Sarah Banet-Weiser

The other day, I was asked by a friend for some advice.  Her teenager had recently transitioned and now had a new gender identity and name.  My friend asked me whether she should leave older photos of her child—before transitioning—on a social media account.  My immediate thought was to get rid of the pictures; I was afraid that they would make the teenager too vulnerable.  After all, it is widely documented that girls, women, people of color, and transgender and nonbinary people are the dominant targets of racist, misogynist, and transphobic comments online, comments that frequently jump from the online space into offline spaces, creating a cultural context where marginalized folks often feel extremely vulnerable and unsafe.  

Sophie Gilbert’s book Girl on Girl offers us a historical accounting of this cultural context, connecting it explicitly to popular media productions.  In the book, she traces the ways that women and girls have been made the targets of surveillance through the media, ranging from reality television to girlbosses to influencers and beyond.  She demonstrates, with astute analyses and pertinent examples, how the heightened visibility of supposedly “empowered” women in popular media positions them in evermore precarious and vulnerable ways, often setting them up for very public failures. Indeed, Gilbert offers a compelling argument that these public failures are not an unfortunate effect of the mediated visibility of “empowered” women but rather are an integral part of the logic of visibility. 

For example, in the epigraph to chapter 4, Gilbert quotes Michel Foucault: “visibility is a trap.” While this chapter is obviously about visibility, the trap of visibility is, I believe, the underlying theme of the entire book.  Indeed, as I have argued in Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, visibility is double-sided in a media context, where it often works as both an action and a reaction; women who “put themselves out there” are also positioned as targets of surveillance and often violence. Visibility could be considered the defining impulse of gender politics in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (the primary periods that are covered in the book).  From television to film to digital media, the visibility of different versions of femininity created and circulated in these varied media are intended to unravel, to reveal the “scam” and “delusion” that women should claim power and influence.  As Gilbert so rightly points out with many examples, it is this unraveling that is ultimately the point.  The highly visible, mediated spectacle of the “empowered woman,” in effect, invites misogynistic cultural backlash.  Because mediated spectacles of female empowerment (usually represented, as Gilbert argues, by white, young, and thin women) exceed our actual empowerment, the resulting political effect is a fortification of already-existing patriarchal and misogynistic structures. That is, the illusion that popular media offers their audience (that women are empowered) suggests that we don’t need resistance to structural change and gendered inequities; indeed, mediated representations of “empowered” women suggest that these inequities no longer exist.

Gilbert discusses media visibility in expansive and compelling ways, but another crucial element in the trap of visibility involves the material conditions of this visibility: mediated spectacles of “empowered women,” whether represented through reality television or Instagram and TikTok, mobilize capitalist institutions to monetize this visibility, to commercialize and brand female power. It is the matrix of capitalist infrastructures and the contexts in which women are seen–themselves formed by media, economics, and culture–that privilege an investment in the visible feminine self. This self is constantly scrutinized and evaluated by the mechanisms of media–from gossip outlets such as TMZ to online comments and feedback.  This visible, evaluated, and often branded feminine self is simultaneously encouraged by the empowerment discourse of women “having it all” or “leaning in.”  This dynamic of first encouraging and then regulating the visible self while simultaneously producing this self as empowered works not only to serve up bodies as commodities but also lionizes the individualized, entrepreneurial self.  

Yet, I would also argue that it is not simply that a particular version of heterofemininity is branded and commodified. Rather, there are other material economic impacts of this hypervisible hegemonic femininity.  In just one example, gendered ageism has become such a truism it is almost comical. Media representations of cisgender women over the age of forty have historically emphasized their lack of societal value and diminishing erotic appeal, while older cisgender men have, conversely, been depicted as distinguished and desirably masculine. There are memes and T-shirts about Leonardo DiCaprio’s pattern of breaking up with girlfriends as soon as they turn twenty-five (he is fifty); Amy Schumer had a comedy skit featuring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Patricia Arquette, and Tina Fey celebrating their fortieth birthdays as their “last f*ckable day” in Hollywood; and there are many more examples. Except the humor fades once we better understand the very real, material, and often financial consequences resulting from such discrimination; ageism faced by mature women at work has significant financial costs. Couple this with conservatives’ decades-long attacks on Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare and the disproportionate effects on women become more severe. AARP reports that nearly 75 percent of women over the age of fifty report experiences of age discrimination, which is compounded by race, body type, and other marks of identity. In other words, the media landscape is but one factor in the social construction and perception of gender and ideal femininity. 

