“The culture at large had exerted the same pressure on her that it exerts on all women, namely to feel insecure about herself regardless of what she was doing, to feel that simply by being a woman in the world she was necessarily doing something wrong and could only correct her wrongness via endless consumerism and an array of contradictory neuroses. She’d been socialized to always apologize, to smile when a man told her to smile, to believe men who told her she was doing something wrong. Before.”
