“The things we watch, listen to, read, wear, write, and share dictate in large part how we internalise and project what we’re worth,” writes Sophie Gilbert in Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. Chronicling the transition from the 1990s to 2000s, which was psychologically violent and sexually exploitative for many women who were part of the pop culture machine, Gilbert calls for a “reappraisal”. She wonders what this moment reflexively did to us as spectators: “How did it condition us to see ourselves? And, maybe more crucially, what did it condition us to think about other women…?” 

The reappraisal is implemented with assists from works like Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs and Chris Kraus’ introduction to Pornocracy, alongside Gilbert’s own examinations of Abercrombie & Fitch, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Issa Rae, Sheryl Sandberg, Amy Winehouse, Nora Ephron, Taylor Swift, Anna Nicole Smith, the Spice Girls, Lil’ Kim and Hilary Clinton. Every form of media is probed, from reality TV (Celebrity Big Brother) to oversharing bloggers (Gawker) to the beginning of live streaming (Jennicam) to unthinkable trends (paparazzi upskirt photos). We spoke with Gilbert – a longtime staff writer at The Atlantic – about charged words (“empowering”, “gaslighting”, etc), the ingenuity of Lena Dunham, and the utility of scrutinising recent history.

You have packed so many references in this book. Did you create a syllabus for yourself? How did you pull all these things together?

Sophie Gilbert: When I wrote the proposal, I knew I wanted to have each chapter focus on a different form of media. The research took a year and a half. I did end up re-watching a lot of the TV shows, a lot of the movies. People have asked if I watched a lot of porn, and I did not, but only because here in the UK I have very tough restrictions on what I can access with my internet.

You mention the word empowering makes you ‘deeply suspicious’. Why, and how are we supposed to make sense of those terms?

Sophie Gilbert: There were certain words that kept coming up over and over and over again during my research, and ‘empowering’ was one of them. Almost inevitably, whenever it came up, it was being used in a defensive sense, after someone had been critiqued for something. The first Wonderbra ad with Eva Herzigova in 1994 was on billboards everywhere; it was very old-school bombshell, like the death knell for third-wave feminism. But the defence of it was that it was ‘empowering’. She made a lot of money, so maybe it was empowering [laughs]. Then there was a movie poster [for 2007 film Hostel 2] where a woman was being tortured and confined. It was quite dark, and when there were complaints, one of the producers claimed that they were ‘empowering’, because in the end, she fights back.

Marketers love nothing more than a good buzzword, right? When they find a word that they can imbue with a certain kind of progressive meaning, that is always a word that you should be suspicious of. Even the word ‘feminism’ is something that is so loaded at this point. But feminism does have a very clear meaning: women should have equal rights to men, and have equal protection under the law.

Periods of backlash always follow periods of progress, and that’s inevitable. But also, periods of progress follow periods of backlash. It’s always this cyclical pattern

You mention dancing in clubs to Sisqó’s ‘Thong Song’, Christina Aguilera’s ‘Dirrty’, and 50 Cent’s ‘P.I.M.P.’. There is a duty to be critical of cultural content, but how do we honour pop culture we like, even if it’s not quite ‘pure’?

Sophie Gilbert: The way I dance when ‘Thong Song’ comes on! The thing is, this era was glorious in so many ways, and that was why it was so easy to be swept up in it. It was so excessive and glittery and skin-exposing — it was touching on all these pleasure points in our brain, right? And there’s a reason why it’s coming back now as an aesthetic mode and as nostalgia, because it is so appealing. 

My point with this book was never to cancel anything, with a few exceptions in the pornography chapter. My point wasn’t to say that anything should be dismissed. It was more to put it all out there and to draw connections for myself in a way that I hoped would make sense to other people. I’m coming to it with my own memories and life experiences, but I really did hope that everyone would come to it with their own frame. I don’t want to write off what so many of us loved. I just want people to be able to see the totality of what was happening in a slightly more considered way. 

How can we reconcile those things, though?

Sophie Gilbert: A lot of people think of this book as cultural criticism – that’s what I thought it would be, when I was pitching it – but to me, now, it is much more of a history book. And the point of history is not to rehash the stories that people already know; it is to look for the hidden stories that weren’t told at the time.

