Latest news with #SophieGilbert
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.
CBC
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
CBC's Commotion Sophie Gilbert Book Giveaway
1. HOW TO ENTER No purchase required. This Contest is open to Canadian residents only and is governed by Canadian law. To enter the Contest, you must have an Instagram account, follow @commotioncbc ("Website") on Instagram, like our Sophie Gilbert book contest announcement post on Instagram, comment on that same post the name of your favourite female artist from the 1990s or 2000s, and tag a friend in the comments. Submission of an entry to the Contest signifies that you have read and agree to the Contest Rules. By submitting an entry to the Contest through the Website or any other electronic platform, you agree that the act of submitting the entry to the Contest is a binding form of your electronic signature, which you agree binds you to these Contest Rules. Questions marked with an asterisk or otherwise indicated as mandatory are required to be eligible for the Contest. Answers to questions not marked with an asterisk on an entry form are appreciated, but not required to participate in the Contest. To be valid, entries must be received by no later than Tuesday, May 27, 2025 at 12 p.m. ET. Limit of one entry per person/social media account/email address during the Contest Period/per day or per method of entry. If you attempt or are suspected of attempting to enter more than the authorized amount, or use robotic, automatic, programmed or any other methods of participation not authorized by these Rules, it shall be deemed as tampering and will void your entries, votes or other results of such participation. No submissions will be accepted after the above deadlines for any reason. Any entries received after the above deadlines will be void. 2. ELIGBILITY Contest is open to all Canadian residents who have reached the age of majority in their province or territory of residence as of the Contest opening date. In cases where the Contest is open to contestant who has not reached the age of majority in their province (a "minor"), parent or guardian consent is necessary to enter the Contest and participate in the prize. Parent/guardian will be responsible for minor's participation in the prize. Where appropriate, the terms "contestant" and "winner" mean parent or guardian of the minor. If a minor contestant has not received consent to enter the Contest or a minor winner does not have parental/guardian consent to participate in the prize, or, where applicable, does not have a parent/guardian to accompany them in the prize, the entry shall be invalid. The following individuals are not eligible: Employees of CBC, during the Contest Period; CBC personalities on air anytime between the start of the Contest Period and up until the prize is awarded Members of the Judging Panel; and Any of the above persons' immediate family (father/mother, brother/sister (including step brother/sister, half-brother/sister), son/daughter) and persons living under the same roof. Where an entry is made on behalf of a group (i.e. class entry, school entry) which includes a person mentioned above, such group's entry may be allowed by CBC in its sole discretion. 3. PROCEDURE FOR AWARDING PRIZES After the Contest Period has ended, a random draw will be conducted by the producers of Commotion on Tuesday May 27, 2025 from among all eligible entries received during the Contest Period. The first selected contestant from the random draw who fulfills the submission requirement and correctly answers the mandatory mathematical skill-testing question shall be declared the winner, subject to meeting all the conditions described in these Rules. The Winner will be announced on the Website and on CBC's Commotion episode airing Wednesday, May 28, 2025. Selected potential winner(s) will be contacted using the social media account used for entry and should claim their prize as instructed by CBC by no later than 5 days after the date and time they are initially contacted. If a potential winner does not claim their prize within such time, incorrectly answers the mathematical skill-testing question (where applicable), declines the prize, or is otherwise found to be ineligible, the prize shall be forfeited and CBC has the right, at its sole discretion, to select another potential winner, even if the potential winner's name has already been publicly announced; forfeited prizes will not be awarded. You may be required to provide proof of your name/identity/age as requested by CBC in its sole discretion. If you fail to provide adequate proof you will be automatically disqualified from the Contest. 4. DESCRIPTION OF PRIZE(S) The winner will receive one (1) signed hardcover copy of the book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert. The prize includes only what is specifically described and no other allowance will be granted. The total approximate retail value of all prizes offered is: $36.00 5. 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CBC
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
How the '90s girl power movement turned into marketing
The phrase "girl power" was coined by Bikini Kill in the early 1990s, but its meaning was watered down later in the decade when angry radical women in music were followed by younger, less opinionated pop stars. But how did this happen? Culture critic at The Atlantic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert takes a deep dive into 1990s and 2000s pop culture in her new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, to find out. Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud speaks with Gilbert about her new book, how this pop culture shift happened and how its effects continue to shape our current moment. WATCH | Today's episode on YouTube:
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.
