Sophie Gilbert’s “Girl on Girl”

In 2008, when my Women’s Studies professor asked the class who was a feminist, I was one of only 2 people who raised their hands.

Why was there such a reluctance to identify oneself as a feminist, especially when the word simply denotes a person who believes in the equal rights of women and men?

The word “feminist” carries a string of ugly associations: angry, man-hating lesbian; hairy, humorless destroyer of the nuclear family; bra-burning radical extremist.

To raise your hand would be to out yourself as one of them.

In the 2000s, no one was more reviled than feminists.  Rousing, riveting and incisively researched, Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves examines early 2000s pop culture and the many ways it dangerously dismantled feminism.  Gilbert, a cultural critic and staff writer for the Atlantic, explores everything from 1990s riot grrrls to the commodification of “girl power,” the rise of raunch culture to the unsettling ubiquity of Girls Gone Wild. 

The late 90s/early 2000s was a period when it was widespread to sexualize women and girls.  In her iconic “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” a 16 year old Britney Spears danced proactively in a Catholic school uniform and pigtails (a trope undoubtedly borrowed from the pornography section of the video store).  Websites counted down until young Hollywood starlets like Lindsey Lohan and the Olsen twins legally became adults.  The 18th birthday of a sexy young celebrity was an occasion for creepy men to celebrate that they could now sexually violate her knowing it would have “resulted in a statutory rape charge just a few hours earlier,” SFGate critic Peter Hartlaub bitingly observed in 2004.

In the 2000s, degradation was rebranded as empowerment.  Baring midriffs and flaunting g-strings was sold to young women as an assertion of agency.  It’s an age-old dilemma in feminism: is expressing our sexuality empowerment or exploitation?  Does taking a pole dancing class or doing a racy Maxim photo spread truly signify sexual liberation or has the patriarchy sneakily repackaged the objectification of our bodies as “empowerment”?

Gilbert seems to agree with the latter. 

At the turn of the millennium, women in pop culture were wildly inebriated, barely legal college girls in Girls Gone Wild, titillating teenagers in tube tops or bikini clad vixens in rap videos.  The message was clear: women were things to be debased and lusted after.  Women were an amalgamation of body parts—not human beings with a rich interior.  They had no voice, no opinions—they were just dolls to be dressed up for male pleasure.

Despite what pop stars like Christina Aguilera claimed, overly sexualizing ourselves didn’t constitute any real power.  After all, did wearing a thong on the cover of Rolling Stone eliminate the wage gap or put more women in the White House? 

Sexualizing women on screen has serious consequences.  As Gilbert notes, “The logical extension of objectification is dehumanization.”  According to Erin Hatton, a UB sociologist and author of “Equal Opportunity Objectification?  The Sexualization of Men and Women on the Cover of Rolling Stone,” “Sexualized portrayals of women have been found to legitimize or exacerbate violence against women and girls, as well as sexual harassment and anti-women attitudes among men and boys.” 

Nowhere have women been more dehumanized than in pornography.  In the oversexed 2000s, porn infiltrated the mainstream: skin care advertisements shamelessly played on the pornographic idea of the money shot, Snoop Dog arrived at the 2003 VMAs walking two women on a leash.  The internet made even the most forbidden fantasies readily available with the click of a mouse.  No longer did you have to suffer the humiliation of buying a dirty magazine at a grocery store—you could simply type in “girl on girl” on Porn Hub. 

Though I’m not against porn per se, I am deeply disturbed by the ways pornography brutalizes women and objectifies our bodies.  One 2010 study of more than three hundred popular pornographic scenes found that “88 percent contained some kind of physical aggression, typically spanking, gagging, or slapping, with force overwhelmingly meted out against women by men.”

If “life imitates art” as Oscar Wilde once wittily observed, the real life bedroom has become a place for men to reenact the brutish fantasies they encounter in hardcore porn.  One 2019 study found that “38% of British women under forty reported having experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging, or spitting during sex.”  In other words, the violent fantasies of pornography have very real repercussions for women.

“Culture conditions desire,” Gilbert says.  When men see women debased and demeaned often enough, they start to desire that same behavior in their real-world sex.  Pornography teaches men several troubling messages: 1. sex is intertwined with a dynamic of domination and subjugation and 2. women are little more than lifeless objects, big-breasted bimbos that exist solely for their sexual gratification.

Pornography also imparts damaging lessons to women: prioritize male pleasure and neglect your own satisfaction. 

After all, what matters in a porn? 

The money shot when the man ejaculates. 

Almost no attention is paid to female orgasm or female fantasy (is this why so many modern men are self-centered in bed?)  As Amia Srinivasan writes, “Porn does not inform, or debate, or persuade.  Porn trains.”

Mainstream movies in the 2000s were also a training ground for misogyny and rape.  Take American Pie, the classic 1999 teen sex comedy in which the four male protagonists make a pact to lose their virginity before prom night.  “Sex is the goal, virginity the antagonist, and the girls the gatekeepers—the ones who are standing in the way of the heroes’ glorious and rightful destiny,” Gilbert writes.

These movies position women as obstacles to overcome.  Why they might not want to have sex—the possibility of pregnancy, the fear of sexually transmitted diseases, shame, stigma—are completely ignored.  The result?  Women are reviled because they “unjustly” deny men what they most want. 

What impact—Gilbert wonders—did such subtly sexist films have on a generation of young viewers?

