#Jia Tolentino

[funeral]

[Simone de Beauvoir] describes the definitive thrill and sorrow of female adolescence—the realization that your body, and what people will demand of it, will determine your adult life. “If the young girl at about this stage frequently develops a neurotic condition,” de Beauvoir writes, “it is because she feels defenseless before a dull fatality that condemns her to unimaginable trials; her femininity means in her eyes sickness and suffering and death, and she is obsessed with this fate.”

Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

[transmutationisms]

I remember everyone was talking about jia tolentino’s instagram face essay as a companion piece to the everyone is beautiful but nobody is horny essay. Have you read it/do you have thoughts on it? Thanks!

i think one of jia tolentino's problems as a writer is that she often seems genuinely unaware of how limited her scope is and how it hampers her efforts to develop any social commentary applicable beyond her socioeconomic milieu. so for example, afaik she's right that a certain plastic surgery look has been popular in recent years with the instagram influencer / model / LA set (w/ some changes over time, like the even more recent popularity of buccal fat removal or that cat-eye facelift situation). but she talks about this as though it's like a universal condition of Modern Womanhood, even after pointing out that it costs a fuckload of money to actually have these procedures done lol. like it's the ig version of how like, legacy media journos are always banging on about what the twitterati think about the latest hbo show. these are like, tiny slices of the population who assume their own experiences are universal because they don't think poor and working class people count the same as them. it's almost funny. anyway i think the most interesting part of the instagram face essay is when she points out that the face in question is often aiming to be white, yet ambiguously 'ethnic'—much to unpack here about beauty standards and the role they play in discourses of racialisation, as well as how they're then shaped by the resultant 'scientific' ideas about phenotypic populations and racial categories. i wish the essay had said more about this. instead it felt like it got stuck on the idea that bodies under neoliberal capitalism are 'assets' to be 'improved' upon—which like, true, but not an entirely new phenomenon and it wasn't an analysis that had much to actually say about capitalism or biopolitics. this is connected to the above issue imo because fundamentally tolentino Doesn't Like Capitalism but also doesn't have much to say about it beyond how it makes Women (a coherent category...) feel.

[metaphrasis]

EZRA KLEIN: I think there’s so much tension and energy and guilt in this connection between the sacred and the mundane, the sense that you often should be feeling. You are so close to this transcendent experience. You are doing the most meaningful thing, and you are so bored or so tired, or you so want to be somewhere else. What do you do when what you are trying to do is escape the thing you should be paying attention to? [...] To be alive is also holy. To be alive, to be able to experience this at any moment, right? The possibility of connection, of experience, of just being in this world, it should be so overwhelming. And instead, I am staring at my phone.

— from his conversation with Jia Tolentino: "On Children, Meaning, Media and Psychedelics"

[catjoyy]

For a long time, there was no way for a woman to be both free and good.

Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

[tetw]

5 Great Essays by Jia Tolentino

The Tyranny of the Ideal Woman by Jia Tolentino - How we became suckers for the hard labor of self-optimization...

Somewhere Worse by Jia Tolentino - We are entering an era not just of unsafe abortions but of the widespread criminalization of pregnancy

The Age of Instagram Face by Jia Tolentino - How social media, FaceTune, and plastic surgery created a single, cyborgian look

Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston by Jia Tolentino - Christianity formed my deepest instincts, and I have been walking away from it for half my life

No Offense by Jia Tolentino - The offense is supposed to go somewhere and do something. Of course, in practice, that’s not what happens at all

[gotochicharm]

💤🌞

[luxe-pauvre]

More than twenty years ago, the writer Michael Goldhaber observed, in Wired, that the Internet drowns its users in information while constantly increasing information production; this makes attention a scarce and desirable resource—the “natural economy of cyberspace.” Goldhaber speculated that, when the “attention economy” had matured, nearly everyone would have her own Web site, and he warned readers that “increasing demand for our limited attention will keep us from reflecting, or thinking deeply (let alone enjoying leisure).” In other words, he roughly outlined the social-media age. Social-media companies monetize everyday selfhood: our preferences and personal data are tracked and sold to advertisers; our relationships are framed as potentially profitable conduits; we continually capture one another’s lucrative attention by performing some version of who we think we are. Over time, we have absorbed these terms and conditions: we might retain very little of the value we create, but we have allowed social media to make us feel valuable. These platforms encourage compulsive use by offering forms of social approval—likes on Facebook and Instagram, retweets on Twitter—that are intermittent and unpredictable, as though you’re playing a slot machine that tells you whether or not people love you. Dependency, eventually, assumes its own logic.

Jia Tolentino, What It Takes To Put Your Phone Away

[loachfriend]

The words of the incredibly wise writer Jia Tolentino. Each of us has the natural inclination to craft chains of connection and support - we just have to find the space for it to happen when every moment of our time is monetized/commodified. Make time to grow. Make time to caretake.

This quote is part of an interview on the Burn After Reading substack.

[ghost-in-a-cup]

Oh mood

Highlighted text reads : " most of my life is inextricable from the internet, and it's mazes of incessant forced connection - this feverish, electric, unlivable hell"

[reverie-quotes]

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.

— Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

[ubu507]

A model has to figure out a way to appeal to an unseen, changing audience; she has to understand how to silently invite their desires and needs onto her under pressure, she has to radiate perfect composure and control.

-- Jia Tolentino

[jesusdeadbeatdaughter]

[gogoartqueen]

Also had to reread this Jia piece from a couple of months ago... well there's still time lmao

[catjoyy]

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

Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror

[solidandsound]

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.

Jia Tolentino, "Always Be Optimizing," Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion

[rickchung]

Jia Tolentino x "Who's Afraid of Eating the Rich?" x Chan Centre for Performing Arts x UBC. (via Justin Man)

How Tolentino engages our existence of interlocking contradictions through cultural touchstones makes her writing so clear-headed yet deeply entangled in messiness. Her pivot to wealth, its depictions, and our relationship to it reveals so much about our inner rot and depression. Even defining "rich" is unclear when measured against others and global reach.