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Death of Feminism
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Reports of feminism's obsolescence have been greatly exaggerated. As female achievement and visibility increased in higher education, the media, politics, and more, some people grew tired of being lectured by feminists and began to wonder: Do we even need them anymore? This attitude made up a dominant strain of popular thinking and discussion in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And as the defiant, gritty rage of third-wave feminism scrabbled for purchase, a new era of 'girl power' was rising up. As the Atlantic writer Sophie Gilbert tells it in her new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, young women of this time 'came to believe that sex was our currency, our objectification was empowering, and we were a joke.' Gilbert's book skewers porn, reality TV, and celebrities for their complicity in relegating women to the role of sex object and for warping feminism into a debate over individual choices instead of collective action. In our conversation on today's episode of Good on Paper, Gilbert and I discuss postfeminism, explore a defense of the girlboss, and examine the false promise of sexual power. 'What I remember from my own life during this period from the 2000s was that there was only one kind of power that women were being allowed, and that was sexual power,' Gilbert recounts. 'And sexual power was everywhere. It was the idea that sex would empower women and that sexual presentation would empower women was in every form of media, and it was impossible to avoid.' The following is a transcript of the episode: Jerusalem Demsas: In 1998, Time magazine plastered a jarring provocation across its cover: 'Is Feminism Dead?' By century's end, the term postfeminism had been thoroughly bandied about in academic circles and in the media. Had feminism finished the job? Or maybe people were just tired of feminists. Either way, something had shifted. Gone were the days of suffragettes and feminist punk rockers. In the dawn of the new millennium, many American women were embracing the empty slogans of 'empowerment' and 'Girl Power.' [Music] My name's Jerusalem Demsas. I'm a staff writer here at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. In all the conversations we're having around broken dating markets, the rights of trans people, and the growing chasm between young men and women's political views, I've felt a bit lost as to how we got here. The feminism of the '90s feels so far removed from today. What changed? My colleague Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert has a new book out called Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. In it, she argues that the shift from '90s Riot Grrrl grit to Spice Girls' empty promises of 'Girl Power' was turbocharged by online porn, reality-TV aesthetics, and an algorithmic spotlight that rewarded hypersexualized images over everything else. It's a really interesting book that I'm so excited to dive into. Sophie, welcome to the show. Sophie Gilbert: Thank you so much for having me. This is really exciting to be here talking with you. Demsas: Yeah. Well, congratulations on the book. I feel like it's a big moment to be writing about feminism. I feel like everyone's writing about the rise of misogyny and, of course, what's going on in right-wing governments across the world. But you're taking us back to my childhood, to the late '90s, early '00s. And I was feeling really nostalgic for those days before I read your book and, I mean, I guess that's just what happens when you get older. You start kind of memory-holing everything that you disliked about your childhood. But you've reminded and also recast much of my memory of those times in your new book. How would you describe the state of feminism in the late '90s and early '00s? What made this period of time that you chose to focus on in your book so interesting to you? Gilbert: Well, originally when I was thinking about the book, I wanted to focus on the 2000s because that was a decade that seemed like where misogyny was really at its sort of febrile peak, should we say. But then I ended up: In my research, so much seemed to lead back to the '90s. And so I think the '90s are really fascinating because there was so much that was going on. And especially within feminism, there were all these sorts of debates and shifts happening. There was the evolution of third-wave feminism, which started out, I think, really potent and was very much, like, the Year of the Woman and Anita Hill's Senate testimony and Riot Grrrl music. And it was sort of ferocious and activist, and it had this real agenda for change. And then over the course of the '90s, it kind of made this shift toward postfeminism, and postfeminism was so different. It was so sort of celebratory, and the ethos of it was really like, We've accomplished everything that we ever will, women. Don't worry. Like, you're free now you have jobs. Go spend money. Like, wear anything you want. Feminism's boring. Be cool. Wear miniskirts. I'm being glib, but it was sort of very, like, Sex and the City, Ally McBeal energy. And I sort of have been trying so much to figure out what happened to get from the Riot Grrrls to Britney Spears in her school uniform. And what I landed on was sort of the Spice Girls as the transitional act in the middle, because you had this slogan that was being used by the riot-grrrl movement—the punk musicians in the Pacific Northwest and Washington, D.C.