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Spectator
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
What was millennial girl power really about?
The 1990s and the following decade were, it is widely agreed, a bad time to be a girl. Which is strange, because a girl seemed like the best thing you could be then. Certainly better than being a woman. Not as good as being a boy or a man, of course, but since those were out of the question (gender fluidity was still a nascent proposition), you might as well lean into girlhood. For millennial girls like me and Sophie Gilbert (a Pulitzer-nominated staff writer on the Atlantic), this was a confusing period. On the one hand, girls were everywhere. We became teenagers to chants of 'girl power!', and later we got our vision of young adulthood from the Lena Dunham series Girls. 'Girl' was an identity with potential. On the other hand, it's hard to avoid just how porny a lot of the uses of 'girl' were. The Girls Gone Wild softcore DVD series turned young women's drunken lapses into permanent, purchasable shame. The phrase 'girl on girl' comes from pornography, where it denoted lesbian scenes. Gilbert uses it here to refer to the self-loathing and anti-sisterhood this period inculcated. 'Empowerment' was the watchword of the millennial girl, but what exactly was she empowered to be? Primarily to be sexy – as Gilbert lays out in this comprehensive analysis of the era's pop culture. A girl could be anything as long as she was pleasing to a man. And God forbid she do anything so crass as grow up. Good girls stayed young. Gilbert acknowledges that this isn't a simple story of backlash. The teen comedies of the period, for example, really were a step up from the 1980s versions, when even the sainted John Hughes played rape as a punchline. American Pie (1999) was crude but charming, and its makers by their own account were trying to write girls with 'more depth'. But that could still mean 'as shallow as a teaspoon'. The female characters of American Pie are all, as Gilbert points out, porn archetypes: sexy cheerleader, hot nerd, horny exchange student (who ends up a victim of revenge porn before revenge porn had a name, something the film treats as a joke). The girls act as the obstacles between the fratty heroes and their objective: sex. They are the gatekeepers of virginity, 'the ultimate prize for any man worthy of claiming it'. In fashion, statuesque supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford were dislodged by the often underage and always underfed waifs. 'Fashion designers grew tired of dealing with the top models, who knew what they were worth and whose fame often overshadowed the clothes. Designers preferred girls.' So did photographers like Terry Richardson, who brought porno chic to high fashion and liked to photograph himself in flagrante with the models. His aesthetic – 'not quite art or porn or fashion photography but a hybrid of all three that kept insisting it was also a big joke' – defined the look (and the moral tone) of the era. Meanwhile, the advances that women had made in the music industry in the early 1990s were abruptly reversed. The punky, confrontational Riot Grrrl movement collapsed under hostile media coverage but lived on when their 'girl power!' slogan was hijacked by the male-svengali-manufactured Spice Girls 'in such a way as to neutralise feminism'. It's worth noting that the Spices ditched their management to successfully and profitably control their own careers, which sounds powerful to me. Nonetheless, Gilbert is right that they represented the renewed dominance of producer-led pop (meaning male-led, because most producers were male). Music channels became a 'gateway to porn. The more sexualised female artists were, the better'. All of which makes it rather surprising that when writing about the porn industry itself in this period, Gilbert steps away from her argument to reassure the reader: 'I'm not interested in kinkshaming, and I'm not remotely opposed to porn.' To which, given all the evidence she arrays in this book, a reasonable person might respond: why not? There's a similar moment of liberal etiquette overwhelming political nous in a chapter on reality TV. Gilbert astutely notes that in these shows, 'exterior womanhood is work' – something constructed through clothes and procedures. But then she argues that this made the genre welcoming to trans women, as though this is an entirely positive feature rather than a vivid illustration of gender identity's misogyny. It's depressing that even now a critic as wide-ranging and incisive as Gilbert can be seen flinching at the acceptable limits of the discourse. In a book that argues convincingly that millennial pop culture conditioned women to 'meticulously present themselves for mass approval', it's a shame to find the author still occasionally contorting herself to avoid upsetting men.