Gilbert focuses on this media landscape, rather than more formal political representation or the law to understand the social construction of gender during the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  And the examples are compelling and convincing to be sure. However, the media is created and received not as inoculation but rather as what Stuart Hall called a “terrain of struggle,” a struggle that engages other cultural and political factors in a broader conjuncture. Her questions about how the media landscape helped to equip women with a guide for feminine success (and failure) are crucial ones.  Yet, while there is some mention of feminist resistance in the book (especially with the discussion of riot grrrls), there was much more activism occurring during the early twenty-first century than Gilbert’s account suggests.  Digital media in particular has afforded spaces for cultural struggles and has often worked to expose sexist and racist practices and policies, as well as given feminist authors and activists a platform that is accessible and available.[1]  This alternative media circulation and feminist visibility implies that ideologies and practices of feminism are increasingly tolerated by mainstream culture (although as we see in the current cultural and political moment, feminist progression is hardly guaranteed and often is turned backward). 

Returning to the notion of the trap of visibility and the advice I gave my friend about social media images, it is important that we understand this dynamic in a nuanced way.  Mediated visibility of female empowerment is not simply a trap (i.e. promised as good but actually bad), but rather both good and bad for women, laden with both vulnerability and opportunity. Feminist media scholars have been sitting with and in that messy ambivalence for many years, reckoning with what it means that digital media technologies and platforms and ecologies simultaneously equip and unravel possibilities for feminist resistance. Recognizing the ambivalence of visibility, as well as the other cultural, economic and political forces that offer context to that heightened visibility, is especially urgent in the current moment—a time when feminist scholarship is under violent attack and when far-right actors insist that gender is simple and can only be understood biologically.  Indeed, the fact that many feminist scholars work to not only articulate the complexity of gender but also the political contradictions of visibility, offers the possibility of a different kind of unraveling than by the mediated spectacle of the “empowered woman;” an unraveling that gestures towards a different, and more feminist, media landscape.

[1] See, e.g., work by Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles; Moya Bailey; and Catherine Knight Steele.

All generations, as they come of age, begin to comb suspiciously through the myths of their childhood. Children know that grown-ups are lying to them, and as they reach young adulthood, they finally have the perspective and the skill set to figure out what those lies were. For millennials over the past ten years, that has meant a laser focus on the strange prim raunchiness of the Bush-era 2000s.

What happened in that time? All those sneering, salivating tabloid articles about bimbos and nymphos; all those lad mags and radio shock jocks discussing what plastic surgery female celebrities should get; the Freudian horrorscape of the white-gowned purity balls where girls pledged to remain virgins under their fathers’ watchful eyes. In podcasts like You’re Wrong About, documentaries like Framing Britney Spears, and my own essay series The Purity Chronicles, we have analyzed those years obsessively, as if they were a fever dream from which we have just awoken.

We were the idealistic children of the baby boomers, and yet we spent our most formative years marinating in sleazy, reactionary misogyny. What did it do to our growing minds, and how can we ever undo it?

