49 pages • 1-hour read
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination, emotional abuse, and sexual violence.
Media’s Impact on a Woman’s Sense of Self
Girl on Girl explores the ways early-aughts media influenced how women were allowed to see themselves via a range of cultural contexts—including sex, beauty, work, and art. Beginning in the early half of the decade, Gilbert examines how women were represented in film, music, television, and literature. She argues that women were actively objectified, disparaged, and dehumanized in all mediums, leaning into pop-culture references to back her assertion. By using allusions to Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Jennifer Ringley, Lena Dunham, and Sheila Heti, among others, Gilbert holds that no matter how women conducted themselves or represented their experience, they were devalued. In turn, young female consumers of this media were taught to see themselves in a negative light.
Gilbert’s empathetic authorial tone formally challenges the media’s negative representation of girlhood and womanhood and argues for rebelling against patriarchal systems of thought. Because the mass media of the aughts was defined by male desire and the male gaze, women were trained to see themselves as inherently flawed sexual objects and to regard their work, thoughts, and opinions as inferior to those of their male counterparts. This mode of thinking, Gilbert holds, reflects the tenets of postfeminism, co-opting “words such as liberation and choice to sell women ‘an airbrushed, highly sexualized, and increasingly narrow vision of femininity’—one in which we were expected to choose a life of being both willing objects and easy targets” (xv-xvi). She frames postfeminism as a reaction to third-wave feminism, suggesting that a woman’s strength and value lie in exposing herself; yet this same exhibitionism, Gilbert avers, caused women to be shamed and disparaged by the media. Because women were not offered truly powerful, capable models of womanhood, they were disadvantaged. Gilbert goes so far as to identify the cruelty toward women that pervaded 2000s media as a direct cause of Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 presidential campaign. She implies that the media a population consumes teaches that population how to perceive themselves and each other. Men were taught to abuse and disdain women, while women were taught to hate themselves and distrust one another.
In the final sequences of the text, Gilbert creates space for change, implying that if the media has the power to “condition us to see ourselves” (181) in a particular way, women artists should create art that presents women more empathetically. She references television shows like Orange Is the New Black and Fleabag as works that featured “dark, uncontained, shockingly human female characters” (275). The more dimensionally the media represents women, she argues, the more dimensionally women might see themselves and other women.
Feminism’s Push for Diverse and Authentic Representations of Women
Throughout the text, Gilbert balances her cultural critiques with suggestions for how feminism might disrupt negative representations of girlhood and womanhood. In her closing remarks in Chapter 10, Gilbert asserts: “For everything I found in my research that felt bleak, or even horrifying, there was more that affirmed how culture can expand our understanding of the world and our sense of what’s possible. And the more platforms we have, the greater the diversity of ideas we’re exposed to” (284). This hopeful passage underscores Gilbert’s overarching argument that women have the power to fight for more accurate representations of their experience. To do so, however, women must upend the stories they have been raised with. Women artists in particular must disseminate work that educates women about their inherent value and creates room for self-exploration outside the context of the male gaze.
Gilbert consistently relies on the writings of other thinkers, journalists, and artists to enact the important work feminists might accomplish using their voices and platforms. She references Jessica Hopper’s essay Punk Planet, Kris Kraus’s I Love Dick, Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? to illustrate the power of studying other women’s social commentaries. Such writings—as well as countless other Gilbert references throughout the text—bolster Gilbert’s belief in the power of solid feminist ideologies.
Gilbert treats her own writing as an act of feminist rebellion and representation. As she delves into the lives, work, experiences, and influence of female cultural figures throughout the aughts, Gilbert treats their stories with respect and their lives with dignity. In devoting concerted time on the page to examining women’s work, Gilbert upholds her overarching belief in the power of women to create change for themselves. “Girls are allowed to be vulnerable,” she holds—“to overshare, to overanalyze, to unburden themselves, to embarrass themselves, to fail” (207). Women, too, Gilbert implies, are allowed to explore, deviate, and rebel on the road to more accurate and diverse representations of their eclectic experiences.
Gilbert references the #MeToo movement throughout Girl on Girl to situate her feminist commentary in a contemporary context. The movement, Gilbert holds, “was enormously influential” and “added a real sense of urgency to the effort of exposing men who were abusing their power” (280). The movement was also founded on the belief that women had the right to tell their own stories. Gilbert takes this notion a step further by showing in the text’s final chapters that women’s stories aren’t limited to the abuse they’ve suffered, but should also present the grittier and even the more banal aspects of living in a woman’s body.
Manufacturing Women’s Competition for Entertainment Value
Gilbert’s protracted examination of early-aughts movies, music, and television shows reinforces her view that American culture during this period exploited women for economic gain and entertainment value. In music videos, the tabloids, and reality television series, women were represented as catty, vain, vapid, and weak. By voiding women of their self-worth, the media taught an entire generation of female viewers that they were no better than the men they could attract or the weight they could lose. Gilbert argues that the Bridget Jones character is an archetype of this postfeminist era, always depicted as “counting calories, agonizing over the choice between a lacy thong and a pair of control-top granny panties, and never managing to actually read Backlash” (102). The same ideas about women led to how women were represented and treated in reality television. Gilbert devotes large swaths of Girl on Girl to examining popular reality series, including Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?, Extreme Makeover, The Real Housewives, Biggest Loser, Big Brother, and America’s Next Top Model, to show how such programming pitted women against other women. As a result, women learned that their substance was directly tied to the malleability of their bodies, the brands they consumed, and the men they attracted and slept with.
Gilbert goes on to argue that such entertainment was an active form of disempowerment. She asserts that “[o]ne of the reasons celebrity coverage”—and reality television—“exploded during the aughts was that people craved distraction” (181). Instead of encouraging a population of women to engage with ongoing global politics, the media compelled women to engage in mindless shopping or the public shaming of contestants on reality television. This media kept women oriented away from real social, political, and cultural issues and focused on vapid shows designed only to amass viewers and increase profit. Gilbert’s writing and research imply that if women are focused on battling each other on television or online, they will not have the time or energy to respond to larger-scale issues or to fight for change on their own behalf.
As she does throughout the text, Gilbert creates room for the possibility that women can change how they see and relate to one another. Near the end of Girl on Girl, Gilbert references Marie Calloway’s essay “Adrien Brody” to emphasize that what women can be doing is re-creating “with quite gnarly honesty, their experiences of twenty-first-century womanhood; prob[ing] the conditions they’re living under; and forc[ing] their way into an artistic realm that has not historically welcomed them” (227). Aughts culture attempted to keep women silent, preoccupied, and disempowered, but going forward, women must be aware that the media might be dictating their regard for themselves and others to fight for community over competition.
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