How Early 2000s Pop Culture Pitted Women Against Each Other - The Assignment with Audie Cornish - Podcast on CNN Podcasts

CNN

4 days ago

Audie Cornish
00:00:00
My Guilty Pleasure podcast is not about the news.
Deux U Podcast clip
00:00:03
Deuxmoi has the whole story. Did you hear what Deuxmoi said?
Audie Cornish
00:00:07
Deuxmoi is the kind of online gossip site that is built on the pillars of the tabloid industrial complex.
Deux U Podcast clip
00:00:13
I'll be your guide into the world of celeb news, sightings, and secrets.
Audie Cornish
00:00:18
'And those pillars were also the foundation for an industry arguably built on the shoulders of young women in the late 90s. And the conditions of fame, submit to constant surveillance by paparazzi, and public scrutiny of your body. Britney Spears and her mid-drift debuted with Baby One More Time to instant fame.
Spice Girls clip
00:00:39
Yes, we all want to be there, lover!
Audie Cornish
00:00:41
Spice Girls were spreading and selling girl power as hot girl archetypes, 40.
Spice Girls clip
00:00:46
'Sporty, scary, baby, and push, the all-conquering Spice Girls!
Audie Cornish
00:00:55
'At the same time, porn was becoming more easily accessible through free file-sharing sites on the early web, and men's magazines sold even racier covers to keep up. What was left of third-wave feminism had been co-opted into a marketing of sexuality that insisted, objectification was empowering.
Sophie Gilbert
00:01:15
And suddenly there was a new category of fame. And the only thing you had to do suddenly to be famous was to be visible, to expose your life to the cameras. And there were women who were very good at that.
Audie Cornish
00:01:28
How did reality TV, early internet fame, and mass market porn help shape a new kind of girlhood? One, that shaped a generation of women today to root for the rise and inevitably public fall of female stars. I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment.
Sophie Gilbert
00:01:54
I was 16 in 1999, which is where my book starts, and I was very much a sort of teenager of the Britney Spears era.
Audie Cornish
00:02:01
Sophie Gilbert writes about culture at The Atlantic. She's the author of "Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves".
Sophie Gilbert
00:02:11
I start the book in 1999 with a sort of confluence of different things that to me at the time when I was 16 were teaching me about what it meant to be a woman. And one was Britney Spears, who I think was a year older than me then, maybe 17 on the cover of Rolling Stone in a bra, talking on the phone with one hand and clutching a Teletubby doll with the other.
Audie Cornish
00:02:31
'And that photo shoot had Spears posing with a pink kids' bike on one page and then in a white bra and hot pants in a bedroom full of dolls on the next. It was controversial at the time. I mean, there was a lot of hand-wringing about the Lolita imagery. But now it's more clear that it was actually kicking off a fundamental shift away from the supermodels and grunge queens and divas who had ruled the decade before.
Sophie Gilbert
00:02:55
There were so many icons in the 90s. I mean, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Queen Latifah, women making really empowered music. That word empowered is very tricky, but we can get to that later. But then the Spice Girls come along and they were so fun. They were so, it was kind of like the moment in the movies where it goes from black and white to technicolor. They were vibrant. They were thrilling to watch. They were kind of uninhibited in everything that they did. And instantly they were a phenomenon. I mean and I remember having the Spiced Girls like impulse body spray. They had so many products that they sold, and in a way that you could not get away with now because people would raise an eyebrow, but they branded their name.
Audie Cornish
00:03:32
But you picked the perfect one, body spray, right? It wasn't vocal tea.
Sophie Gilbert
00:03:38
No, it absolutely was not. No, someone told me on tour, they had a Spice Girls toaster, they sold lollipops, they sold sneakers. They had within their first year and a half as a band, they have $500 million worth of commercial deals, which is obviously so much more money they can than you can make selling records. And the minute that people saw how much money could be made selling products, particularly selling products to teenage girls, they sort of lost interest in the angry women of rock and it became... That was what facilitated this shift towards teenage stars like Brittany and Christina who could sign the Pepsi deals and do the big, you know, skechers, sneakers deals and could sell things to teenage girls.