In Girl on Girl, the culture critic and Pulitzer finalist Sophie Gilbert takes on the project of placing 2000s raunch culture into its proper historical context. Gilbert tracks the way media consolidation laid the groundwork for the replacement of the angry rock-and-roll women of the 1990s with the compliant sexy girl children of 2000s pop, and how along the way “girl power” went from riot grrrl political slogan to empty Spice Girls catchphrase. She unpacks the way edgy art and fashion scenes of the late-1990s played provocatively with pornified aesthetics, until pornography itself became the dominant aesthetic mode of 2000s culture. Meanwhile, Gilbert writes, porn itself became ever more extreme in an effort to maintain its taboo power, even as the technological advances of the internet made it more accessible than ever.

While Gilbert builds a methodical and compelling history of 2000s raunch, she largely ignores its twin sister, purity culture, which was just as dominant and just as vicious during these same years. Part of the trap of being a girl in the 2000s is that you were asked to be not just a pornographic spectacle but a virginal one, too, an impossible double bind that played a major role in Britney Spears’s downward spiral. Placing purity culture into its own historical context alongside raunch would be a major project, but without it, we’re left with only half the picture.

Still, Gilbert is able to take her analysis further than many of the other Bush-era misogyny retrospectives by continuing it into the 2010s, when the self-help shelves were full of books about being a “girlboss,” cutesy and powerful, and prestige TV was peopled with hot-mess women.  Perhaps most compelling is her reading of Girls, which Gilbert positions as a show about its protagonist’s attempts to navigate the cheesy, porny narratives to which we were taught to aspire in the 2000s. Girls’s Hannah Horvath, Gilbert writes, was trying to figure out what happened to her in the Bush years. But then, aren’t we all? Currently, if all the pundits announcing that we’re in the midst of a vibe shift are to be believed, we’re heading back into a reactionary cultural moment that will give the 2000s a run for their money, one where the new rape joke is “your body, my choice.” Gilbert writes that she hopes analyzing the misogynistic narratives of the 2000s will leave us better prepared to face whatever this new era brings us.

If anyone has done the work for this moment, we navel-gazing millennials have. The real question is: what will this moment do to the children living through it now? What stories will they have to unlearn for themselves when they become adults?

That July I had written a piece about the reaction to Paul Feig’s all-female adaptation of Ghostbusters, in which a swamp of aggrieved online commenters directed organized ire at the movie and misogynistic and racist abuse at one of its stars, Leslie Jones. If America wasn’t ready to even temporarily cede a fictional world of hearse-driving, ectoplasm-dodging paranormal investigators to women, it could hardly have been expected to give one of us the nuclear codes.

— Sophie Gilbert

Janell Hobson

So writes Sophie Gilbert in a salient reflection on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the impact of popular culture on our electoral politics. In Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women against Themselves, such anecdotal examples saturate this expansive and meticulous study of women’s mediated representations throughout the twenty-first century. Beginning with the late-1990s narratives of Girls Gone Wild and moving through reality television of the early aughts to confession-style scripted series like Lena Dunham’s Girls later in the 2010s, and then to the more recent presidential campaigns of Clinton and Vice President Kamala Harris, Gilbert takes us on a journey through flattened and homogenized images and messaging surrounding womanhood in our popular culture.

Specifically, Gilbert concerns herself with representations of “Girl Power,” feminist articulations of “girlboss” and #MeToo, and the ways that women’s power comes up short when weighed against the white heteropatriarchal system upholding these media narratives. It is an insightful and engaging story that is cleverly written with the keen feminist sensibility that asks for more nuanced and transformative representational politics. So, why did I still find myself asking, “are all these ‘girls’ still white?”

The question recalls the title of an edited collection that I had assembled: Are All the Women Still White? Rethinking Race, Expanding Feminisms, itself an allusion to the seminal work All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, edited by Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith. These scholarly works insist on feminist analyses that engage with the intersections of race, gender, class, and other vectors of difference. As much as Gilbert incorporates nonwhite artists, celebrities, and other public figures in her critique – from Jennifer Lopez to Beyoncé to the fictitious Olivia Pope – their inclusion does little to expand the gender conversation. Indeed, their mentions seem more “add race and stir.” Not much is offered about the ways that these representations of difference expand the gender discourse through race.