—who were really sort of advocating for safety for women and girls at punk shows, but also, at college, safety from sexual assault. And they had this slogan that was 'Girl Power,' which was fascinating because they were trying to put together words that no one would sort of free-associate: girl and power. And then this slogan, which was very sort of charged, got co-opted by the Spice Girls, and the way that they used it was really fun—and I love the Spice Girls—but it didn't really stand for anything anymore. It was just kind of, like, this kind of mantra that people said, and it wasn't sort of advocating for change or anything specific. And the Spice Girls were such good branding mechanisms. They had something like $500 million worth of branding deals in the first year and a half as a band. And when people saw how much money you could make with very fun, beautiful women in pop, that was sort of the beginning of the end for feisty women in music. Demsas: I have this trouble with cultural criticism, because it's not what I do. This is mostly a policy show. And I'm always like, Okay, well, how do I know something? Like, is there a study? Is there something I can point to that feels concrete? Can I draw inferences from data? And the thing about cultural criticism is that it takes just absorbing a lot of qualitative material, that it's very difficult to categorize in some objective way, and then to make arguments based on that, that are often very contested. But it's not a computer. Like, a computer will not be able to just resolve these things for us in the way that hopefully we'll be able to resolve some scientific questions in other fields. And so I wanted to ask you, like, when you're thinking through these sorts of questions—like, How did feminism change?—what are these inflection points in feminism? How do I describe what's going differently in the early '90s versus the late '90s and the mid-'00s? How do you determine that things are actually trends versus something that you're just noticing, maybe because it's your media diet? How do you think through that problem? Gilbert: It's such a good question, because I think so much of what was appealing to me about this sort of period of research and study with the book was reading between the lines a bit and, like, trying to detect patterns and things that maybe weren't so studied or weren't so obvious or hadn't been talked about so much. That was the thing that was really thrilling. This period has also been studied a lot by different kinds of academic researchers. And so there were some really helpful books and some really thoughtful analysis of the period that was helpful to me. But also, I think, for myself—I don't want to be like, So much depends on vibes, but you can tell that there is a vibe shift from the riot-grrrl movement to the Spice Girl movement. Like, it's different. It's sort of anodyne compared with what came before it. Demsas: Yeah. So as you mentioned, you framed the book as reckoning with postfeminism, this idea that feminism's work was done; women could just enjoy the spoils. But I wonder, postfeminism is a very deeply contested term. Could you help refine that down for us a bit? Gilbert: Yeah, I mean, it's tricky, right? Because postfeminism was sort of something that people kind of interpreted from the outside. There was no figurehead waving the flag. In many ways, postfeminism, I think now, seemed to be a mechanism to sell things, more than anything else. But there was very much this idea that was sort of spread in the media in different forms of media that people were tired of feminism; people were tired of the sort of scolding, boring, serious, blue-stocking era of second-wave feminism. And they wanted something sort of fresher and newer for the new millennium. What was really interesting to me, in researching my book, was the influence of the AIDS crisis, because I hadn't been anticipating that, but it was obviously this moment of profound anxiety and fear, especially regarding sex. And that impact was felt in culture in very different ways. And one of the ways was this sort of movement of what we now call sex positivity, where artists like Madonna felt like in this moment of fear, it was really important for people to be able to still celebrate sex—like, celebrate what it meant to people, what a source of joy it could be, what a source of meaning in people's lives. So there were shows—like, HBO's Real Sex was sort of born out of this impulse to defend sex as a pastime, not that sex has ever really needed defending, but to sort of be able to find space in media to portray it in a way that was not so fearful and so afraid. But what that meant was: Suddenly, the '90s were just this, like, very sexually —explicit is not the right word, but this era that was sort of defined by sex in different ways. Like, Bill Clinton—I mean, we'd never thought about a president in a sexual context before, or maybe people had, but they kept it to themselves. Demsas: (Laughs.) Yeah. Gilbert: But there was sort of the era of the tabloids, of Hugh Grant being arrested for soliciting in Los Angeles and all these scandals that were, like, John Wayne Bobbitt—all these scandals that were very sexual in nature. And I remember asking my parents about them and being, like, in the awkward silences at the breakfast table when they tried to figure out how much they could actually explain. But the '90s were this decade more than ever before that was really consumed by sex. And how that fed through, I think, to feminism was: It just became so much easier, I think, with this real glut of sexual imagery in media—it just became so much easier to persuade women that was their source of power, especially heading into a new millennium, heading into this new era. I start the book in 1999, when I was 16 years old, which was the year when you had 'Baby One More Time' coming out. You had American Beauty, which was this movie about a middle-aged man with a mad crush on his teenage daughter's best friend. And that won five Oscars, so it's hardly fringe product. And you also had that year that Abercrombie & Fitch catalog came out, which was targeting, I think, 18-year-olds, and it had an interview with Jenna Jameson. It was just like everything in that moment was highly eroticized. And I think what was happening was: This sort of movement to celebrate sex had become commercialized in a way that I think in the 2000s made it much easier to exploit people, especially women. Demsas: So you are describing this sort of cultural shift, and I wonder how much of it you attribute to technological changes. In the book, you talk about how these gossip blogs and social media really contribute to this culture of exploitation and objectification of women. You're talking about this as kind of a reaction