Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves - Softcover

Gilbert, Sophie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593656318 ISBN 13: 9780593656310

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book • Named one of the Best Books of the Year by TIME, NPR, Elle, and The Boston Globe

“Searing… rigorously researched but never stuffy… 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.” —The New York Times

“So clear-eyed that it’s startling." —The Washington Post

“Entertaining and even energizing, transforming a dismal history into something like a rallying cry.” —The Boston Globe

From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of early aughts pop culture

What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.

Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and “riot grrrl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Mining the darker side of nostalgia, Gilbert trains her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the leering gaze of the paparazzi to the gleeful cruelty of early reality TV and a burgeoning internet culture vicious toward women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period’s dominant themes back to the rise of internet porn, which gained widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.

The result is a devastating portrait of a time when a distinctly American blend of excess, materialism, and power worship collided with the culture’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and continues to shape our world today.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes about television, books, and popular culture. She won the 2024 National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism and was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. She lives in London.

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Chapter 1

Girl Power, Boy Rage

Music and Feminism in the 1990s

I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate.
Joni Mitchell (2004)

When will this caveboy shit end?
dream hampton (1991)

In 2003, the music critic Jessica Hopper published an essay in Punk Planet titled "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't," detailing the alienation she felt from one of the most influential artistic genres of the era. "Girls in emo songs today do not have names," she wrote. "Our actions are portrayed solely through the detailing of neurotic self-entanglement of the boy singer-our region of personal power, simply, is our impact on his romantic life. We're vessels redeemed in the light of boy-love. On a pedestal, on our backs."

Many of us could sense this dynamic at the time, even if we couldn't quite rationalize it. What Hopper was articulating about emo was true of much music in the aughts: The most popular anthems of the decade were sticky, leaden strip-club soundtracks, full of rote clichés about male sexual prowess and devious, grasping women. In my late teens and twenties, I danced in clubs to Sisqó's "Thong Song," Christina Aguilera's "Dirrty," and 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P." without realizing that something had shifted. It's impossible to analyze millennial culture without first going back to the 1990s, where flash points in music would uncannily anticipate and inform what was coming. During that decade, music was the site of some of our most crucial battles over sex, power, and feminism. It was where provocateurs and rebels came to play and to protest. Women in music in the 1990s were angry and abrasive and thrillingly powerful. And then, just like that, they were gone-replaced by girls. The backlash that banished them would reverberate across all forms of media, so relentlessly and persuasively that people of my generation would hardly think to notice what we'd lost.

At the tail end of 1990, Madonna released a video to accompany her new single, "Justify My Love," that set the tone for the coming decade: audacious, wildly sexual, a little bit trollish. The song was a hypnotic, trip-hoppy declaration of lust; the video was a conceptual, wildly sexual exploration of fantasy and desire that detonated pre-internet popular discourse. Madonna, shot in black-and-white, is seen walking down a hotel hallway toward an assignation, limping slightly in heels and a black raincoat, clutching her head as if in pain. As she passes different doorways, we see fleeting glimpses of the people occupying various rooms, watching us watch them. The star is joined by her lover (played by her real-life boyfriend at the time, the amiable lunk Tony Ward); a man laces a woman into a rubber corset; a dancer in a unitard contorts into shifting positions; Ward watches Madonna with another partner, his expression a picture. More people arrive; Ward gets trussed up in fetish netting; everyone tests the amorphous boundaries of sexuality, gender, and dominance. Finally, Madonna puts on her coat and leaves, laughing, renewed and jubilant, no longer tired.

The brazen, unnerving sexuality of the video was the whole point. By the end of that year, the AIDS epidemic had claimed more than 120,000 lives in the United States, one-fifth of which were in New York, the epicenter of fashion, art, music, media, and advertising. Cultural anxiety regarding the idea that sex could literally kill you had led to two wildly divergent schools of thought in media. One, nicknamed the New Traditionalism, preached a revival of old-fashioned family values, where women went home and stayed there. (The 1987 movie Fatal Attraction made this fear of a corrupted American culture literal, in the form of Glenn Close's sexually adventurous, bunny-boiling career woman, the fling who won't be flung.) The other, the New Voyeurism, embraced sex, but as a spectator sport. "At a time when doing it has become excessively dangerous, looking at it, reading about it, thinking about it have become a necessity," a Newsweek feature on Madonna declared in 1992. "AIDS has pushed voyeurism from the sexual second tier . . . into the front row."

For the rest of the 1990s, culture would be shaped by the push-pull of these two opposing forces. The New Traditionalism and the New Voyeurism seemed at odds, but both were essentially promising women the same thing: that fulfillment and prosperity lie in catering to men's desires. Music, though, was where women were pushing back. The "Justify My Love" video reads now as a brazen affirmation of sexual freedom in a turbulent era. But there was a twist. The subject of the video was Madonna-the fantasies, the imagery, the pleasure all hers. If it was alienating to men, or to mainstream audiences, she didn't care. The video ended with words on a screen: "Poor is the man / Whose pleasures depend / On the permission of another."

Madonna must have anticipated mass outrage, and she got it. But she also helped ignite a sex-positive wave of music that put women's desires front and center. In 1993, Janet Jackson released Janet, a silky, carnal record all about lust. The video for her track "Any Time, Any Place" teases the same voyeuristic impulses at play in "Justify My Love"; people spy on each other through peepholes and letterboxes and an elderly neighbor looks on, disapprovingly, as Jackson pushes her lover's head down while he's on top of her-a revolutionary assertion of sexual power and equality that would later be echoed in videos and lyrics by TLC, Mary J. Blige, and Lil' Kim.

At the time, music videos were still a novel art form. The 1990s predilection for voyeurism wasn't just a response to AIDS: Images became more ubiquitous and more freighted because consumers now had the ability to watch music as well as listen to it. When MTV launched in 1981, it turned the nature of pop and rock stardom inside out. What you looked like as an artist became, overnight, as crucial as the sound you made. Artists such as Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, and Tina Turner, whose unique aesthetics made them immediately recognizable on-screen, flourished in the new medium. But Madonna and Jackson both also seemed to recognize all the ways in which video made women targets. Twelve days after the launch of MTV, Duran Duran began production on the video for "Girls on Film," a six-minute short in which topless models had pillow fights, mud wrestled, kissed, poured champagne over each other's breasts, and straddled an oversized pole covered in shaving cream-adapting hokey sexist imagery for a new technological era.

Madonna's and Jackson's videos openly challenged the idea of women's performing for men's pleasure. In the 1986 video for "Open Your Heart," which incorporates a vast nude painting by the Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka, Madonna played a peep-show dancer in front of an audience of leering, dead-eyed onlookers. The following year, a study found that while rock videos were "cable's first real contribution to entertainment programming on television," the majority of videos shown on MTV depicted women as sex objects or two-dimensional stereotypes. Madonna was more pro-sex than possibly anyone else alive, but for her, sexuality was synonymous with power. Her 1992 coffee-table erotica book Sex was another manifestation of her fantasies: surreal in parts, kinky in others, sometimes outright comical. The author Mary Gabriel argues that it "may have been the first major book of female sexual imagery ever published that was not created to titillate a heterosexual man." And yet the message the entertainment industry would end up taking away from the book was that it was sexual-and that it sold, and sold, and sold.


In some ways, the story of what happened to the feminist...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593656318
• ISBN 13: 9780593656310
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 353
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien