‘Girl on Girl' explores how Internet pornography's rise helped normalize misogyny
Girl on Girl, the treatise on the seismic shift in pop culture of the late 1990s/early 2000s by Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert, opens with one of the most enduring images of that time: the 1999 Rolling Stone cover featuring Britney Spears.
The then-teenage pop star is reclining on magenta satin sheets, clutching a Teletubby doll — the purple one, another lightning rod for controversy — her shirt open, revealing a satin push-up bra in bad-girl black.
In many ways, that image was a cultural bellwether of all that was to come: the objectification, infantilization and hyper-sexualization of girls and women by popular culture.
With Girl On Girl, Gilbert, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, offers a clear-eyed survey of an era when feminist 'Riot Grrrl' women were replaced by girls — pliable, exploitable, profitable girls.
The book is chronological, divided up into sections with 'girl' in the title — Girl Power, Girl Fight, Gossip Girls, Girl Boss — to examine, in dizzying, harrowing detail, all the ways in which the late '90s and the early aughts were no friend to women.
From teen sex comedies such as American Pie casting women as the gatekeepers of sex to reality TV's meat-market appraisal of women, Gilbert takes a sharp critic's view of the culture of the era, and how it normalized misogyny.
She treats her subject matter seriously because it is serious. Sometimes people dismiss pop culture as frivolous when it actually has the power to shape social mores. We are what we eat, the adage goes; it follows that we are what we consume in other spheres as well.
As Gilbert discovered through her research, all roads lead back to the advent of internet pornography. The aesthetics of porn had a far-reaching — and sometimes insidious — influence, including into IRL bedrooms.
The chapter Final Girl, which explores the rise of violence in porn and other media, is particularly terrifying in its lurid detail. (If you're looking for a feel-good read, this is not it.)
A lot is packed into these chapters — each individual cultural example on its own could likely merit a full-length book treatment — but taken all together, the effect is like looking at a completed jigsaw puzzle; we knew each individual piece was bad, but the whole is devastating.
Gilbert mentions that publishers wanted her to insert more of herself into the book; save for a few instances, she mostly does not. Girl On Girl could have benefitted from more of a personal touch; the writing sometimes feels distant and anthropological. If the whole point is to understand how this culture made women feel, and the lasting scars it left, it could have been helpful to have a millennial guide in Gilbert, who was 16 in 1999.
Wednesdays
Columnist Jen Zoratti looks at what's next in arts, life and pop culture.
Lately, culture's been feeling very Y2K. The alarming rise of Skinnytok — the pro-anorexia, 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels' messaging of the early aughts repackaged for the TikTok generation — and Ozempic bringing back impossible Hollywood body standards. Girlbosses, Girl Dinners, Tradwives, Instagram Face and cosmetic surgery, skin-care obsessed Sephora tweens. A reality TV star in the White House.
Gilbert draws a straight line between then and now, but manages to end on a hopeful note. We have the language now, she notes. We can name the misogyny, the objectification. We can understand, clearly, the harms of the culture we consumed back then — the culture we might even find ourselves nostalgic for now.
To wit: on Instagram there was a trend of millennial women making videos critically addressing and reflecting on the era at the heart of Girl On Girl and how it made them who they are. The soundtrack? Billie Eilish's aching song What Was I Made For?, from Greta Gerwig's Barbie.
Jen Zoratti is a Free Press columnist and a millennial who was 14 in 1999.
Jen ZorattiColumnist
Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.
Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.
Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber.
Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
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Winnipeg Free Press
17 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
‘Girl on Girl' explores how Internet pornography's rise helped normalize misogyny
Girl on Girl, the treatise on the seismic shift in pop culture of the late 1990s/early 2000s by Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert, opens with one of the most enduring images of that time: the 1999 Rolling Stone cover featuring Britney Spears. The then-teenage pop star is reclining on magenta satin sheets, clutching a Teletubby doll — the purple one, another lightning rod for controversy — her shirt open, revealing a satin push-up bra in bad-girl black. In many ways, that image was a cultural bellwether of all that was to come: the objectification, infantilization and hyper-sexualization of girls and women by popular culture. With Girl On Girl, Gilbert, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, offers a clear-eyed survey of an era when feminist 'Riot Grrrl' women were replaced by girls — pliable, exploitable, profitable girls. The book is chronological, divided up into sections with 'girl' in the title — Girl Power, Girl Fight, Gossip Girls, Girl Boss — to examine, in dizzying, harrowing detail, all the ways in which the late '90s and the early aughts were no friend to women. From teen sex comedies such as American Pie casting women as the gatekeepers of sex to reality TV's meat-market appraisal of women, Gilbert takes a sharp critic's view of the culture of the era, and how it normalized misogyny. She treats her subject matter seriously because it is serious. Sometimes people dismiss pop culture as frivolous when it actually has the power to shape social mores. We are what we eat, the adage goes; it follows that we are what we consume in other spheres as well. As Gilbert discovered through her research, all roads lead back to the advent of internet pornography. The aesthetics of porn had a far-reaching — and sometimes insidious — influence, including into IRL bedrooms. The chapter Final Girl, which explores the rise of violence in porn and other media, is particularly terrifying in its lurid detail. (If you're looking for a feel-good read, this is not it.) A lot is packed into these chapters — each individual cultural example on its own could likely merit a full-length book treatment — but taken all together, the effect is like looking at a completed jigsaw puzzle; we knew each individual piece was bad, but the whole is devastating. Gilbert mentions that publishers wanted her to insert more of herself into the book; save for a few instances, she mostly does not. Girl On Girl could have benefitted from more of a personal touch; the writing sometimes feels distant and anthropological. If the whole point is to understand how this culture made women feel, and the lasting scars it left, it could have been helpful to have a millennial guide in Gilbert, who was 16 in 1999. Wednesdays Columnist Jen Zoratti looks at what's next in arts, life and pop culture. Lately, culture's been feeling very Y2K. The alarming rise of Skinnytok — the pro-anorexia, 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels' messaging of the early aughts repackaged for the TikTok generation — and Ozempic bringing back impossible Hollywood body standards. Girlbosses, Girl Dinners, Tradwives, Instagram Face and cosmetic surgery, skin-care obsessed Sephora tweens. A reality TV star in the White House. Gilbert draws a straight line between then and now, but manages to end on a hopeful note. We have the language now, she notes. We can name the misogyny, the objectification. We can understand, clearly, the harms of the culture we consumed back then — the culture we might even find ourselves nostalgic for now. To wit: on Instagram there was a trend of millennial women making videos critically addressing and reflecting on the era at the heart of Girl On Girl and how it made them who they are. The soundtrack? Billie Eilish's aching song What Was I Made For?, from Greta Gerwig's Barbie. Jen Zoratti is a Free Press columnist and a millennial who was 14 in 1999. Jen ZorattiColumnist Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen. Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Winnipeg Free Press
21 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Q&A: Pulitzer Prize winner Robin Givhan chronicles Virgil Abloh's rise to fashion fame
NEW YORK (AP) — With his calm and cool demeanor, fashion disruptor and multi-hyphenate Virgil Abloh artfully challenged the fashion industry's traditions to leave his mark as a Black creative, despite his short-lived career. In the years since his 2021 death at just 41, his vision and image still linger. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robin Givhan sheds new light on how Abloh ascended the ranks of one of the top luxury fashion houses and captivated the masses with her latest book, 'Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh.' In the book out Tuesday, Givhan documents Abloh's early life growing up as the son of Ghanaian immigrants in Rockford, Illinois, his days as graduate student studying architecture and his working relationship and friendship with Kanye West. Before taking the helm of Louis Vuitton as the house's first Black menswear creative director, Abloh threw himself into his creative pursuits including fine art, architecture, DJing and design. Abloh remixed his interests with his marketing genius and channeled it into fashion with streetwear labels like Been Trill and Pyrex Vision. These endeavors were the launchpad for his luxury streetwear label Off-White, known for its white diagonal lines, quotation marks, red zip ties and clean typeface. Off-White led to Abloh's collaboration with Ikea, where he designed a rug with 'KEEP OFF' in all-white letters and also with Nike where he deconstructed and reenvisioned 10 of Nike's famous shoe silhouettes. Throughout his ventures, Abloh built a following of sneakerheads and so-called hypebeasts who liked his posts, bought into his brands and showed up in droves outside his fashion shows. Social media made Abloh accessible to his fans and he tapped into that. Off-White had built a loyal following and some critics. Givhan, a Washington Post senior critic-at-large, openly admits that she was among the latter early on. Givhan said she was fascinated that Abloh's popularity was more than his fashion. 