Sophie Gilbert’s critique of misogyny in the 1990s and 2000s, Girl on Girl, would be disheartening but for the iconoclastic and subversive feminist artists in pop culture.
I don’t remember much of the 2000s, the decade I was born, but I remember NBC’s The Biggest Loser (2004-2016), which came to mind while reading Sophie Gilbert. The Biggest Loser was a game show by way of humiliation, pitting overweight Americans against each other to drop body fat through grueling workouts, and as quickly as possible. Cruel trainers with rare tender moments would push contestants harder — the sweat dripping onto each treadmill and the cheers after each contestant’s weekly weigh-in (often reaching the double digits in the first couple weeks) all suggested this was about positive change, overcoming adversity.
Indeed, with a modern view, The Biggest Loser‘s sadism is glaring. These people desperately needed their lives to change, and with a $250k prize, they pushed themselves into unhealthy territory. I remember seeing Rachel Frederickson, the 14th season’s winner, looking gaunt as she celebrated slimming from 260 to 130 pounds. Her too-slim frame was chastised just as much as her being formerly overweight was: Twitter lit up with anorexia allegations. Of course, her journey was harmful, but her occupying both extremes demonstrated how the public responded to women at the time — too fat, too thin, you lose either way.
It’s this contradiction that The Atlantic writer Sophie Gilbert explores in her debut book Girl on Girl, a broad-reaching and exhaustive excoriation of the layers of sediment that weigh on the modern woman’s body, sexuality, and psyche. “Every magazine I read during my teens and twenties, every TV show featuring a doe-eyed teenage star with visible clavicles, seemed to contain the same message: shrink,” she writes, which makes a show like The Biggest Loser feel like a satirical parody of the era’s misogyny. Gilbert’s meticulous research shows that there was no place for women to hide in the 1990s and 2000s, an age that shaped how men and women judge, think, and see each other and ourselves.
Its title comes from a popular porn category, a medium that Sophie Gilbert argues is “the defining cultural product of our times.” She writes in the introduction, “It fascinates me that so much of what I was trying to figure out kept coming back to porn. [It’s] the thing that has shaped more than anything how we think about sex, and, therefore, how we think about each other.” This is not solely related to misguided television characters like Lena Dunham’s coming-of-age series Girls’ Adam Sackler (Adam Driver), who fantasizes about seeing a sexually open-minded Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) as an 11-year-old junkie getting sent “home to your parents covered in cum,” but can infiltrate every situation we see a woman in — on a magazine cover or behind a podium.
Such an epidemic is debilitating; even when a woman is in power, or attempts to ingratiate themselves through masculine formality, we oftentimes cannot recognize them as anything but a sexual object. Sophie Gilbert mentions Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?, Jerome Tanner’s 2008 pornography video starring sex workers as parody versions of Sarah Palin, the first female vice presidential candidate, as well as Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. Kamala Harris’ assent to the 2024 Democratic nomination was similarly marked with allegations that she “slept her way to the top”.
The chapter before, “Girl Boss”, mentions how women in power can be even worse; their gender doesn’t negate the cruelty and business coldness a man has. She mentions Rihanna and Kim Kardashian, two women whose empires have attracted controversy, even though Kim’s eating disorder accelerants are obviously worse. Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty lingerie line sneakily trapped customers into silent monthly subscriptions, which seems like a logistical error rather than something she approved. “What was more perplexing,” Sophie Gilbert paraphrases from culture writer Kaitlyn Tiffany, “was that any of these shoppers’ parasocial relationships to Rihanna made them reluctant to publicly complain.”
A woman in power must be seen as good. These are wholly different examples, but I can’t help but think of the girlboss-ification of people like Elizabeth Holmes, or Jen Shah, two imprisoned scammers whose camp personas and large personalities attract an irony-tinged crowd (myself implicated) to call them “iconic”. Or, one step further, in Ghislaine Maxwell’s 2020 court proceeding, suggested to perhaps bring down Trump, commenters replied, “it was ALWAYS going to be a woman,” “Get it girl…” or included pictures of Rosie the Riveter. Feminism, it seems, doesn’t exclude scammers or grifters.
Girl on Girl is at its most successful when documenting the spiky media landscape of the era, reserved for young girls. Teen stars like Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton were relentlessly shamed for what male commentators saw as their sexuality, even though they were trying to conform to the standards of the time. After the early 1990s wave of feminist, grassroots punk bands like Bikini Kill or Sleater-Kinney, younger, sexier singers like Britney Spears or Spice Girls popped up to offer a glassy, fun version of feminism that promised enlightenment through fundamentally indifferent actions. Girl Power, Spice Girls’ message, was propped up as a capitalist ploy through merchandise, Sophie Gilbert suggests, and stood for basically nothing.
