Jia Tolentino

The internet is still so young that it’s easy to retain some subconscious hope that it all might still add up to something. We remember that at one point this all felt like butterflies and puddles and blossoms, and we sit patiently in our festering inferno, waiting for the internet to turn around and surprise us and get good again.

In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir writes that a girl is a “human being before becoming a woman,” and she “knows already that to accept herself as a woman is to become resigned and to mutilate herself.”

childhood heroines had shown me who I wanted to be, but teenage heroines showed me who I was afraid of becoming