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

Sophie Gilbert, a London-based journalist who writes for The Atlantic, is the author of Girl on Girl. Since earning her graduate degree in journalism from New York University, Gilbert has written primarily about television, culture, and literature. She served internship positions at Slate and Vogue when she was a graduate student, and later began writing about entertainment for similar publications.

In Girl on Girl, Gilbert explores how the movies, television shows, music, and literature of the early aughts impacted an entire generation of women and feminism at large. In her introduction, Gilbert says that with her book, she wanted “to reframe recent history in a way that might enhance my own perspective. But what became clear was how neatly culture, feminism, and history run on parallel tracks, informing, disrupting, and even derailing each other” (xiii). For Gilbert, writing is a way to question, think, and explore ideas. Her interrogative stance is reflected throughout the text. Gilbert believed her book would corroborate her preexisting ideas but admits that she discovered otherwise. Her confessional tone conveys her willingness to test her own theories. Gilbert employs this journalistic approach throughout the text, consistently creating room for ideas that do not necessarily align with her own preconceptions.