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eschoeps 's review for:
Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
by Jia Tolentino
Trick Mirror is a critical, self-examining feminist take on anti-materialism, anti-capitalism and modern American culture.
Jia Tolentino is a culture writer for the New Yorker. She understands that to be part of mainstream culture, you have to participate in it. But that doesn't mean you have to engage in that culture idly and with complicity. Her critiques move slowly, building their argument concretely with examples until she hits you with a gut punch of a summation.
"The I in Internet" is about moral talk on the Internet and how this translates into our off-internet lives.
Notable quotes include:
"Our world makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard."
"the discourse of righteousness occupies far more public attention than the conditions that necessitate righteousness in the first place."
"It is nearly impossible, today, to separate engagement from magnification"
Frankly, I wrote down more than these, but I think the context surrounding the other quotes is necessary for deeper appreciation.
The grounding point of Tolentino's argument is that Internet discourse is firmly grounded in opposition. Its fuel is angry discourse.
Tolentino's career as a culture writer does include writing about morality on the Internet. She knows that she is a part of the media cycle, so she must unpack herself. It keeps these essays from being patronizing and bitter; Tolentino speaks from the insider's perspective. She is an elevated insider, whose opinions are considered more worthy than others because of her social standing as a New Yorker writer.
“Reality TV Me” is a critical essay for anyone who loves, guiltily or non-guiltily, reality television. This is an attempt to explain why reality show participants show up. Why viewers keep coming back, even when they blush as they tell their friends and family about their viewing habits. What does the viewer get from the reality tv experience that they can’t get elsewhere?
Tolentino relives her time on reality tv. She examines who she used to be and what she personally wanted from this. Her present self rewatches her old performance and cringes, but soldiers on to provide the reader with more analysis. It’s clear that Tolentino was publicly exploited for reality tv, but she never falls into self-pity or grumbling.
“Always Be Optimizing” is a look at The Western World’s obsession with efficiency, with a specific focus on the rise of athleisure clothing and the female experience. Again, Tolentino’s greatest strength is turning her criticisms inward and always keeping it personal. She is not free from the market forces she describes and then critiques. It would be a slog to read something critical and impersonal-- not because it isn’t true, but because it’s depressingly so. The human element of Tolentino’s writing always keeps the reader laughing and sympathizing with Tolentino. We are flawed humans.
“Pure Heroines” is a look at how the struggles of female heroes and male heroes are different. I’ll just include a surgeon-level precise quote that’ll summarize this one for me.
“Heroes are mostly unhappy for existential reasons; heroines suffer for social reasons”
Ecstasy is a comparison of religious experience and upbringing and drug experience and upbringing. It’s sensual and exciting, and as readers we watch Jia grow, explore, question, and experiment. This essay validates drug experiences as religious experience, if you are so inclined to argue for that.
The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams is a coming of age story for all millennials, told through the publicly acceptable scams we all engage in to survive. There are shocking statistics about wealth inequality and the 1%. There are reflections on the word “#girlboss” and the way money and resources directly translate to freedom.
“A politics built around getting money and spending money is sexier than a politics built around politics.”
This essay is a good example of the way Tolentino builds the majority of her arguments; she uses small-scale, outrageous, well-publicized examples to flesh out the big point. It’s entertaining and relatable, but I was sometimes questioning the truth of the big point because of the examples she uses. Are these examples really the best base to build an argument upon, or are these examples humorous outliers? Tolentino halts the move towards skepticism by enforcing herself with the gut punch and mic drop of all examples-- Donald Trump and Amazon.
This essay ends without hope, as Tolentino explains her attempt to justify her self-serving actions to herself.
We Come From Old Virginia is Tolentino’s take on sexual assault and rape on college campuses. She is an alum of UVA, so she is personally close to the infamous Rolling Stone article “A Rape on Campus.” Although the Rolling Stone article was a mess of reportage, an ugly scandal of journalism, eventually proven flawed, etc, etc, etc. Tolentino talks through the modern condition of women, fraternities, college administrations, and sexual assault/rape.
This quote was both entertaining and explanatory in a way I’d never seen put to words.
“Fraternities attract men who value other men more than women. The intimacy that develops within fraternal circles between men who care for each other necessitates a vigorous performance of heterosexuality in order to combat the appearance of homosexuality.”
