acquire economic capital—this was the connective tissue of our experience, an unbreakable link between the women who didn’t work, who were married to rich men, and the women who did work, like me.
A few months later, I claimed the same spot in the room, and my eyes wandered down to the street again. My heart suddenly contracted, as it sometimes does in barre, with an intense, glancing sense of implication. Outside, the day was bright and shallow, and everyone on the street was posing their daughters in front of that statue, Fearless Girl.
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The ideal woman looks beautiful, happy, carefree, and perfectly competent. Is she really? To look any particular way and to actually be that way are two separate concepts, and striving to look carefree and happy can interfere with your ability to feel so. The internet codifies this problem, makes it inescapable; in recent years, pop culture has started to reflect the fractures in selfhood that social media creates. Not coincidentally, these stories usually center on women, and usually involve a protagonist driven to insanity by the digital avatar of an ideal peer.
The best-known version might be a particularly on-the-nose episode of the on-the-nose show Black Mirror, in which Bryce Dallas Howard plays a pathetically eager-to-please striver obsessed with her low social media rating and the comparatively high status of a beautiful childhood friend. (The social media system in this episode, in which the totality of a person’s interactions with the world are rated and integrated into a single number, is not unlike China’s actual Social Credit System, which began beta-testing around 2017.) The episode ends with Howard’s character smeared in mud and crashing the friend’s wedding, a screaming and vindictive Swamp Thing.
The 2017 movie Ingrid Goes West begins with a similar scene—weddings, again, being the ur-event for all these anxieties. Aubrey Plaza, playing the titular character (a joke about Instagram—“in grid”), pepper-sprays a Barbie-looking bride at the reception of a wedding she wasn’t invited to. After a stay in a mental hospital, Ingrid then moves to Los Angeles and maniacally stalks and mimics a lifestyle blogger named Taylor Sloane, played by Elizabeth Olsen. The smartest thing about the movie is the way Taylor was written—not as a super-strategic phony, but as a regular, vapid, genuinely sweet girl whose identity had been effectively given to her, without her knowing it or really caring, by the winds and trends of social media. The movie ends—spoiler—with Ingrid attempting suicide and then becoming virally famous as an inspirational yet cautionary tale.
The story has shown up in books, too—big-box-store novels and literary ones. In 2017, Sophie Kinsella, of the hugely popular Shopaholic franchise, published a book called My (Not So) Perfect Life, featuring a young protagonist named Katie who is obsessed with the social media presence of her perfect boss, Demeter, memorizing and trying her best to reproduce the details of the body, the clothes, the family, the social life, the house, and the vacations that Demeter presents. (This book is structured like a romantic comedy: after the two women take turns humiliating each other, they end up on the same team.) Another 2017 novel, Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic, is a dispassionate Lewis Carroll revision, where the looking glass is a smartphone and the main potion is prescription speed. The protagonist, Alice Hare, becomes obsessed with a writer named Mizuko, whose life compels Alice to such a degree that she starts to believe that she is actually, in some way, Mizuko—a double of her, a shadow, an echo.
There is an exaggerated binary fatalism to these stories, in which women are either successes or failures, always one or the other—and a sense of inescapability that rings more true to life. If you can’t escape the market, why stop working on its terms? 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. And yet there is enormous pleasure in individual success. It can feel like license and agency to approach an ideal, to find yourself—in a good picture, on your wedding day, in a flash of identical movement—exemplifying a prototype. There are rewards for succeeding under capitalism and patriarchy; there are rewards even for being willing to work on its terms. There are nothing but rewards, at the surface level. The trap looks beautiful. It’s well-lit. It welcomes you in.
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There is a case, as laid out by Donna Haraway in her