Take, for example, the epigraph included here. The online attacks against Ghostbusters costar Leslie Jones illustrate the “misogynoir” that Moya Bailey – who introduced the term in a 2010 post on the popular blog Crunk Feminist Collective – has described as a specific form of anti-Black misogyny expressed in popular media against Black women (cis, trans, and nonbinary), which would not have the same effect on Jones’s white costars. Indeed, it is worth noting that pop star Katy Perry actually came to Jones’s defense by naming her abuse “misogynoir” in a tweet. This intersectional influence – emerging through our social media – suggests that our feminist discourses have more than made space for the nuance and complexity that recognizes the gendered differences in these representations. Similarly, Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign may have suffered from the same misogyny that Clinton experienced during hers, but Clinton did not have to contend with the Jezebel stereotype that exacerbated the hypersexual attacks leveled against her.

These differences matter, and not just with race. For a book titled Girl on Girl, its heteronormative focus is quite limited, especially given that Gilbert comments only on Lilith Fair’s use of the lesbian anthem “Closer to Fine” without also mentioning the queer connotations of its inclusion in Greta Gerwig’s mega blockbuster film Barbie. Nor does it address the class and race conflicts of the gentrified, all-white spectacle of Lena Dunham’s Girls, which many feminist bloggers of color have explored in their commentary. The very whiteness of Paris Hilton or Girls or Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In must be consistently named. Perhaps Gilbert is not the author to do this, but at the least, she should acknowledge that whiteness exists beyond a default category.

Marisa Meltzer

In the ‘90s, we had one brief moment of idealism when it came to women in pop culture. Or at least that’s what it seemed like it to me, a teenager reading Backlash and The Beauty Myth and going to $5 shows by riot grrrl bands. But maybe it was just a calm before the storm.

In Girl on Girl, Sophie Gilbert writes a rapid-fire work of cultural criticism that posits that around 1999, when Britney Spears posed in pink underwear and a black bra on the cover of Rolling Stone, and when American Beauty came out to great acclaim, things started to take a grim turn for women. 

The book is a propulsive one, moving between music, TV, movies, tabloids, and the growing presence of the internet. There’s a clarity to her writing that’s not just smart but also compassionate; she’s not out to scold women for being complicit in their own undoing but rather to trace how we got here in the first place.

Gilbert is an assured guide when it comes to making connections. There is a chapter about torture porn—the ubiquity of porn in general is perhaps the greatest common theme of the book—and she reveals that the Hostel movies were in fact produced by Mike Fleiss, who created The Bachelor, linking romance, porn, violence, and reality television in a way that was both elegant and totally disturbing. She draws connections between the way we’ve consumed women and the ways we’ve been taught to see ourselves: as rivals, as brands, as bodies always on display. 

Once Gilbert gets further into the millennium and conquers the first-person essay boom, body image, and girlbosses, the book feels more like an overview of well-trod recent history. She inserts her own narrative here and there without it becoming a memoir. I went back and forth between whether I wanted more of her personal experiences, as a participant in the 2000s and as a product of them, chronicled in the book or whether the work was more effective when she lets history unroll. I felt her own ambivalence about including herself in the narrative and wish she had taken a more decisive step in one direction or another. 

She doesn’t pretend there are easy solutions, only hard truths and the slow work of unlearning. Sometimes I wanted less coverage of the issues and quotes—soooooo many quotes—from other sources and wanted to know more about what Gilbert herself made of all of this, beyond being a very adept tour guide. But maybe that’s just my mood these days, when the state of the world seems so doomed that I’m desperate for anyone to tell me what to do: Girl of Girl is not a cure-all but a mirror. One that says, No, it’s not just you. Yes, this was all by design.

And maybe that’s the first step toward fixing it.

