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How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
by Sophie Gilbert
Book Reviewed by:Sophie Gilbert traces the genesis of Girl on Girl to the early 2020s, when, in the wake of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign defeat and the dispiritingly short-lived reckonings of #MeToo, she began to notice concerning trends on social media and in other forms of pop culture. After a decade-long body positivity movement that saw a wider range of body types depicted in fashion magazines and on clothing retailer websites, women were now embracing readily available weight-loss medications and showing off their newly skeletal frames. Meanwhile, female social media influencers (some as young as preteens) were setting aside professional ambitions, instead touting the life-changing magic of rejuvenating skin care products and extolling the virtues of a "soft, feminine life" involving total financial dependence on a man.
Gilbert, a journalist for The Atlantic, found all this eerily familiar: "time no longer seemed linear, progress no longer felt inevitable, and every ugly trend I'd come of age with as a Y2K teen had looped its way right back around." Although Gilbert had been too young to apply a critical lens to the phenomenon at the time, with the benefit of hindsight, she now noticed how starkly the trajectory of feminism had shifted between the 1990s and the aughts, back when she was a teenager.
As just one example, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, supermodels like Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell were formidable professionals, demanding agency over their strong, glamorous, and powerful images—and also commanding staggeringly high salaries. Just ten years later, the fashion industry had changed tack, instead privileging an aesthetic that was very young, passive, and relatively powerless. Likewise, the "riot grrrl" feminist punk rock movement of the early 1990s was warped into a new kind of paradigm when the Spice Girls burst onto the scene in the latter half of the decade, with their looks that were simultaneously hyperfeminine, infantilized, and sexy, manufactured for others' enjoyment rather than evolving out of their own desires: "the Spice Girls were sexy women who behaved like toddlers at a wedding...They embodied 'freedom' if you understood that concept as 'total absence of impulse control.' They made you want to immediately go shopping. And they talked, often, about Girl Power."
Gilbert sets out to trace these kinds of trends' resurgence over time, along the way exploring how women are inevitably—thanks to the multiplying effects of late capitalism and misogyny—caught in a seemingly endless web of double binds. In a chapter on women's career ambitions and the rise of the social media–fueled "#girlboss" movement, for example, she outlines how books like Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In focused women's attention away from advocating for structural changes around issues like, for example, affordable childcare and equal pay. Instead, according to Sandberg's book, career success is almost entirely contingent on the individual, about each woman jockeying to demand her own seat at the table rather than collectively advocating for greater workplace supports that could benefit all women. Is it any wonder, Gilbert muses, that in the decade since Lean In, women who've been failed by this kind of corporate feminism have instead embraced the individualistic (and exhaustingly exploitative) nature of multilevel marketing campaigns, relentlessly crafting their own online images, their personal brands, to sell friends, acquaintances, and total strangers on everything from weight-loss remedies and supplements to fitness wear?
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. Sure, not everyone will remember Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica (starring pop stars Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey) or The Simple Life with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, but Gilbert gives plenty of context to go on. Readers may, in fact, thank their lucky stars that Gilbert is the one to wade into (re)watching the horrific makeover show The Swan or a variety of hard-core pornographic content (it's notable that she gives a special shout-out to her fact-checker for having to watch the videos included in the chapter specifically devoted to the topic).
As the book's title hints at, much of what Gilbert writes about across the realms of popular culture inevitably comes back to pornography, which has become exponentially more available throughout the decades she covers and has, as she demonstrates repeatedly and compellingly, come to influence almost every other facet of pop culture about which she writes. She isn't anti-porn by any means, but she does posit that the now-ubiquitous visual language of pornography—particularly the increasingly violent and extreme types that have grown in popularity and availability since the rise of the internet—are affecting the ways in which men view women and, perhaps more critically, how women view themselves.
Gilbert is careful to note that she's not exactly suggesting that, for example, pop culture and pornography are responsible for Kamala Harris's 2024 loss to Donald Trump. She does, however, caution readers to think about the ways in which the media environment in which we've all been stewing has affected the kinds of narratives available to us: "We each of us have decades of internal writing informed by the works we grew up with. And so we need to expand our conception of what power for women looks like. We need to rewrite the archetypes and the narratives, all the way down to the bones." Gilbert's work reminds us that pop culture might be packaged as frothy fun, but it's hardly trivial—and that readers would be well served by paying more attention to the messages and power dynamics that it currently reinforces.
This review
first ran in the May 7, 2025
issue of BookBrowse Recommends.
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