How Pop Culture Betrayed Millennial Women

New York Times

30-04-2025

There were several passages in Sophie Gilbert's blistering, sobering book 'Girl on Girl' that challenged my selective nostalgia, making me wince. If you too came of age around the late 1990s and early aughts, prepare to have the balloon string of sentimentality pried from your grip. The party's over. It's been over.
And it's for the best, Gilbert, a writer for The Atlantic, makes clear as she guides readers chronologically down the rabbit hole of popular culture from the 1990s to today, connecting the dots to reveal a previously uncharted map. Her book is a course correction of sorts, taking a holistic tack to explain our current sociopolitical reality: one in which women's hard-fought gains are quickly eroding, and men and boys are in crisis.
Across 10 rigorously researched but never stuffy chapters, Gilbert has compiled perhaps the first comprehensive examination of turn-of-the-millennium mainstream, cool-kid trends and ephemera, and how they were largely molded by those in power to sell a generation of girls and young women reality-warping lies: that self-objectification is empowerment, that disciplined conformism is a lifelong project, that sexism is comedy.
Gilbert was drawn to this subject, she writes, 'because the cruelty and disdain expressed toward women during the aughts seemed to be more significant than it's often given credit for.' Think of the public dissection of and collective sneer toward pop darlings suffering mental health crises, like Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan, or the contemptuous treatment of Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential run.
'The nature of how women were being treated in mass media wasn't an aberration,' Gilbert goes on. 'The women we were being conditioned to hate were too visible.'
Her examples are abundant, and span genres. In music, there was the replacement of the defiant and gutsy female icons of the '80s and early '90s — Madonna, Janet Jackson, Kathleen Hanna — with Y2K pop's much younger and less opinionated girls: Spears, Jessica Simpson, Christina Aguilera. In fashion, the sidelining of powerful supermodels who demanded to be paid their worth (Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista) in favor of frail, passive, American Apparel-esque teenagers.
The phasing out of the golden age of rom-coms made way for a surge of teen-sex and adult bromance comedies — 'American Pie,' 'Scary Movie,' 'The Hangover' — that either fetishized younger female characters or cast adult women as 'shrill, sexless nags or trampy, adulterous harpies.'
'Movies in the aughts hated women,' Gilbert writes, and she has a stack of receipts to prove it.
Then came the explosion of makeover shows that disguised cruelty as tough love, and reality dating shows that continue to pit a parade of interchangeable women against one another for the affections of the same male stranger. Women's personal desires, the author says, have become indistinguishable from the desire to satisfy men's 'perennial fantasy of an emotionally uncomplicated, sexually available woman.'
In the 2000s, the emergence of streaming and social media swiftly cleaved the self to accommodate a digital counterpart, making 'reality' content ubiquitous and blurring it with actual reality. The transition gave women especially the ability 'to assess in real time how the world wanted to view us — and adjust ourselves instantly in response.'
'The recent history of technology is written on women's bodies,' Gilbert writes.
Threaded through every chapter is a running commentary on the malignant nature of pornography, which by design must grow ever more violent, degrading and humiliating to women to keep pace with the lightning-fast speed by which its tropes are absorbed into the mainstream. In 2005, the horror movie 'Hostel' further established the emerging subgenre of 'torture porn,' and the aughts' defining aesthetic became known as 'porno chic.' The superstar fashion photographer Terry Richardson's 'most reliable subject,' as Gilbert puts it, was his erect penis. Merging sex, art and consumerism in new ways, extremity became the selling point — extending the objectification beyond porn stars and It Girls to all girls and women. As Gilbert writes, 'the logical extension of objectification is dehumanization.'
Throughout the book, she pushes against the narrative that pop culture is merely a distraction from hard news, arguing instead that it is inextricable from some of the most traumatic events of this century. The photographs of abuse taken by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib were the definition of torture porn, she writes, 'ideologically and aesthetically aligned with movies that often seemed to present a revenge defense for acts of extreme humiliation and violence.' In his 137-page incel manifesto, the 22-year-old Elliot Rodger, who went on a misogyny-fueled murder spree in 2014, cited 'Game of Thrones,' 'Alpha Dog' and porn as guiding influences. A 2011 study in the British Journal of Psychology found that its young male participants generally 'weren't able to distinguish between derogatory quotes about women taken from men's magazines and quotes from convicted rapists.'
Now — with a U.S. president with reality TV roots once again in the White House, having twice triumphed over a female opponent despite having faced accusations of sexual misconduct (ditto for more than one member of his cabinet) — 'Girl on Girl' is just as urgently a book about men.
Her research is admittedly 'bleak' at best, but Gilbert isn't concerned with softening the blow. Instead, she's intent on snapping millennials out of any instinct to idealize the decades that shaped us — even if that awareness stings.
Still, Gilbert writes, 'it's consoling to remember that most women watching' sexist content proliferate today (usually with a modern twist like 'tradwives' or tween skin-care influencers) 'have both newfound language and skepticism that I couldn't have dreamed of while watching 'Girls Gone Wild' or the video for 'Money Maker.''
After all, once we're able to name the patriarchal sludge we've all been immersed in, it becomes just that much harder to stomach it.