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

About the book

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.

Where the score comes from

The sources average 7.9 across 33 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 15% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Rankings average of 7.8. That is how 8.3 comes out.

Reader voices

The most-liked reviews on Hardcover (credited to their authors).

• “I thought this made some interesting and excellent points. I also learned a lot about pop culture that I missed out on, and it was good to have it in context. I did have to skim quickly over most of the torture porn chapter, though.”

  ★ 5/5ktb on Hardcover

• “Gilbert covers a lot of ground exploring incidences of women exploitation in music, entertainment, reality TV, and the even porn. The more things get better, the worse things are for women. Even the ones with power aren’t spared. Some of the things mentioned in the book are truly revolting and disgusting. ”

  ★ 5/5Pratik on Hardcover

• “I came into this expecting a serious cultural argument, as promised by the subtitle “How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves.” What's missing, though, is the “how”—and, more importantly, any concrete demonstration of women being meaningfully turned against themselves. It's from this gap between premise and execution that my disappointment comes. The book largely surveys how women are portrayed and treated across film, television, music, and fashion, with lighter excursions into politics and entrepreneurship. Much of this takes the form of a chronological recounting of …”

  ★ 2/5shawndynamic on Hardcover

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