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Daily Mirror
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
'2000s pop culture thrived on turning millennial women against themselves'
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. 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. 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.' 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. 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.' 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.
Los Angeles Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Essay: Tracing the roots of today's anti-feminist backlash
In March, a plane carrying British-born influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate landed in Florida. Travel restrictions on the duo, accused of human trafficking and rape in Romania (and, separately, in the U.K.), were lifted after alleged pressure from U.S. officials . The brothers, who promote misogynist content online, have been outspoken supporters of President Trump. The administration denied any involvement, but the message sent to those watching in the U.S. was clear: The boys — in their frattiest, porniest, most abusive iteration — were back in town. But did they ever really leave? That question is at the heart of two new books that explore women's role in culture and the backlash it so often inspires. Sophie Gilbert's 'Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves' scrutinizes the music, film and television of the early 2000s to show how sex, sold as liberating to young women of the time, was more often used as a cudgel against them. Tiffany Watt Smith, as a historian, takes the longer view in 'Bad Friend: How Women Revolutionized Modern Friendship,' an examination of female friendship and the centuries-long efforts to control and patrol it. Gilbert, a staff writer at the Atlantic, meticulously documents the explosion of highly sexualized content in mainstream American culture. As it became more easily accessible on the internet, pornography permeated every aspect of cultural life: 'Porn's dominance in popular culture came much like Ernest Hemingway's description of bankruptcy: first gradually, then suddenly.' Fashion led the charge: Gilbert shows how an industry dominated by male photographers and founded on the exploitation of (primarily powerless and young) female bodies was an experimental hothouse for the integration of porn into mass culture. Much of this teetered on the boundary between porn and art, as photographers used sex, sometimes unsimulated, as a way to signal their transgressive credentials. Sophie Gilbert's 'Girl on Girl' meticulously documents the explosion of highly sexualized content in mainstream American culture in the early 2000s. Gilbert supports the rights of people to consume and to create porn. But she takes issue with the contradictory message that porn in its current iteration sends to girls: 'They could be liberated while on their knees.' Sex might have been liberating if it was something millennial girls could have opted out of or something that reflected their desires rather than those of men. Instead, porn was largely dominated by male fantasies, and withholding sex was less a choice one could make than a sign of prudish backwardness or, even worse, a denial of men's God-given rights. My favorite chapter of the book by far is about movies of the early 2000s. Rewatching 'American Pie' or 'Eurotrip' now, you cannot ignore the absurd pornographic tropes, from naked women being watched without their knowledge to sibling incest. As Gilbert points out, in these movies, women are complicit — the theory is that they secretly want to be spied on, desired, subjugated. For men, their flimsy resistance is just a ruse to make men's lives more difficult: 'Sex is the goal, virginity the antagonist, and girls the gatekeepers … standing in the way of the heroes' glorious and rightful destiny.' This book jolted me back to my own millennial girlhood, as I grew up more or less during the time Gilbert describes. I distinctly remember sitting in my senior-year English class while two boys behind me discussed whether or not women could be funny. Both concluded that no, women could not be funny — where were any examples to the contrary? I remember grasping for names of female comedians and coming up dry. The tsunami of female talent to come — the likes of Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, Ali Wong, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson of 'Broad City' — would not hit our screens for several years to come. I simply had no reference points. This encapsulates the strength of Gilbert's book as an analysis of millennial culture, but also its limits. Gilbert largely glosses over the fact that the 2010s unleashed a veritable onslaught of female talent on the cultural world. This centering of female perspectives is exactly what the stereotypical resident of the so-called 'manosphere' is reacting to today. Gilbert argues that mainstream culture from the 2000s to today has been extremely effective at promoting post-feminism, a vision of liberation that says women can enjoy their equal rights as long as they don't talk too much about them and are willing to take their tops off. I would argue that we are well beyond that, as today's manosphere believes in reasserting inequality between the sexes rather than tolerating an equality that they believe harms men. That said, even if some of Gilbert's analysis feels 10 years out of date, it is nonetheless a reminder of where we come from as a culture, and a reinvigorating exhortation not to return there. Tiffany Watt Smith's 'Bad Friend' is an examination of female friendship and the centuries-long efforts to control and patrol it. After reading 'Girl on Girl,' I felt almost sticky with proxy humiliation, as Gilbert evokes example after example of female abasement in pop culture. Watt Smith's 'Bad Friend' proved a much-needed curative. Watt Smith deftly takes us across time and space to show how female bonding has often weathered cultural backlash to emerge intact, albeit sometimes changed, on the other side. We learn that school- and college-age girls in the late 19th century developed such strong emotional attachments to classmates that some institutions panicked in response, banning hand-holding and communal hair washing. English writer and women's rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft was so obsessed with her best friend that after her friend died, Wollstonecraft wore a mourning ring made of her friend's hair until her own deathbed. We are taken to 1950s suburban America, where Watt Smith upends our negative stereotypes about PTA moms, showing that they were in fact the engine behind radical childcare reform. We meet an all-female Christian sect from the 12th century, which gave older women the rare freedom of living unaccompanied by men, before fast-forwarding to house-sharing models for single older women today. All these iterations of female friendship received their fair share of hatred and handwringing in the popular culture of their time. These friendships were broken up by violence, censored in films or simply abandoned by women themselves in the face of the dominant patriarchal norms. Women have sometimes been their own worst enemies, holding themselves — and their friends — to unattainable standards. But Watt Smith's book shows that while female friendships may ebb and flow, fortunately for us, they persist: We need them to share information, to become the people we are, to share childcare duties, to watch over us as we age. Through all the backlash, these friendships nevertheless persist. It seems the girls never left town either.
