack of technological barriers and a surplus of hustle have ushered in a fairer world. But venture capital is social capital, doled out according to networks and affinity and comfort. (Location 2867)

• As wealth continues to flow upward, as Americans are increasingly shut out of their own democracy, as political action is constrained into online spectacle, 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. (Location 2926)

• It would be better, of course, to do things morally. But who these days has the ability or the time? Everything, not least the physical world itself, is overheating. The “margin of refusal,” as Jenny Odell puts it, is shrinking, and the stakes are getting higher. People are so busy just trying to get back to zero, or trying to build up a buffer against disaster, or trying to enjoy themselves, because there’s so little else to count on—three endeavors that could contain the vast majority of human effort until our depleted planet finally ends it all. And, 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. (Location 2943)

• In this, Erdely replicated the mechanism of self-delusion that’s embedded at UVA: she acted as if the story she believed in, that she thought she was working for, was already real. (Location 3134)

• I have sympathy for the experience of being fooled by what you want to believe in. Good intentions often produce blind spots. (Location 3137)

• It seems possible that Beebe, honing the trajectory of his life in recovery, genuinely convinced himself of this over the ensuing decades, and that he contacted Seccuro in part to validate his altered narrative. Conversely, I’ve always thought that Jackie must have believed, at some deep and bizarre level, in the truth of her imagined story. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been able to consistently fool Erdely and the fact-checker. I wonder if she thought that a written record, a big-deal Rolling Stone piece, would enshrine the narrative she wanted as the truth. (Location 3158)

  • Note: We all want to believe the story that fits our imagination

• The most generous way to describe Jackie’s sense of reality is to say that it was porous. She could lie wildly even in cases where the stakes were low. (Location 3168)

• Erdely says yes. But the choice is not always between being sincere and untruthful. It’s possible to be both: it’s possible to be sincere and deluded. It’s possible—it’s very easy, in some cases—to believe a statement, a story, that’s a lie. (Location 3182)

• There is no darkly romantic teleology here, no unbroken chain of historical inheritance linking wolf boys to frat boys, just as there is no primordial wellspring of masculine violence that forces wolf boys to kill or frat boys to rape. There are two institutions, two leagues of young men, one belonging to an archaic and semi-mythic past, the other flourishing here and now. Institutions, by definition, are not natural or primal. They are not what just happens when you let boys be boys. They are created and sustained for a reason. They do work. Rape is an inescapable function of a world that has been designed to give men a maximal amount of lawless freedom, she argues. It “cannot, logically, be just a vile anomaly in an ethical system otherwise egalitarian and humane.” (Location 3303)

• Violence against women is fundamentally connected to other systems of violence. Though Erdely tried, it’s not possible to capture the reality of rape—or even of fraternities—at UVA without writing about race. (Location 3339)

• This tension between honorable appearances and unsavory reality was embedded at UVA in the nature of its founding. (Location 3373)

• The truth about rape is that it’s not exceptional. It’s not anomalous. And there is no way to make that into a satisfying story. (Location 3476)

• I hate the dirty river I’m standing in, not the journalist and the college student who capsized in it. I understand that we have all shared in the same project, in some way. (Location 3488)

• I was twenty-one, and I was trying my hardest to be permeable, to be alive to other people’s suffering, but I didn’t know how to stop being permeable when it was pointless, when it was ultimately narcissistic, when it did no good. I felt, monstrously, that there was no boundary between my situation and the larger situation, between my tiny injustices and the injustices everyone faced. I was so naïve, and violence seemed to be everywhere: a bus thundering through my village at night hit a person and kept driving; a drunk man threw a child against a wall. 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. (Location 3527)

• The reframing of female difficulty as an asset rather than a liability is the result of decades and decades of feminist thought coming to bear—suddenly, floridly, and very persuasively—in the open ideological space of the internet. (Location 3553)