to what's happening with people's fatigue with second-wave feminism and fatigue with being scolded and frustration with the difficulties around celebrating sex in the AIDS crisis. But would all of this just have happened, regardless, once you have easily accessible digital cameras and you have the internet and you have information technology so people can transmit these little news items really quickly. Is it technology that is really driving all of this? Gilbert: This is where we need the study, you see, because we'll never know. I mean, there were so many elements at play, but what was fascinating to me—and I sort of never had really thought about this before, because I'm not a historian of porn—was just how much porn as a cultural medium really exploded from the late '80s onward. I mean, there's a statistic in the book, I think—especially if you think about VHS, like, even before the internet. I remember naively, like, going to Blockbuster and renting VHS tapes, and you probably maybe do too. It was like this technology that just felt very normal, but I think when VHS was first launched, 75 percent of the tapes at launch were pornographic. Like, it was basically just a mechanism for people to watch sex in their own homes. And from 1985 to 1996, porn rentals per year on VHS went from 70 million to something like 700 million. It was just this huge increase in the number of people watching porn. And then the internet happened. And it was, obviously—it's hard to quantify. But imagine— Demsas: The internet was for porn. (Laughs.) Demsas: Yeah, I know. (Laughs.) The earliest issue of Wired in the mid-'90s, I think, was acknowledging how the internet already was just, like, this home for smut. And so I think you had this sort of shadow cultural product that was really America's, like, No. 1 pastime at that point, but no one was really talking about it. There were jokes about it, and obviously its influence was very much being felt in culture as time went by. But it's just so interesting to me that you could have something be so influential and so popular, but no one's really analyzing it or kind of getting into the weeds of what it's doing to people. Demsas: Yeah. I mean, you wrote in the book that you just kept coming back to porn. Do you think that porn is inherently anti-feminist? Gilbert: No. No, I don't. And I especially know that there are filmmakers now who are making their best efforts to make feminist porn. And there are certainly really interesting things happening in the romance fiction market, which I know is not porn. But it's sort of similarly aligned. Demsas: Some of these things, they're close. They're quite close. (Laughs.) Gilbert: But it's interesting, right, because it's so different. Romantic fiction has always been made for women. Whereas porn, I would argue, has always historically, with a very few exceptions, been made for men. And so if you compare the two, you can see how the people that they're being made for influences the product itself. And I think what was interesting to me about porn, without condemning it, is just tracing how extreme it became, especially over the course of the late '90s and the 21st century—because mainstream media was becoming so heavily sexualized that porn had to become more transgressive to persuade people to pay for it. Otherwise, why watch porn when you can see the same thing on HBO, you know what I mean? So that was really driving this trend towards much more extreme and much more, in some ways, cruel and more violent content that I deal with in one chapter of the book. Demsas: There are thinkers like the controversial Camille Paglia who might say something like, Sexual imagery is liberating, and women are strong enough to handle them, and the real problem is seeing prudery and women as passive victims. And she's criticized anti-porn feminists as being anti-sex. How do you respond to those who argue that porn, strip clubs can be venues of women's empowerment? And of course, like, as you've said, it's not that you don't think that theoretically they can't be. But in the instantiation that they have, in reality at this time period you're studying, it seems like a lot of people might push back and say like, Yes, there's degradation, but empowerment is much more a theme that they're witnessing. They're also saying, like, Women do have the choice to opt out of these situations. So how do you respond to those kinds of critiques? Gilbert: Well, the word empowerment is really interesting to me because whenever I encountered it in my research, it was being used to defend something that was absolutely not about giving women power, like Wonderbras. I think when they first launched, everyone was like, Wonderbras are empowering. Like, I'm sure people have defended corsets and lip gloss as being empowering. I mean, there was a torture porn movie that came out in the 2000s starring Elisha Cuthbert, and there was a very sort of controversial ad campaign for it that depicted her being bound and tortured, and even in some of the images, like, her body, her dead body. There was this massive reaction to the campaign, and one of the producers of the film was like, Well, she fights back in the movie. This movie's actually about female empowerment. And so I've sort of become very suspicious now whenever I find this word, because it seems to be such a tell in so many ways. And what I would say is: Of course, women have the right to present themselves any way they want and to feel empowered and act any way they want and behave anywhere. That's the point of feminism. It's not to judge other women or to condemn them or to restrict their choices. It's to offer people more choice and more freedom. But I would just say that what I remember from my own life during this period from the 2000s was that there was only one kind of power that women were being allowed, and that was sexual power. And sexual power was everywhere. It was the idea that sex would empower women and that sexual presentation would empower women was in every form of media, and it was impossible to avoid. And we absorbed it. Of course we did, inherently. And the issue I have with that is not that sexual power