Girl on Girl

How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

By: Sophie Gilbert

Narrated by: Sophie Gilbert

A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book • Named one of the Best Books of the Year by TIME, NPR, Elle, and The Boston Globe

“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.

Read it

If you are a Millennial, read this book. And if you're a Millennial woman, definitely read it. Sophie Gilbert's voice is lovely, and her book was interesting to read.

Thank you.

Beautifully written and researched. A riveting read. It helps so much to see our experiences reflected back to us. Especially at a time like this. Thank you .

Thought provoking from start to finish

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this insightful book. The observations accurately describe and label the truths we have lived through our whole lives.

Must Read

Well researched and relevant reveal of the feminists movement’s continual struggle of progress vs regression. Gilbert’s expose, while bleak still proves that women will never stop rewriting a narrative towards equality.

Phenomenal/disturbing

This is an incredible review of cultural milestones of my life growing up from a girl to a now 40 year old woman. Some of it is tough to read without cringing at my own participation in my own degradation during my younger years (without completely understanding the dynamics at play.) A harrowing look through events that felt entirely rational and normal at the time.