• But when the case for a woman’s worth is built partly on the unfairness of what’s leveled at her, things get slippery, especially as the internet expands the range and reach of hate and unfair scrutiny into infinity—a fact that holds even as feminist ideas become mainstream. (Location 3581)

• the line between valuing a woman in the face of mistreatment and valuing her because of that mistreatment is blurring; if the legitimate need to defend women from unfair criticism has morphed into an illegitimate need to defend women from criticism categorically; if it’s become possible to praise a woman specifically because she is criticized—for that featureless fact alone. (Location 3587)

• By nature, difficult women cause trouble, and that trouble can almost always be reinterpreted as good. Women claiming the power and agency that historically belonged to men is both the story of female evil and the story of female liberation. To work for the latter, you have to be willing to invoke the former: liberation is often mistaken for evil as it occurs. In 1905, Christabel Pankhurst kicked off the militant phase of the English suffrage movement when she spat at a police officer at a political meeting, knowing that this would lead to her arrest. From then on, the Women’s Social and Political Union got themselves dragged out of all-male rooms, imprisoned, force-fed. They smashed windows and set buildings on fire. The suffragettes were written about as if they were wild animals, which swiftly highlighted the injustice of their position. (Location 3617)

  • Note: Need for violence and disobedience and difficulty for inconceivable types of change??

• In 1451, twenty years after her death, Joan of Arc was retried posthumously, and deemed a virtuous martyr. The two stories—her disobedience, her virtue—continued to intertwine. “The people who came after her in the five centuries [following] her death tried to make everything of her,” writes Stephen Richey in his 2003 book Joan of Arc: The Warrior Saint. “Demonic fanatic, spiritual mystic, naïve and tragically ill-used tool of the powerful, creator and icon of modern popular nationalism, adored heroine, saint.” Joan was loved and hated for the same actions, same traits. When she was canonized, in 1920, she joined a society of women—St. Lucy, St. Cecilia, St. Agatha—who were martyred because of their purity, the same way we now canonize pop-culture saints who were martyred over vice. (Location 3631)

• To argue against an ideology, you have to acknowledge and articulate it. In the process, you might inadvertently ventriloquize your opposition. This is a problem that kneecaps me constantly, a problem that might define journalism in the Trump era: when you write against something, you lend it strength and space and time. (Location 3639)

• In 2017, Anne Helen Petersen published Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman, a book that took the double-edged sword of female difficulty as its thesis. Unruly women have taken on an “outsized importance in the American imagination,” Petersen writes. To be unruly is both profitable and risky; an unruly woman has to toe an ever-moving line of acceptability, but if she can do so, she can accrue enormous cultural cachet. (Location 3695)

  • Note: Like a comedian

• The bar is uniquely low with Kim Kardashian, who is frequently written about—much less in Petersen’s book than elsewhere—as some sort of deliciously twisted empowerment icon. Kim has benefited from the feminist tendency to frame female courage as maximally subversive, when, just as often, it’s minimally so. It is not “brave,” strictly speaking, for a woman to do the things that will make her rich and famous. For some women, it is difficult and indeed dangerous to live as themselves in the world, but for other women, like Kim and her sisters, it’s not just easy but extraordinarily profitable. It’s true that the world has told Kim Kardashian that she’s too pregnant, as well as “too fat, too superficial, too fake, too curvy, too sexual,” and that this policing, as Petersen notes, reflects a larger misogynist anxiety about Kim’s success and power. But Kim is successful and powerful not in spite of but because of these things. It actively behooves her to be superficial, fake, curvy, sexual. She is proof of a concept that is not very complicated or radical: today, it’s possible for a beautiful, wealthy woman with an uncanny talent for self-surveillance to make her own dreams of increased wealth and beauty come true. (Location 3726)

• This type of rule-breaking operates, by definition, on the level of the extraordinary individual. It’s not built to translate to ordinary life. (Location 3741)

