FEATURE:
Toxic
Inside Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
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I am going back…
IN THIS PHOTO: Sophie Gilbert
a few months or so (the book was released on 1st May). There is a chance that some music fans might have missed Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. Not that this book exclusively looks inside the 1990s and 2000s and what it was like for women in music. It is no secret that, when it comes to how women were portrayed in music and film during that decade, there was massive misogyny and sexism. Women reduced to objects and hyper-sexualised. It was an awful time I look back on with regret. I was coming out of my teens and embracing new music. I was not really aware of just how bad it was for women. That seems a bit vague and non-specific. I think a lot of today’s best Pop music nods back to artists of the '90s and '00s who were blazing a trail. Spending some time discussing that and so much more, Sophie Gilbert’s new book is illuminating and often shocking. I would compel anyone who has not picked it up to order it. I am going to end with a review of the book. I will also include a few interviews with Gilbert. Before that, this is what Waterstones had to say about Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves:
“'Fascinating and powerfully argued' Daily Telegraph
'A captivating must-read for anyone who wants to understand how and why misogyny is as powerful a force as ever' KATE MANNE, author of Down Girl
Cosmetic surgeries are at an all-time high, Ozempic is bringing back 'heroin chic' and TikTok trad-wives are on the rise - after four waves of feminism, what went wrong?
Despite decades of progress, the gains of the feminist movement feel more fragile than ever. But as Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert points out, this is not a unique moment. Feminism felt just as fragmented in the early 2000s, when the momentum of third-wave feminists and riot grrrls was squashed by lad culture and the commodification of Girl Power.
Casting her eye across pop culture of the past thirty years - from Madonna, the Spice Girls and the Kardashians, to MySpace, #GirlBoss and Real Housewives - Sophie Gilbert reveals a toxic pattern of progress and misogynistic backlash. Girl on Girl shows how every form of media, heavily influenced by the rise of porn, has shaped and warped women's relationships with themselves and other women.
We cannot move forward without fully reckoning with the ways pop culture has defined us - this book shows us how.
'Add this book to the list of titles that urgently provide context and answers to the hell storm that is [vaguely waves around] everything going on right now' HARPER'S BAZAAR”.
Sophie Gilbert looks at various different corners of '90s and '00s culture and the arts. I will filter it down to music mainly, because that is my main interest. However, it is important to realise the extent of misogyny and how it blunted feminism’s third wave. DAZED spoke with Gilbert back in April. The more I find out about the book and how Sophie Gilbert shines a light on the exploitation and abuse of women. I will expand in a minute. However, I want to bring in these sections of the interview:
“The things we watch, listen to, read, wear, write, and share dictate in large part how we internalise and project what we’re worth,” writes Sophie Gilbert in Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. Chronicling the transition from the 1990s to 2000s, which was psychologically violent and sexually exploitative for many women who were part of the pop culture machine, Gilbert calls for a “reappraisal”. She wonders what this moment reflexively did to us as spectators: “How did it condition us to see ourselves? And, maybe more crucially, what did it condition us to think about other women…?”
The reappraisal is implemented with assists from works like Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs and Chris Kraus’ introduction to Pornocracy, alongside Gilbert’s own examinations of Abercrombie & Fitch, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Issa Rae, Sheryl Sandberg, Amy Winehouse, Nora Ephron, Taylor Swift, Anna Nicole Smith, the Spice Girls, Lil’ Kim and Hilary Clinton. Every form of media is probed, from reality TV (Celebrity Big Brother) to oversharing bloggers (Gawker) to the beginning of live streaming (Jennicam) to unthinkable trends (paparazzi upskirt photos). We spoke with Gilbert – a longtime staff writer at The Atlantic – about charged words (“empowering”, “gaslighting”, etc), the ingenuity of Lena Dunham, and the utility of scrutinising recent history.
You have packed so many references in this book. Did you create a syllabus for yourself? How did you pull all these things together?
Sophie Gilbert: When I wrote the proposal, I knew I wanted to have each chapter focus on a different form of media. The research took a year and a half. I did end up re-watching a lot of the TV shows, a lot of the movies. People have asked if I watched a lot of porn, and I did not, but only because here in the UK I have very tough restrictions on what I can access with my internet.
Relative to Catherine Breillat’s work, you wonder ‘whether or not someone can replicate abusive imagery in order to explore what it means — without falling into its trap’. That is such a powerful inquiry. Can you unpack that?