In the 2000s raunch comedy Gilbert finds the origins of modern day incel culture.  In 2014, merciless misogynist and mass murderer Elliot Rodger killed 6 and wounded 14 in Isla Vista, California. 

His motive? 

To “destroy all women” because he was still a pathetic virgin.

Born in 1991, Rodger was undoubtedly exposed to teen sex comedies and the trope of losing your virginity before prom.  His disdain for women seemed to originate in the idea that as a young teenage boy, he was entitled to sex.  Women were denying him something he “deserved.”  In his abhorrent 141 page manifesto, he confesses:

“My teenage years were completely denied to me by the cruelness of women.”

Rodger’s concept of his “teenage years” seems inextricably connected to sex.  Is it possible movies like American Pie made him believe that losing his virginity was a rite of passage?  that his high school and college years should be a time of hedonistic sexual exploration and unrestrained carnal indulgence?

The grammar of the sentence is interesting.  “Women” are both subject and object: they are technically the subject, the people “denying” Rodger his “teenage years” but are positioned as a grammatical object by the passive construction.  So while Rodger holds women responsible for his sexless misery, he also views them as secondary objects, not worthy of holding the power of a proper grammatical subject (he didn’t phrase the sentence “the cruelness of women completely denied me my teenage years”).  Even his syntax is steeped in misogyny.

The rest of his manifesto seethes with hatred for the opposite sex.  He dismisses women as “evil,” “wicked,” “degenerate.”  To Rodger, rejection of him was a crime worthy of punishment.

Would Rodger have gone on his killing spree if he’d never seen a crude comedy?

Pop culture can’t be held entirely accountable for one person’s horrific acts (violent video games didn’t cause Colombine), but we can’t be too shocked when a virulently misogynistic culture creates virulent misogynists.

In another chapter, Gilbert turns her agile mind to impossible beauty standards.  If you’re a millennial like me, your childhood was an unrelenting cycle of body shaming.  The 90s and 2000s was the era of emaciated models, the age of Atkins and South Beach.  Any woman who dared to be more voluptuous than a runway model was derided as a “beluga whale” or “fat pig.”  Women’s bodies were subjects of near constant scrutiny (“Did Britney Spears get a boob job?”/”JLo’s butt is too big!”).  In trashy tabloids, a woman’s every “flaw” was dissected and cruelly criticized.  When a slightly more curvaceous Jessica Simpson appeared in a black tank top and high-waisted jeans in 2009, she was bashed brutally, called “Jumbo Jessica” though she was probably no bigger than a size 4. 

Britney Spears faced similar treatment at the 2007 VMAs.  Though she wasn’t fat in any sense of the word, the media maliciously teared her apart: “Lard and Clear,” read the New York Post headline. E! Online was just as venomous, “The bulging belly she was flaunting was SO not hot.”

From an early age, millennial women were taught to despise our bodies.  In the 2000s, we only had the most narrow conception of beauty: thin, white, and blonde.  Our bodies were a “perfectable project,” something we could mold and shape, chisel and construct.  To achieve unattainable beauty standards, we were encouraged to frequent the pilates studio, the surgeon’s office, the makeup counter; to spend thousands of dollars on Botox and boob jobs and BBLs and facelifts and fillers.

When I was a pre-teen, I distinctly remember challenging myself to go whole days without eating.  At the time, I was 4’11 and no more than 95 pounds.

Another time, I tried to follow Britney Spears’ rigorous workout routine (100 sit ups a day) because I wanted her unnaturally sculpted abs from the “I’m a Slave for You” music video.

As a generation, millennials (myself included) still battle with collective body dysmorphia.

Thanks to the body positivity movement of the 2010s, we momentarily witnessed a broadening of our conception of beauty to include more shapes and sizes of women than ever before.  But unfortunately, regressive 90s/2000s beauty standards are having a resurgence thanks to the prevalence of plastic surgery and the rise of Ozempic and SkinnyTok. 

In many ways, Gilbert’s reexamination of the 90s and 2000s feels more timely than ever.  Just like in my Women’s Studies class in 2008, we’re facing a vitriolic backlash against feminism.  This is the age of Tate and Trump, tradwives and incels.  For the first time in our nation’s history, young girls have fewer rights than their mothers.

It’s easy to feel demoralized by the reversals of progress the past few years.  

But Gilbert encourages us not to lose hope.

Women no longer need to get married or have children.

Women enter the workforce, climb the corporate ladder, and contribute to global politics.

Women now outnumber men in college enrollment.

“If fear and loathing of feminism is a sort of perpetual viral condition in our culture, it is not always in an acute stage; it’s symptoms subside and resurface periodically,” Susan Faludi wrote in Backlash, “if  we trace these occurrences in American history…we find such flare-ups are hardly random; they have always been triggered by the perception—accurate or not—that women are making great strides.”

The current backlash against feminism is a direct result of the landmark progress we’ve made in the last 50 years.  When the pendulum swings one way, it inevitably returns to the other.

Women entering the work force in record numbers?

There’s a resurrection of “traditional” gender roles on social media.

Women no longer have to marry out of economic necessity?

More men are single and you get the entitled tantrums of incels and the malign misogyny of the manosphere.

Progress is always two steps forward, one step backward.  The road will always be winding—not straight and narrow.

Despite the rise of red pill content, I’d like to think if my Women’s Studies professor asked a class if they were feminists today, more women (and men) would raise their hands than ever.