• There is a blanket, untested assumption, in feminist celebrity analysis, that the freedom we grant famous women will trickle down to us. Beneath this assumption is another one—that the ultimate goal of this conversation is empowerment. But the difficult-woman discourse often seems to be leading somewhere else. Feminists have, to a significant degree, dismantled and rejected the traditional male definition of exemplary womanhood: the idea that women must be sweet, demure, controllable, and free of normal human flaws. But if men placed women on pedestals and delighted in watching them fall down, feminism has so far mostly succeeded in reversing the order of operations—taking toppled-over women and re-idolizing them. Famous women are still constantly tested against the idea that they should be maximally appealing, even if that appeal now involves “difficult” qualities. Feminists are still looking for idols—just ones who are idolized on our own complicated terms. (Location 3751)

  • Note: Shifted who makes the definition. But is that enough?

• In 2018, Gina Haspel, the CIA official who oversaw torture at a black site in Thailand and then destroyed the evidence, was nominated to be director of the agency—the first woman to hold this office. Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted, “Any Democrat who claims to support women’s empowerment and our national security but opposes her nomination is a total hypocrite.” Many other conservatives echoed this view, with varying degrees of sincerity. There’s a joke that’s circulated for the past few years: leftists say abolish prisons, liberals say hire more women guards. Now plenty of conservatives, having clocked feminism’s palatability, say hire more women guards, too. (Location 3846)

• Misogyny insists that a woman’s appearance is of paramount value; these dogged, hyper-focused critiques of misogyny can have an identical effect. Generic sexism is not meaningfully disempowering to Kellyanne Conway in her current position as an indestructible mouthpiece for the most transparently destructive president in American history. In fact, through the discourse established by feminism, she can siphon some amount of cultural power from this sexism. SNL called her a needy psycho? Nevertheless, Kellyanne persists. — (Location 3882)

• It’s as if what’s signified—sexism itself—has remained so intractable that we’ve mostly given up on rooting out its actual workings. Instead, to the great benefit of people like Ivanka, we’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. (Location 3937)

• Often people would launch into a series of impassioned arguments, as if I’d just presented them with a problem that needed fixing, as if I were wearing a sandwich board with “Change My Mind” written on it—as if it were a citizen’s duty to encourage betrothal the way we encourage people to vote. (Location 3998)

• In the forties, getting married “went from a transition to a kind of apotheosis,” Wallace writes. A wedding no longer marked a woman’s shift from single to married, but rather, it indicated her ascension from ordinary woman to bride and wife. (Location 4092)

• Despite the economic precarity that has threatened the American population since the 2008 recession, weddings have only been getting more expensive. They remain an industry-dictated “theme park of upward mobility,” as Naomi Wolf put it: a world defined by the illusion that everyone within it is upper-middle class. (Location 4138)

• Today, Instagram encourages people to treat life itself like a wedding—like a production engineered to be witnessed and admired by an audience. It has become common for people, especially women, to interact with themselves as if they were famous all the time. (Location 4144)

• I was a raw nerve, fragile in a way that I had never been before—flattened out by the awful juxtaposition between my obscene power as an American and my obscene powerlessness as a woman, and by an undiagnosed case of tuberculosis, and by my own humiliating inability to live comfortably in a situation where I couldn’t achieve or explain my way out of every bind. (Location 4202)

  • Tags: blue

• How is it possible that so much of contemporary life feels so arbitrary and so inescapable? (Location 4369)

• The paradox at the heart of the wedding comes from the two versions of a woman that it conjures. There’s the glorified bride, looming large and resplendent and almost monstrously powerful, and there’s her nullified twin and opposite, the woman who vanishes underneath the name change and the veil. These two selves are opposites, bound together by male power. (Location 4386)

• This seems true, but I still feel that I can’t trust it. Here, the more I try to uncover whatever I’m looking for, the more I feel that I’m too far gone. I can feel the low, uneasy hum of self-delusion whenever I think about all of this—a tone that gets louder the more I try to write and cancel it out. I can feel the tug of my deep and recurring suspicion that anything I might think about myself must be, somehow, necessarily wrong. (Location 4409)