The era’s fixation on beauty, femininity, and bodies is notorious. The relentless onslaught of degradation and shame women faced in films, from celebrity and mainstream journalists, or corrupt, attention-seeking creeps like Perez Hilton and the larger tabloid industry, could only instill in the minds of young men how to see and treat these (to them, inferior) people. An August 2004 Rolling Stone cover story on Lindsay Lohan with the words “Hot, Ready, and Legal!” includes a slimy anecdote by writer Mark Binelli: “[She] has been eighteen for just under a week when she tells me her breasts are real. I did not ask (gentlemen never do), though my reporting (discreet visual fact-checking, a goodbye hug) seems to confirm her statement.”
In the UK, a gossip magazine, Heat, featured the “sidebar of shame”, pointing out “celebrities’ errant cellulite dimples, sweat patches, or tummy bulges.” Paparazzi would lie in the street, waiting for an upskirt shot of stars getting out of cars. “When they sold the pictures, Sophie Gilbert writes, “it was unfailingly their subjects who were shamed.”
Sophie Gilbert on Girls Who Feel Like Real Women
It’s no wonder some artists, reckoning with this media blitz, turned their focus inward. Much of Girl on Girl‘s section on female auteurs revolves around Nora Ephron’s quote from her 1983 novel, Heartburn: “If I tell the story, I control the version.” It goes deep into Lena Dunham of Girls fame, and ping-pongs to Canadian novelist Sheila Heti and pop artist Taylor Swift, three of the most unflinchingly raw writers of the modern age.
Where Darren Star’s Sex and the City (1998-2004) series was mostly fantasy, Lora Durnham’s Girls (2012-17), its Millennial next-of-kin, was muted and flat when it debuted in 2012. The sex scenes were dour, the nudity was realistic, but the central theme is the disillusionment young people feel in the face of unfettered optimism. As a result, the girls hang out, attempt to make art, but usually stall in their careers and lives. It’s a shrug of a show, a day that begins at noon. “[Girls is] telling to me,” Sophie Gilbert writes, “that what offended people most about Dunham during her early years in television was her conviction that she had something worth saying.”
Girls was disarmingly similar to real life, with no Hollywood sheen, which some people took as laziness or self-importance. Heti’s novels are similarly pragmatic, loosely autobiographical, documenting the process of forming your identity or relationship to motherhood. “A necessary process for women writers during this moment was acknowledging that the mythology of contemporary womanhood was entirely false, in order to create something less pretty and more truthful,” Gilbert writes. Sex and the City’s martinis and theater were traded out for Girls’ beer and bad concerts.
Artists during this era often strived to make their work come as close to reality. Sophie Gilbert mentions Jennifer Ringley, who livestreamed her daily activities in the late 1990s, and Marie Calloway, a writer whose exposé of sexual assault included photos with the man’s cum on her face, visual candor which was somewhat replicated in Lila Shapiro’s February 2025 New York Magazine story on Neil Gaiman. “The point of her own work, one senses, is for there to be no gap, nothing that allows for self-flattery, self-embellishment, or even self-protection,” Gaiman writes about Calloway, but the same can be extended to Dunham or Heti.
“When the corporeal form of your body is the only thing standing between you and material wealth, why be sentimental about what happens to it?” Gilbert asks. This can refer to stars who augment their faces and bodies to meet the beauty standards of the time, but also to celebrities who take control of the narrative and their sexuality by leaning in. Madonna’s 1992 Sex photography book and Janet Jackson’s albums, particularly The Velvet Rope (1997) and Janet (1993), welcomed fans in increasingly intimate ways. “Do you think that I’m that person you watch on TV?” Jackson coyly asks on 2004’s steamy Damita Jo. If you’re entertained, what’s the difference?
Girl on Girl is often disheartening only for the mountain of misogyny Sophie Gilbert presents — but it’s somehow not a heavy read. Research is abundant on how American and British society has mistreated women, but also an emphasis on their iconoclastic art. Society goes through waves of progress and regression — our current era is a bleak nadir — but logically, it has to pivot. Even though it will take unlearning who gets to tell which stories, Gilbert ends, “I do fundamentally believe art can occasionally enable a top-to-bottom reconfiguration of everything we’ve ever found ourselves believing.” It’s one of life’s greatest pleasures, even.