isn't real and can't make someone feel powerful, but it's the absence of all other kinds of power, like the distraction of what sexual power promises. And what I've come to think of much more as I enter my midlife period now, in my 40s, I'm much more interested in other kinds of power. Demsas: Well, to push on this a little bit more, because you brought up romance novels as something that's being made for women. I'm hoping you can help tease out how you distinguish things that are actually venues for women to express themselves sexually and have access to their sexual identity, and ones that you view as primarily exploitative. Because a lot of these romance novels are extremely violent. They're indulging in fantasies where, if they were depicted on a screen and the director was a man, I could imagine it being criticized in your book. So how do you distinguish between these two types of things? Gilbert: I think I must be reading different kinds of romance novels, because— Demsas: Well, look at, like, Fifty Shades of Gray or things like that, where it's kind of dominating. Gilbert: Oh God— Demsas: I mean, those are very, very popular. Gilbert: Yeah. I mean, the difference, I would say, between romantic fiction and porn is that romantic fiction—and I've written about it for The Atlantic in the past, defending it, because it's always been condemned as trash, as fodder for maids to read, scullery maids—but the difference is that romantic fiction sees women as full-bodied human beings with consciousnesses and who are deserving of dignity and kindness and respect. And that doesn't mean in scenes of a sexual nature that those things always adhered to. But porn, I would say, does not. And that's the difference. There was actually a really interesting argument from the sociologist Alice Evans that I found about a year ago, and she found that one of the best predictors of how a society—and a society in a different country or a different era—how it treats women and what kind of status women enjoy in that society is the importance that society places on romantic love. And so cultures that are more inclined to celebrate romance are more inclined to see women as human beings and to think of them as worthy of respect and dignity and kindness. So once you see that, it's very hard to unsee. [Music] Demsas: After the break: in defense of the girlboss. [Break] Demsas: I know that your book is not about what should be done about this, but what do you think should be done about porn? I mean, is this something where you view the need for governmental action and intervention here? Because there's always this tension between How much coercion do we want in these spaces? and Is the free marketplace actually ending up coercing us anyway without that government intervention? Not that you need to lay out a specific policy agenda, but do you think that the government should step in and regulate what types of porn is allowed? Like, do you view that as possible in a place where the government struggles to really hem in the internet? Gilbert: It's so funny because I was just listening to your episode on this, and it really did make it sound like, Oh, there's not really a lot to be done here. I mean, the things that are so crucial, I think, are the things that are maybe the hardest to implement—and I don't think that means people shouldn't try, because if you don't try, nothing will ever change. And I think that means better education, better media education for teenagers. I know there's a significant movement now among my fellow parents to not give children phones until they turn 14 and to keep them off social media as long as possible. And I have two 4-year-olds, and the idea of them being on the internet is the most scary thing in the entire world. So I'll check in 10 years and let you know how that's going. But, I mean, so much of it relies on people being willing to think critically about what they consume, and that's not always possible. But also, at this point, it just feels like the genie's out of the bottle with so much content. I do think there are filmmakers like Erika Lust who are really doing their best to make feminist porn that treats performers ethically and is much more curious about female desire and treating women not just as objects. But as far as the legislative aspect of it, I mean, I know in my home country, in the U.K., they're making great efforts now to try and make porn and all kinds of content less available to children. So it'll be interesting to see how that pans out. Demsas: One thing I find interesting in your book is: I was trying to identify the villains. I was trying to go through and be like, Okay, who does Sophie think are all the bad people? And there's some obvious ones, like Harvey Weinstein, etcetera and other misogynists who have committed crimes against women. But one thing that I see is that you don't let women off the hook, right? Was it bell hooks who said, 'Patriarchy has no gender'? Meaning that women can uphold sexist culture and do uphold sexist culture just as much as men. And of course, the title of your book, Girl on Girl, and the subtitle, which specifically points to how we've turned against ourselves. How do you think about the question of female agency? Because sometimes I hear from people who push back on this argument, saying, Okay, it's like feminists want to have it both ways. Like, both you are put upon by society, and also, We're victimizing you by not giving you the voice in describing how power is actually distributed in society. Do you have pushback on women's complicity here? Like, are we just doing this to ourselves? And the question is just: When will we stop? Gilbert: No, we are not. I mean, I think people complicate arguments so much. I've heard from so many women who are like, I'm not a feminist, because I like men. And I'm like, No, I like men too. I have a husband. I have a son. My boss is pretty great. Like, there's all kinds of men who—that makes it sound like I'm saying, Some of my best friends are men. (Laughs.) Demsas: (Laughs.) Not all men. Gilbert: But the point is not to be anti-men or that it's a zero-sum game. The point is just: Do we think that