History is so often presented through a male frame. These are the stories that weren’t told or weren’t put together at the time, because people don’t really care about women that much, and also people don’t take seriously cultural products that are deemed to be ‘trash’, whether reality TV or gossip magazines or different kinds of media that women enjoy. But at the same time, they have such a massive influence. What I really wanted to do was to look at these, critically and historically, and see what they told me. 

Relative to Catherine Breillat’s work, you wonder ‘whether or not someone can replicate abusive imagery in order to explore what it means — without falling into its trap’. That is such a powerful inquiry. Can you unpack that?

Sophie Gilbert: It’s really complicated. In the 90s, because of the internet, suddenly sex was everywhere, in a way that it had not typically been in the 20th century. What happened in the shift from 90s to 2000s media is that you can see provocation go from an intellectual exercise to a commercial one. One of the things that thoughtful artists always try to do is respond to culture, to systems of power, and to the relationship between the two.

In the chapter about Catherine Breillat, I mentioned Lena Dunham as well, because I think she’s doing the same thing with pornography, which is presenting the tropes in a way where they’re almost defanged by provocation, where rather than being ‘turned on’ by this sort of fairly monstrous power dynamic, you’re looking at it with fresh eyes because of how it’s being presented. That’s very hard to do.

You describe Lena Dunham and Sheila Heti as ‘creating something less pretty and more truthful’ about the female experience. Do you feel that approach has created a lasting shift, or was that a cultural moment?

Sophie Gilbert: I think with writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, they’re really not at all enthralled with making things pretty. It’s very much about originality and the effect that it has on the reader, rather than the aesthetic experience. In my chapter on first person writing, it’s like: what does women’s pain actually achieve? If you lay yourself bare, if you’re honest about your experiences, what kind of difference can you actually make? I think the backlash to #MeToo has been really gloomy on that front. But in literature, I think there are people still playing with those ideas. In TV, it feels to me like we’re in quite a boring moment.

Younger women are now so much better equipped to see flaws. They have better media sources. They have voices on TikTok... They have more power to deconstruct things in a way that I never felt like I had as a teenager, and that does make me hopeful

You cite Adrienne Rich in terms of analysing cultural things as a hopeful gesture. But how can we feel hopeful that things will shift when media industries are slow to systemically change?

Sophie Gilbert: You can’t change patterns if you don’t understand where they come from. Culture, in particular, is so influential in terms of being able to change the way that people perceive the world and perceive themselves and understand their own power. Periods of backlash always follow periods of progress, and that’s inevitable. But also, periods of progress follow periods of backlash. It’s always this cyclical pattern.

I do think young women now have better tools than I had in 1999. People who were really in charge of setting the paradigm for media in that moment were stripping influences from porn. Everything was sort of thrilling and vibrant and fun and jokey and ironic. It was very hard for those of us who were 15, 16, 17 in that era to get the irony, because we’d never known anything different. It was just what was cool, what was popular. I think younger women are now so much better equipped to see flaws. They have better media sources. They have voices on TikTok. They have more familiarity with words like ‘gaslighting’ — and, yes, it can be a cliché in its own way — but at the same time, they just have more power to deconstruct things in a way that I never felt like I had as a teenager, and that does make me hopeful. In this wave of Y2K nostalgia, you see all the same trends coming around, like really low cut trousers and stuff… you’re kind of like, ‘oh my god, again!’ But I do think there’s sort of a raised eyebrow in the revival, taking them less seriously.

Fashion magazines are implicated in the book, too...

Sophie Gilbert: What was happening in the 90s was subversive and experimental in so many of the right ways. But what happened in the 2000s was such a bastardisation of that spirit. It really was cheap sexual excess to get people to buy things and to exploit women. I think what Dazed and other magazines were doing in the 90s was thrilling, right? It was just trying to see what they could make imagery be, in fashion and commercially, and how much they could push things into the mainstream. I think it was done with, I don’t wanna say honourable intentions, but I think it was done with a spirit of ingenuity. 

Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves is published by Hachette UK on May 1.