49 pages • 1-hour read
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
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Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content and gender discrimination.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Girl Boss: The Making Over of Female Ambition”
Gilbert describes her experiences earning her journalism degree in New York in 2008. She had countless bills and unmanageable debt. Her first paid internship only paid $7.50 per hour. Amidst her own personal struggle, the culture was changing, too. She references the growing economic crisis, the emergence of Instagram, and evolving representations of women in the media. Gilbert reflects on how Instagram impacted art, self-presentation, and feminism.
Gilbert considers how changing cultural representations of women impacted women’s place in the workforce. She references Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In, which argued that to receive equal pay and rights in the workplace, women needed to work harder. Gilbert critiques what she views as Sandberg’s premise, arguing that Sandberg was effectively catering solely to wealthy, white women. The only women who could afford to work harder were women who had money to pay for childcare, housing, and other expenses.
She notes that the success of Lean In ushered in an era of female empowerment memoirs and narratives. The book was quickly followed by the publication of Sophia Amoruso’s #Girlboss, which implied that women could be as successful as they chose to be without interrogating the structural inequity and intersectional challenges of their claims. Gilbert notes that Amoruso became successful only after relying on venture capitalists, highlighting the role of economic privilege in her narrative. She argues that “girlboss culture” was behind Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop and Jennifer Alba’s Honest Company, too. For Gilbert, the hashtag in Amoruso’s book makes the link between girlboss ideals and “ the rise of Instagram” (246) inextricable.
Gilbert explores how Instagram fueled what she calls the girlboss era. Online, female social media users began to start their own companies, but many were backed by shoddy investors or scammed their consumers. Gilbert holds that the whole culture was empty, which eventually led to today’s tradwife movement and aesthetic. She says that tradwives—women promoting a return to traditional values and domestic concerns for women—market their regressive lifestyle to over-taxed mothers under the guise of ease and comfort. Gilbert admits it can feel tempting to buy into the lifestyle they’re selling.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Girls on Top: Rewriting a Path Toward Power”
Gilbert again considers why culture matters and how it impacts women’s lives. She references social scientist Alice Evans’s and writer Adrienne Rich’s work to fuel her exploration. In an ongoing attempt to understand why women were treated so cruelly in the 2000s, Gilbert asserts that popular culture predicts the future. She considers how particular shows and publications led to cultural shifts. For example, because of the media preceding the 2016 presidential election, the culture had been trained to believe that women inherently lacked the “intelligence, morality, dignity” (264) required to run the country.
Gilbert considers the cultural climate surrounding Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential bid and Hillary Clinton’s presidential race. She examines how the media represented each woman and the scorn and derision they received. No matter how they tailored their behavior, appearance, or presentation, Palin and Clinton were repeatedly discredited in the wider culture.
Gilbert considers how women artists’ work from the late aughts led to cultural shifts. She references Broad City, Orange Is the New Black, The Body Keeps the Score, and Fleabag by way of example. She argues that such shows immediately preceded #MeToo in 2017, and thus predicted a new era for women.
Gilbert admits that old cycles have begun again with the reelection of Donald Trump and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but she’s still hopeful that more progress might emerge for women. History is cyclical, she holds, but is not unchangeable: “I have no idea what happens next,” Gilbert admits, exposing her own vulnerability and humanity, but “history suggests that women will be much harder to sideline than the Trump-Vance administration may anticipate” (283). In her research, she uncovered many bleak truths but also came upon countless affirming accounts. She argues that such stories imply that further change is possible.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
The final chapters of Girl on Girl offer closing reflections on Gilbert’s overarching thematic explorations, while offering hope for the future. Over the course of the text, Gilbert seeks to answer questions including “Why does culture matter?” and “What impact does it actually have on our lives, our finances, our status, and our possibilities?” (259). She considers these quandaries through the lens of women’s experiences. If culture does matter and does have an impact on its citizens, Gilbert reflects, how does the culture particularly affect how women see themselves, relate to one another, and use their voices to create space? While Gilbert does assert that the media has negatively influenced women’s relationships with each other and their regard for their bodies and sexual identities, she consistently makes room for the culture to evolve.
Gilbert roots her thematic exploration of society’s attempts at Manufacturing Women’s Competition For Entertainment Value in examples of women in the workforce, women in politics, and women online. In the workforce, Gilbert uses Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In to explore how women have been trained to regard each other as competition. Sandberg’s writing preached the idea that all women have to do to receive more rights, respect, and power is “get in the race” (239). Sandberg promoted a culture of competition between women, instead of a culture of acceptance, support, and community. Sandberg and Amoruso, Gilbert holds, fostered the rise of the girlboss era—a flimsy notion of female empowerment in the workforce. Rather than urging women to fight injustice or to make work that more accurately represented their experience, such women urged women to “lean into” the very patriarchal system that disempowered them in the first place. Gilbert’s example of tradwives (and other social media influencers) provides a comparable example from the online sphere. Gilbert notes that she resists disparaging women like Sandberg and Amoruso to avoid engaging in the cruel cultural trends she is critiquing. At the same time, she uses her final chapter to argue that “the elevation of other women” (249) cannot come about via capitalizing on unrealistic standards.
Gilbert’s final chapter emphasizes Feminism’s Push for Diverse and Authentic Representation of Women, ending the text on a hopeful, forward-looking note. Gilbert acknowledges both negative and positive events in recent cultural history as evidence that, despite attempts to dehumanize and disregard women and their contributions, there are always women fighting back. On the one hand, Gilbert holds that “old cycles [have] repeated once again” (281) with Trump’s reelection and Kamala Harris’s loss, but she looks to the past to make sense of the future. While the past reveals how much women have suffered and endured, it also reveals how much women have overcome and how much women still have to fight for. By ending Girl on Girl on the subject of change and progress, Gilbert allows her cultural commentary to extend beyond the margins of the page.
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