It's not enough for candy to be candy. It has to symbolize candy too.
Catalog
Carina Chocano
The women on The Bachelor shows aren't interested in marriage except as a certificate of completion; proof that they've become what a girl is still expected to become. What they're looking for is the chance to embark on the singular adventure they've read about and seen acted in movie after movie…
The Bachelor presents itself as a show about beautiful young single people finding love, but the show is less a matchmaking service than a sporting event. The sport is femininity.
Eat, Pray, Love felt about as authentic to me as the heroine's "journey" on The Bachelor: Either she triumphed against all odds, or she quietly disappeared. It had to be a certain kind of redemptive narrative for a certain kind of lady at a certain stage in life when perhaps she has taken to…
At the start of the book, Gilbert paints herself as a desperate suburban housewife in the throes of a nervous breakdown. But she was already a prize-winning journalist. She was rich. She'd had stories made into movies.
I wish I could say I was immune to the promise of the redemption narrative, but I found it hard to resist its mass-market allure. I also wanted very badly for it to save me.
Eventually, she left her husband, moved to California with her daughter; and became an internationally best-selling author.
Romantic love is a mirror in which you can see your whole self pleasantly reflected, if you're lucky. Or it's a dark mirror into which you can disappear.
A woman’s education was designed to coax her to sleep at sixteen and keep her unchanged and unconscious forever. It was an undoing. It wasn’t a start but a “finishing”.