Stuart Ewen on “self-fetishization”

“As notions of failure were to be perceived within a style of self-denigrating paranoia, notions of success were likewise portrayed in purely self-involved terms. Though the victorious heroines of cosmetic advertisements always got their man, they did so out of a commodity defined self-fetishization which made that man and themselves almost irrelevant to the quality of their victory. Their romantic triumphs were ultimately commercially defined versions of the auto-erotic ones of Alban Berg’s prostitute, Lulu, who declares that ‘When I looked at myself in the mirror I wished I were a man -a man married to me.'”