Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

by Sophie Gilbert

Overview

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 in a moment 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. Mining the darker side of nostalgia, Gilbert trains her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the leering gaze of the paparazzi to the gleeful cruelty of early reality TV and 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 rise of internet porn, which gained widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.

The result is a devastating portrait of a time when a distinctly American blend 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 continues to shape our world today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593656297
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/29/2025
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	240,195
Product dimensions:	6.34(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.16(d)

About the Author

Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes about television, books, and popular culture. She won the 2024 National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism and was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. She lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/24/2025

In this triumphant debut, Pulitzer finalist Gilbert dissects three decades of pop culture, from the Riot Grrrl 1990s to the #Girlboss 2010s, arguing that the era’s depictions of women evolved in ways that ended up warping their self-esteem. Analyzing a head-spinning array of cultural artifacts—from high art to gossip columns—she dredges up long-forgotten relics, among them the reality TV show “Are You Hot?” in which “members of the public stripped in order to be assessed by a panel of judges,” and “The Swan,” in which contestants were given “dozens” of cosmetic surgeries. Gilbert identifies a series of interlocking cultural shifts over this period that, in her telling, amounted to a subtle backlash against feminism. Examples include the late-’90s replacement of “angry and abrasive and thrillingly powerful” women musicians, like Tori Amos and Sinéad O’Connor, with more childlike or even underage stars like Britney Spears. Gilbert traces the origins of this drift to the objectifying influence of pornography, which, as it rapidly proliferated in online spaces, began to infect pop culture with a degrading attitude toward women. She also makes a convincing case that the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade was the long tail of this backlash. It’s a tour de force of cultural criticism. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

In this triumphant debut, Pulitzer finalist Gilbert dissects three decades of pop culture, from the Riot Grrrl 1990s to the #Girlboss 2010s . . . a tour de force of cultural criticism.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Gilbert deserves a medal—not only for her observations and conclusions, but for navigating the sludge she had to wade through to get there. Essential cultural criticism.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Girl on Girl is a work of overwhelming meticulousness and clarity. If you’re confused about the current uncertainty about feminism’s power, Sophie Gilbert has done the work of painstakingly and granularly tracing every cultural thread to reveal how we got here. Gilbert unmasks an insidious cultural coup that seemingly overnight dethroned the transgressive women of the 90s; 'Just like that they were gone–replaced by girls,' she writes. Over and over, Gilbert reminds us: it wasn’t always this bad–in fact, it was getting better, then it got taken away. Girl on Girl is a necessary corrective of cultural memory, but more importantly, it is a definitive archive of that disempowerment and its ensuing cruelties.” —Elamin Abdelmahmoud, host of CBC’s Commotion and author of Son of Elsewhere

“With panache, wit, and brilliance, Sophie Gilbert's Girl on Girl offers compelling analyses of how mass culture has diluted and tainted feminism. 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 and Unshrinking

“A riveting, incisive, rousing exploration of millennial culture that reveals the cyclical pattern of political movements, the insidious nature of backlash, and the importance of understanding how we got here, so that we can move forward. Sophie Gilbert is one of our most important cultural critics and I'll read everything she ever writes.” —Melissa Febos, author of The Dry Season and Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism

“A deep dive into pop culture's pernicious obsession with female youth. An incisive spotlight that lays bare the trap of postfeminism. A fascinating, compelling, and maddening look at the guise of female sexuality in the new millennium—how it became a dominant yet misperceived source of power for women and, of course, how it was and continues to be used against us.” —Anna Marie Tendler, New York Times bestselling author of Men Have Called Her Crazy

“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.” —Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men

“Girl on Girl’s greatest gift is its insistence on treating some of culture’s longest-standing punchlines—porn girls, reality stars, gossipmongers, self-mythologizers—with the seriousness they deserve, interrogating them both as the products of their circumstances and as a material basis for the new world in which we live. The result is dizzying, engrossing, sometimes nauseating; an ambitious modern history of public-facing womanhood that manages to make the senselessness and horror of our current moment feel eminently comprehensible.” —Rayne Fisher-Quann, writer of the blog and newsletter Internet Princess

From the Publisher

★ 2025-02-01
How the last three decades of movies, music, and media have written the story for women.

In a carefully buttressed and sharply written analysis that takes into account a dizzying number of cultural products and characters, Gilbert tries to understand how we got where we are today, a moment when the undeniable increase in women’s power meets the repeal ofRoe v. Wade and the reelection of Donald Trump. If we can see what went wrong, theAtlantic staff writer says, perhaps “we can conceive of a more powerful way forward.” As she considers topics ranging from the Spice Girls to Nora Ephron to Paris and Perez Hilton, fromAmerican Pie toAwkward Black Girl, from Sheryl Sandberg to Sheila Heti to Kim Kardashian, she sees that “so much of what I was trying to figure out kept coming back to porn.” Insights of that sort come fast and bright, big and small: “I’ve always wondered why people diminish girlhood as somehow cosseted or twee, when the reality of coming-of-age as a young woman is so raw, filled with emotional violence and literal blood.” “Movies in the aughts [the decade ofShallow Hal andKnocked Up]hated women.” “Why is male honesty in art seen as brave while female honesty is so repellent?” The heroes of her account are sometimes unexpected, Taylor Swift and Instagram among them. Her exploration of torture porn and its connection to Abu Ghraib is not for the fainthearted. (If you’ve never heard of a movie calledHostel, consider yourself lucky.) Truly, Gilbert deserves a medal—not only for her observations and conclusions, but for navigating the sludge she had to wade through to get there.

Essential cultural criticism. But brace yourself—it ain’t pretty.

Kirkus Reviews