Girl on Girl

How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

De: Sophie Gilbert

Narrado por: Sophie Gilbert

“Searing… rigorously researched but never stuffy… Gilbert has compiled perhaps the first comprehensive examination of turn-of-the-millennium mainstream, cool-kid trends and ephemera, and how they were largely molded by those in power to sell a generation of girls and young women reality-warping lies.”—The New York Times

“So clear-eyed that it’s startling."—The Washington Post

“Entertaining and even energizing, transforming a dismal history into something like a rallying cry.”—The Boston Globe

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

“Searing . . . There were several passages in Gilbert’s blistering, sobering book Girl on Girl that challenged my selective nostalgia, making me wince. If you too came of age around the late 1990s and early aughts, prepare to have the balloon string of sentimentality pried from your grip. The party’s over. It’s been over . . . Her book is a course correction of sorts, taking a holistic tack to explain our current sociopolitical reality: one in which women’s hard-fought gains are quickly eroding, and men and boys are in crisis . . . Across 10 rigorously researched but never stuffy chapters, Gilbert has compiled perhaps the first comprehensive examination of turn-of-the-millennium mainstream, cool-kid trends and ephemera, and how they were largely molded by those in power to sell a generation of girls and young women reality-warping lies . . . Gilbert isn’t concerned with softening the blow. Instead, she’s intent on snapping millennials out of any instinct to idealize the decades that shaped us—even if that awareness stings.”—New York Times

“So clear-eyed that it’s startling . . . Girl on Girl covers how American culture writ large treated women from the 1990s to the 2010s. It’s to Gilbert’s credit that she makes a cohesive history emerge from this morass of references . . . Her organization is as confident and nimble as her arguments . . . The informed and persuasive essays in Girl on Girl stand alone, even as they build on one another. A chapter on the early years of reality television is exceptional . . . This ground is well-trod, but rarely trod so well . . . Gilbert is a critic skilled in the art of seeing close-up and faraway all at once, a Vertigo effect of cultural observation. Girl on Girl doesn’t settle into outrage or pity, but instead offers a clear-eyed, unblinking stare that conveys one thing: I see what you’re doing.”—The Washington Post

“Gilbert, a staff writer at the Atlantic, meticulously documents the explosion of highly sexualized content in mainstream American culture . . . A reminder of where we come from as a culture, and a reinvigorating exhortation not to return there.”—Los Angeles Times

Riveting! Well, researched…

I will be recommending this to all of my clients. Especially the males. It will give them perspective. The porn culture has been with us for 50 years. Or 60 years, depending on who’s counting. When tropic of cancer was banded and then made available, I remember all the fuss. I never read the book until a few weeks ago. Henri Miller was a talented writer, but that book shines a huge light on the misogyny of the male culture. It was stunning and the misogyny and the basement of females. Oh well! When we have a sex offender as a president, we’re not on the right track.

Eye opening

Despite the heaviness of the content, I found myself often smiling when listening because I felt seen. Through Sophie’s writing, I see how much I (a millennial) have been influenced by the pop culture context I grew up in and can now untangle it, see it from afar and separate myself (or at least start to separate) from the thoughts I thought were my own.

Hard to imagine that we would be sliding so far backward but this perfectly articulated why.

love it and will recommend to mothers of young girls. it's beautifully narrated by the author.

Millennial women needed this book.

Thank you for writing such a beautiful, well thought out and researched work. It’s such an achievement. And very helpful.

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.)

So many things make so much more sense now.

I listened to this book in just three days, it felt like uncovering a map that helped me understand how we arrived at so many of our current predicaments. I deeply appreciated the journey! I also enjoyed the author’s narration style just as much as her writing.

Why did I download this book?

This book is a slog. I can’t remember why I purchased it (I believe I heard about it on a Podcast), but it is totally without charm and nuance. I made it a few chapters and then I realized that is all there is…