Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

But women are shaped by patriarchy: my own professional instincts are different because I grew up in Texas, in the evangelical church, on a cheerleading squad, in the Greek system. My approach to power has been altered by the early power structures I knew.

Clinton’s loss, which I will mourn forever, might reiterate the importance of making space for the difficult woman. It might also point toward the way that valuing a woman for her difficulty can, in ways that are unexpectedly destructive, obscure her actual, particular self.

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 anal

For women, authenticity lies in difficulty: this feminist assumption has become dominant logic while still passing as rare.

Feminists have worked so hard, with such good intentions, to justify female difficulty that the concept has ballooned to something all-encompassing: a blanket defense, an automatic celebration, a tarp of self-delusion that can cover up any sin.

We are what we do, and we do what we’re used to, and like so many people in my generation, I was raised from adolescence to this fragile, frantic, unstable adulthood on a relentless demonstration that scamming pays.

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

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. It’s also a personal matter, because when we reclaim the stories that surround female celebrities, stories surrounding ordinary women are reclaimed, too.

(It’s arguable that we could understand the institution of celebrity itself as similarly suspicious: despite the prevailing liberalism of Hollywood, the values of celebrity—visibility, performance, aspiration, extreme physical beauty—promote an approach to womanhood that relies on individual exceptionalism in an inherently conservative way.)