“Feminists have worked so hard, with such good intentions, to justify female difficulty that the concept has ballooned to something all-encompassing,” Tolentino writes.

Not that they shouldn’t be idolised, she argues, but that it’s had an unexpected trickle-down effect wherein more politically dangerous individuals like Ivanka Trump have undergone similar reframing by mere proxy of being a woman in power. In another essay, she reflects on the rise of think pieces that celebrate “difficult women”, stories that have reframed the likes of Kim Kardashian, Lena Dunham or Caitlyn Jenner as feminist icons importantly disrupting the status quo. The anti-Photoshop crusades that propelled to notoriety the late-Noughties feminist site Jezebel, Tolentino’s one-time home, unknowingly spawned an expectation that women should strive for a “natural” beauty which “requires almost no intervention”. She also guiltily uses her own history in journalism to explore how things went so awry, particularly positive-seeming movements that unknowingly left far more insidious problems in their wake. “Where we had once been free to be ourselves online,” she writes, “we were now chained to ourselves online.”

She then explores how it all became corrupted, the endless possibilities of the internet growing harsher and meaner, until it felt like we had become at the mercy of an online world that had shaped our real-world personalities for the worse. During Trick Mirror, her first collection of essays, she writes about her earliest memories of the digital world, the Angelfire web page she filled with choppy HTML flourishes and Dawson’s Creek references. In her best work, she uses the rise of the internet to chart our collective anxieties. Her work, as a staff writer for The New Yorker, often doubles as a kind of existential survival guide, regularly driven by how odd it is for a generation to have to navigate a world increasingly lived online, where toxicity, capitalist horror and self-loathing has long bled into our everyday existences. Jia Tolentino has spent the past decade as our foremost expert on how to exist in the 21st century.

Trick mirror by jia tolentino