Sophie Gilbert: It’s really complicated. In the 90s, because of the internet, suddenly sex was everywhere, in a way that it had not typically been in the 20th century. What happened in the shift from 90s to 2000s media is that you can see provocation go from an intellectual exercise to a commercial one. One of the things that thoughtful artists always try to do is respond to culture, to systems of power, and to the relationship between the two.
In the chapter about Catherine Breillat, I mentioned Lena Dunham as well, because I think she’s doing the same thing with pornography, which is presenting the tropes in a way where they’re almost defanged by provocation, where rather than being ‘turned on’ by this sort of fairly monstrous power dynamic, you’re looking at it with fresh eyes because of how it’s being presented. That’s very hard to do”.
I was fortunate enough to see Sophie Gilbert speak with journalist and broadcaster, Pandora Sykes. They were hosting a Trouble Club event in promotion of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. Some of the exchanges really took me back. How young women in music and film, if they were getting close to the legal age of consent, were put on a radar. Magazines and radio stations counting down the days. It turns the stomach! Although we have made steps forward, I think we forget how things were. We often see the 1990s and 2000s with rose-tinted glasses. Pandora Sykes’s Substack post is an interview with Sophie Gilbert. One of the most harrowing parts of the Trouble Club event was Sophie Gilbert discussing how Britney Spears was treated by the media:
“You cite three key motivating factors for the book, which all took place in 1999: Britney Spears on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, aged 17; the release of American Beauty (which won 5 Oscars); and Gail Porter being projected, nude, onto The Houses of Parliament.
I was thinking that you could actually find a crucial cultural event—one which had significant effects on popular culture and women’s rights and safety—every single year of the 90s: Lorena Bobbit chopping off her abusive husband’s penis, in 1993; Clinton and Lewinsky in 1995; the murder of JonBenét Ramsay in 1996 (covered in horrifying detail by The National Enquirer etc); Pamela Anderson’s sex tape in 1997. These really splashy, lurid, pop-culture moments, which I didn’t really understand as a form of violence until I was well into adulthood.
You’re so right, the 90s were this really provocative decade. One person who spoke to me for the book theorised that this was because, after AIDS, there was a need to be explicit about sex in a way that had been hushed up in culture before. It was a matter of public safety, there was a need to discuss condoms and safe sex. That mandated this quite graphic treatment in culture. I’m not sure it wholly explains what happened over the course of the 90s. One event that you didn’t mention—and this was how I learned what oral sex was; sorry to my step-mother in the audience—is Hugh Grant being arrested, in 1995.
That mugshot—I can recall it in detail. Let’s go back to your three totems, and let’s start with Britney who arrived in 1997, aged 16. She was so emblematic of the paradox of this age: she had to look super sexy, but be a virgin. When Justin Timberlake revealed they had had sex, it basically trashed her career.
The pop stars at this time were a conflation of both New Traditionalism and New Voyeurism. They were expected to dance and perform sexually—their appeal was all in how well they performed sex—but they were absolutely not supposed to have sex, because that would not sell to America. So it was this really impossible bargain.
Chris Moyles offering on live radio to take Charlotte Church’s virginity when she turned 16.
It was really licensed by the culture, then, in a way it is—thankfully—not now.
I made an audio doc about Britney Spears in 2021, and one of things I found most shocking to revisit as an adult, is the archive footage of her smashing the car with her umbrella. She was only in her mid 20s. She had two kids under 1. (Her sons are only 11 months apart.) She was breaking up with her husband. And she had 30 men chasing her, day in day out, screaming profanities at her, for over five years. I cried re-watching the clip.
Two kids, she’s not yet 25, she has postpartum depression, her husband is suing her for custody. Everyone is critiquing her for being a bad mother because in one photo she almost dropped one of her kids. What’s almost worse, is that the condition of her being accepted back again [into pop-culture prime] is that she performs this sexy dance at the VMAs. And that she performs it sexily enough that everyone goes, okay, Britney! You can come back. And then when she comes out in the bikini, and she kind of shuffles through the moves, everyone was incredibly cruel to her, because it was just seen as more confirmation of her failure, her failure at fulfilling this impossible role”.
I am highlight a few of the many interviews around Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. Sections that caught my eye. I would urge people to do more reading. I was eager to spotlight this book as I think we have not made the progress we should. How many women are judged and criticised for being sexual or what others think as ‘controversial’. It is a very relevant and timely book in many ways. Vogue interviewed Sophie Gilbert in April:
“I was struck by the phases of erasure that occurred across types of media, particularly in music. You write, “Women in music in the 1990s were angry and abrasive and thrillingly powerful. And then, just like that, they were gone—replaced by girls.” Are we still there?