Audie Cornish
00:04:17
At the same time, you have a shift in media itself. I'll even set aside for a moment, selling the music becomes harder because Napster comes into play and all that kind of stuff. But you have the rise of a blogging culture that isn't kind of mimicking a newsroom or mimicking magazine. It's just basically like gossip columnists, right? Um only they trade in what you use use the term surveillance talk about that what do you what do you mean by that
Sophie Gilbert
00:04:51
When the internet arrived, it had all this space, like suddenly there was ample space to be filled. And I think what arose in terms of filling that space was this really industrial paparazzi machine. And so suddenly you had hordes of young men who weren't trained photographers in the way that paparazzi had been before. They were just like guys with rented cameras on the back of scooters who would stalk, especially women, female stars, extremely aggressively. So in terms surveillance, There was really this new culture, if you were a young woman in that era and you were famous, of the idea that you could not step outside your house without hordes of photographers surrounding you, lying on the ground to try to take pictures of your skirt, hoping that something would happen, you would fall, you would trip, they would catch you drunk, they would you crash in your car. It was suddenly this really, really intrusive kind of frenzy of paparazzi. And it was like that because there was all this internet space to fill. And at the same time, the gossip bloggers and the people that... So, Perez Hilton obviously being one, TMZ and Gawker as you mentioned, I think one thing that they were really trying to do was to set themselves apart from conventional media and to do something that hadn't been done before. And one of the ways to do that was to have this tone of sort of irreverence, right? Like snark and irreverent kind of treatment of celebrities and this sort of attitude of not wanting to do the same thing that media had always done. And a lot of that came hand in hand with often cruelty.
Audie Cornish
00:06:16
Cruelty and misogyny or just cruelty? As I was reading your book, I couldn't tell if it was fair to say that it was misogyne since lots of men in that period also kind of suffered under the same conditions. What was it about that period you think that also coupled itself with this kind of cruelty towards young women in particular?
Sophie Gilbert
00:06:35
I think it was misogyny. And the reason why I think that is because when you go back now and you look at the archives, a lot of the old gossip blogs have disappeared now, but you can still read them on internet archive. They had this tone towards women that I would say was really characterized by disgust. They would talk about women being like women who are out in short skirts, being nasty or putrid or like this language of real disgust at famous women who dared to kind of step outside their houses. And that same language of disgust, I think, you see it most recently being directed at people like Kamala Harris during her presidential run. It's this very dehumanizing treatment of women that is intended to elicit a very strong reaction. Men were obviously being the subject of these posts on these blogs too, but much more prominently it was women and the tenor of the disdain and the sort of sense of failure, I think was really being directed at women.
Audie Cornish
00:07:28
And voyeurism, I think that I was, I had forgotten certain things that you kind of reminded me of, like the idea of YouTube kind of being created by someone that was like, where do I find that Janet Jackson nipple, you know, from the Super Bowl, I got to get that. And what I did know, Google image search kind of, being the result of people trying to find Jennifer Lopez in her famous Versace Grammy dress that these moments, our sexuality, our bodies, sell things, you know what I mean? Like, have led to really strange, I'll call them innovations, that really have to do with like sexual interests.
Sophie Gilbert
00:08:13
Yeah, I mean it was really sort of dispiriting to look back at this moment when the internet was just sort of coming into place and revisiting that sense of utopia that everyone had about how we might use it as a way to connect, to understand each other, to be sort of profoundly, to understanding each other's lives in a way that we never had. And yet very, almost instantly, you can see that the thing that people want to use the internet for is to look at women. There were lifecasters early on, people who would post pictures of their lives online, who were very sort of free and wanting to share what they were doing with the world in a way that now seems quite normal with social media, but back then was revolutionary. But the ones who were the most successful instantly were women and they were most successful when it seemed like they might be doing something that was say, you know, changing after a shower or bringing someone home after a date or something like that. That was just almost instantly what people wanted to see when they logged on.
Audie Cornish
00:09:09
We're gonna have more with Sophie Gilbert. Stay with us.
