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How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
by Sophie GilbertFrom Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of early aughts pop culture.
What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent after a period of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement's power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.
Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and "riot grrrl" feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Gilbert mines the darker side of nostalgia, training her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. And what she recounts is harrowing, from the leering aesthetic of American Apparel ads and explicit music videos to a burgeoning internet culture vicious toward women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren't. Gilbert tracks many of the period's dominant themes back to the explosion of internet porn, tracing its widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.
Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence of excess, materialism, and power worship collided with the culture's reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and how it continues to shape our world today.
Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men
Reading Girl on Girl feels like revisiting your memories with your brilliant protective older sister making sense of them for you. Her cultural criticism is as coolly sophisticated as it is deeply personal, making you feel like she's reading your mind. It's alarming to see so clearly how cruel the aughts were to young women. But the great payoff is, finally, self awareness. Kate Manne, author of Down Girl and Unshrinking
With panache, wit, and brilliance, Sophie Gilbert's Girl on Girl offers compelling analyses of how mass culture has diluted and tainted feminism. A captivating must-read for anyone who wants to understand how and why misogyny is as powerful a force as ever.
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