49 pages • 1-hour read
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
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Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, gender discrimination, antigay bias, mental illness, disordered eating, and death.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Girls on Film: Sex Comedies from the Multiplex to the Manosphere”
Gilbert explores how the 1999 comedy American Pie impacted early-aughts culture, noting that she’s rewatched it countless times to understand its archetypes. In the film, the protagonist Jim is so obsessed with losing his virginity that he and his friends make a pact to all have sex for the first time by prom night. The film catalyzed a trend of teen-sex comedies that pointed to the era’s preoccupation with adolescence. Gilbert argues these films’ storylines were more hedonistic—their protagonists weren’t seeking social justice or fighting against corruption, but were motivated by personal pleasure. Gilbert argues that such stories directly influenced prominent, contemporary, public figures and their disparagement of women, such as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of attempted sexual assault at a party in the 1980s. Gilbert also references the films Kids (1995), Wild Things (1998), and American Beauty (1999), noting how such films represent sex for boys and girls differently.
Gilbert lays out several scenes from American Pie, asserting that the film’s messaging robbed women of their privacy and suggested that all “normal” girls were wild and hyper-sexual. In American Pie, Gilbert believes, girls weren’t allowed their own natural sexual awakenings while boys were. In other subsequent teen-sex comedies, girls’ experiences were given even less space, leaning into “borderline abusive treatment of women, gay people, trans people” (71), and other marginalized groups. She contends that such films created anxiety around non-white, non-male identities, holding that such titles dangerously normalize incel culture—short for “involuntarily celibate”—referring to a community of men that holds women responsible for the difficulties they experience dating, establishing relationships, and finding willing sexual partners. Incel mythology blames feminism for perverting “normal” gender roles and relations at the expense of cisgender, heterosexual men. At the heart of this mythology, Gilbert argues, the teenage girl is the villain, while the hero is the thwarted teenage boy who was refused sex.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Girl Fight: Regression and Representation in the Early Years of Reality Television”
Gilbert argues that Jennifer Lopez’s and Jennifer Ringley’s work in the 1990s predicted aspects of the aughts’ internet culture to come. In Lopez’s 1999 “If You Had My Love” music video, a man scrolls on the internet until he finds Lopez’s website, where he discovers he can watch her dance in a private room. Later, he discovers that he and a host of viewers can watch her shower, too.
In 1996, Jennifer Ringley connected a webcam to her computer and broadcast her private life online, calling it “Jennicam.” Jennicam did not begin with a focus on sex—it featured Ringley doing banal things in her private space completely alone—but she amassed millions of viewers, Gilbert asserts, because of the potential for sex. Gilbert holds that Ringley was courting the male gaze, intentionally catering to a male audience who viewed her as an object of sexual desire. Eventually, sex did feature on Jennicam. Ringley ultimately ended the project seven years after its start. She had issues with PayPal because of her cam’s sexual aspects and had also been publicly shamed for sleeping with a married man on her livestream.
Gilbert argues that the projects of entertainers like Ringley (and artists like Lopez who referenced them) laid the groundwork for an era of lifecasting, which would later lead to reality television. According to Gilbert, reality television is inspired by both anthropological and economic motivators. She references Cops, America’s Most Wanted, The Real World, and Big Brother by way of example, particularly emphasizing the latter. Big Brother presented itself as “an analysis of human psychology under pressure that was self-aware about its slightly sadistic leanings” (91). In the series, housemates live in a shared space, shut off from the rest of the world and constantly monitored by cameras. Over the course of each season, housemates are eliminated by a televote.
Gilbert considers the long-lasting impacts of the show’s model on its subjects. For example, Nikki Grahame lashed out with a dramatic outburst when she was nominated for eviction during a Big Brother season, which prompted public discussion about the show’s ethical responsibility when casting contestants with serious mental health concerns that could be exacerbated by the pressure of public scrutiny. Grahame later died from anorexia, which she’d lived with for many years. Gilbert also describes how Big Brother gave viewers a new kind of power over the show’s subjects, arguing that subjects were like caged zoo animals, and the audience could determine their fates. If the public disliked subjects for how they looked or behaved, they were eliminated. Gilbert remarks that the show was predictive of social media.
