‘Barely legal': how 2000s pop culture destroyed women

Telegraph

30-04-2025

While working as an intern at GQ during the last hurrah for men's magazines, I would often study archive celebrity interviews to learn how to write. I'll never forget the discomfort I felt reading Rolling Stone's 1999 cover with the 17-year-old Britney Spears, posing semi-nude on pink satin sheets, holding a Teletubby, with the coverline: 'Inside the mind, heart and bedroom of a teen dream.' The piece, written by a man, leers over her 'honeyed thighs', how her T-shirt is 'distended by her ample chest'– at one point, she's even referred to as 'jailbait'.
Later, I read Rolling Stone's 2004 Lindsay Lohan cover profile, also by a male writer, which begins: 'Lindsay Lohan has been 18 for just under a week when she tells me her breasts are real. I did not ask (gentlemen never do), though my reporting (discreet visual fact checking, a goodbye hug) seems to confirm her statement.' The writer then asks Lohan how she feels 'becoming a sex object'. Lohan replies: 'I don't think of myself as a sex symbol. It's weird that people call me that.' The cover line? 'Hot, ready and legal!'
These interviews form part of what author Sophie Gilbert describes as the 'pornification of pop culture' in her fascinating, thoughtful book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. Beginning in the Nineties, Gilbert identifies a spirit of promise: from Sinead O'Connor ripping up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live to Tori Amos protesting against Female Genital Mutilation, women in music 'were angry and abrasive and thrillingly powerful,' writes Gilbert. 'And then just like that they were gone – replaced by girls.'
The pendulum had swung too far, too quickly. Fierce activism and 'riot grrl' energy gave way to the hypercommercialised 'girl power' of the Spice Girls, where women presented themselves as independent while being, writes Gilbert, 'all things to all men' – 'the paradox of postfeminism in a nutshell'. Women were free to dress how they liked, eat what they liked, sleep with who they liked… so long as the way in which they did so remained socially palatable. And the great irony of the Spice Girls was that they were merely puppets on strings pulled by music mogul Simon Fuller.
Men in the entertainment business, realising it was easier to control girls than women, started investing in a different, younger demographic. Esquire had a sidebar titled 'Women We'd Be Willing to Wait For', featuring a 13-year-old Kirsten Dunst and 15-year-old Christina Ricci, and in 1997 had put Dominique Swain, the 17-year-old star of Lolita on the cover, suggestively licking her finger. American Beauty, in which Kevin Spacey plays a middle-aged man fantasising about his teenage daughter's friend, won Best Picture at the Oscars in 2000. What's so disturbing about this pivot to the 'barely legal' star, argues Gilbert, is that pop culture's defining new aesthetic came from porn.
And here lies Gilbert's persuasive central thesis: when it comes to how women have been portrayed in pop culture – from sex-obsessed teen comedies such as American Pie to the tabloids' obsession with leaked celebrity sex tapes and the rise of 'torture porn' horror – all roads led and lead back to the adult film industry.
One of the accidental instigators of 'porno chic', Gilbert suggests, was Madonna. Following the record sales of her controversial 1992 coffee table book SEX, a companion to her album Erotica, 'it was that much easier,' writes Gilbert, 'to argue that porn was now art'. Vogue used fetish gear in its spreads, Jeff Koons's Made in Heaven series featured pictures of Koons having sex with porn star (and future wife) Ilona Staller, and the now disgraced photographer Terry Richardson shot an entire fashion campaign up women's skirts.
On a page that is genuinely staggering to read, Gilbert relays how teen clothing brand Abercrombie and Fitch – which my sister and I shopped at aged 11 and 14 – featured nude spreads and an interview with porn actress Jenna Jameson in their Christmas magazine, Naughty or Nice. But in 2000 'sales increased sixfold in just six years,' writes Gilbert. 'So selling sex to its teen consumer base worked.'
And, argues Gilbert, 'the more mainstream culture ripped off [porn's] imagery and its sexual excess, the more pornographers, to be able to stand out from the masses, had to go to extremes.' The words 'torture porn' entered the lexicon; a 2010 report found that in a study of more than 300 recent pornographic scenes, 88 per cent contained some kind of physical aggression. Porn had become available to everyone, and for free. Gonzo porn director Max Hardcore became famous for his grotesquely violent abuse of women that required, as Gilbert writes in the book's most disturbing chapter, 'the psychological dismantling of a young woman before our eyes'.
The same phrase could easily be used for how the media's endgame with female celebrities played out in the Noughties. From circling women's cellulite in the Daily Mail's 'Sidebar of Shame' and tracking every moment of Britney Spears's mental breakdown in 2007 to paparazzi calling Keira Knightley a 'whore' outside her front door to snap her reaction, degradation and dehumanisation, which Gilbert describes as 'the logical extension of objectification'.
Gilbert struggles to end the book on a cheerier note. Celebrity culture may have become a little more respectful – fewer paparazzi, more privacy, a greater sense of ethical responsibility – yet public degradation is still the number one tactic for tearing women down. In 2008, when Sarah Palin was announced as John McCain's running mate, a pornographic film starring a Palin lookalike, 'Who's Nailin' Paylin?' was shot within 10 days. In 2015, Donald Trump told Clinton she was 'disgusting' for taking a bathroom break during a televised debate, and said that US journalist Megyn Kelly must have 'blood coming out of her wherever' following a heated line of questioning. Last year, a mystery group paid influencers to promote violently sexual smear campaigns against Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. As Gilbert writes: 'There was no public venue – not foreign policy, not education and not The White House – within which a woman couldn't be reduced to a sexual caricature.'
And, while MeToo led to a redistribution of power – at least 200 powerful men lost their jobs, nearly half of whom were replaced by women – this proved temporary. Gilbert ends in the year 2022, when Amber Heard lost her defamation case against her ex-husband Johnny Depp, and when Roe v Wade was overturned. It was this seismic event that prompted Gilbert, a staff writer at The Atlantic, to write Girl on Girl. Her thesis is powerfully argued, but it's a shame that the book must have been completed prior to British porn star Bonnie Blue going viral earlier this year for sleeping with over 1,000 men in one day, many of them 'barely legal'. That stunt prompted fraught debates on agency and feminism – and would have taken Girl on Girl to even more disturbing depths.