The Guardian
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert review – how pop culture turned a generation of women against themselves
In 2021, JD Vance told Fox News that senior Democrat women were just 'childless cat ladies', lacking cultural or social value compared with their married and procreating counterparts. When Taylor Swift looked down the barrel of this insult with a post on Instagram showing her posing with beloved feline Benjamin Button (from Time magazine's photoshoot naming her 2023's person of the year), she embraced the role of killjoy, rejecting Vance's attempt to divide women. But even this gesture of defiance and solidarity was not enough to push back the red tide of misogyny and corruption: Trump was elected to a second term, the US was denied a female leader, and millions of women held their breath. When Sophie Gilbert, a Pulitzer-nominated journalist and critic at the Atlantic, was writing Girl on Girl, the 2025 Trump administration was just a worrying possibility. But Gilbert's account of women's degradation since the early 90s through pop culture sounds a crescendo of doom towards this present moment. With what she calls a 'wry nod' to lesbian porn, you'd be forgiven for concluding from her title that Gilbert thinks women are the problem. But it's the patriarchy, stupid. Born in the 80s, Gilbert wanted to better understand the world of her girlhood, and the sexualised power women were taught to value in themselves and scrutinise in others. Madonna and riot grrrl were 'switched out' for male-managed girl bands, and music moved away from 'angry and abrasive and thrillingly powerful' visions of social injustice to the vanilla offerings of 'girl power'. Gilbert recounts the rise and fall of Britney Spears, the exposure of the Kardashians and the exploitation of models such as Kate Moss against wider trends in the music scene, tabloid rags and reality TV, the art world, advertising agency boardrooms and our Instagram feeds. She argues that the promises of third-wave feminism were 'blunted by mass culture', which trained women not to be shrill, not to be a prude, and not to get (visibly) old. Gilbert claims that women were turned against one another, neutralising the potency of feminism's promise. Meanwhile, post-feminism was fed by porn ('the defining cultural product of our times') and opportunistic capitalism, facilitated rather than challenged by Sheryl Sandberg's individualist corporate movement in 2013 imploring women to #LeanIn. Gilbert writes that popular culture is invariably 'calibrated to male desire', which has ushered in 'cruelty and disdain' towards 51% of the population, particularly if they are not white. Women are told they're never good enough, but better can be bought: contouring, surgical enhancement and dieting sell an ideal that 'can't actually be humanly attained' but can be purchased, now with a single click. Getting by as a woman in post-feminist times means not taking apparently misogynistic music, art and TV too seriously, while women are being exploited, mocked and assaulted in plain sight, as #MeToo belatedly attested. When porn is everywhere, most worryingly on the phones of primary school children, no wonder 38% of women in the UK said they experienced 'unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during sex'. The blokeish 'irony-as-defence motif', which nudges women to be in on the gag, denies the truth that sexist and racist cultural products profoundly change the way society thinks about women and therefore how women are treated. Are there any solutions? Gilbert's writing pays tribute to feminist texts that came before her, from Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, Susan Faludi's Backlash and Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs, to Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror and Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex, all of which are quoted at length. While Girl on Girl focuses on where pop culture has gone wrong for women, I enjoyed Gilbert's praise for Madonna, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Chris Kraus's resistant voices, and her book would have benefited from more. In her conclusion about potential bulwarks against women's dehumanisation, Gilbert starts to make an intriguing argument about romantic love as a force of gender equality and respect, but this runs out of steam. When Gilbert was pitching Girl on Girl, potential editors wanted more of her first-person voice. She felt 'conflicted' about female confessional writing, and refused. The result is that Gilbert retreats from voicing her full indignation. She insists she's 'not interested in kink-shaming, and not remotely opposed to porn', even while diagnosing porn as an unquestionable source of harm to women. Moreover, Gilbert doesn't describe the conditions under which porn can be a force for good, which seems important to know in order to decide when to be what the scholar Sara Ahmed has called a feminist killjoy: 'someone who speaks out about forms of injustice, who complains, who protests, who says no'. I finished Girl on Girl struck by Gilbert's skilful marshalling of evidence and elegant writing, but looking for a bolder claim about where the real problem lies and what can be done about it. Kate Womersley is a doctor and academic specialising in psychiatry Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert is published by John Murray (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Telegraph
