On Tuesday, the University Philosophical Soceity (the Phil) and its subcommittee, The Elizabethan Society (the Eliz) presented American writer and editor Jia Tolentino with its Gold Medal of Honorary Patronage.
Outgoing Phil President Annika Ramani and Eliz President Marin Henley opened the ceremony in the GMB chamber to a modest but excited crowd. Ramani introduced Tolentino as a worthy recipient of the honour, given her outstanding contributions to discourse through her work at The New Yorker, Jezebel, and The Hairpin, coupled with her poignant essay collection “Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion”. Tolentino has emerged as one of the foremost journalists of our time. She is known for her sharp writing and incisive criticism, exploring the tangled intersections of identity, media, and morality in the 21st Century.
Tolentino opened, jokingly asking Ramani and Henley if they were sure she was the right person to be given the award. She continued, grateful to the Phil and Eliz, particularly because this was her first time in Ireland, pointing out her in-laws and children in the crowd. She pivoted, discussing the importance of universities, specifically their role in language, society, and holding on to a sense of history. “The idea that human effort matters is getting harder to hold on to. [It’s] hard to find dimension and continuity, with the past eighteen months we’ve seen what’s happening in Gaza, and now in the states with three months of an overtly fascist administration” (Referring to Donald Trump). She discussed “Horrors appearing before us, that are then replaced with new horrors, in the unimaginable reality of life.” Underscoring that “speech and discourse are more important than ever” in the “reality of perpetual crisis”.
Tolentino was raised in Houston, Texas, among “Conservative, Evangelical, Southern Baptists”. When asked about the influence of her childhood on her writing, Tolentino eagerly shared “I’m grateful for my background, I grew up reading the Bible” which she called “fundamentally a very left-wing, communist text”. She attributes her political instinct to her upbringing, citing “devotion as a practive, no matter what it is, is a moral project in itself.” Further, the situated perspective of the political landscape of the American South allowed Tolentino to be “very familiar with and embedded with those who legitimately hold the belief that life begins at conception” when writing about abortion.
Ramani asked Tolentino about the evolution of feminism throughout her life, to which Tolentino responded “Bush was president when I was in college.” Describing her generation’s rise with feminism, she cited blanket statements like “All women are beautiful!” to which she laughed, “as if that’s important for feminism”. She called the feminism of her college years “robust and democratising, especially online and in America” but “in tandem with big banks like Goldman Sachs having a feminist day, like, you’re missing the point”. Adding “the feminism of my 20s was ‘pop-feminism’ with ‘She-E-Os’”. She stated “Feminism is bottom-up. It’s about the minimum wage, healthcare, and the carceral system. Women bear the brunt of economic exploitation. It’s not as splashy or sexy.” She proceeded “I feel grim confirming I was right to doubt the pop-feminism of my time, it’s clear now that it A. didn’t work, and B. caused all this backlash.” Indeed, we ought to “not prioritise women in pantsuits”.
Henley pressed on the point about the internet, asking if it is possible to exist authentically online, to which Tolentino emphatically responded “Yes! Many do!” Continuing “but, can you exist morally under hyper-advanced capitalism? Not really. But it is a worthwhile project.” “The approach is asymptotic (…) basically, whether we have authenticity is beside the point.” She encouraged the crowd to “evaluate what freedom you have, and what you can possibly make of it.” She also noted that she took a personal break from digital life in 2020: “memes stopped being funny”.
Ramani pointed to Tolentino’s criticism of “optimisation culture”, which refers to the societal push to maximise performance, productivity, and personal improvement, asking how we may seek to resist it. Tolentino outlined that “there’s a difference between a publicly traded company seeking constant hockey stick growth (…) which is impossible and profoundly unethical” and “steady, slow growth” which is “possible to do ethically”. “It requires constant improvement”. Adding “as a girl, I feel an ethical mandate to constantly make myself more appealing to others. Men have the same thing in other ways, and it is equally punishing.”
