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

Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves is a work of cultural criticism by British journalist Sophie Gilbert. Originally published by Penguin Press in 2025, Girl on Girl examines how early-aughts media influenced women. Gilbert incorporates pop-culture references and entertainment analyses to fuel the text’s themes of the Media’s Impact on a Woman’s Sense of Self, Feminism’s Push for Diverse and Authentic Representations of Women, and Manufacturing Women’s Competition for Entertainment Value.

Gilbert is an arts, culture, and entertainment journalist for The Atlantic. In 2022, she was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, and in 2024, she won the National Magazine Award. Girl on Girl is her second book publication, and was preceded by her 2023 essay collection On Womanhood.

This guide refers to the 2025 Penguin Press hardback edition of the text.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of sexual content, cursing, gender discrimination, sexual violence, emotional abuse, graphic violence, mental illness, disordered eating, antigay bias, illness, and death.

Summary

Girl on Girl is organized into an introduction and 10 titled, numbered chapters. The text follows a chronological structure, tracing the evolution of pop culture from the 1990s through the 2010s and beyond.

Gilbert introduces her reasons for writing Girl on Girl as a journalist and culture critic. Fascinated by the abject cruelty shown toward women throughout the 2000s, she wanted to understand where this cultural climate originated. She set out to answer this question, unearthing new revelations about what it meant to be a woman during the early and mid-aughts.

Gilbert analyzes the shift between 1990s music and 2000s music, arguing that while the music industry of the 1990s created more space for women to express their views and to challenge predominant misogynistic ideas, the 2000s did not. Gilbert references pop stars of the 1980s and 1990s, like Madonna, to convey how women in these eras represented both sex and desire in their music. She analyzes how Madonna’s unprecedented work was received, contrasting it with the ways stars of the following generation, like Britney Spears, were manipulated and abused by the media. Gilbert holds that female pop stars of the 2000s had no real autonomy. She asserts that postfeminist ideals bastardized the real social activism of third-wave feminism, co-opting once-critical notions like “Girl Power” and diluting them for consumerist gain.

Gilbert goes on to explore the influence that pornography had on the music, film, and fashion industries throughout the 2000s, focusing on fashion photographer Terry Richardson’s impact. Gilbert argues that work like Richardson’s—which embraced pornographic imagery—normalized blatant sexual representations of women across the media, which taught women to view themselves as sexual objects. She believes that the more sexualized fashion, advertising, and art became, the more intense pornography itself had to become.

Gilbert analyzes how film impacted the way women saw themselves and each other in the aughts. She focuses on the 1999 teen-sex comedy American Pie, arguing that the box office success of this film’s narrative inspired countless others like it throughout the 2000s. Films of this era focused more on male sexual awakenings than on those of believable female characters like those depicted in the rom-coms of the 1990s. She holds that sexual comedies of the 2000s taught men that women were objects to be won and manipulated, and that sex was an adventurous rite of passage. Women’s sexual desires or awakenings were not given the same space in film.

Gilbert argues that the movies of the 2000s gave way to televised misrepresentations of women throughout the era. She offers examples of the ways female television characters were represented as catty, vapid, and lacking in any true substance. She believes the television industry capitalized on the post-9/11 era, throughout which the American public was desperate to escape global conflicts and politics. The only goal for major networks, she says, was to create television that could amass viewers. Reality television shows taught the public that laypeople should aspire to be famous. These shows focused on selling luxury products and lifestyles to their viewers, who were predominantly women.

Reality television shows of the 2000s, Gilbert argues, also embraced New Traditionalist values. New Traditionalism is a school of thought that promotes conventional gender roles and particularly emphasizes a return to traditional gender roles for women in the home rather than the workplace. Gilbert references Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? and The Bachelor by way of example. Such shows reinforced the stereotype that a woman’s worth is measured by the wealth and caliber of the men she’s able to attract, and her ability to win the attention of men over other women. Reality series like The Biggest Loser, America’s Next Top Model, and Extreme Makeover reinforced the idea that women were inherently flawed and should focus on manipulating their appearances and bodies to achieve confidence, contentment, romance, and professional success.  

Gilbert widens her discussion by analyzing the work of comedian and filmmaker Lena Dunham and writer Sheila Heti. She considers Dunham’s film Tiny Furniture and television series Girls—analyzing the style, narrative, and message of each. She likens Dunham’s work to Heti’s autofictional novel How Should a Person Be?, arguing that both artists were reacting to postfeminism and trying to create something new.

In the final chapters of the text, Gilbert imagines a new era for women. She describes all of the difficulties women have faced throughout the 2000s, and seeks opportunities for change in the future. Despite the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and Donald Trump’s re-election to the United States presidency in 2024, Gilbert remains hopeful. She believes that together women can fight for more accurate representations of their experience.