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

“Why were we so easily persuaded of our own inadequacy? Who was setting the agenda? Why, for decades and even now, has virtually every cultural product been so insistently oriented around male desire and male pleasure?”

In her introduction, Gilbert presents a string of questions she asked herself when she first began writing Girl on Girl. By incorporating these questions into the text’s writing, Gilbert allows her audience to witness her thinking on the page. She did not set out to write Girl on Girl to simply verify her own ideas, but to interrogate early-aughts culture and its impact on women and feminism.

“I’ve structured this book chronologically, from the 1990s to the present, as a way of trying to parse what was happening in culture against the backdrop of what was happening in history. And, as you’ll see, virtually every era, art form, historical moment, trend, and icon reflects the influence of the genre that became, over the past twenty-five years, more ubiquitous than any other mode of entertainment.”

Gilbert employs direct address, speaking directly to her reader, as she lays out her objectives for and approach to writing Girl on Girl. She uses a direct tone and conversational voice, inviting her audience into her cultural commentary, while offering the reader guidance for her coming discussions. The clarity of her voice affects a transparent mood, which encourages trust between Gilbert and her reader.

“Women in music in the 1990s were angry and abrasive and thrillingly powerful. And then, just like that, they were gone—replaced by girls. The backlash that banished them would reverberate across all forms of media, so relentlessly and persuasively that people of my generation would hardly think to notice what we’d lost.”

Gilbert analyzes cultural shifts between the 1990s and 2000s by focusing on musical trends. At the start of Chapter 1, she particularly focuses on the punk scene and how representations of women within this musical genre drastically changed from one decade to the next. This passage creates a throughway into Gilbert’s larger analysis of The Media’s Impact on a Woman’s Sense of Self.

“Women were making music about abortion, about sexual assault, about domestic violence. They were spelling out all the ways in which they felt belittled and diminished as artists, in an industry where it was silently forbidden to play two songs in a row by female acts.”

Gilbert references the work of female hip hop artists in the late 1990s to launch the text’s thematic exploration of Feminism’s Push for Diverse and Authentic Representations of Women. Women rappers began to use their art to react to male rappers’ disparaging representations of women. They fought back against such stereotypes and created awareness. Gilbert argues that their voices would soon be silenced, allowing an increasingly misogynistic era to flourish in the 2000s.

“[Sex] proclaimed that sexuality for women was something to be celebrated, not stifled or shamed. But because of Madonna’s extraordinary level of fame at the time of the book’s publication, and how she fit within a stereotypically pornographic frame, the long-term impact was to license more and more sexual provocation in conventional media, reaching a tipping point during the aughts.”

In this passage, Gilbert explores both the pros and cons of Madonna’s work, examining the pop-culture icon’s impact on popular representation of women and their bodies. Madonna’s work, Gilbert argues, both helped and hurt the cause for women. While she argued in the name of women claiming their sexuality and desires, Madonna’s work also reinforced hyper-sexual stereotypes around women. In this moment, Gilbert uses negative capability to consider both sides of the issue.

“American Pie signaled the beginning of a new cultural fixation with adolescence: with the freedom, friendship, and misadventures it affords boys and with the sexual vulnerability it enforces on girls. […] An endearing, absurd comedy, despite its best efforts, had helped affirm a culture of sexual entitlement in ways that would curdle and metastasize as the aughts went on.”

Gilbert references American Pie as influential in how young men and women were taught to regard sex. Her protracted discussion of the movie reinforces her thematic focus on The Media’s Impact on a Woman’s Sense of Self. While the movie featured a young man’s sexual awakening—creating space for “freedom, friendship, and misadventures”—it obscured the sexual experiences of his female counterparts. Gilbert identifies the film as emblematic of the entire aughts culture, which fetishized youth while eliminating authentic representations of young women.

“And so Nadia—humiliated, entrapped, intimately exposed to an entire town, sent away from the United States in disgrace—never gets to express to Jim what his actions meant to her. Instead, she’s just presumed to have forgiven him and even returns to claim him in the sequel. She’s less a real, authentic character than a prop, a pair, a punch line.”

In this passage, Gilbert delves further into her analysis of American Pie. Instead of following the protagonist Jim’s experience in this passage, Gilbert focuses on the female lead, Nadia’s, storyline. She exposes the truth of Nadia’s experience, which was given little attention in the actual film. In doing so, Gilbert argues that all characters like Nadia were made into “props” and “punch lines.” Such representations of women taught young female viewers that their value originated from their relationships with men.