“The Cult of the Difficult Woman"
Here’s a summary quote:
“Analyzing sexism through female celebrities is a catnip pedagogical method: it takes a beloved cultural pastime (calculating the exact worth of a woman) and lends it progressive political import.”
This essay examines the pitfalls of contemporary feminist critiques, mostly centered around popular contemporary feminism as seen in news media and tabloids. The thesis is that liberal pop feminism is so superficial and spineless that the right wing can easily utilize it for their own purposes.
I’d say the essay’s target audience is readers that already share Tolentino’s ideological foundation regarding sexism and feminism. Tolentino reminds us at her conclusion that the majority of sexism is mundane; but instead of writing a pragmatic and everyday account of mundane sexism, she peeked in at neoliberal celebrity feminism.
The beginning of this essay initially felt rough. I noted that the beginning of the essay leans heavily on merely pulling really great quotes from other sources and rearranging them into an essay format. But as I continued, I ended up feeling charmed by the way the quotes were arranged; also, by her quote curation showed a breadth of understanding and research.
Here are two more excellent quotes:
“Gwyneth Paltrow, on the other hand, has always represented a collection of tasteful but safe consumer reflexes more than she has reflected much of a real personality.”
“‘It’s not out of the realm of possibility in fact quite likely, that no matter what she says or does… she will be criticized in bluntly sexist terms because she is a woman.’ (Jia’s response) I’d add that she also likely knows that, on the terms of contemporary feminism, she will be defended in equally blunt terms, too.”
"I Thee Dread"
You can guess what’s coming now that you’re at the end of Trick Mirror . This essay is a critique of capitalism, materialism, and sexism in Western wedding culture. My favorite part of this essay is her historical critique; her idea is that the “tradition” of Western weddings is a product of shrewd capitalism and not a grassroots cultural practice. Again, Tolentino loads the critique with her personal marriage struggles.
Here were my favorite marriage culture quotes:
“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.”
“planning a wedding is the only period in a woman’s life where she is universally and unconditionally encouraged to conduct everything on her terms”
“Inequality bestows outsize affirmation on women as compensation for making us disappear”
These quotes make large assertions, but even as Tolentino plants herself firmly, she provides her own personal examples of how these assertions pressured her but don’t fully control her. The lived practice of these underlying cultural assumptions looks different, and Tolentino’s acknowledgement of that makes all the difference.
Jia Tolentino is a culture writer for the New Yorker. She understands that to be part of mainstream culture, you have to participate in it. But that doesn't mean you have to engage in that culture idly and with complicity. Her critiques move slowly, building their argument concretely with examples until she hits you with a gut punch of a summation.
"The I in Internet" is about moral talk on the Internet and how this translates into our off-internet lives.
Notable quotes include:
"Our world makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard."
"the discourse of righteousness occupies far more public attention than the conditions that necessitate righteousness in the first place."
"It is nearly impossible, today, to separate engagement from magnification"
Frankly, I wrote down more than these, but I think the context surrounding the other quotes is necessary for deeper appreciation.
The grounding point of Tolentino's argument is that Internet discourse is firmly grounded in opposition. Its fuel is angry discourse.
Tolentino's career as a culture writer does include writing about morality on the Internet. She knows that she is a part of the media cycle, so she must unpack herself. It keeps these essays from being patronizing and bitter; Tolentino speaks from the insider's perspective. She is an elevated insider, whose opinions are considered more worthy than others because of her social standing as a New Yorker writer.
“Reality TV Me” is a critical essay for anyone who loves, guiltily or non-guiltily, reality television. This is an attempt to explain why reality show participants show up. Why viewers keep coming back, even when they blush as they tell their friends and family about their viewing habits. What does the viewer get from the reality tv experience that they can’t get elsewhere?
Tolentino relives her time on reality tv. She examines who she used to be and what she personally wanted from this. Her present self rewatches her old performance and cringes, but soldiers on to provide the reader with more analysis. It’s clear that Tolentino was publicly exploited for reality tv, but she never falls into self-pity or grumbling.
“Always Be Optimizing” is a look at The Western World’s obsession with efficiency, with a specific focus on the rise of athleisure clothing and the female experience. Again, Tolentino’s greatest strength is turning her criticisms inward and always keeping it personal. She is not free from the market forces she describes and then critiques. It would be a slog to read something critical and impersonal-- not because it isn’t true, but because it’s depressingly so. The human element of Tolentino’s writing always keeps the reader laughing and sympathizing with Tolentino. We are flawed humans.
