Readings: the intimate and the political
A companion to: A woman out in the world
This is a companion letter to: A woman out in the world.
As part of my #2020readingchallenge, I read a bunch of books that touch on how women navigate identity, love, sex, sexism, assault, and other thorny aspects of womanhood. Perhaps spurred by #metoo and perhaps because I had started seeing someone again, I was interested in probing the shadowed corners of intimate relations and their political dimensions. But also, many of these books were simply popular in Berlin’s bookshops last year!
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
Where female difficulty once seemed perverse, the refusal of difficulty now seems perverse. The entire interpretive framework is becoming untenable. We can analyze difficult women from the traditional point of view and find them controversial, and we can analyze bland women from the feminist point of view and find them controversial, too. […] Feminists have worked so hard, with such good intentions to justify female difficulty that the concept has ballooned to something all-encompassing: a blanket defence, an automatic celebration, a tarp of self-delusion that can cover up any sin. […]
I have wondered if we’re entering a period in which the line between valuing a woman in the face of mistreatment and valuing her because of that mistreatment is blurring; if the legitimate need to defend women from unfair criticism has morphed into an illegitimate need to defend women from criticism categorically; if it’s become possible to praise a woman specifically because she is criticized—for that featureless fact alone.
Not all the essays are compelling, but it’s definitely worth your time. It deals with how much the internet makes us who we are, modern feminism’s limitations due to a lack of imagination, and the optimization of beauty for success in a rampantly capitalist society, among other things.
Lauren Oyler has a biting review of Tolentino and her book, also equally worth reading. I think many of us would feel implicated too.