From Madonna’s Sex to Lena Dunham’s Girls, writer Sophie Gilbert skillfully connects the dots on how a generation of women were shortchanged, infantilized by mainstream culture.Christie Vuong/The Globe and Mail
If you’ve recently logged on to Instagram or TikTok, you’ve likely noticed girl math, girl dinner, girly pops and girl’s girls proliferate the digital landscape.
Girl math is most pointedly not real math, replacing calculation with vibes and girl dinner is not real dinner, replacing the evening meal with pickles and a handful of crackers. The girlies, it should be said, who are broadcasting their gendered math and nutritionally empty dinners on social media tend to be fully grown adult women.
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“Girl power” isn’t what it used to be, as The Atlantic magazine culture critic Sophie Gilbert outlines in her persuasive, decades-spanning analysis of women in the American entertainment sphere. Gilbert’s first book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, is a more-or-less chronological account of sexism in media from the late-eighties to the end of the 2010s.
From Madonna’s Sex to Lena Dunham’s Girls, Gilbert skillfully connects the dots on how a generation of women were shortchanged, infantilized – gate-kept and girl-bossed, even – by mainstream culture. It’s compelling and Gilbert’s voice is extremely readable, with a magazine writer’s polish. But the long view of the project and the many, many examples Gilbert deftly critiques lead to a somewhat dispiriting investigation of the misogyny deeply embedded in pop culture. Hit me one more time, indeed.
“I’m sorry,” Gilbert says, laughing over tea on a recent afternoon in Toronto. “I didn’t want it to be such a bummer. I wanted the book to be galvanizing. I mean, this is a word that comes up throughout the book and ironically, I’ll use it now: I wanted it to be empowering.”
She says cultural institutions concocted the entertainment, and subsequently the norms, that millennial women grew up with. It was basically, a “very manufactured, fake version of things,” as Gilbert put it.
This “fake version of things” is the pop culture arm of what Susan Faludi predicted and described in her era-defining 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. Where Faludi investigated the social, political and economic imbalances American women faced after feminism’s second wave, Gilbert zeroes in on the cultural impact of increasingly available pornography, the sexualization of teen girl pop stars such as Britney Spears, and the death of the big movie rom-com making way for ultra-raunchy buddy movies such as the indelible 1999 film American Pie.
In “Girls on Film,” the aptly-named chapter where Gilbert looks at the Bush era comedy boom, she examines how Hollywood is a mirror and also a blueprint. “We learn an awful lot from the stories we encounter,” she writes. During the 1980s, it was normal to see women be depersonalized on screen. Gilbert quotes cultural critic Wesley Morris to paint the picture: “girls got drunk, spied on, stuffed in car trunks and shopping carts, and laughed at.”
By the 1990s, she writes, things were even more complicated for heroines in Hollywood: “The straightforward misogyny of Porky’s and Revenge of the Nerds was replaced by filmmaking that saw girls as creatures with plenty of sexual agency of their own — maybe too much.”
Gilbert gives plenty of examples of movies centered on the sexualization of teen girls, including 1995’s Clueless, the straight-to-video thriller The Babysitter from the same year, and the 1993 video for Aerosmith’s song Crazy – all starring a teenaged Alicia Silverstone. Clueless, Gilbert writes, “only spelled out what other Silverstone products were implying: that teenage sexuality was the ultimate prize for any man worthy of claiming it.”
For Gilbert’s purposes, American Pie bridges the gap from the 1990s fixation on teenage girls and 2000s-era ultra-bawdy genre spoofs such as Scary Movie or Not Another Teen Movie. “There was so much in that decade of movie-making that was benignly sexist, stuff you can just kind of shake off,“ she says. “But there was so much that was also really hateful.”
Gilbert highlights a scene with Alyson Hannigan in Date Movie, where men flee as she runs down the street, because she’s wearing a fat suit. “It was not an uncommon instance of really quite shocking cruelty.”
Film Shallow Hal, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Jack Black, is an example Gilbert uses of how 1980s’ Hollywood normalized depersonalizing women on screen.
The fat suit is a riff on the 2001 Gwyneth Paltrow flick Shallow Hal, whose whole premise is that the average man (played here by Jack Black, who also didn’t fit the chiseled stereotype of a leading man) would have to be deeply hypnotized or otherwise mentally controlled to find a fat woman attractive. “Some of these movies just had real, real disgust at the idea of women in their real-life bodies,” Gilbert says about that era of comedy. “The filmmakers, the culture, all these people told us it was a joke.”
While Girl on Girl creates a neatly organized timeline of women’s marginalization, there are moments where her schema feels too narrow to account for moments of disruption or dissent, or even what today’s terminally online girlies might call the “female gaze.”
Even in the mainstream, there were women working in entertainment who challenged the status quo. Tina Fey, who was absent from Gilbert’s book and our conversation, became Saturday Night Live’s first female head writer in 1999, and in 2008, gave the culture an enduring but unprintable joke about the ability of women to make things happen. Gilbert describes porn parodies mocking Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, but somehow leaves out Fey and Amy Poehler’s infamous sketch portrayals.
Screenwriter Diablo Cody’s cult-classic late 2000s films Juno and Jennifer’s Body are both toothy comedies responding to a culture that oversexualizes teenage girls, but neither are discussed in Girl on Girl, although the filmmaker is fleetingly mentioned in a list of autobiographies about sex work.
When asked about her decision to avoid writing about counternarratives to the era’s general misogyny, Gilbert smiles with some contrition. “There was so much that it could have included and there was so much in this era that was positive,” she says, adding she could probably write a whole other version of the book about activism on the outskirts.
There is one section where she engages with online feminist culture: “In the chapter on writing, I do mention how much feminist media and feminist blogs in particular were doing during this era to challenge these very mainstream, very dehumanized portrayals of women,” Gilbert says. But for the most part, she found herself assembling each chapter as if creating a collage. “I was trying to put things together in a way that made sense and I did find that sometimes the easiest way to do things was to focus on the bad.”
While Girl on Girl is not quite an empowering interruption in the history of women’s cultural subordination, it does provide a compelling overview of just how common cruelty toward women was during the years covered. While Gilbert didn’t conduct any interviews or even write much about her own experiences, millennial women especially will recognize the world she describes.
Gilbert admits that sometimes, the book was difficult to write. One chapter in particular, on the rise of torture porn films such as Saw and Hostel, gave her some trouble sleeping. Still, she found it exciting to connect the dots and see how patriarchal ideas shaped the culture she grew up with. “Now, I get why this happened,” Gilbert says. “I get why we all felt this way.”
“It felt so thrilling to me to make it make sense.”