“The typical dynamic between voyeur and subject was being disrupted by the fact that the camgirls wanted to be looked at, within the security and comfort of their own domestic spaces. ‘This will replace television,’ David Letterman predicted in his interview with Ringley, and he was at least partly right.”

Gilbert examines the relationship between pornography and entertainment throughout the text. In this passage, she explores how conceptual artist Jennifer Ringley’s Jennicam—a 24-hour livestream of Ringley’s private life—impacted the larger culture. She incorporates David Letterman’s commentary on Ringley’s work because his remark is predictive of the era to come—particularly of how women began to represent themselves on social media.

“This was a medium that, during the aughts, watched women, weighed them, waxed them, cut them open, groomed them to be more feminine, trained them to be more ladylike, exposed all their secrets, and built them vast business empires based on persuading other women to do all these things too.”

Gilbert holds that reality television of the 2000s objectified and dehumanized women. In this passage, she traces all of the ways reality series manipulated their female subjects and their female viewers. If women were simply meant to be malleable money-making mannequins, consumers would come to see themselves in the same way.

“The first wave of reality series compelled us to watch. The second wanted us to imagine ourselves through the camera’s unforgiving lens, and its shows had a vested interest in selling us things that might improve the picture.”

Gilbert employs the first-person plural point of view in this passage to incorporate both herself and her audience into her wider cultural commentary. She identifies herself and her readers as members of the larger early-aughts reality television audience. This authorial stance compels the reader to examine how consuming reality shows might have impacted his or her own sense of self.

“It’s only with Wolf and Knapp in mind that I can really wrap my head around the tenor of 2000s diet culture—hypothesizing that it was as cruel as it was, as vicious and prejudiced and uncompromising, because it was weaponizing shame in a way that would neutralize women’s ambitions and agency, as well as protect patriarchal power.”

Gilbert incorporates references to Naomi Wolf’s and Caroline Knapp’s writings into her wider cultural commentary to broaden her overarching argument. These external voices help Gilbert arrive at a larger conclusion regarding the media’s attempts at Manufacturing Women’s Competition for Entertainment Value. If women were consumed by petty fights with each other or dissecting their own bodies, they would be powerless in the face of “patriarchal power.”

“No one is totally immune. Even tweens with enough natural collagen to make a Housewife weep are now begging for antiaging products, comparing their own living faces with the immaculate masks of Instagram and TikTok, and seeing only fallible features in need of a fix.”

Gilbert uses humor and hyperbole to underscore the dangerous impacts of consumerism on young girls. She makes a joke about tweens’ youthful appearances, which lightens the overarching mood while revealing the intense sway that advertising has on young users.

“It’s the female filmmakers, though, who grapple with the most difficult truth of all: that contemporary sexuality has been shaped and informed by a million cultural products and experiences long before any one movie begins. And that for women, true satisfaction might require a drastic reappraisal and redistribution of power.”

Without finger-pointing or blame-casting, Gilbert asserts that women artists must challenge dangerous stereotypes about women. She asserts that such stereotypes don’t originate from one source but span generations of media and entertainment. To alter these dangerous representations, women artists have to disassemble powerful structures—an idea that centers her thematic emphasis on Feminism’s Push for Diverse and Authentic Representations of Women.

“Sontag argued that most of the Abu Ghraib pictures ‘seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography […] And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet—and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.’”

Gilbert alludes to Susan Sontag’s commentary on Abu Ghraib to bolster her own arguments about sex, pornography, and cultural trends. Sontag holds that such sexual violence could only have originated from pornography, which was teaching young men and women to brutalize each other. By incorporating Sontag’s voice into her own writing, Gilbert fortifies her stance and underscores the feminist nature of her own work.

“This cover by itself was telling. People wanted to peer at gorgeous young female stars; they were even willing to pay to do so. But more and more, they were resenting those women for making them look.”

Throughout the text, Gilbert explores how postfeminist culture both urged women toward exhibitionism while simultaneously punishing them for it. This passage refers to an Esquire issue featuring a topless photo of Jessica Simpson on the cover to sell a story about a soldier in Iraq. While the advertising scheme worked, it only reinforced the notion that women were meant to be consumed and marketed, used and scorned.