Tolentino is perhaps best known for her reporting on the conservatorship of Britney Spears in 2021, that was described as the “journalistic reference text on Britney Spears” by Dirk Peitz. Ramani inquired about Spears, and Tolentino’s role in the ensuing “Free Britney” movement. Tolentino remaked on how bombarded Spears was, by paparazzi, family, and constant attention, laughing “so what if she did drugs and wasn’t a perfect parent for a year? I would’ve done the same thing, and six months earlier.” Continuing, “She was so uniquely vulnerable to being exploited.” She also noted “male celebrities loose all their money gambling all the time, and no one places them under a conservatorship”. She highlighted the emphasis on protection for celebrities like Spears who are young, beautiful, and talented. Explaining those around Spears wanted to “maximise what she could bring to the world, and make her there for other people.” She called protection a “strange, double-edged sword for women.”
Tolentino, who appeared on the reality TV show “Girls vs. Boys” when she was sixteen, was asked by Henley about the nature of performance and surveillance more broadly. Tolentino commented “we perform everything we do” adding “when you’re a server, you’re performing being a great server”. But reflected, “now, especially as a mother, I have learned that the most human moments are unsurveilled”.
When asked by Henley about sex and gender more broadly, Tolentino shared she’s been working on a piece about Gen-Z and sex. She laughed “People are so worried about Gen-Z, like ‘what is going on? They’re non-binary and choking each other!’ but that’s above the point”. She reflected “I believe in policy and structures, but with this [sex], it is so uniquely embedded in our complicated notions of transaction.” She articulated that sex is “impossible to legislate”. Arguing that young people should be “very true to ownership in relationships, specifically the physical and sexual.”
Ramani transitioned to Tolentino’s writing process, asking about how Tolentino chooses what to write about. Tolentino said she knows when to write about something when “I’m trying to make all my friends talk to me about it. Only in the real world, not on the internet.” She also explained her research process, admitting “it’s a fool’s errand, inventing ideas other people haven’t thought of” adding “I go as far back in the past as I can and look at the earliest precursors of any thought I have”. “[I go] as deep in time and far in discipline as possible”.
One of Tolentino’s most notable talents is interviewing, and her ability to get subjects to be honest and descriptive. Henley asked how Tolentino is able to get people to trust her. Tolentino called it a “tough question” but said “what makes someone a good journalist is listening carefully.” She continued “You want to hear what they have to say. I want to know.” “If that’s the leading impulse, people can sense that”. She clarified, interviewing is not about extracting something to fit into a story, but “encouraging people that what they say is important”.
Ramani asked about journalistic responsibility, to which Tolentino replied “Some news sources are fact-checked, and some are insane and designed to scare you”. She expressed “there will still be people that care [about that distinction]”. However, she admitted “recently, it’s been harder to tease out workable definitons of true and false.”
On the field in general, Tolentino joked “I am literally a DEI hire”. But asserted “this job wouldn’t be interesting without young people, people of colour, and women.” “There are legitimate reasons to diversify […] you can’t have a 65-year-old white guy from the Upper West Side going and interviewing FKA twigs”. “But do I care about the diversity of a hedge fund? Not really.” Though ending with “I believe in DEI”.
On the act of writing, Tolentino declared “anyone who wants to be a writer should read ten to twenty times more than they write”. “It’s a matter of craft.” “Learning how to structure anything is useful”. She grinned, “You can tell when a writer is not a reader. The writing is bad.”
A question from the floor asked Tolentino about how she has confidence in what she writes, to which Tolentino responded “I wrote nothing in college. No school newspaper, no internships. No one read anything I wrote.” Adding “it’s partly temperamental, I’m not a very reserved person in general.” “In any artistic discipline, there’s so much to think about in the thing itself. You don’t have time to worry about anyone else.” “You need to please yourself first, and if you can make that bar sufficiently challenging, make yourself sick with how bad your writing is, you get so exhausted you have no time to worry about anyone else.” Tolentino called mistakes “important”. She said “many young journalists are afraid of making public mistakes.” “You will regret things you write and learn in public”
Tolentino remarked “in this horrific non-field of being a writer, you have to be so insane that you do it regardless of whether or not anyone reads it.”
Previous recipients of the Gold Medal of Honorary Patronage from the Phil include Gloria Steinem, Ruth Bater Ginsberg and Whoopi Goldberg.
