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How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
by Sophie Gilbert
Book Reviewed by:From 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.
Girl on Girl is structured more or less chronologically, starting with a chapter on the changing face of the music industry in the 1990s and wrapping up with a final chapter that touches on the relevance of Gilbert's observations to the 2024 presidential campaign and women's political power (or lack thereof). Along the way, individual chapters focus on the fashion industry, film, reality television, beauty standards, fame, confessional narratives, and more. Although Gilbert's contemporaries—growing up in the 1990s and 2000s and deeply immersed in the pop culture of those eras—will likely find the most touchstones in her narrative, the range of topics she touches on is so broad and her larger points about misogyny and capitalism so universal that a range of readers interested in the intersections of culture and society will find much to appreciate here...continued
Full Review
(1024 words)
(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
If you think about internet influencers, you might first consider your favorite cookbook blogger, Instagram fashion icon, or YouTube content creator. But, as Sophie Gilbert notes in a chapter on the rise of reality television in her book Girl on Girl, the very first person who might stake a claim to that title is a woman who, back in 1996, decided to switch on her webcam and start streaming—and, with rare exceptions, didn't turn it off for the next seven years.
Jennifer Ringley was a 19-year-old student at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania when she started the project, known as Jennicam. Hers was not the first live webcam—she was preceded by a coffee pot cam (started in 1993 and retired 10 years later) and a FishCam (...
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I write to add to the beauty that now belongs to me
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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.