women are equal human beings, and do we want women to have equal opportunities? And the answer to both of those, for me, obviously, is yes. And I don't know—everything else just feels like muddling up people's thinking. The complicity of women is an interesting idea because women are not a monolith, and we never will be. And we'll always have different motivations and different backgrounds, and we'll always want different things, and we'll always, in some ways, be in conflict. But I don't know—I just think there was this real shift in feminism in the 21st century towards a more individualist outlook, and it has not made anything better. And I think if we are going to try to change things in the years to come, we have to start thinking more collectively and to think about what we can do that will benefit not just ourselves and not just our circle, but all women—like, what we can do that will really make a tangible difference in women's lives. Demsas: It's funny. I was reading your book, and I was nodding along to so much stuff and then I got to—you critique individualism and girlboss feminism. And I've begun recently feeling a bit defensive of girlboss, individual feminism. And I'm not saying that it's, like, a holistic solution or anything, but I feel like there is this trend now where, in order to recognize structural critiques, we're, in essence, reducing our own individual agency. I mean, the research has shown repeatedly a positive relationship between having an internal locus of control and better mental health. So like, do you believe that outcomes and misfortune are largely driven by your own actions and choices and abilities, or external ones, like powerful people or chance? And internal locus of control is much better for mental health. And it may not be true, right? It may just be, like, a lie that we tell ourselves. But at the same time, I really remember coming into contact with a bunch of arguments when I was in late high school, early college in particular, around reframing interactions that I had, that I'm now understanding like, Oh, this was tinged with misogyny. I'm re-understanding and contextualizing all of these dynamics that I've noticed and have stuck with me. And it didn't make me feel better. Like, it didn't make me more capable of fighting back. I actually felt a lot worse for a serious period of time. And it may have been true, right? But anyway, I say all that to say, like, I do wonder if there's some compatibility here. Like, yes, of course, collective action is needed, but having this sort of 'lean in' energy, girl-boss energy may actually help individual women navigate their own lives. Gilbert: Yeah, I guess I don't think it's an either/or situation. I think they're very compatible. I mean, if I had really believed in collective effort to the extent of everything, I probably would not have written a book. Obviously, I can't stand here and say that I don't have my own career ambitions and my own— Demsas: You're girlbossing right now. Gilbert: I am. We are both girlbossing. We should change the name of this podcast and write a new book, #girlbosses. But, like, the thinking strategically needs to be more inclusive. And that doesn't mean that we can't and we shouldn't all have our own dreams and our own goals and our own ability to sort of feel empowered—there's that word; oh my God—our ability to feel in control of our own lives and to feel like we're able to make differences. But in terms of feminism's ambitions more broadly, it's so powerful to me whenever you can sense that. And I'm going to use an absurd example here, but I remember I was so depressed after Roe v. Wade was overturned, and I remember going to see the Barbie movie in my little pink jacket. And it just felt so lonely. I felt so isolated. I felt so feeble in so many ways, and there was just something about seeing all the other women in their little pink jackets that made me feel like, Oh, maybe I'm not alone. Maybe there's some way that we can harness this, like, group energy. And I know that protests are really good for that, too—which obviously, we are not allowed to do, because we're journalists. But protests, I think—just that sense of feeling connected with other people for a shared goal can be so powerful and so inspirational. Demsas: So what we need to do is get everyone on board to a Lean In book club, and then we'll have it. (Laughs.) So amid a lot of the doom, you do point to Taylor Swift as a hero, which I was a little bit surprised about. I'm a big Taylor Swift fan. I went to see her concert. But I think often she's at the receiving end of a lot of criticism around feminism. Can you elaborate what makes her kind of an emblem of progress? Gilbert: Well, she was really interesting to me because she emerged as an artist in this, like, wasteland of music in 2005, 2006, 2007—where, to go back and watch some of the videos now, as I did for research, is a really interesting experiment, because it's like Fergie, 'Buttons,' Pussycat Dolls. It's a lot of, like, kind of dull rap music about strip clubs, and it's, like, all the songs are like, Smack that, tap that, hit that, laffy taffy. It was just a lot of very objectifying, which—and those songs slap. But put collectively, shall we say—I mean, my point with this book is never to indict anything individually. It's more to point out patterns and themes that are maybe interesting when you look at them. And Taylor Swift came into this very sort of gloomy environment, and she just asserted her interiority, and it was this real force of feeling and emotion, and she's never shied away from writing about—I mean, obviously, she's not the first person to do it. It's a grand tradition in music. But she's always—even the way that she tells stories about her own life and the way she sort of incorporates things, it sort of aligned with this movement of first-person confession in writing for women in the 2010s that, to me, was really fascinating. Because the 2000s was such a period of tearing women apart, raking them over the coals, criticizing them, dehumanizing them. And then suddenly, you had this movement of artists and writers coming along who felt the need to