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Title details for Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert - Wait list

Girl on Girl

How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

by Sophie Gilbert
ebook
Pre-release: Expected April 29, 2025
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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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    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from March 1, 2025
      How the last three decades of movies, music, and media have written the story for women. In a carefully buttressed and sharply written analysis that takes into account a dizzying number of cultural products and characters, Gilbert tries to understand how we got where we are today, a moment when the undeniable increase in women's power meets the repeal ofRoe v. Wade and the reelection of Donald Trump. If we can see what went wrong, theAtlantic staff writer says, perhaps "we can conceive of a more powerful way forward." As she considers topics ranging from the Spice Girls to Nora Ephron to Paris and Perez Hilton, fromAmerican Pie toAwkward Black Girl, from Sheryl Sandberg to Sheila Heti to Kim Kardashian, she sees that "so much of what I was trying to figure out kept coming back to porn." Insights of that sort come fast and bright, big and small: "I've always wondered why people diminish girlhood as somehow cosseted or twee, when the reality of coming-of-age as a young woman is so raw, filled with emotional violence and literal blood." "Movies in the aughts [the decade ofShallow Hal andKnocked Up]hated women." "Why is male honesty in art seen as brave while female honesty is so repellent?" The heroes of her account are sometimes unexpected, Taylor Swift and Instagram among them. Her exploration of torture porn and its connection to Abu Ghraib is not for the fainthearted. (If you've never heard of a movie calledHostel, consider yourself lucky.) Truly, Gilbert deserves a medal--not only for her observations and conclusions, but for navigating the sludge she had to wade through to get there. Essential cultural criticism. But brace yourself--it ain't pretty.

      COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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