Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

"Even as we became increasingly sad and ugly on the internet, the mirage of the better online self continued to glimmer." 

Related to the "trick mirror" of the collection's title, these lines show the distorted relationship between image and reality, created here by the internet. Tolentino uses this observation not only to illustrate the internet's appeal, but also to show how websites were able to monetize users' online behavior through this appeal.

"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." 

As Tolentino writes about the distance between images and reality, one key point she returns to is the dangers this distance creates. This is particularly true in the case of performative speech replacing concrete political action, as she references here. In other words, Tolentino worries that seeming to be ethical is now equated with actually being ethical, when the two are very different.

"To communicate an identity requires some degree of self-delusion." 

The subtitle of the book references self-delusion, which each essay then explores with nuance. In this case, Tolentino explains that performing selfhood requires fooling oneself into believing the performance. This shifting relationship to the self appears in other essays in different ways.

"It is now obvious to me, as it always should have been, that a sixteen-year-old doesn’t end up running around in a bikini and pigtails on television unless she also desperately wants to be seen."

Here, Tolentino contrasts her current ideas about why she appeared on a reality show with what she thought were her motives at the time. This desire to be seen—and the industries that have risen up around it is at the heart of many issues Tolentino examines in these essays, from the rise of the internet to the selling of the ideal woman.

"Reality TV enacts the various self-delusions of the emotionally immature: the dream that you are being closely watched, assessed, and categorized; the dream that your life itself is movie material, and that you deserve your own carefully soundtracked montage when you’re walking down the street." 

In these lines, Tolentino describes the appeal of reality TV to contrast it with reality. The repeated use of the word "dream" highlights the difference. In making this point, Tolentino builds upon the theme that images and reality have a complex relationship: they are not the same, though each affects the other.

"This sort of feminism has organized itself around being as visible and appealing to as many people as possible; it has greatly over-valorized women’s individual success. Feminism has not eradicated the tyranny of the ideal woman but, rather, has entrenched it and made it trickier."

Tolentino defines popular feminism here as a dangerous force. Through its focus on the success of individuals, rather than collective gains, it has prevented large numbers of women from achieving more and living better. In this case, Tolentino relates this to the concept of the ideal woman: a positive feminism would rewrite or erase this figure, whereas popular feminism has only made her harder to ignore.

"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."

By comparing a popular exercise class with a popular restaurant, Tolentino makes the link between the body and capitalism. She writes here that both experiences have a primarily psychological, rather than physiological, benefit. They prime users to be better participants in capitalism, rather than truly making themselves better people.

"It’s possible if we want it. But what do we want? What would you want—what desires, what forms of insubordination, would you be able to access—if you had succeeded in becoming an ideal woman, gratified and beloved, proof of the efficiency of a system that magnifies and diminishes you every day?" 

In this ending to her essay on the ideal woman and optimization, Tolentino presents a negative view of the future. By arguing that women who have already achieved this aesthetic would refuse to undermine, it, Tolentino highlights the theme that easy answers are not possible for many of the issues that she presents. In this case, she makes the reader complicit in this ambivalence by using the first-person plural (we) and second-person (you) pronouns. 

"If you were a girl, and you were imagining your life through literature, you would go from innocence in childhood to sadness in adolescence to bitterness in adulthood—at which point, if you hadn’t killed yourself already, you would simply disappear." 

Here, Tolentino introduces the life cycle of the typical literary heroine she examines in this essay. Representative of a particular kind of white girlhood, their narratives once they leave childhood are both depressing and changeable. Ultimately, Tolentino proposes a new kind of representation that begins with this model and turns it into something new.

"All of these women are in pursuit of basic liberty. But our culture has configured women’s liberty as corrosion, and for a long time, there was no way for a woman to be both free and good." 

In these lines, Tolentino writes about the common trope of affairs in narratives about adult heroines. These lead to their downfall for reasons related to society as a whole. Here, she makes the connection between what they desire from life and what is possible for them, which is fundamentally impossible given the social context she describes. 

"Being a writer compounds the dilemma: to articulate this desire to vanish is always to reiterate the self once again." 

Tolentino makes this observation about Christian writers who hope to lose themselves in God, but later connects it to herself. In religion and drugs, she believes that participants are looking for the erasure of themselves. Yet in writing about their experiences, they affirm their selves—as Tolentino does in this essay.

"There are some institutions—drugs, church, and money—that aligned the superstructure of white wealth in Houston with the heart of black and brown culture beneath it." 