kind of just express themselves and really, like, unburden themselves on the page and in songs, and to kind of defend themselves as thinking, feeling human beings. Demsas: I mean, this kind of leads to sort of a more meta question about cultural commentary in general. And obviously, you're not saying in your book that all anyone needs to do is do cultural criticism and make better art. But your book leans heavily into focusing on media, music, and fashion. And what is the value of investigating those sorts of things—in looking at Taylor Swift lyrics, in interpreting feminism? Like, why not focus just on what's going on in labor rights? Like, you talked about Roe v. Wade—like, why did you not become inspired to just write about abortion rights and the ways in which that's shifting in society? So why do you view this as a valuable way to do feminist critique? Gilbert: Because it's where most women are. And the culture that especially women consume has always been derided as trash. Especially if you look at something like reality television, no one cared to really—I mean, there are academics who have—but its influence has never really been given the study that it deserves, I would say, because people don't want to think about it seriously. They think it's a kind of absurd thing, like silly little shows that women watch on Sunday nights. But they're massively influential. And the ideas about beauty, about bodies, about friendships, about relationships, about power, about money, about careers—like, they atomize out all these different ideas into the mainstream, and we, the consumers, absorb them even if we don't watch those shows. Like, everyone knows who Kim Kardashian is. And I remember writing about her in 2014, back in The Atlantic, and I would get these furious emails from people like, This is the magazine of Emerson and Twain; like, how dare you lower yourself to write about this trashy woman? But she, I would argue, now is one of the most powerful women in the world and certainly one of the most influential. And so if you want to look at what's happening to women, there are certain people who really can embody it, who can embody those shifts, and who can sort of show you not just what's happened but also what might be coming. Demsas: So your book and much of this conversation has just really been focused on this time period, the early '00s, in particular. But I want to ask what you think about more modern shifts, particularly in the post-#MeToo era. So there's this idea that Simone de Beauvoir had about this master myth around an unattainable ideal that women are supposed to reach. And this ideal-woman myth, in her telling, was: You had to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother, a muse. In the early '00s, you kind of have this sense of the perfect muse is this extremely waifish, beautiful, sexy girl who bears herself out to the world, never ages above, like, 17 years old. What does that ideal woman look like now? Gilbert: Oh God. I mean, I think I write about Fleabag in the book as being this, like, satire of a woman who just cannot get to grips with what women are supposed to be. Because she doesn't feel powerful. She doesn't feel like a girlboss. She can't identify as a career woman or as a sexy lingerie-wearing dominatrix. Like, she just cannot feel at home with mass portrayals of womanhood. And I think, to use some recent examples, there is so much in recent media that is so much better than things used to be. And I think about movies as an example— like, the 2000s were just this decade where there really weren't many movies about women for women. Every movie seemed to fail the Bechdel Test. I mean, women, if they appeared at all, they were sex objects or they were scolds, or they were boring girlfriends who were getting in the way of the fun trip to Vegas or whatever. It was just this complete lack of curiosity and interest in women's lives. Whereas now, like, I think about the Golden Globes and the Oscars this year: Like, you had these women in their 40s, 50s, 60s doing the most interesting performances of their careers and exploring subjects like beauty culture and aging and motherhood and all these, like, really rich stories being made for and by women. And they're complicated. They're hard to parse. But they were so much more compelling than a lot of what's come before. But I would say the thing that sometimes gives me pause is that even though there are so many women now who are allowed to be visible in their 40s and 50s and 60s, they're only allowed to be visible under certain terms, right? Like, they're all gorgeous, they're all immaculately well-preserved, they don't seem to age, and sometimes the sort of uncannyness of that, it's always the tension that I'm always stuck on. Like, it is incredible to have more visibility for women in midlife and even late in life. But if the bargain is that we have to present ourselves always in the same kind of girlish way, what does it mean? Demsas: How do you kind of put together this view of women's power being so focused on their physical appearance and that's kind of the only realm of power, as you said, that women are allowed to have. How does that fit in with existing narratives around women's educational attainment now exceeding that of men's? Of course, women's purchasing power is really high. As you talk about in your book, a lot of postfeminism, a lot of this era of American feminism—or Western feminism, that is—is focused on things that you can buy, which I think reflects the purchasing power that women have gained in recent decades. So it does feel like there's a lot more gains that have been made in material realms but that those material changes have actually perpetuated the misogyny rather than freeing women from it? Gilbert: It's interesting because one of the things I think that really changed portrayals of women in media from sort of the late '90s onwards was the discovery by corporations that teenage girls had lots of pocket money. They had babysitting money, and they didn't have mortgages, so they could go to the mall at the weekends and they could buy things, and they would buy things because they had extra