Audie Cornish
00:09:15
'Talk to me a little bit about the girl-on-girl part of your story, because I think that the book does a really good job explaining the different forces that kind of exert themselves on young women. Images of thinness, the way the tabloids kind of keep track and create storylines out of rivalries. What I haven't been able to figure out, and I'm hoping you've heard and thought about more, is those of us who engage in this world. Ourselves for money right because I think sometimes there's not sympathy because we think well she wants to be here like she's making money off this she's part of this she says she's empowered um and I think there has been real surprise that people like Paris Hilton saying like oh actually no I hated this this this and that because we she told us over and over again she was happy. The Playboy bunnies were similar, right? Over and over again, they would say like no, no, I want to be here. This is me. This is my— I'm empowered and we were constantly told that we were seeing women who were empowered
Sophie Gilbert
00:10:29
There was a real shift in the 2000s in terms of what it meant to be famous. Like I think before the 2000, before the internet age, if you were famous, it was usually for something that you did, like you were an actor or you were a singer or you are a sports star or you had some skill that you were for. But then along came the internet, along came this sort of industrial gossip machine and along came reality television as well. And suddenly there was a new category of fame. And the only thing you had to do suddenly to be famous was to be visible, to expose your life to the cameras, to go to all the red carpets for all the right events and to pose in beautiful dresses and talk to photographers or to open up your home to reality TV cameras, to really sort of expose yourself in a way that was kind of unrelenting. And there were women who were very good at that. Paris Hilton was one. I think Kim Kardashian was obviously kind of the master of this kind of model of fame if you look at the trajectory of her career. I mean, Paris Hilton, she starred in a movie, I think, in 2005 called House of Wax, and the promotional campaign part of it was posted up all over LA that said, see Paris die. It was a horror movie, and her character had this sort of very nasty and bloody end in it. But it was, she was sort of stood next to them smiling and took photos, and I think was seen as very much on board with the idea that because of the condition of her fame, she knew that people might not like her for it. But that was the twist. Because we could all see that these women were famous for something that we didn't really think was valid, it became much easier to judge them when they were seen as failing, not living up to the conditions of their fame or when they seemed like they weren't entertaining us well enough. If that makes sense.
Audie Cornish
00:12:10
'Actually, can you underscore that? What do you mean the conditions of fame? Meaning literally this is the trade-off. You want to be this famous? Well, this is what you got to give us.
Sophie Gilbert
00:12:18
Yeah, I mean, there's a moment in 2006 I write about in the book where it just seemed like women were melting down, famous women. I mean within, I think, the space of a few days, Brittany shaved her head, Anna Nicole Smith died. She overdosed on prescription medication and it was this huge media frenzy. There was footage of her corpse being wheeled out of the hotel into an ambulance. Lindsay Lohan went to rehab, Nicole Ritchie was arrested, Paris Hilton went to jail. It was just this cavalcade of event, of event of event after event. And the sort of constant media update, it was like this rolling tick tock. It was like a soap opera. And I think it was easy for us all to be entertained by it because we'd seen so much news about this woman that they felt in some ways more like TV characters than real people. I think we'd sort of lost a sense of understanding that they were fully human because we were so bombarded with information about what they were doing, what they wearing, where they were eating, what cars they were driving.
Audie Cornish
00:13:12
Or even that they we're girls. Like, they weren't really adults in some ways, when you think about how old they were.
Sophie Gilbert
00:13:20
Yeah, they were young. And then New York posted that very famous headline now of Paris, Brittany, and Lindsay, I think, in the front seat of a car where the headline was Bimbo Summit. It was just this sort of, it was this real thing where the media could not stop covering these women because we would not stop looking at them, but everyone at the same time seemed sick of it.
