Sophie Gilbert wrote her new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, because she wanted “to understand how a generation of young women came to believe that sex was our currency [and that] our objectification was empowering.”
On one level, Gilbert, a Pulitzer-Prize nominated journalist and staff writer at the Atlantic, succeeds in that goal. Her analysis of popular culture in the 1990s and 2000s sheds light on the influences that shaped not only millennial women’s fashion choices and music tastes but also their self-concepts, their sexual relationships, and the political landscape in which they came of age. Yet, in a deeper sense, Gilbert’s analysis falls short. She readily identifies the proximate causes of women’s objectification, but she doesn’t follow the problem back to its root. Gilbert is right, for instance, that the Spice Girls—and the pornified, profit-driven music industry that enabled their meteoric rise—embodied the message that modern feminism was reducible to the pursuit of whatever an individual woman said she wanted. But that message wouldn’t have taken root without the much deeper, more gradual social, political, and philosophical revolution that preceded it.
It’s understandable that Gilbert doesn’t delve deeply into these complex historical causes in a book devoted to pop culture. Still, the book would have been stronger if she had displayed a willingness to interrogate her own assumptions, acknowledging that some of the questions she raises are more complex than they might initially appear.
Girl on Girl has some notable weaknesses, but it is still worth reading, especially for those who are inclined to criticize the #girlboss feminists of the 2010s. The book serves as a good reminder that much of what we sloppily ascribe to “feminism” is really the fruit of capitalistic consumerism. On the other hand, by assigning all the blame for the ills she documents to consumeristic “post-feminism,” Gilbert effectively sidesteps the question of whether liberal feminism has itself played a role in the sexualization and commodification of women by hollowing out the normative foundations of what we are supposed use our freedom for. For those who want to reform and reclaim the feminist project, this is a question that simply cannot be ignored.
Politics and (Pop) Culture
Gilbert’s book is a highly readable, engaging, and insightful study of pop culture from the 1990s to the present. Over the course of ten chapters, Gilbert analyzes the music industry, the fine art world, fashion, movies, television, tabloids, gossip blogs, diet books, social media, and electoral politics. She focuses, in particular, on the impact of reality TV. Madonna, Lil’ Kim, Demi Moore, Kate Moss, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian, Lena Dunham, Taylor Swift all make appearances, along with many more.
Girl on Girl is not just a catalog of pop culture moments, though. It is also positioned as a feminist text, with clear political implications. Gilbert repeatedly cites Susan Faludi, author of the 1991 feminist classic Backlash: The Undeclared War on American Women, who argues that periods in which women are perceived to have made progress are always followed by periods in which misogyny flares up with a vengeance. In both the introduction and conclusion of the book, Gilbert points to the overturning of Roe v. Wade as inconvertible evidence that America is currently in such a period. It doesn’t occur to her that feminist readers could possibly disagree about whether the Dobbs ruling should be interpreted as misogynistic backlash or, on the contrary, an opportunity to recover an earlier, more life-affirming feminist vision.
Today, nostalgia for the 90s and early aughts is all the rage—as evidenced by new releases like Freakier Friday, in which Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis reprise the roles from their 2003 hit, or last year’s musical remake of 2004’s cult classic, Mean Girls (also starring Lohan). Millennials and Gen Xers love to reminiscence about simpler times, and Gen Z and Gen Alpha fantasize about what it must have been like to grow up in the analog era. But even if we millennials were more innocent when we were children, that doesn’t mean that our society was. Gilbert’s book makes painfully clear that the harmful tendencies that fuel phenomena like OnlyFans already existed in pop culture twenty or even thirty years before. The smartphone accelerated the pornification of America; it didn’t invent it. Gilbert documents case after case of undeniable misogyny, objectification, and abuse in that era, all fueled by the rapacious desires of the American consumer.
Sex sells, and women’s sexual degradation sells better still. And the more it sells, the more it is replicated, not only in the media we consume but also in the relationships we form, the choices we make, the desires we pursue, and the ways we perceive ourselves.
Feminism and Pornography
Gilbert makes many keen observations about the influence of pop culture on young women’s psyches and our political climate. Yet I was struck by how uncurious Gilbert seemed about feminism’s role in the developments she describes.
In the introduction, Gilbert explains that her title “was initially supposed to be a joke—a wry nod to all the ways in which women seemed to have been turned against themselves and each other.” Of course, the title also has another set of connotations, of the X-rated variety. That second meaning ended up being more apt than Gilbert initially envisioned. As she searched for the causes of the social ills she documents, Gilbert kept coming back to the same root: pornography. It makes sense, then, that Gilbert opens the book with an epigraph from anti-pornography warrior and radical feminist Andrea Dworkin.
Gilbert chronicles countless examples of the deeply harmful ways that pornography has malformed our conception of what it means to be a woman, training both sexes “to see women as objects—as things to silence, restrain, fetishize, or brutalize.” And yet, as Christine Emba has noted at The New York Times, Gilbert shies away from ever stating that pornography is bad. She certainly doesn’t call for legal restrictions or moral censure, as Dworkin heroically did.
Instead, Gilbert toes the party line, taking care not to criticize pro-porn, sex-positive, trans-affirming feminism. To be sure, when her chronological narrative gets to the 2010s, Gilbert has some choice words for the capitalism-friendly, individualistic model of the #girlboss hailed by Sheryl Sandberg. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that, by embracing the tenets of the sexual revolution so thoroughly, liberal feminists of the 70s, 80s, and 90s may have helped to lay the groundwork for the pornified, consumeristic sexual culture she critiques.