There have been so many emerging women artists who just absolutely do not limit themselves or their self-expression, even when they get censured for it. Like Sabrina Carpenter being critiqued for being sexual onstage at her shows because children attend, as though sexuality hasn’t been a fundamental—and fun!–part of her music since she hit adulthood. Or Chappell Roan being totally unfiltered in interviews and presenting this really thrilling, vibrant exploration of sex that’s totally uninterested in what men might want. Or Doechii being maligned for expressing her dating preferences. These women are getting an awful lot of flak for being honest about who they are, but they’re not retreating, and they’re winning awards and selling out more and more shows. And they’re not beholden to what a man in a corner office wants them to do. That looks like progress.
It’s hard to consider the depiction or representation of women without factoring in the real and increasingly omnipresent notion of celebrity. How has it changed over time?
This was one of the most interesting developments in the book for me—the ways in which celebrity changed throughout the 2000s, and what that shift did to the rest of us. In the 20th century, people could achieve tabloid renown without having any particular skill set, but in the 21st, suddenly there was all this space to fill in gossip magazines and infinite space online, and so women who were willing to go to the right places, pose for the cameras, or open up their entire lives to a film crew, became famous just for letting themselves be seen. Being willing to be visible became a viable path to fame. What changed in the 2000s, and what persists now, is the tease that virtually anyone can become famous if they honor all the conditions. The question is, is it worth it?”.
I am going to end with a review of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves from The Guardian. I hope I have done enough to convince those who are not familiar with the book and Sophie Gilbert to seek it out. As a music journalist and someone who grew up in the ‘90s and ‘00s, I was perhaps too young or naïve to realise how things were. How damaging it was. Maybe being so romantic and idealistic about a time in pop culture that was particularly toxic towards and for women:
“Gilbert writes that popular culture is invariably “calibrated to male desire”, which has ushered in “cruelty and disdain” towards 51% of the population, particularly if they are not white. Women are told they’re never good enough, but better can be bought: contouring, surgical enhancement and dieting sell an ideal that “can’t actually be humanly attained” but can be purchased, now with a single click. Getting by as a woman in post-feminist times means not taking apparently misogynistic music, art and TV too seriously, while women are being exploited, mocked and assaulted in plain sight, as #MeToo belatedly attested. When porn is everywhere, most worryingly on the phones of primary school children, no wonder 38% of women in the UK said they experienced “unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during sex”. The blokeish “irony-as-defence motif”, which nudges women to be in on the gag, denies the truth that sexist and racist cultural products profoundly change the way society thinks about women and therefore how women are treated.
Are there any solutions? Gilbert’s writing pays tribute to feminist texts that came before her, from Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, Susan Faludi’s Backlash and Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, to Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex, all of which are quoted at length. While Girl on Girl focuses on where pop culture has gone wrong for women, I enjoyed Gilbert’s praise for Madonna, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Chris Kraus’s resistant voices, and her book would have benefited from more. In her conclusion about potential bulwarks against women’s dehumanisation, Gilbert starts to make an intriguing argument about romantic love as a force of gender equality and respect, but this runs out of steam.
When Gilbert was pitching Girl on Girl, potential editors wanted more of her first-person voice. She felt “conflicted” about female confessional writing, and refused. The result is that Gilbert retreats from voicing her full indignation. She insists she’s “not interested in kink-shaming, and not remotely opposed to porn”, even while diagnosing porn as an unquestionable source of harm to women. Moreover, Gilbert doesn’t describe the conditions under which porn can be a force for good, which seems important to know in order to decide when to be what the scholar Sara Ahmed has called a feminist killjoy: “someone who speaks out about forms of injustice, who complains, who protests, who says no”. I finished Girl on Girl struck by Gilbert’s skilful marshalling of evidence and elegant writing, but looking for a bolder claim about where the real problem lies and what can be done about it”.
One of this year’s most important and essential books, go and grab a copy of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. After hearing Sophie Gilbert speak and discuss writing the book, it did affect me and open my eyes! Though we are not quite in the same dark days as experienced in the '90s and '00s, are women in pop culture and especially music have a better experience? The latest work from the amazing Sophie Gilbert is something…
EVERYONE needs to read.