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

What happened to feminism in the 21st century? This question feels increasingly urgent after a period of reactionary cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movements power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.

Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at The Atlantic and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, provides one answer, identifying an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the energy of third-wave and riot girrrl feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Gilbert mines the darker side of nostalgia, training her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. And what she recounts is harrowing, from the leering aesthetic of American Apparel ads and explicit music videos to a burgeoning internet culture vicious towards women in the spotlight and damaging for those who werent. Gilbert tracks many of the periods dominant themes back to the explosion of internet porn, tracing its widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.