Hello,
Happy Monday! I hope everyone has a good and safe week ahead. Right before I finished The Secret History, I read Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino and really enjoyed it. I found it an incredibly thought-provoking and enriching read that made me pause with shock throughout its pages. If you decide to read it, I hope you enjoy it!
mariana
Why did I read this book?
Earlier this year, I saw Trick Mirror recommended everywhere, so I bought the audiobook, assuming it was the sort of book I could listen to. When I started going through the first chapter, I realised that there were a lot of points the author was making that I wanted to digest, so I decided to return the audiobook and get the printed copy instead. So much to highlight!
What is the book about?
A collection of essays that analyse and criticise our zeitgeist: This book contains 9 different essays that cover a wide range of topics that Tolentino peels like an onion. The topics featured revolve around our culture and its relationship to self-delusion. From the state of the internet to widely accepted marriage traditions, Jia Tolentino leaves no stone unturned while trying to raise awareness on our common yet mad shared behaviours.
An X-Ray on the common delusions of our times: In each essay, Tolentino explores how specific parts of our cultural system act as trick mirrors, reflecting all but reality. As a result, we’re consistently perceiving everyday madness as normality, repeatedly deluding ourselves. For example, does the internet actually make us feel more connected or more lonely? Are the things we value in our lives (e.g. an overpriced barre class) actual rewards or traps? Is it possible for women to succeed on their terms? Are female heroines in stories inspiring or depressing? Throughout the essays, Tolentino gives several detailed examples of how the reflection of the reality that we see every day isn’t necessarily real, right or true.
“To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror
Why should you read it?
An interesting critique of what we ignore: Trick Mirror is one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read recently. You might find yourself agreeing with the ideas and nodding while you read, or you might feel uncomfortable and challenged by some of the strong points she makes. Either way, if you approach it with an open mind, it’s a stimulating read.
A contrasting view: Trick Mirror provides a different perspective on topics that you have probably thought about before, but didn’t have the words to describe. If you like challenging the status quo, you’ll enjoy following her thought processes.
“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.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror
Links to buy the book
During these difficult times, try to support your local bookshop instead of using Amazon :-)
UK
Mexico
US
Any recommendations?
Favourite quotes
//The purpose of this section is to share some of my favourite book bits, so you can come back to them when you finish a book if you wish to do so. I’ve put in bold my favourite ones, in case you want to read a few (or all) ahead of the book.//
This was a tricky bit to curate. I tried to pick quotes that made sense on their own. However, all the quotes below are much better understood in the context of each essay.
“As more people began to register their existence digitally, a pastime turned into an imperative: you had to register yourself digitally to exist.”
“Through the emergence of blogging, personal lives were becoming public domain, and social incentives—to be liked, to be seen—were becoming economic ones.”
“The internet, in promising a potentially unlimited audience, began to seem like the natural home of self-expression.”
“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. You have to communicate in order to maintain an internet presence. And, because the internet’s central platforms are built around personal profiles, it can seem—first at a mechanical level, and later on as an encoded instinct—like the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good.”
“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.”
“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 understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.”
“To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion.”
“We can, and probably do, limit our online activity to websites that further reinforce our own sense of identity, each of us reading things written for people just like us.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The internet can feel like an astonishingly direct line to reality.”
“But the internet brings the “I” into everything. 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.”
“...social media was constructed around the idea that a thing is important insofar as it is important to you.”
“...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.”
“You see it now, with these apps, everyone likes to have an audience. Everyone thinks they deserve one.”
“Reality TV is notorious for constructing stories out of nothing.”
“The ideal woman has always been generic. I bet you can picture the version of her that runs the show today. She’s of indeterminate age but resolutely youthful presentation. She’s got glossy hair and the clean, shameless expression of a person who believes she was made to be looked at. She is often luxuriating when you see her—on remote beaches, under stars in the desert, across a carefully styled table, surrounded by beautiful possessions or photogenic friends. Showcasing herself at leisure is either the bulk of her work or an essential part of it; in this, she is not so unusual—for many people today, especially for women, packaging and broadcasting your image is a readily monetizable skill. She has a personal brand, and probably a boyfriend or husband: he is the physical realization of her constant, unseen audience, reaffirming her status as an interesting subject, a worthy object, a self-generating spectacle with a viewership attached.”
“The ideal woman, in other words, is always optimizing. She takes advantage of technology, both in the way she broadcasts her image and in the meticulous improvement of that image itself.”
“Everything about this woman has been preemptively controlled to the point that she can afford the impression of spontaneity and, more important, the sensation of it—having worked to rid her life of artificial obstacles, she often feels legitimately carefree.”
