Chapters 5 and 6 complicate the theme of Media’s Impact on a Woman’s Sense of Self via the lens of sex and beauty. She uses examples of reality shows like America’s Next Top Model, The Real Housewives, Biggest Loser, and Extreme Makeover to explore how disgust, dissatisfaction, and shame compelled women to both disparage and manipulate their appearances to meet impossible standards. In Chapter 6, Gilbert widens this discussion by exploring how global conflict, violence, and war directly impacted representations of women and sex across the media. Because women grew accustomed to seeing themselves in positions of submission and violation, Gilbert holds, they were conditioned to disassociate from their bodies and their personal desires.

Throughout this section, Gilbert’s arguments center on the link between pop cultural representations of women and their bodies and the ways women learn to view themselves. As a result of such cultural shifts and media representations, Gilbert holds that women lost a true sense of their worth and value. Throughout the aughts, women were trained to regard themselves as malleable objects. She frames this link in terms of commercial profit and patriarchal control: If girls grew up believing they were inherently flawed, they could be easily trained to buy products that might change them. They could also be trained to tailor their sexual “preferences” according to the dominant male culture. 

Gilbert employs the language of the shows and publications she references. For example, she holds that “[c]osmetic surgeries were widely touted and understood to be fixes for the imperfect self, with reality shows in particular hammering home the message that becoming skinny, hot, and sexy would totally change a person’s life” (115). This passage argues that reality television—particularly makeover shows—led women to disparage their own bodies, framing her points as a cause-and-effect argument. Women were taught to vote against contestants that were labeled repellent or unfit. The act of scrutinizing television subjects, Gilbert argues, trained women to scrutinize themselves in the same way. Reality television leaked into the culture beyond it, dictating various diet, cosmetic, and beauty trends—all of which capitalized on a woman’s self-loathing and desperation to perfect herself. If a culture keeps its female population absorbed with endless self-modification, Gilbert implies, women remain powerless.

In Chapter 6, Gilbert situates her examination of the ways pornography teaches women to feel shame around sex within the larger social and political context of the 2000s. Gilbert references various films and pornography actresses to present cultural representations of sex as primarily male-driven. Gilbert argues that it wasn’t until #MeToo—a global, feminist movement that emphasized solidarity among sexual assault survivors and emphasized the widespread nature of sexual harassment and rape—that “a broader discussion of desire, equity, and consent” (164) began to emerge. Until this movement, women were culturally disallowed from exploring their own bodies, sexualities, desires, and fantasies without fear or shame. Violence toward women and women’s acceptance of violence inflicted upon them was the norm. As a result, contemporary sexuality became “shaped and informed by a million cultural products and experiences” (164) rather than a woman’s inner compass.

Gilbert uses authorial intrusion to broaden her claims and leave room for readerly analysis. Although Gilbert is the author of the text, she does not claim to be the ultimate authority on each of her arguments. When her first-person voice appears on the page, she uses a humble tone and a quiet, interrogative stance. At the end of Chapter 6, for example, she reflects on her assertions, inviting her reader to do the same: “Every adult should be free to have sex however they want with whoever consents to join them. I’m not interested in kink-shaming, and I’m not remotely opposed to porn. I’m curious, rather, about how culture conditions desire” (171-72). As a journalist, Gilbert uses her writing to ask questions and seek answers. While she has made direct claims about the relationship between media and sex, entertainment and beauty, she leaves room for other interpretations than her own.