Audie Cornish
00:13:40
'You know, if Britney Spears embodies the storyline through the aughts, right? This person who rises and is put on a pedestal as like sexy virgin, you know, goes through the transition, not a girl, not yet a woman, as she's saying, and then becoming a mother and just being completely shredded through that process, basically being punished for transitioning into adulthood. The person that embodies The now to me is Kim Kardashian, because in a way the Kardashians are the logical conclusion of all that you have described. Kind of the origin story of a sex tape being part of that gossip culture and being one of those kind of D-list celebrities, right? Like she starts out as being like, is she Paris Hilton's assistant or something? Who is this girl? And then monetizing that. Industrializing that, being empowered by that. And at all times, again, their public story is we wanna be here, we're doing this ourselves. If I'm gonna sell— if my body's gonna be sold, I'm going to do it. How do you make sense of them?
Sophie Gilbert
00:14:59
I think that's absolutely right. And it's sort of funny to go back and look at early episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians because I think in the first season, Kim is on the fence about posing for Playboy and her mom is really kind of emphasizing that she should. It's a really good opportunity and they'll pay really well. And so instantly, like from the beginning, from the earliest days of fame, there's this idea that sexualizing your image and monetizing that visibility is the bargain. It's everything. It's sort the career. And she has been so good at it. And I think what comes hand in hand with that, that she is able to pull off that a lot of other women maybe can't, is this real sense of kind of Teflon almost, like not really caring about how other people perceive her or not really about whether she's criticized for being, you know, superficial or she does all these stunts like I'm thinking about the paper magazine cover.
Audie Cornish
00:15:49
This is a famous cover that was kind of an homage or straight ripoff of a very famous image of Grace Jones, which when Grace Jones did it was controversial because it was sort of an exaggerated figure of a black woman's body. And then, as you mentioned, Kim Kardashian does it and it, quote unquote, breaks the internet.
Sophie Gilbert
00:16:11
I think it was 1% of the entirety of internet traffic that day. I mean, it was just this incredibly layered image. So many just sort of really fraught with different kinds of tropes and different kinds of stereotypes and then she, but I think she's always done stunts like that. And she's realized that provocation is its own payoff because it's attention. Like she has monetized the currency of attention and she's used it to become possibly the most famous and the most powerful woman on earth.
Audie Cornish
00:16:41
One of the stories, in my mind I call them Betty and Veronica stories, that this idea that there's like two women fighting over a man, it's always a man. I'd pretend they're fighting over something else, but why bother? And, you know, for some generations, maybe the generation we're talking about, you have Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt. I don't know if that's too late in the timeline. I don't what part of the multiverse we're in because they've just been going for so long. And now maybe for this generation, it might be Selena Gomez and Hailey Bieber and Justin Bieber. But there is always a set of women that are, and they're part of the tabloid story, is fighting with each other. Talk about like, am I making this up? Did you see it? And where does it fit into what you're describing? Because it's not necessarily sexual. It's not the fault of porn. It's like its own very specific thing we do with women in public.
Sophie Gilbert
00:17:42
Yeah, I mean, that was part of why I wanted to call the book Girl on Girl. I mean obviously it sort of speaks to the sexualization of the culture of the time, but also the idea that women naturally exist in opposition to each other and that media has trained to think of ourselves as sort of in opposition to other women and to criticize ourselves and to criticize other women, and that that just feels normal. But you have throughout the last 30 years, I mean really before because it predates, but especially in this gossip period, you know, like the Britney versus Christina rivalry, The Brittany versus Madonna rivalry. This constant idea that I think it's like a scarcity mode maybe where you can only have one kind of female celebrity like that you can have as many men as you want and throughout media. But if there's one famous blonde woman, God forbid there'd be another famous blonde women because that would be too many women.
Audie Cornish
00:18:26
And their way of solving that with the public is to kiss. Which is what I remember from that period. Of course. Of course!
Sophie Gilbert
00:18:36
But I also think, I mean, I talked earlier about this sort of infinite space of the internet. I think what you're seeing now in TikTok is a kind of extension of the same idea where there are people who are trying to make names for themselves by commentating on celebrities and there's infinite TikTok space to fill. And so the easiest way to do it, to get attention, is to talk about celebrities who, you know, probably are not actually fighting or feuding or have never really thought that much about each other, but to sort of manufacture a conflict that will get people to click or get people pay attention. And like, for some reason, we are just, we find these. Fake feuds irresistible, like the idea that that celebrities might be fighting. I think maybe it makes them more accessible and more humanized to us. I don't know, but it's just it's just a constant sense of like women in tension.
