Grazie Sophia Christie at The Point:
Women have always had a special relationship with lies; often, we have relied on them for survival. But it was the aspirational feminism of the 2010s—individualistic, empowering, breathless, especially after SoulCycle—which first introduced many of us to the art of lying to ourselves.
In those years, women followed a noble ethics—or a maladaptive one, depending on who you asked. We tried to live by the rules of how things should be, rather than how things are. The premises from which we were not to budge could be found in children’s books. Like “boys and girls are made of much the same, except for little things.” Or that girls can “be anything … even president,” as one 2019 book put it, quoting Hillary Clinton after she learned otherwise. Misogyny was a feedback loop that would keep running unless we intervened in it: systemic, embedded in all our expectations and validated each time we played along. Since our actions and speech could either reinforce misogyny or undermine it, feminists fought the patriarchy conceptually, with the right words and behavior. We would not flirt at speed traps or interviews.
more here.
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