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“For readers who’ve wondered what Susan Sontag would have been like if she had brain damage from the internet.” This claim appears on the inside jacket of Jia Tolentino’s debut essay collection, Trick Mirror. Tolentino is an established voice on the internet, a staff writer at The New Yorker, formerly the deputy editor at Jezebel, and a contributing editor at the Hairpin. What I love about this jacket inscription is that it crosses the divide between the thoroughly researched and at times academic criticism that Tolentino engages in throughout the collection, and the low-brow internet meme culture that she concerns herself with. The collection includes personal reflections on internet culture and the delusion it inspires, and I would point readers towards a particularly strong essay called “Ecstasy”, which deals with Tolentino’s break with the mega church that she was raised in. But the collection seems to widen its lens as it progresses, opening itself to such massive cultural phenomena as on-campus sexual assault, scammer culture (read: capitalism for millenials), and the institution of marriage.
There are a total of nine essays in the collection, some of which were developed from Tolentino’s research and reporting at The New Yorker, and occupy various positions on the spectrum of personal reflection, journalism, and research. What makes the collection feel so cohesive despite its range of disciplines, is Tolentino’s fully developed voice, which is a harmonious blend of her strong instinct for narrative prose and her sharpened wit. What is unique about Tolentino is that she never sacrifices one for the other, which is perhaps why the reference to Sontag in the fraught digital age feels so apt.
While so many of the essays included in this essay spoke to me, one has really dug itself into my consciousness in the intervening weeks since I’ve read the book, called “We Come From Old Virginia”. The essay begins as a reflection on the infamous 2014 Rolling Stone article detailing a gang rape that allegedly occurred at the University of Virginia Phi Psi fraternity house, and the cultural firestorm that was ignited after the report turned out to be false. Tolentino identifies the factors that precipitated this scandal, telling the story of Liz Seccuro, who was gang raped at the Phi Psi fraternity house in 1984, from whose memoir the alleged victim in the 2014 rape case had lifted some details in fabricating the story of her own rape. Tolentino identifies the eventual vilification of the accuser and of Rolling Stone, and the total absolution of the University of Virginia, as a signpost of society’s misplaced blame surrounding rape culture. The reality is that rape has existed in our culture as long as there has been a culture, it is present in the Bible and Greek mythology, and as Tolentino writes, “Rape, until very recently, was presented as a norm.” Rape on college campuses has become a mainstream conversation only in recent years, despite the staggering statistics relating to its prevalence. Among undergraduates, 23.1% of female students, 5.4% of male students, and 21% of transgender, genderqueer, or gender nonconforming students have experienced rape of sexual assault by physical force. (Source). Tolentino identifies the fraternity system as a key factor in the historical lack of concern surrounding campus rape allegations, pointing out the financial capital that fraternities contribute to their respective universities, as well as the social environment that they facilitate, which “doesn’t create rapists as much as it perfectly obscures them.” Tolentino also makes crucial connections between sexual violence in Charlottesville and racial violence, observing that the first reported rape at the university occurred in 1850, when three students gang-raped an enslaved woman. Tolentino traces how sexism, racism, and violence are baked into the culture of universities, many of which are having trouble navigating relationships with problematic founders and donors. She transitions to the years following the 2014 Rolling Stone report, and the strong reporting that has emerged surrounding sexual violence, especially as part of the #MeToo era, and how many strides have been made in victim’s advocacy since 2014. However, the fact remains that rape victims still have trouble reporting their attacks, and even when they do, the rate of official rape complaints that actually result in justice for the victim is quite miniscule. For me, Tolentino’s most incisive point in this essay is the observation that, “The best-case scenario for a rape victim in terms of adjudication is the worst-case scenario in terms of experience: for people to believe you deserve justice you have to be destroyed. The fact that feminism is ascendant and accepted does not change this…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 is not exceptional. It’s not anomalous. And there is no way to make that into a satisfying story.” This discussion about the criteria necessary for believability, much less interest, in rape victims has been something I’ve been engaging with a lot lately, after watching the Netflix series Unbelievable, and reading Chanel Miller’s Know My Name, the survivor’s account of the infamous Stanford rape case. Tolentino perfectly identifies the frustration that accompanies these other texts surrounding rape culture: society has been wasting time searching for this elusive perfect victim rather than pursuing justice. She opens the floor to every woman’s story of abuse, assault, or harassment, acknowledging that each of these stories is worth identification and recognition.
I will not spoil any of the other essays, but will mention that the other ones that have stuck with me include “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams” and “The Cult of the Difficult Woman”. “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams” draws a convincing through line from the 2008 financial crisis, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, to social media-adjacent scams such as the ill-fated Fyre Festival. “The Cult of the Difficult Woman” explores the intersection of feminism and celebrity culture, including the internet’s glorification of controversial women such as Kim Kardashian or Whitney Houston, and makes the sharp assertion that “womanhood has been denied depth and meaning for so long that every inch of it is now almost impossibly freighted.” The experience of reading this book felt like replaying the daily debates that rage on in my own head, but on an elevated plane. And I feel the source of this personal recognition not only arises from the essays’ literal relevance to my own life, but more from the fact that none of Tolentino’s work moves toward simple conclusions. What is both terrifying and electrifying about her writing is that she doesn’t pretend to know the solutions to the problems she identifies, she merely lays them bare for her reader to marvel at. Her writing contains many of the twists and binds of the human thought process played out in real time. In my opinion, the principle goal of an essay collection of this nature is to expose cultural dilemmas in a way that generates discourse, rather than offering the dialectical endpoint of that discourse. In this way, Tolentino absolutely succeeds in creating and contributing to a fruitful discourse surrounding the many fraught issues she tackles, which is the essential effort necessary to society’s cultural evolution.
Read more of Jia’s work at The New Yorker. Some of my favorites pieces include her essay on the social media platform TikTok, this one about the convalescence of internet and celebrity culture, and a meditation on Kanye West’s Sunday Service.