'For me, there was something of a disconnect really,' she said. 'That here was this person who had clearly had an enormous impact within the fashion industry and outside of the fashion industry, and yet it wasn't really about the clothing. It was about something else.' For her latest project, Givhan spoke with The Associated Press on how she approached each of Abloh's creative undertakings and his legacy during a period of heightened racial tension in America. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. AP: Tell me why you felt it was important to include the context of what was happening at the time Abloh was growing up as well as on his rise up through the fashion industry, with him ultimately ending up at Louis Vuitton. GIVHAN: Fashion doesn't just sort of happen in a vacuum. People are the product of their parents, their family, their environment, their timing, their interests, all of those things. I always like to see, what is swirling around people when they make certain decisions? What is sort of in the water that you're absorbing, that you are not even conscious that you're absorbing it. AP: Can you talk about the process of writing about all of his creative endeavors and how they shaped his career? GIVHAN: The skater culture — in part because it was such a sort of subculture that also had a very specific aesthetic and was such a deep part of the whole world of streetwear — and then the DJing part intrigued me because so much of his work as a designer seems to reflect a kind of DJ ethos, where you're not creating the melody and you're not creating the lyrics. You're taking these things that already exist and you're remixing them and you're responding to the crowd and the crowd is informing you. And so much of that, to me, could also be used to describe the way that he thought about fashion and the way that he designed. AP: What role would you say that Virgil has had in the fashion industry today? GIVHAN: He certainly raised the question within the industry of what is the role of the creative director? How much more expansive is that role? … And I do think he has really forced the question of how are we defining luxury? Like what is a luxury brand? And is it something that is meant to sort of have this lasting impact? Is it supposed to be this beautifully crafted item? Or is it really just a way of thinking about value and beauty and desirability? And if it's those things, then really it becomes something that is quite sort of quite personal and can be quite based on the community in which you live. AP: How did he use social media to his advantage and to help catapult his career? GIVHAN: He really used social media as a way of connecting with people as opposed to just sort of using it as kind of a one-way broadcast. He was telling his side of things, but he was also listening to other people. He was listening to that feedback. That's also what made him this larger-than-life person for a lot of people, because not only was he this creative person who was in conversation with fans and contemporaries, but he was this creative person inside. He was this creative person at the very top of the fashion industry. For a lot of people, the idea that you could ostensibly have a conversation with someone at that level, and they would seemingly pull back the curtain and be transparent about things — that was really quite powerful. AP: You write about his relationship to Kanye in the book. Were you able to get any input from him on their relationship for the book? GIVHAN: Their individual ambitions, aesthetic ideas and curiosity kind of propelled them forward in separate directions. I did reach out to Kanye after a lot of the reporting because he obviously is this thread that is woven throughout the book. And, ultimately, he elected not to engage. But I was lucky enough to get access to an unpublished conversation that Virgil had had around, I think it was 2016-ish, where he talked at length about his working relationship with Kanye and sort of the differences between them and the similarities and the ways in which … Kanye inspired him and sort of the jet fuel that he got from that relationship. More than anything, because Virgil's personality was in so many ways kind of the opposite of Kanye's, that for every door that Kanye was kind of pounding on, Virgil was able to politely sort of walk through. AP: Why do you think his legacy continues to persist? GIVHAN: For one, he had such an enormous output of work. I think there's a lot of it to consider. Also, sadly, because his career was cut so short that there is this sense of someone who sort of stops speaking mid-sentence. I've been thinking about how Virgil might have responded, how his creativity might have responded to this moment because so much shifted post-George Floyd that like this is another inflection point and it makes me wonder, 'OK, how would he have responded today?' And with the person who said, 'I'm not a rebel and I'm not a flame thrower,' would he have picked up some matches? I don't know.
