GIRL ON GIRL

Girl on Girl a blazing critique of how early-aughts pop culture turned women and girls against each other-and themselves-with disastrous consequences. For readers of Roxane Gay and Lauren Bates.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert delivers a blazing critique of how early-aughts pop culture turned women and girls against each other-and themselves-with disastrous consequences.

What happened to feminism in the 21st century? This question feels increasingly urgent after a period of reactionary cultural and legislative backlash. When widespread uncertainty about the movement's power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.

Sophie Gilbert provides one answer, identifying an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s. When the energy of third-wave and "riot girrrl" feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization.

Gilbert tracks many of the period's dominant themes back to the explosion of internet porn. Tracing its widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.

Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence 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. The one that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century. And how it continues to shape our world today

Relatable, wide-ranging and covering TV, film, music, journalism and the internet, Sophie Gilbert asks how did we get here. And what lies ahead.

Girl on Girl : How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves - Sophie Gilbert - 9781399812320