cash, and they were this very powerful demographic. And of course, that changed culture because you needed different kinds of people to sell them products and different kinds of imagery to make them want to buy products. And so that's a lot of where the Britneys and the Christinas came from. I think what I come to at the end of the book—I interviewed Tom Perrotta at The Atlantic Festival a few years ago, and he, of course, wrote Election, the book that was made into a movie with Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick. And Tracy Flick has forever been our kind of icon of female political ambition. And Tom said that he was sort of surprised by that, but then somebody—it occurred to him at some point that there just weren't other cultural portrayals of women seeking out political power or women politicians even in general. And that's why I think when we have this stereotype of the sort of grasping ambitious political blonde, it's Tracy, it's Leslie Knope, it's Hillary Clinton even. Because there's just this real void of cultural considerations of women who want power and use power and have power. So I think one of the things that I'm really interested in, people sort of say, Oh, why don't you have more solutions in the book? And I think, at the end, I actually do. I think one of the solutions I would suggest is just different kinds of storytelling about women, and especially about women in power that sort of try to make the ideas less divergent—and I guess it does come back to 'Girl Power' in the end and, like, the idea that these are two words that shouldn't go together—but more really thoughtful, really intellectual. And that doesn't mean that women would be necessarily so much more gracious with power than men. And I think some of the most interesting writers and thinkers out there don't take that for granted at all. But just more understanding, more sort of creative thinking about what it might mean for women to have power and to wield it. Demsas: I think that's a great time for our last and final question: Sophie, what is something you once thought was a good idea but ended up being only good on paper? Gilbert: I don't know if this will be controversial or completely noncontroversial, because to me, I think: social media. Demsas: Yeah, yeah. Gilbert: Maybe people have said this before. Demsas: No, but it's a good one. What happened? Gilbert: I don't know. I just feel like we've lost the ability to relate to each other and to connect with each other. And I think about so many—especially, like, living in London now—so many of my friendships, so many of my work relationships, so many of my, like, really critical friendships, they're all sort of online. Like, I don't really call my friends on the phone anymore, because I'm that elder millennial who would rather die than leave a voicemail. And I feel like I'm in touch with people, because I see these pictures of them and their kids online, but it's not real. And I think one of the things—especially after COVID, it was just so much harder to have conversations with people in real life. And you, obviously, will have the studies to show the sort of very tangible effects that social media has had on people's lives and what it does to us in so many ways. But thinking just purely about human beings relating to human beings, I'm not so sure that it's a force for good. Demsas: I'm so cross-pressured on social media, and I think partially it's because, like, once everyone starts saying something, I'm just like, I don't know. Like, maybe everyone's wrong. But like, I also just think back, and there's so many people who I genuinely would not have interacted with or known about or, like, heard their ideas or arguments if there was not some vector for them to speak louder than they had the ability or power or time to do. And it's just—I don't know. Like, obviously, the things that are bad, I think it's, like, fried my brain, you know what I mean? So that's not good. But I just really feel like we're—maybe not you in particular, but as a culture, I worry that we're overshooting the harms here sometimes. And I just remember there was a big moment during the Arab Spring when everyone was like, This is going to be—it's possible now for people to organize protests and shifts with social media, and that obviously did not turn out well. Gilbert: It's really interesting. I've been reading Careless People, the Facebook memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, and she sort of charts the evolution of Facebook from that really hopeful period, where she was like, Facebook is going to change the world, to what actually happened and the sort of real atrocities that she writes about Facebook being involved in one way or another. And I don't know. I'm like you. I mean, it has elevated so many different kinds of voices that have been so beneficial to my life and to my work. It's just, it's not as real as the communities that I have now, like around my children's school and my children's friends. And I think being a part now of a very real three-dimensional, tangible community of people who are actually there to pick up your kids if you are stuck or to help you if you have a doctor's appointment or, like—I don't know. There's a guy who saves a loaf of bread for me in the morning. Like, stuff like that. It sounds so medieval. It sounds so, like, Gilmore Girls. Demsas: It's like an American's version of, like, what we expect is going on in the U.K. Gilbert: Yeah, seriously. My bread man. But you actually feel this is a real community, and that's not to devalue online communities. Like, it can be profoundly powerful and helpful, but I'd find the real iteration of it so much more important to my life. [Music] Demsas: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Sophie. Gilbert: Thank you. It was so nice to talk to you. I'm so sad that we still haven't met because I'm so far away. But I hope we will very soon. Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. And hey, if you like what you're hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. I'm Jerusalem Demsas, and we'll see you next week. Article originally published at The Atlantic
