49 pages • 1-hour read
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
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Introduction-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment.
Introduction Summary
Sophie Gilbert describes key cultural events that occurred in 1999, the year she was 16. Britney Spears was featured in Rolling Stone, a nude image of Scottish TV presenter Gail Porter in FHM magazine was projected on the Houses of Parliament, and American Beauty was released. She muses on how these events defined representations of women throughout the era to come and led to other cultural touchstones throughout the aughts and beyond, including #MeToo and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Referencing these topics, Gilbert describes her reasons for writing Girl on Girl and how the project evolved as she worked.
Gilbert reflects on how the defining cultural events of the early aughts were related to postfeminism. She explores the origin of postfeminism as a reaction to feminism itself, encouraging women to embrace sex, consumerism, and archetypically girly, sexy appearances. She references the Spice Girls and Sex and the City by way of example. She cites Susan Faludi’s and Natasha Walter’s writings on the women’s movement and third-wave feminism in their respective books Backlash and Living Dolls to examine how changing ideas about womanhood led to the culture’s cruelty toward women throughout the 2000s.
Gilbert explains why she structured the text chronologically and describes how she will approach her subsequent explorations. She alludes to topics she will touch on throughout the text, including pornography, the music industry, and cinema and television.
Chapter 1 Summary: “Girl Power, Boy Rage: Music and Feminism in the 1990s”
Gilbert explores the representation of women in the music industry starting in the 1990s. She echoes the points made by Jessica Hopper’s essay “Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t,” arguing that women disappeared from music during the aughts, immediately following a notable representation of women’s voices and experience in the 1990s.
Gilbert remarks on Madonna’s single “Justify My Love” and its accompanying music video, citing Madonna’s work as a direct reaction to New Traditionalism, which touted the revival of old-world values, stressing that a woman’s place was in the home. She references Janet Jackson’s “Anytime, Any Place” video from the same year, as well as videos and lyrics by TLC, Mary J. Blige, and Lil’ Kim during the same period as additional “assertion[s] of revolutionary sexual power and equality” (5).
Gilbert explores the emergence of the “Girl Power” slogan, which was coined by Tobi Vail, the Bikini Kill drummer. She considers how the slogan evolved and links it to the emergence of the riot-grrrl era. She notes that the riot-grrrl scene was notable for its secrecy, which contrasted with postfeminism’s messaging of exposure. By the late 1990s, she argues, the concept of Girl Power lost its original meaning and weight.
Gilbert continues exploring representations of sex and sexuality in music, particularly in relation to women of color. She references Kimberlé Crenshaw’s idea of intersectionality to discuss discrimination in the media. In late 1980s hip-hop culture, for example, women of color were both disparaged and hyper-sexualized. In the 1990s, women rappers started responding to this discrimination and began to present alternate versions of Black womanhood in their music. Many women artists used music to express both their deep personal experiences and their anger.
Gilbert asserts that even as women’s voices gained traction in 1990s pop music, male rappers continued objecting to their female counterparts. Gilbert references songs by Korn and Eminem that, she argues, contributed to a culture of hatred toward women, holding that the music people listen to influences how they see the world—and women in particular.
The Lillith Fair, an all-female music festival founded in 1997 by singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan, raised millions of dollars “for women’s charities” (23), but was constantly disparaged by the media. The fair’s end in 1999 after only two years deeply impacted women artists, Gilbert holds. The tour was later revived in the summer of 2010.
Gilbert examines how pornography influenced the music industry throughout the early aughts, noting scenes she views as pornographic in Lil’ Kim’s and Britney Spears’s work. Gilbert holds that the evolution of the music industry throughout these years was a response to women claiming and using their voices. Strong women’s voices were silenced or replaced by inexperienced teenage girls.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Show Girl: Overexposure in the New Millennium”
Gilbert continues her examination of pornography’s influence on early-aughts culture. In 2004, photographer Terry Richardson rose to greater prominence when the Deitch Projects gallery showed his work in conjunction with his book Terryworld’s publication. The book featured photos of Kate Moss and described the culture’s “defining aesthetic: porno chic” (28). While many found Richardson’s work unsettling at the time, Gilbert argues that it now seems typical of the aughts, with its flattened, overtly sexualized representations of its subjects.
Gilbert explores how Richardson’s work influenced other areas of culture, particularly the fashion industry. She references Kate Moss’s work and Brian McNair’s Striptease Culture book, which analyzed representations of pornography. Gilbert describes the direct impact of this cultural moment on women, noting how major fashion brands like Abercrombie & Fitch and Victoria’s Secret were later exposed for their mistreatment of female models.