Audie Cornish
00:19:17
How has the book been received?
Sophie Gilbert
00:19:21
I think I think, well, I've been it's always a question because the criticism, I think sticks more in your mind than the praise with any kind of creative project.
Audie Cornish
00:19:30
Oh, tell me, what's a criticism that's stuck in your head?
Sophie Gilbert
00:19:33
Well, I knew this would happen, but the book, obviously, gets into the ways in which porn influenced the culture of the 2000s and the 2010s. And initially, I wasn't going to write about porn at all. I mean, the title, Girl on Girl, obviously was kind of like a wink, but. Porn was not something I was thinking that much about when I wrote the proposal, but the more research I did, the more everything seemed to come back to the fact that suddenly porn was America's premier cultural pastime. Like it was a thing that hundreds of millions of people were doing.
Audie Cornish
00:20:04
Because they had access to it, they didn't have to go to some shady video store on the edge of town in a trench coat, like you could get it free on your computer.
Sophie Gilbert
00:20:13
Yeah, you didn't have to go to a movie theater, you didn't have to rent a VHS that your wife might find, like you could just watch anything you wanted on your computer at home. And that shift, I think, just, like I said, made it impossibly popular. And of course that influence bled out into culture. At the same time, and part of the book is about how this sort of mass sexualization and mainstream culture made porn more extreme because it had to become more transgressive to stand out, to get people to keep paying for it. And a lot of people have criticized the fact that I don't come out explicitly enough and say that I am against porn and that porn is bad for women. The reason why I don't do that is because if you go back and you research culture, you can see that anytime there's any kind of new technology, people use it to watch sex. It's like there are cave paintings.
Audie Cornish
00:21:02
Absolutely.
Sophie Gilbert
00:21:04
I mean, early lithographs, when the printing press came out, like VHS, when VHS first launched, 75% of the videos being made were pornographic, like back in the late 70s. It's just, we've always wanted to see sexual imagery. I think it's part of human nature. And I don't know necessarily that it's bad per se. I just think the way in which it's been done, the kind of porn that we've been given, the kinda is free, the time that is easily accessible throughout, certainly the 21st century has been a kind that. If the large part is misogynistic, is about male pleasure, is directed for men, assuming that men will be the people watching it, and is very much set on the project of men are catered to and women do the catering. And that, I think, I find...
Audie Cornish
00:21:46
So even though there's all these women involved in it, all these women who are part of the process. You still feel...
Sophie Gilbert
00:21:53
It's just the dynamic, it's the dynamic. It's a product that is tailored toward men and in which men are empowered, I would say. I mean, obviously there are exceptions, but for the most part. And like, you just have to wonder what has that done to our imaginations, to our psyches, to constantly see this hierarchical, cultural, sexual product that people don't really talk about because they're ashamed, because they. It's something that people prefer to do in secret, but it's been impossibly popular for several decades now. Like, what has it made us think about men and women and the ways in which we relate to each other?
Audie Cornish
00:22:24
Why does the criticism bother you, then?
Sophie Gilbert
00:22:26
'It doesn't bother me, I just find it interesting. So like I said, I've been criticized for not being anti-porn enough, and then I've criticized for being too anti-porn by one particular review. And I think it speaks to how much people want clarity. They want a distinct message that they can take home. They want advice. But actually, for me, culture is so much about nuance and about messiness and about trying to exist in a kind of yes and a place where you can hold multiple ideas in your head at the same time.
Audie Cornish
00:22:54
Is always where the most interesting stuff takes place. Well, Sophie Gilbert, thank you so much for speaking with me.
Sophie Gilbert
00:23:00
Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure.
Audie Cornish
00:23:03
Sophie Gilbert is the author of Girl on Girl, How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. Thanks so much for listening. Please follow, hit subscribe, leave a review, and we'll see you next week.