“But I’m interested, too, in what this moment did to those of us who were simply spectators: curious and even envious of the stars whose degradation was offered up to us as thrilling, perpetual, stakes-free entertainment. How did it condition us to see ourselves?”

Gilbert uses her first-person point of view and the first-person plural perspective to humanize her explorations. While Gilbert largely leaves herself off the page, she does at times incorporate her own questions, thoughts, and commentaries.

“Disgust is one of the most powerful human responses and one of the least studied. The history of misogyny is defined by expressions of repulsion toward women and their bodies—pervasive ideas across culture, art, and religion that we are somehow unclean or putrid or, to use a term that was weaponized against Hillary Clinton, ‘nasty.’”

Gilbert’s reflections on disgust reiterate the importance of Feminism’s Push for Diverse and Authentic Representations of Women. While patriarchal systems and misogynistic thought capitalized on a woman’s shame, Gilbert holds that such negative representations of women are inaccurate. She puts the term “nasty” in quotations to convey its simultaneous meaninglessness and power.

“A necessary process for women writers during this moment was acknowledging that the mythology of contemporary womanhood was entirely false, in order to create something less pretty and more truthful.”

Gilbert argues in the name of progress throughout Girl on Girl. She holds that in order to disrupt stereotypes about women, women must begin by acknowledging the flaws in these stereotypes. In this passage, Gilbert gives a call to action to women in general, and women writers in particular.

“Ultimately, it’s not surprising that so many artists in the 2010s, having experienced a decade in which the most intimate details of women’s turbulent lives were appropriated callously for entertainment, decided to claim ownership of their own narratives before others could do so. Or that they often chose to deconstruct storytelling itself to try to approximate the fragmented, chaotic nature of what being alive felt like.”

In Chapter 8, Gilbert examines the work of Lena Dunham and Sheila Heti to underscore Feminism’s Push for Diverse and Authentic Representations of Women. Gilbert positions Dunham and Heti’s work as a direct reaction to the appropriation of the decade prior. Instead of disparaging these artists’ experimental and autofictional projects—as the media has throughout their careers—Gilbert presents Dunham and Heti as artistic heroes and feminist role models of their time.

“None of this had happened just by accident. Rather, the glossy misogyny of the aughts coupled with the internet’s flourishing pop-feminist spaces had led both to extensive discourse about how women were portrayed and perceived and to a roiling sense of discontent with the status quo.”

In this passage, Gilbert provides answers to some of the questions she laid out for herself in the introduction. She began the text asking why women were treated so cruelly throughout the aughts and why representations of women evolved thereafter. As she brings the text to a close, Gilbert concludes her analysis of the 1990s and 2000s by defining the contemporary cultural moment.

“But the girlboss was also cursed from the start because she was essentially a figurehead—as much a branding tool as Mr Muscle or Tony the Tiger. For much of the 2010s, feminism was chic, and the empowering symbol of a woman succeeding in business was the ultimate key to media attention, good PR, and—most crucially—juiced-up sales.”

Gilbert’s analysis of the concept of girlboss parallels her exploration of the Girl Power slogan at the text’s start. Just as the Girl Power ethos was co-opted and diluted, she argues the girlboss idea quickly proved vapid. It turned into a marketing scheme, using women to brand products rather than enabling them to make real change or establish real influence in the workforce.

“But what’s become clearer since I started my research is that popular culture is a strikingly predictive and transformative force with regard to the status of women and other historically marginalized groups. The things we watch, listen to, read, wear, write, and share dictate in large part how we internalize and project what we’re worth.”

In the closing sequences of the text, Gilbert reiterates her overarching arguments. At the start of Girl on Girl, Gilbert questions the relevance of culture to identity. In Chapter 10, she asserts that culture creates the self. Therefore, if a culture were to promote alternative ideas and more diverse representations of the human experience, new modes of behavior and interpersonal relationships might result.

“We each of us have decades of internal wiring informed by the works we grew up with. And so we need to expand our conception of what power for women looks like. We need to rewrite the archetypes and the narratives, all the way down to the bones. And in many ways, this rewriting is already happening.”

Gilbert incorporates another call to action in the final chapter of her text, urging her readers to reframe dangerous mythologies about women to create cultural change. However, she doesn’t simply put the onus on her audience. Instead, she uses the first person plural to include herself in the same cultural agenda.