Gilbert explores the relationship between reality television and women’s culture. She references Danielle J. Lindemann’s book True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, arguing that reality television represented a clash between voyeurism and traditionalism. Women make up the largest audience of reality television programming, which increasingly touted New Traditionalist values while also shaming women for being too sexual or “wild.” Gilbert references Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? and The Bachelor by way of example—both shows that represented New Traditionalism. In the former, women competed to marry one multi-millionaire. The Bachelor operated under a similar premise, except women were meant to be in love with the bachelor of choice. Gilbert argues that such shows limited women’s value, implying that they were only as good as their looks, alliances, rivalries, and ability to be chosen by a man.
Gilbert references numerous thinkers and writers who have analyzed reality television and claimed that it teaches women how to see themselves as vicious competitors and obsessive consumers. Gilbert goes on to argue that other reality shows changed how the culture saw celebrities. Suddenly, ordinary people could be famous, too, and famous people appeared more ordinary. Gilbert references The Osbournes and Anna Nicole as examples of the latter effect. These shows also implied that anyone could and should aspire to be famous.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
In Chapters 3 and 4, Gilbert furthers her thematic exploration of Media’s Impact on a Woman’s Sense of Self by using specific films, music videos, and entertainment projects as case studies to trace how early 2000s film and television represented and spoke to women. Chapter 3 uses “the 1999 comedy American Pie” (53) as a throughway into exploring unbalanced representations of the adolescent sexual awakening for boys and girls. Chapter 4 uses Jennifer Ringley’s 1996 Jennicam and Jennifer Lopez’s 1999 “If You Had My Love” music video as throughways into discussing the erasure of a woman’s private sexual life and experience. Gilbert uses these familiar cultural references to render her wider argument more accessible to readers and help them to understand the subliminal effects of such narratives on how women saw themselves.
Gilbert employs first-person plural pronouns throughout her discussion to create a sense of solidarity with her readers and universalize her overarching claims. In Chapter 3, Gilbert argues that film has the power to determine how the individual sees herself and others: “Popular culture isn’t an innocuous force; we don’t go through adolescence—watching scenes and reading books and hearing jokes and listening to all kinds of dialogue—while wearing an invisible force field that bounces bad ideas away” (58). The use of the first-person plural point of view in this passage allows Gilbert to incorporate herself and her reader into the collective. Everyone, she holds, understands themselves via the media they consume—media that either rebels against or reinforces the larger system’s beliefs.
Gilbert argues that, unlike the romantic comedies of the 1990s, the 2000s teen-sex comedies eliminated a young woman’s bodily autonomy by refusing girls a gradual sexual awakening: “What girls want in movies is portrayed as being much more complicated, which both deters boys from trying to figure it out and turns sex into a power struggle” (63). Boys are represented as young heroes on a quest to lose their virginities and establish their manhood, teaching heterosexual men that women are conquests and that sex is a rite of passage, while young female viewers are taught that their sexual experience is limited to how men perceive them sexually and how they might make themselves appealing to men.
Chapter 4 builds upon the themes of Chapter 3, while developing the text’s explorations of Manufacturing Women’s Competition for Entertainment Value. Gilbert uses pop cultural examples such as Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? and The Bachelor to examine how postfeminist and New Traditionalist values robbed women of their autonomy, power, and innate value by limiting them to their appearances and pitting them against each other. While reality television in the early aughts began as a money-making scheme, Gilbert holds that the entertainment trend is revealing of deeper cultural truths: “For the last twenty-five years, the women our culture has loathed the most have unfailingly been the same ones we can’t stop watching” (101). Reality television intentionally puts women in dehumanizing or shameful positions for the sake of entertainment or to preach particular ideologies, using their appearances and rivalries with each other to vie for male attention, which limits the female contestants to their sexual marketability. Gilbert goes on to argue that such shows teach women how to treat one another, too. If men are all women are allowed to want, they must compete against each other to win their match; this notion is central to patriarchal systems of power built to keep women subjected to male authority.
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