New York Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How Pop Culture Betrayed Millennial Women
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.
Yahoo
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Six Stories for Your Weekend
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Our editors compiled six stories to serve as your weekend reads. Spend time with articles about why grandparents are reaching their limit, an 'impossible' disease outbreak in the Alps, the Trump administration's many conflicts of interest, and more. I Should Have Seen This Coming When I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, there were two types of people: those who cared earnestly about ideas, and those who wanted only to shock the left. The reactionary fringe has won. By David Brooks An 'Impossible' Disease Outbreak in the Alps In one tiny town, more than a dozen people were diagnosed with the rare neurodegenerative disease ALS. Why? By Shayla Love Kleptocracy, Inc. Under Trump, conflicts of interest are just part of the system. By Anne Applebaum The Retired J.P. Morgan Executive Tracking Trump's Deportation Flights A CFO turned activist has become a go-to source for understanding the administration's immigration crackdown. By Nick Miroff A Defense Against Gaslighting Sociopaths If you can recognize their signature move, then forewarned is forearmed. By Arthur C. Brooks Grandparents Are Reaching Their Limit Older Americans might be doing more child care than ever. By Faith Hill The Week Ahead Thunderbolts*, a Marvel film about a ragtag group of antiheroes (in theaters Friday) The Four Seasons, a comedy-drama show starring Steve Carell and Tina Fey (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Girl on Girl, a book by the Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert about how pop culture and hypersexualization transformed a generation of women (out Tuesday) Essay The Worst Job in America By Rose Horowitch It makes for a most tempting 'Help Wanted' ad: Earn $5 million a year to lead one of the nation's most powerful and prestigious institutions. Enjoy fancy dinners, almost unlimited travel, and a complimentary mansion in Upper Manhattan. This is an incomplete list of the perks that the president of Columbia University receives. And yet no one seems to want the job. Read the full article. More in Culture Ryan Coogler didn't want to hide anymore. The triumph of a film that flips on us halfway in Two murder mysteries' surprising window into human genius What to read to wrap your head around the climate crisis The Last of Us didn't soften the blow. Catch Up on Tesla's remarkably bad quarter is even worse than it looks. Trump's plan to sell out Ukraine to Russia The real legacy of Pope Francis Photo Album Take a look at the life of Pope Francis, in photos. Explore all of our newsletters. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Six Stories for Your Weekend
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Our editors compiled six stories to serve as your weekend reads. Spend time with articles about why grandparents are reaching their limit, an 'impossible' disease outbreak in the Alps, the Trump administration's many conflicts of interest, and more. I Should Have Seen This Coming When I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, there were two types of people: those who cared earnestly about ideas, and those who wanted only to shock the left. The reactionary fringe has won. By David Brooks An 'Impossible' Disease Outbreak in the Alps In one tiny town, more than a dozen people were diagnosed with the rare neurodegenerative disease ALS. Why? By Shayla Love Kleptocracy, Inc. Under Trump, conflicts of interest are just part of the system. By Anne Applebaum The Retired J.P. Morgan Executive Tracking Trump's Deportation Flights A CFO turned activist has become a go-to source for understanding the administration's immigration crackdown. By Nick Miroff A Defense Against Gaslighting Sociopaths If you can recognize their signature move, then forewarned is forearmed. By Arthur C. Brooks Grandparents Are Reaching Their Limit Older Americans might be doing more child care than ever. By Faith Hill The Week Ahead Thunderbolts*, a Marvel film about a ragtag group of antiheroes (in theaters Friday) The Four Seasons, a comedy-drama show starring Steve Carell and Tina Fey (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Girl on Girl, a book by the Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert about how pop culture and hypersexualization transformed a generation of women (out Tuesday) Essay The Worst Job in America It makes for a most tempting 'Help Wanted' ad: Earn $5 million a year to lead one of the nation's most powerful and prestigious institutions. Enjoy fancy dinners, almost unlimited travel, and a complimentary mansion in Upper Manhattan. This is an incomplete list of the perks that the president of Columbia University receives. And yet no one seems to want the job. Read the full article. More in Culture Ryan Coogler didn't want to hide anymore. The triumph of a film that flips on us halfway in Two murder mysteries' surprising window into human genius What to read to wrap your head around the climate crisis The Last of Us didn't soften the blow. Catch Up on The Atlantic Photo Album Take a look at the life of Pope Francis, in photos.
