At the end of the nineties and the beginning of the two thousands, many teenage girls grew up with the Spice Girls playing in the background, going to the cinema to watch 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: the mainstream portrayals of young women were preparing, almost without us realizing it, a setback for feminism and a loss of rights for the next generations.
In Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Pitted a Generation of Women Against Themselves, Sophie Gilbert, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2022, 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 very high-impact 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 do not appear out of nowhere, but rest on decades of narratives that pitted girls against each other and placed their bodies at the center of spectacle, mockery, and control.
This essay offers genuine violet-tinted 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 with different eyes at music videos, social networks, media, and political speeches.
“In Girl on Girl, Sophie Gilbert delivers a raw analysis of how the cultural currents of the 90s and 2000s, both inside and outside the internet, 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 an editor at The Atlantic, where she writes about television, books, and popular culture, and has received the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism 2024, as well as being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2022. She is the author of Girl on Girl and On Womanhood: Bodies, Literature, Choice, and lives in London.