Sophie Gilbert (by Urszula Solty)

First of all, I’m grateful for the consideration of Girl on Girl in this feature, and for the careful scrutiny of the book. I have never imagined my book to be a definitive parsing of the popular culture of the twenty-first century but rather see it as a small part of a much larger and more generative project of reconsideration, so any expansion of our discussion of this era and its impact on women is of course productive.

I agree with Sarah Banet-Weiser that visibility is one of the underlying themes of the book, if not the most crucial element. Because I came of age in this period of great technological expansion and the commoditizing of women’s faces, bodies, and lives into content, the subjects of visibility and overexposure were at the forefront of my mind when I was writing. And the ways in which first reality television and then platforms such as Instagram and TikTok monetized visibility are, I would argue, considered in Girl on Girl, especially with regard to how they intersect with changing notions of celebrity. I would agree that the feminist blogosphere and its incredibly positive impact on women doesn’t get enough attention in my book, but only because I was obliged to narrow my focus onto popular culture and mass media. I hope the chapter on what women’s first-person writing enabled during the 2010s acknowledges at least some of the feminist blogosphere’s significant contributions on that front.

The biggest challenge for me with regard to this book was one of framing: There was so much crucial history to try to contain that finding ways to rein it all in was always a struggle. I appreciate that different writers would have done it differently, and that Constance Grady, who’s done excellent work in the realm of purity culture, might want more analysis of the bind it put young female celebrities in—something I write about in the introduction, and in the chapters on reality television and gossip media, but ended up seeing as less integral to other sections. I’d slightly critique the term “navel-gazing” used in the context of this process of historical revisionism, only because I think reconsidering the many injustices and the real cruelty of this era is crucial not only for the women who were profoundly wronged but for all of us who internalized the misogyny of the era and must unlearn it if we actually want to see more progress in our lifetimes.

I feel Janell Hobson’s criticisms of the book very deeply, because the one thing I really didn’t want to do while writing the book was to replicate the pervasive whiteness of the era felt in so much of mass media. My hope in devoting a large section of the first chapter to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s indictment of 2 Live Crew as a lens through which to understand intersections of race and gender in music was that doing so would set the reader up to understand all the ways in which Black women were doubly marginalized by much popular culture in the aughts. My research on hip-hop feminism was really illuminating to me personally, and how it arose out of the need among Black feminists to establish a kind of feminism that spoke directly to and for them. But I’m receptive to the critique that I should have more explicitly underscored the dynamics of misogynoir throughout the book. My hope was that pointing out the segregated landscape of the early days of reality television, the ways in which white beauty influencers profited from “blackfishing,” and the space that YouTube and new media gave creators like Issa Rae to crack open the field of American comedy for Black female characters, for example, might make the racialized misogyny of so much of this period seem self-evident. I do think I point out homogenous whiteness as a consistent theme in the teen movies of 1999 and beyond, and with regard to Girls and Lean In, I acknowledge the pushback from women who didn’t see themselves represented on the show, and the real deficiencies in a supposed manifesto for women that was not remotely inclusive.

With regard to Marisa Meltzer’s comments, I’m grateful for her acknowledgement of the connections I made with the book, because this, for me, was the point of the project. I knew that everyone would come to Girl on Girl with different areas of insight and expertise (Meltzer’s breadth of research for her own excellent book, Glossy, perhaps informs why the girlboss period feels more well-trod for her.) I knew I wouldn’t possibly be able to do a version of this book that would absolutely gratify or do justice to everyone. So my intention was to simply try to do enough research and make enough connections to make certain dispiriting trends and developments make sense. I didn’t want to rely too heavily on my own forceful arguments because I wanted to leave space for people to draw their own conclusions. I know this approach has been frustrating for some readers, who want more energetic arguments, but it was important for me in analyzing the history to leave space between the lines for interpretation. And if I overrelied on other people’s voices in the book, it was because there are so many writers, thinkers, and academics who’ve done really phenomenal work considering this period, and I would always rather overcite than underacknowledge the work that helped me refine my own thinking about this era.