'2000s pop culture thrived on turning millennial women against themselves'

Daily Mirror

23-05-2025

Feminist author Sophie Gilbert explores the complicated relationship between pop culture and modern women in her book Girl on Girl - and details how the culture turned a generation of women to misogyny
Britney Spears 's breakdown. American Pie's hero journey to get laid. Pamela Anderson 's stolen sex-tape. All of these were huge pop culture moments in the 1990s and 2000s. But with hindsight, each was an intrusion onto women's vulnerability played out for entertainment. Looking back now, it's brazenly horrific.
Author and staff writer at The Atlantic, Sophie Gilbert's new book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves explores the myriad ways that the media, from news to movies, was consumed by women and used as a weapon against themselves.
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Sophie spoke with The Mirror about the process of writing Girl on Girl and how society has moved on to where we are now. That is to say: in an era of OnlyFans and so-called involuntary-celibate ('in-cel') culture.
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Sophie says that there were many moments that jolted her into writing this book, not least the election of Donald Trump over his opponent Hillary Clinton in 2016. It is no secret that we live in a time where progress in equality is no longer guaranteed, with the recent news of a reductive definition of what the Equality Act definition of a woman passed down by the UK Supreme Court on April 16.
Across the Atlantic in the States, Roe v Wade, the historic legal win for reproductive rights in 1973, was subsequently overturned in 2022. But beyond the contemporary political moment, she tells me, 'so much of wanting to write the book was trying to understand why I didn't see Britney's mental health crisis as a mental health crisis [at the time].' It was presented for all to see as a media moment across magazines and gossip forums.
Now there is a near-total infiltration of technology into every facet of our daily lives, but in the 1990s and 2000s this internet was a new frontier. Sophie explains that this had a direct impact on pop culture.
She told us: 'The internet had infinite space and we clicked on [relentless coverage of celebrities' daily lives]. So they just gave us more and more and more and I think we all got disgusted with ourselves in the process and projected that disgust outwards at the women who we could not stop looking at.'
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Visibility, both in the pop culture and beyond, is a power tool, wielded by and against women. Gilbert explains: 'The more people gave us of their lives, the more we wanted to see something that they wouldn't give us, something that we shouldn't.'
The interplay between power and visibility in pop culture, particularly in depictions of sex, has exponentially increased from the 1990s to now. Beginning in 1990, HBO's documentary Real Sex, that aired until 2009, was symbolic of the heightened voyeurism of the era, where women's bodies were shown naked and engaging in various sexual acts. This context is important as it created an environment of heightened access to the ordinary person's life, with the boundaries expanded into the sex lives of regular people.
But how did this translate into pop culture? In one chapter of Girl on Girl, Sophie rewatches and dissects the hit-movie American Pie, in which teenage boys are presented on a kind of hero's journey to lose their virginity.
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Sophie tells me about how, as a teenager, she went to see the movie with friends. She said that the movie presents sex as a 'right of passage that cements your path from boy to man.' Later, she realised that the boys she was friends with had 'absorbed this idea of entitlement to sex.'
In the 1990s an entitlement to privacy was eroded away. Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson had a sex-tape of her and her then partner Tommy Lee stolen and released. The resulting court case in 1997 ruled that due to her work with Penthouse magazine, that these images of her were not private property. Gilbert says of this that it 'signif[ies] a culture that women no longer had authority over what happened to their body and certainly no longer had claims of privacy over their own body.'
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In recent years there has been a proliferation of sexualised content, not least in the rise of the platform OnlyFans. Punters can pay for access to a woman's body, to view them in ways they would not be permitted to in their regular day-to-day life. Gilbert said: 'I find people like Bonnie Blue so interesting too because they're really capitalizing on the profit that can be made from not just visibility but extreme visibility.' To put it another way, she adds: 'The people who get the most attention are the ones who are willing to do the most extreme things.'
However, Sophie says that it is not the 'extreme stunts of sexuality' that is her concern - she says that it is an individual's choice - but rather what these sites do for women as a collective. She says that it can warp 'men's portrayal [and] understanding of women in general when they see sex being commercialized in this way.'
But with every extreme trend, there is a counter-trend. Recently social media has been flooded with so-called 'trad-wife' content, where women are presented as wholesome care-givers and providers. To view it, it harkens back to 1950s womanhood, or as Sophie describes it, it is a 'new traditionalist very conservative impulse'.
She said: 'What the trad-wife does is appeal to men's desires but through a more traditionalized frame. So acknowledging that what men really want is a woman who caters to them, who is very beautiful but who also is not threatening in the way that other men might find her desirable. So she's willing to stay home to raise the kids to make bread from scratch.'
In Girl on Girl is an astonishing text, that speaks with forensic feminist rage against the misogyny that was so normalised in the 2000s. When I finished this book, I felt like I had been truly seen for the first time, as if the 2000s were a collective horror for women everywhere. The aftermath of which we are still contending with today.