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Witches, storms, America – this novel is a mess
It's the 1930s, Dust Bowl Nebraska. The town of Uz, named after the Biblical home of Job, has been all but destroyed by storms. 'The Antidote' – real name Antonia Rossi – is a 'prairie witch', who makes a living by relieving others of unwanted memories and 'storing' them in their bodies. (Customers are given a deposit slip and can retrieve them later.) But Rossi wakes up in the local prison to find her own 'vault' emptied, and as the town packs to leave, the farmers want their memories back. Rossi and her assistant Asphodel must cook up a plan to forge the stories she's lost. At the same time, when the sheriff, Rossi's long-term abuser, gets wind, he decides to use their ruse to his own nefarious ends. That, however, is barely the half of it. In The Antidote, Karen Russell's first novel since the Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia! in 2011, she populates her world with a large, engaging but ultimately unwieldy cast of narrators. In addition to Rossi, whose own past – she was robbed of her son in a home for 'unwed mothers' – is as important to the book as her present, other narrators include Asphodel, a young girl whose mother was recently murdered, supposedly by the very same 'Rabbit Foot Killer' the sheriff is after; Cleo Alfrey, a government-sponsored photographer whose pictures, hole-punched by her belittling editor, pop up throughout the text; and Harp, Asphodel's down-to-earth uncle, whose own fields, rippling with an unearthly, impossible colour, are the only ones unscathed by the storms of dust. And Asphodel has a regional basketball tournament to win – and she's in love with her best friend. Unsurprisingly, even with 400 pages to work with, no single story has time to develop. The core themes – the hidden histories of women in the West, the destruction of the Native American world – build up, but it isn't clear who or what is driving the plot or why we're hearing from any one narrator at any one time. Some transitions are pure TV. 'You asked me once how I became a prairie witch,' Rossi tells Asphodel. 'I'm ready to tell you now, if you still want to know.' More problematically still, every narrator sounds more or less the same, and more or less like a novelist. Rossi, Cleo, Asphodel, Harp and the rest are all capable of beautiful style ('waves of earth crashing over the prairie… the sky exhaling all her birds') and perfectly weighed aphorisms on the West's history ('Freedom turned out to be a territory we occupied'); but none sound like themselves. In the meantime, Russell's more unusual narrative tricks – Alfrey's photographs, or the poetry-delivering scarecrow in Harp's fields – are intriguing but underexplored. Above all, for a book so concerned with the use and abuse of the stories we tell ourselves, Russell's prose shows remarkably little interest in the way memory feels. The work of the witches is a potent, overdetermined metaphor: customers make their 'deposits' by speaking into an antique 'ear horn' while the witch themselves drifts into a trance; in return, they receive a deposit slip, which if read back to the witch will retrieve the memory, though the witch has no notion of what is hidden in their body. In short, a rich invention. Yet when we encounter the process in the text, the experience is underwhelming: one crucial passage, in which a long-lost memory from a previous generation draws parallels between the 'devouring of the Poles' in 19th-century Prussia and the colonisation of Native America, reads like a textbook, complete with an exact quote from Bismarck. The events are shocking and the comparison is brave, but I learnt more than I felt. The Antidote is a deeply-researched book about the power and importance of stories, but as a novel, it too often seems to lose its faith in the very medium in which it's working. At times it wants to be a history lesson, at times an eight-part series. Russell's narrators stop at every opportunity to answer questions that were already raised and might otherwise have been left hanging by her enchanted conceits – not least in the final, action-packed confrontation between storytellers, townsfolk and the sheriff. It all raises a question of its own: if novelists won't believe in the novel, who will?