Blame It on the Postfeminism
Aside from pornography, the primary villain in Gilbert’s story is what she calls postfeminism. “Less an explicit ideology than a mechanism to attract media attention and sell things,” postfeminism “seemed to define itself mostly in opposition to a boogeyman version of feminism, encouraging women to embrace casual sex, spend with abandon, and be as stereotypically girly or overtly sexy as they desired.” In Gilbert’s telling, postfeminism effectively co-opted authentic feminist messaging, neutering and subverting it for the sake of profit.
To illustrate this process, Gilbert traces the evolution of the slogan “Girl Power.” The phrase was coined by the leaders of the riot-grrrl movement, which “filtered punk’s rage through lived experience, demanding more space and respect for women.” Before long, however, it was appropriated by manufacturers and marketers. Eventually, it deteriorated into a meaningless slogan to be plastered on little girls’ t-shirts, surrounded by pastel flowers and neon pink peace signs.
To Gilbert, the Spice Girls are the ultimate embodiment of postfeminism, despite their claims to the feminist label. In a particularly insightful turn of phrase, Gilbert writes:
the riot-grrrl movement wanted women to have freedom from: sexual violence, abuse, injustice, fear. The Spice Girls embodied freedom to: have fun, earn money, pursue pleasure. There are no prizes for deducing which ideology was easier to package and sell…. They embodied “freedom” if you understood that concept as “total absence of impulse control.”
Gilbert criticizes postfeminism for teaching women that “any individual choice could be empowering if someone declared it to be so.” Yet she fails to see that she has fallen into this same trap. Gilbert—like the contemporary feminist movement to which she belongs—lacks a coherent ethical framework to guide individual choice, grounded in an understanding of what it means to be human and what constitutes a good life. If we’re afraid to make normative statements about the nature and purpose of sex—and of human freedom, more generally—we shouldn’t be surprised that individual choice and free consent are the only standards that remain.
What Counts as “Feminist”?
Gilbert unsuccessfully tries to make fine-grained distinctions between empowering, artistic, feminist self-objectification-for-profit, on the one hand, and degrading, pornified, post-feminist commodification, on the other. She argues, for example, that Madonna’s 1992 “coffee-table erotica book” Sex constitutes a courageous artistic reclamation of female sexual agency, rather than a capitulation to the objectifying male gaze. Even so, Gilbert recognizes that the message Madonna was trying to send wasn’t the one that listeners and viewers actually received. She laments that “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.”
Strangely, for Gilbert, this isn’t a cautionary tale. I say this is strange, because Gilbert goes to great lengths to argue that the appeal of pornography is its transgressive nature, which is defined relative to the moral and artistic standards of the day. As pop culture becomes more and more sexually explicit, porn has to become more and more violent and gruesome in order to stay exciting. In other words, a musician’s choice to imitate the tropes of pornography and present them as art doesn’t just mean that her likeness will inevitably be used as a cheap masturbatory aid. By Gilbert’s own reasoning, it also contributes to the larger trend of normalizing what was once taboo and incentivizing the creation of ever-more morally repugnant content, from violent rape to pedophilia (whether real or simulated). That doesn’t sound very feminist to me.
Gilbert’s reflections on the social construction of gender norms fall short in similar ways. She makes insightful connections between the shallow vision of femininity presented by reality TV, the normalization of plastic surgery, and attempts by drag queens and male-to-female transitioners to construct and claim female identity. Yet she fails to acknowledge that this defining down of womanhood to exaggerated stereotypes and artificially manufactured sex appeal sounds an awful lot like the self-objectification and pornification that she is at such pains to reject in other contexts.
“On reality television,” Gilbert writes, “exterior womanhood is work, which is perhaps why, paradoxically, trans women have been more visible and more welcome within the genre than virtually anywhere else in popular culture.” In particular, Gilbert praises Ru Paul’s Drag Race for demonstrating the essential performativity of gender. She then turns around and criticizes female conservative politicians’ attempts to conform to exaggeratedly feminine beauty standards. But who gets to decide when the performance of gender through the pursuit of sexual objectification is empowering and when it’s not?
Looking Deeper
There are answers to the questions Gilbert’s book raises. Indeed, many of Fairer Disputations’ featured authors have devoted whole books to these issues, from critiquing the sexual revolution, to uncovering the roots of the postmodern gender paradigm, to arguing for the dignity of dependence, to recovering an older, more coherent vision of rights as inextricably linked to our responsibilities to one another.
Angela Franks’ new release from Notre Dame Press, Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self, would pair particularly well with Gilbert’s book. Franks provides a rigorous intellectual foundation to explain the historical and conceptual roots of our modern identity crises—the “liquid bodies and empty selves” that underlie so many of the problems that Gilbert describes. Franks, like all of our featured authors, is fleshing out a conceptual framework for a renewed feminism that is responsive to the reality of today’s bleak, pornified sexual landscape. This project demands that, eventually, we have to move beyond diagnosis and into prescription, offering historically grounded solutions to our distinctively modern problems. That is what Franks and the others offer—and what Gilbert is unwilling or unable to do.
Nonetheless, I am encouraged by the publication of Girl on Girl, and by its positive reception in publications like Ms. Magazine and Slate. In recent years, mainstream journalists and progressive publications have exhibited an increasing willingness to acknowledge the ways in which the contemporary sexual culture has harmed women. It’s no longer taboo to admit that the sexual revolution, the normalization of pornography, and the rapid spread of the postmodern gender paradigm have had unintended consequences. What we need next is a willingness for these writers and publications to admit that those consequences were not an unforeseeable accident but a natural outgrowth of a worldview that elevates freedom as the highest ideal for men and women alike.
Most people who enjoy good standing in elite institutions don’t want to risk being seen as judgmental, sex-negative, or transphobic by following these lines of thought to their logical (but uncomfortable) conclusions. Still, in incremental ways, thoughtful writers like Gilbert are exposing the cracks in the edifice of a feminism premised on the pursuit of radical autonomy.
