Girl on Girl

How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

De: Sophie Gilbert

Narrado por: Sophie Gilbert

Named a most anticipated book of Spring by Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Bustle, LitHub, Our Culture, Kirkus, AV Club and WNYC

From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of early aughts pop culture

What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.

Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and “riot grrrl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Mining the darker side of nostalgia, Gilbert trains her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the leering gaze of the paparazzi to the gleeful cruelty of early reality TV and a burgeoning internet culture vicious toward women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period’s dominant themes back to the rise of internet porn, which gained widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.

The result is a devastating portrait of a time when a distinctly American blend of excess, materialism, and power worship collided with the culture’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and continues to shape our world today.

©2025 Sophie Gilbert (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Amid pervasive rollbacks to women’s rights in America, Gilbert . . . mounts a powerful argument that millennial pop culture ‘turned a generation of women against themselves.’”—The New York Times

“The book takes a hard look at the pop culture of the late ‘90s and early 2000s—the explosion of tabloid photography, increasingly cruel and ceaseless commentary on celebrity blogs, sexualization of young women by the media, etc.—and the lasting damage it has done to modern women and, possibly, the feminist movement itself. It's a book that will make you think, and want to discuss.”—Glamour

“Add this book to the list of titles that urgently provide context and answers to the hell storm that is [vaguely waves around] everything going on right now . . .Gilbert unmasks the collective regression that continues to influence our views on misogyny, feminism, and womanhood today.”—Harper’s Bazaar

Very lucid, clever, bright

This a very timely, urgent read. Nobody in their right mind would dismiss pop culture as a social force, but Sophie Gilbert will give you the why, when, how and who. Porn, movies, pop music, marketing, politics, culture are all examined with care and knowledge.
The incredible power of internet and the rise of an unhealthy idea of self love that tends to make women market themselves, is exposed in smart, often funny prose. and the author's demeanor (she reads her own book) is friendly and clear.
I can't recommend it enough.
As a Mexican, I would add that narco culture also permeates the atmosphere and the way women shape —literally, with the use of plastic surgery— themselves, but maybe this situation only prevalent in Latin America, although there are some gestures that cross the border (the exaggerated breasts and hips, lips an lashes, etc.)