“The ideal woman always believes she came up with herself on her own.”
“Today’s ideal woman is of a type that coexists easily with feminism in its current market-friendly and mainstream form.”
“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.”
“Why would smart and ambitious women fall for this? (Why do I have such a personal relationship with my face wash? Why have I sunk thousands of dollars over the past half decade into ensuring that I can abuse my body on the weekends without changing the way it looks?) 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.”
“...we idealize beauty that appears to require almost no intervention—women who look poreless and radiant even when bare-faced in front of an iPhone camera, women who are beautiful in almost punishingly natural ways.”
“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.”
“The root of this trouble is the fact that mainstream feminism has had to conform to patriarchy and capitalism to become mainstream in the first place. Old requirements, instead of being overthrown, are rebranded. Beauty work is labeled “self-care” to make it sound progressive.”
“...porn and modeling and Instagram influencing are the only careers in which women regularly outearn men.”
“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.”
“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.”
“In literary stories and plenty of real-life ones, a wedding signifies the end of individual desire.”
“My relationship to female protagonists changed sharply in adolescence: childhood heroines had shown me who I wanted to be, but teenage heroines showed me who I was afraid of becoming—a girl whose life revolved around her desirability, who was interesting to the degree that her life spun out of control.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A college degree is no guarantee of financial stability. Today, aside from inherited money, such guarantees barely exist.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“More than any other entity, Facebook has solidified the idea that selfhood exists in the shape of a well-performing public avatar. But Zuckerberg, in picking up on the fact that we would sell our identities in exchange for simply being visible, was riding a wave that had been growing for a long time.”
“I have sympathy for the experience of being fooled by what you want to believe in. Good intentions often produce blind spots.”
“It cowed me, and reminded me that most people still find false accusation much more abhorrent than rape.”
“For centuries, rape was viewed as a crime against property, and offenders were often punished by the imposition of a fine, payable to the victim’s father or husband. Until the 1980s, most rape laws in America specified that husbands could not be charged with raping their wives. Rape, until very recently, was presented as a norm. This extends to UVA, which for many decades expelled students for plagiarism while refusing to consider rape a serious offense.”
“Celebrities have been the primary teaching tools through which online feminism has identified and resisted the warping force of patriarchal judgment.”
“We are all defined by our historical terms and conditions, and these terms and conditions have mostly been written by and for men.”
“Until very recently, we were always introduced to women through a male perspective. There is always a way to recast a woman’s life on women’s terms.”
“By what means, but by screaming, knocking, and rioting, did men themselves ever gain what they were pleased to call their rights?”
“It’s true, of course, that women who become famous for pushing social boundaries do the work of demonstrating how outdated these boundaries are. But what happens once it becomes common knowledge that these boundaries are outdated? We’ve come into a new era, in which feminism isn’t always the antidote to conventional wisdom; feminism is suddenly conventional wisdom in many spheres. Women are not always—I’d argue that they’re now rarely—most interesting when breaking uninteresting restrictions.”
“...when the fact of the matter is that the whole thing is just transparently ridiculous, starting from the idea that a man just proposes to a woman and she’s supposed to be just lying in wait for the moment he decides he’s ready to commit to a situation where he statistically benefits and she statistically becomes less happy than she would be if she was single, and then she’s the one who has to wear this tacky ring to signify male ownership, and she’s supposed to be excited about it, this new life where doubt becomes this thing you’re supposed to experience in private and certainty becomes the default affect for the entire rest of your life …”
“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. Under these circumstances, the vision of the bride as celebrity princess has hardened into something like a rule. Expectations of bridal beauty have collided with the wellness industry and produced a massive dark star of obligation.”
“A woman keeping her name is making a choice that is expected to be limited and futile. She will not pass the name down to her children, or bestow it upon her husband. At most—or so people tend to think—her last name will be crammed into the middle of her children’s names, or packed around a hyphen, and then later dropped for space reasons.”
“We find it inappropriate for women to treat their names the way that men, by default, feel entitled to. On this front, as on so many others, a woman is allowed to assert her independence as long as it doesn’t affect anyone else.”
“It feels like a trick, a trick that has worked and is still working, that the bride remains the image of womanhood at its most broadly celebrated—and that 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.”
“In exchange, from that point forward, in the eyes of the state and everyone around you, your needs will slowly cease to exist. This is of course not the case for everyone, but for plenty of women, becoming a bride still means being flattered into submission: being prepared, through a rush of attention and a series of gender-resegregated rituals—the bridal shower, the bachelorette party, and, later, the baby shower—for a future in which your identity will be systematically framed as secondary to the identity of your husband and kids. 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.”
I loved the local bookstores idea! Thanks