“Pure Heroines” is a look at how the struggles of female heroes and male heroes are different. I’ll just include a surgeon-level precise quote that’ll summarize this one for me.
“Heroes are mostly unhappy for existential reasons; heroines suffer for social reasons”
Ecstasy is a comparison of religious experience and upbringing and drug experience and upbringing. It’s sensual and exciting, and as readers we watch Jia grow, explore, question, and experiment. This essay validates drug experiences as religious experience, if you are so inclined to argue for that.
The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams is a coming of age story for all millennials, told through the publicly acceptable scams we all engage in to survive. There are shocking statistics about wealth inequality and the 1%. There are reflections on the word “#girlboss” and the way money and resources directly translate to freedom.
“A politics built around getting money and spending money is sexier than a politics built around politics.”
This essay is a good example of the way Tolentino builds the majority of her arguments; she uses small-scale, outrageous, well-publicized examples to flesh out the big point. It’s entertaining and relatable, but I was sometimes questioning the truth of the big point because of the examples she uses. Are these examples really the best base to build an argument upon, or are these examples humorous outliers? Tolentino halts the move towards skepticism by enforcing herself with the gut punch and mic drop of all examples-- Donald Trump and Amazon.
This essay ends without hope, as Tolentino explains her attempt to justify her self-serving actions to herself.
We Come From Old Virginia is Tolentino’s take on sexual assault and rape on college campuses. She is an alum of UVA, so she is personally close to the infamous Rolling Stone article “A Rape on Campus.” Although the Rolling Stone article was a mess of reportage, an ugly scandal of journalism, eventually proven flawed, etc, etc, etc. Tolentino talks through the modern condition of women, fraternities, college administrations, and sexual assault/rape.
This quote was both entertaining and explanatory in a way I’d never seen put to words.
“Fraternities attract men who value other men more than women. The intimacy that develops within fraternal circles between men who care for each other necessitates a vigorous performance of heterosexuality in order to combat the appearance of homosexuality.”
“The Cult of the Difficult Woman"
Here’s a summary quote:
“Analyzing sexism through female celebrities is a catnip pedagogical method: it takes a beloved cultural pastime (calculating the exact worth of a woman) and lends it progressive political import.”
This essay examines the pitfalls of contemporary feminist critiques, mostly centered around popular contemporary feminism as seen in news media and tabloids. The thesis is that liberal pop feminism is so superficial and spineless that the right wing can easily utilize it for their own purposes.
I’d say the essay’s target audience is readers that already share Tolentino’s ideological foundation regarding sexism and feminism. Tolentino reminds us at her conclusion that the majority of sexism is mundane; but instead of writing a pragmatic and everyday account of mundane sexism, she peeked in at neoliberal celebrity feminism.
The beginning of this essay initially felt rough. I noted that the beginning of the essay leans heavily on merely pulling really great quotes from other sources and rearranging them into an essay format. But as I continued, I ended up feeling charmed by the way the quotes were arranged; also, by her quote curation showed a breadth of understanding and research.
Here are two more excellent quotes:
“Gwyneth Paltrow, on the other hand, has always represented a collection of tasteful but safe consumer reflexes more than she has reflected much of a real personality.”
“‘It’s not out of the realm of possibility in fact quite likely, that no matter what she says or does… she will be criticized in bluntly sexist terms because she is a woman.’ (Jia’s response) I’d add that she also likely knows that, on the terms of contemporary feminism, she will be defended in equally blunt terms, too.”
"I Thee Dread"
You can guess what’s coming now that you’re at the end of Trick Mirror . This essay is a critique of capitalism, materialism, and sexism in Western wedding culture. My favorite part of this essay is her historical critique; her idea is that the “tradition” of Western weddings is a product of shrewd capitalism and not a grassroots cultural practice. Again, Tolentino loads the critique with her personal marriage struggles.
Here were my favorite marriage culture quotes:
“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.”
“planning a wedding is the only period in a woman’s life where she is universally and unconditionally encouraged to conduct everything on her terms”
“Inequality bestows outsize affirmation on women as compensation for making us disappear”
These quotes make large assertions, but even as Tolentino plants herself firmly, she provides her own personal examples of how these assertions pressured her but don’t fully control her. The lived practice of these underlying cultural assumptions looks different, and Tolentino’s acknowledgement of that makes all the difference.