Winnipeg Free Press
a day ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
A MacArthur ‘genius' skewers philanthropy in a farcical play tackling oligarchy and arts funding
NEW YORK (AP) — Taylor Mac does not set out to bite the hand that feeds in a new play satirizing cultural philanthropy. The MacArthur 'genius grant' recipient claims to be 'just trying to get some lipstick on it.' Set at a not-for-profit dance company's gala, 'Prosperous Fools' invites questions about the moral value of philanthropy in a society denounced by the comedy as 'feudal.' A boorish patron goes mad trying vainly to wield his lacking creative capital and thus confirms the choreographer's fears of selling out to a sleazy oligarch who represents everything his art opposes. The show, written by Mac and directed by Darko Tresnjak, runs through June 29 at Brooklyn's Polonsky Shakespeare Center. 'I'm not trying to hurt anybody. I'm trying to get people to think differently about the world,' said Mac, whose gender pronoun is 'judy.' 'I just wish that all of the great philanthropists of America, and the world, would lead with, 'This is a temporary solution until we can figure out how to make a government of the people, for the people, by the people,'' Mac added. 'Instead of, 'This is the solution: I should have all the money and then I get to decide how the world works.'' Don't let present day parallels distract you. The fundraiser's honored donor enters atop a fire-breathing bald eagle in a black graphic tee, blazer and cap much like Elon Musk's signature White House getup. He later dons the long red tie popular in MAGA world. But the resemblance doesn't mean Mac is meditating solely on recent events such as President Donald Trump's billionaire-filled administration and tightening grip over cultural pillars including the Kennedy Center. The script reflects personal frustrations with philanthropy's uneven power dynamics navigated throughout a 30-year career spent in what Mac described as 'a million handshaking ceremonies,' first as a cater-waiter and eventually as one of the celebrated honorees who donates performances to help fundraise. Mac's desperate portrayal of the artist at the center of 'Prosperous Fools' only sharpens its skewering of wealthy philanthropists who take more than they give away. When the artist cries 'But why couldn't I have a good oligarch?' and bemoans that 'I should have stayed in the artistic integrity of obscurity,' it feels like a case of art imitating life. Mainstream success came last decade for Mac. 'A 24-Decade History of Popular Music' was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2017 and Mac's Broadway debut play 'Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus' racked up seven Tony nominations in 2019. 'Prosperous Fools,' however, was written 12 years ago before much of the critical acclaim. Mac said 'someone with power' commissioned a translation of French playwright Molière's 'Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,' which mocks a status-obsessed middle class social climber. Mac isn't surprised the original commissioner didn't want the final product. Molière is hardly present. And the play essentially advocates for an end to the perpetuation of culture that only the affluent deem worthy of funding. Mac is also unsurprised it took over a decade to land another interested producer. The initial 40-person ballet troupe had to be shrunk to a more affordable ensemble of four dancers. Plus, its style, in Mac's judgment, is still rather 'queer' for a 'heteronormative' theater industry. 'And then the other reason is because I insult donors,' Mac said. 'I don't think I insult donors,' Mac added. 'I ask donors to consider. And the theater is entrenched in making sure their donors feel good about themselves — not that their donors are in collaboration with us for us all to get to a place of better consciousness.' The show's slapstick humor helps break down its fairly cerebral subject matter. In one of several moments of hilarity, the patron and his 'philanthropoid' — the ballet's artistic director, whose primary concern is securing donations — sway around the stage oinking like pigs. Mac's artist delivers scathing and highbrow critiques while pretending to be 'The Princess Bride' actor Wallace Shawn in a puppet costume. The gala's other honoree — a star singer called the 'patron saint of philanthropy' who wears a gown adorned with impoverished children's faces — makes no bones about her lust for Shawn. But, as Mac knows, nonstop humor can have the effect of softening its target. 'Prosperous Fools' foregoes the actors' bows that typically end a play in favor of an epilogue, delivered by the artist in rhyming couplets, that serves as the show's final blow to 'philanthrocapitalism.' Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. 'I want to be a tender heart in this too tough world trying to figure out how to maintain my tenderness and how to create revolution with tenderness. And I'm at a loss for it right now,' Mac said. 'Part of what the play is doing is saying, 'I'm at a loss. Are you? Do you have a solution for me?'' By skipping the curtain call, Mac practically demands that the crowd wrestle immediately with whether charity absolves wealth hoarders' greed — a question boldly put forth at the close of a Theatre for a New Audience season sponsored by Deloitte and Bloomberg Philanthropies. But whether the show's heavy-handed message has reached those financial backers remains to be seen. 'No one's spoken to me,' Mac said. Neither responded to requests for comment. ___ Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP's philanthropy coverage, visit