At the end of this essay, Tolentino provides context for her own experiences with drugs and religion by situating them in Houston at a particular time. This is typical of the ways in which she connects her personal narratives to larger social issues and movements throughout the essays. She views her personal narrative as intertwined with the culture that produced it.

"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." 

Tolentino critiques capitalism and capitalist institutions throughout these essays, but nowhere is her criticism more pointed than in "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams." Here, she connects the con artist to American society and history in terms of the search for profit at others' expense. All seven scams have this in common, and other essays in the collection highlight the ways in which the profit drive has harmed individuals.

"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." 

Here, Tolentino links criticism of a particular scam, the financial crisis, to criticism of larger structures: the American context, in this case. This is typical of the connections she makes throughout the book between individuals and larger movements (and vice-versa). Often, she points out the ways in which capitalism has thrived at the expense of the individual, which she hints at here.

"A politics built around getting and spending money is sexier than a politics built around politics." 

As Tolentino analyzes various issues in contemporary society, she also asks how we got to this place. In other words, how did these issues arise? Here, she describes the appeal of capitalism, whereas in other places, she describes the appeal of the internet or reality television. Identifying the appeal of these institutions is a key component of these essays.

"On the wings of market-friendly feminism, the idea that personal advancement is a subversive form of political progress has been accepted as gospel. The trickiest thing about this idea is that it is incomplete and insufficient without being entirely wrong."

Tolentino writes about the issues of popular feminism ("market-friendly feminism" here) with nuance. Though she writes at length about the ways in which this has focused on the individual at the expense of the collective, she notes here that it has its uses. As she writes, the elements that make it "incomplete and insufficient" do not make it inherently wrong, though they can make it dangerous.

"Configured this way, success is a lottery—just as survival today can look like a lottery, too."

In writing about the scams she sees as defining the Millennial generation, Tolentino also examines the larger belief systems that both produced them and were created by them. She describes how the success of sites and apps like Amazon and Uber led venture capitalists to invest in worthless products. Here, she describes the attitude and beliefs that this type of investment has led to.

"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." 

Though referencing a journalist's deposition in this case, these lines can also apply to Tolentino's depiction of the relationship between images and the self throughout these essays. As she looks at how media and institutions work in society, she repeatedly poses the question of what reality truly is. In these lines, she makes the nuanced point that a statement can be both real ("sincere") and false ("untruthful").

"Jackie’s false accusation, in this context, appears as a sort of chimera—a grotesque, mismatched creation; a false way of making a real problem visible." 

Throughout this essay, Tolentino attempts to understand why Jackie would have fabricated parts of her story. She ultimately connects these lies to a desire for greater power and the need to make clear current power structures. This is related to the previous quote, in which Tolentino parses sincerity and untruthfulness in a statement, in Tolentino's juxtaposition of "false" and "real," highlighting that both can be true at once.

"I’ve begun to think that there is no room for writing about sexual assault that relies on any sense of anomaly. 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."

By examining Jackie's story, Tolentino ultimately examines what makes a "satisfying story," here concluding that this is not even desirable in rape cases. Providing numerous other examples of women whose cases were shut down without punishing the attackers because of gaps in the women's stories, Tolentino positions rape as both a unique and common crime. Because of its nature, she writes here, we need to reframe the way we expect victims to tell their stories.

"The freedom I want is located in a world where we wouldn’t need to love women, or even monitor our feelings about women as meaningful—in which we wouldn’t need to parse the contours of female worth and liberation by paying meticulous personal attention to any of this at all." 

Tolentino examines two models of womanhood in this essay and in "Always Be Optimizing." Though she offers no easy answers for the type of model that women could follow instead, here, she presents an alternative model for attitudes towards women. In doing so, she suggests that it is these that need to change, rather than the models of womanhood itself.

"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."

In these lines, Tolentino describes one negative consequence of celebrating difficult women. It has given those who actively harm women through policy a "get-out-of-jail-free" card to avoid criticism. Later, Tolentino connects this idea to an erasure of female individuality, as all women become united only through the fact that they all experience sexism.

"On the whole, though, the 'traditional' wedding—meaning the traditional straight wedding—remains one of the most significant re-invocations of gender inequality that we have." 

Here, Tolentino references several key ideas from the essay. First, that wedding traditions are not actually traditional, which she highlights through the use of quotation marks, but instead contain traditions developed relatively recently as a way of encouraging consumers. In addition, she notes the harm that weddings do, representing "gender inequality." Elsewhere in the essay, she describes how weddings sell a type of idealized womanhood while actually reinforcing such inequalities.