Girl on Girl

How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

By: Sophie Gilbert

Narrated by: Sophie Gilbert

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

Critic reviews

“In this triumphant debut, Pulitzer finalist Gilbert dissects three decades of pop culture, from the Riot Grrrl 1990s to the #Girlboss 2010s . . . a tour de force of cultural criticism.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Gilbert deserves a medal—not only for her observations and conclusions, but for navigating the sludge she had to wade through to get there. Essential cultural criticism.”—Kirkus (starred review)

“Girl on Girl is a work of overwhelming meticulousness and clarity. If you’re confused about the current uncertainty about feminism’s power, Sophie Gilbert has done the work of painstakingly and granularly tracing every cultural thread to reveal how we got here. Gilbert unmasks an insidious cultural coup that seemingly overnight dethroned the transgressive women of the 90s; 'Just like that they were gone–replaced by girls,' she writes. Over and over, Gilbert reminds us: it wasn’t always this bad–in fact, it was getting better, then it got taken away. Girl on Girl is a necessary corrective of cultural memory, but more importantly, it is a definitive archive of that disempowerment and its ensuing cruelties.”—Elamin Abdelmahmoud, host of CBC’s Commotion and author of Son of Elsewhere