In the late nineties and early two thousands, many teenage girls grew up with the Spice Girls playing in the background, going to the movies to see American Beauty or Scary Movie, devouring music videos and youth magazines full of Britney Spears and reality TV stars. That feeling of empowerment from showing a thong coexisted with a much less innocent message: mainstream representations of young women were preparing, almost without us realizing it, a rollback of feminism and a loss of rights for future generations.
In Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, Sophie Gilbert, a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist, takes a thorough look at the popular culture of the turn of the millennium. She analyzes teen pop, heroin chic, reality TV, and the explosion of internet pornography, and how that global presence seeped into the collective consciousness until normalizing a low-intensity but extremely impactful misogyny.
Gilbert shows how that cultural climate was the seed of regressions we now clearly recognize: Trump’s reelection, the rollback of reproductive rights, the rise of the tradwife phenomenon, or incel violence did not appear out of nowhere but are supported by decades of narratives that pitted girls against each other and put their bodies at the center of spectacle, mockery, and control.
This essay offers genuine violet glasses to read the cultural dynamics of the past and present. Understanding the ways women have been denigrated and dissected helps identify and neutralize those attacks today: after closing the book, what remains is a tool of cultural self-defense to look at music videos, social media, media, and political discourse with new eyes.
“In Girl on Girl, Sophie Gilbert delivers a raw analysis of how the cultural currents of the 90s and 2000s, both on and offline, harmed young women in a dark and profound way.”
Maya Salam, The New York Times
About the author:
Sophie Gilbert is a British journalist and cultural critic. She is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes about television, books, and pop culture, and has received the 2024 National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism, as well as being a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Criticism. She is the author of Girl on Girl and On Womanhood: Bodies, Literature, Choice, and lives in London.