Gilbert notes the dichotomies of the aughts culture, which stressed exposure but also shamed women for embracing their bodies or sexuality. While some exposure was treated as positive, other types of exposure were maligned. For example, Annie Leibovitz’s nude pregnancy photos of Demi Moore inspired many women to embrace and publicize their pregnancies similarly. However, when the sex tape Pamela Anderson made with her husband, Tommy Lee, was stolen and disseminated without her permission, she was publicly shamed. Gilbert considers how women had to intentionally disassociate from their sexual experiences to avoid derision. Madonna, for example, invented her alter ego, Dita, for her book Sex.
Gilbert continues to analyze the relationship between porn and fashion by considering the influence of the zine Dazed and Confused. Although the publication was originally meant as a reaction to the synthetic, mainstream culture, sex remained central to its content. Over time, Gilbert argues, pornography, art, and fashion became increasingly indistinguishable. Gilbert holds that the more pornographic art and fashion became, the more intense pornography had to become in turn.
Introduction-Chapter 2 Analysis
In the opening sections of Girl on Girl, Gilbert offers overarching social commentary on 2000s culture, introducing her thematic exploration of the Media’s Impact on a Woman’s Sense of Self. In the introduction, Gilbert uses her own experience to contextualize this relationship between culture and identity. The text begins, “In 1999, the year I turned sixteen, there were three cultural events that seemed to define what it meant to be a young woman—a girl—facing down the new millennium” (ix). Articulating her own retrospective experience allows Gilbert to consider how popular culture impacted her own coming-of-age journey and extrapolate it to the broader experiences of young girls growing up in this period. She argues that figures like Britney Spears, Gail Porter, Madonna, and the Spice Girls defined how girls and young women were meant to see themselves. Gilbert acknowledges that her adolescent mind wasn’t analyzing the impact of her culture on her understanding of womanhood, but her authorial stance creates space to reflect on and to analyze this intersectionality. With the benefit of hindsight, she believes, the way women were represented in the media taught men how to treat women and taught women how they were meant to see and carry themselves.
Gilbert incorporates cultural references and entertainment allusions to bolster her argument. She intersperses brief references to her own thought processes with detailed descriptions of 2000s culture—including specific music videos, fashion icons, or photographic exhibitions. In doing so, Gilbert formally enacts the inextricable relationship between culture and identity. In Chapter 1, for example, Gilbert delves into the origin and evolution of “Girl Power” in punk culture, using a more objective, journalistic lens to explore how the 1990s created space for women to claim their voices, bodies, and experiences. She follows that analysis with authorial intrusion—a literary technique in which the author addresses the reader directly within the text—and remarks on her own research: “I’ve always wondered why people diminish girlhood as somehow cosseted or twee, when the reality of coming-of-age as a young woman is so raw, filled with emotional violence, and literal blood” (8). Here, Gilbert allows her first-person voice onto the page, humanizing her explorations. She is claiming her own voice while remarking on the early 2000s cultural attempts to silence women who “[took] control of their art, their image, and their careers” (26). As she both identifies with the grittier aspects of girlhood and interrogates cultural misrepresentations of it, her voice acts as a counter to the dilution of “Girl Power” and the infantilization of young women’s experiences.
Gilbert also uses cultural references to explore Feminism’s Push for Diverse and Authentic Representations of Women. In the introduction, Gilbert recognizes that although women were poorly represented and actively disparaged throughout the early aughts, it’s important to unearth ways women were also fighting back: “We try to understand all the ways in which things went wrong so that we can conceive of a more powerful way forward” (xix). Gilbert’s authorial tone mirrors that of the women artists and thinkers she references throughout Chapters 1 and 2. For example, although women were actively denigrated for claiming their voices with their art, an artist like Madonna used her work to react to cultural anxiety “regarding the idea that sex could literally kill you” (3). To Madonna, Gilbert argues, “sexuality was synonymous with power” (5). Similarly, Gilbert asserts that Annie Leibovitz’s pregnancy photos of Demi Moore created opportunities for authentic representation of women’s experiences. These photos “transformed the way pregnancy was portrayed in culture, destigmatizing women’s bodies and encouraging a new kind of frankness regarding the physical state of gestating a child” (37). Gilbert references such artists to convey how strong feminist voices can continue fighting for diversity and authenticity amidst a culture that attempts to shame and silence them.
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