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In her role as a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she has covered Madonna, Taylor Swift, The White Lotus, Severance, and become a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, Sophie Gilbert spends a lot of time thinking about pop culture, functioning as a kind of Lionel Trilling for the TikTok generation.
With her new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves (out April 29 from Penguin Press), Gilbert looks back at the late 1990s and early aughts, endeavoring to find out what happened to feminism in the early 21st century. In so doing, she shines a light on the last few decades of popular culture and their intersections with sex, politics, fame, morality, and much more.
Here, Gilbert discusses culture, celebrity, and how to find light in dark times and places.
Vogue: Where did the idea for this book come from?
Sophie Gilbert: There were two precipitating moments. I had twins in July 2020 in New York City, right in the middle of COVID, and in the months after, I totally lost myself. I couldn’t read or watch TV; I barely slept and was too exhausted to eat. My husband and I took care of these tiny babies in what was essentially total isolation, and in that, we both experienced a kind of total breakdown of self. And so when I went back to work and started engaging with the world again, I found myself circling stories that were about culture and identity: how the art we consume influences who we are, for better and worse.
The other moment was the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. I couldn’t understand how women—a majority of people in America—could have so little power, and the only theory I could come up with was that culture had lulled us into some kind of state of passivity and distraction.
You close your introduction with a sense of optimism: “We try to understand all the ways in which things went wrong so that we can conceive of a more powerful way forward.” Can we?
We’re in a period of profound turmoil now, and it’s truly horrifying what the current administration is doing to trans people, to immigrants and refugees, to women and people who become pregnant. For the most part, the culture we consume isn’t reinforcing these efforts—it’s counteracting them.
I was struck by the phases of erasure that occurred across types of media, particularly in music. You write, “Women in music in the 1990s were angry and abrasive and thrillingly powerful. And then, just like that, they were gone—replaced by girls.” Are we still there?
There have been so many emerging women artists who just absolutely do not limit themselves or their self-expression, even when they get censured for it. Like Sabrina Carpenter being critiqued for being sexual onstage at her shows because children attend, as though sexuality hasn’t been a fundamental—and fun!–part of her music since she hit adulthood. Or Chappell Roan being totally unfiltered in interviews and presenting this really thrilling, vibrant exploration of sex that’s totally uninterested in what men might want. Or Doechii being maligned for expressing her dating preferences. These women are getting an awful lot of flak for being honest about who they are, but they’re not retreating, and they’re winning awards and selling out more and more shows. And they’re not beholden to what a man in a corner office wants them to do. That looks like progress.
You touch on the tension of girls vs. women—or, put another way, coming-of-age versus life experience—early and often. When it comes to capturing that distinction, does anyone get it right?
With regard to girlhood, there are so many writers and artists who’ve gotten it right. Melissa Febos’s 2021 book Girlhood is my lodestar. She’s so brilliant at laying out exactly how treacherous a state coming-of-age can be. I love the show Pen15, and Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, and Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum. Euphoria I found unsettling, in the sense that there’s something so leering about the show, even while it does seem to be trying to engage with what a poisoned environment we’ve passed down to Gen Z. I do think girls today are a lot savvier and have access to a much greater range of influences, as well as the vocabulary to understand and describe misogyny. But they’re also under siege on social media in a way that we never were.
Why were so many movies of the 2000s—Shallow Hal, Knocked Up, White Chicks, Bringing Down The House—so vehemently anti-woman? Is that still the case with film and television?
During the 2000s, there was no desire in mainstream movies to think about women at all, only to position us as idiotic or annoying foils for goofy male characters. But recently we’ve had so many fascinating narratives about aging, beauty standards, sexual desire, grief, the transition into motherhood, the performance of femininity and power. That’s not to say things are perfect in the industry. But they’re absolutely so much better than they were.
You write that “the women our culture has loathed the most have unfailingly been the same ones we can’t stop watching.” Tell me more.
I’ve been writing about Kim Kardashian since I started working at The Atlantic more than a decade ago. Early on, whenever I wrote about her I’d get all these horrified comments and emails saying that I was lowering the tone of the magazine of the American idea by giving credence to such trash. But Kim is now arguably the most influential woman in the world. And she managed that ascension by having an incredibly astute sense of what the world wants to see, what it wants to watch her do. We’ve long been furious at the women who capture our gaze: Anna Nicole Smith, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Madonna. I think the anger comes, in part, from our disappointment with ourselves for being interested, for being so susceptible to charismatic, beautiful women. Men who are similarly overexposed—I’m thinking of Kanye West, Elon Musk—can provoke anger as well, but not the same denigration, not the sense that they’re not even worthy of our consideration.
It’s hard to consider the depiction or representation of women without factoring in the real and increasingly omnipresent notion of celebrity. How has it changed over time?
This was one of the most interesting developments in the book for me—the ways in which celebrity changed throughout the 2000s, and what that shift did to the rest of us. In the 20th century, people could achieve tabloid renown without having any particular skill set, but in the 21st, suddenly there was all this space to fill in gossip magazines and infinite space online, and so women who were willing to go to the right places, pose for the cameras, or open up their entire lives to a film crew, became famous just for letting themselves be seen. Being willing to be visible became a viable path to fame. What changed in the 2000s, and what persists now, is the tease that virtually anyone can become famous if they honor all the conditions. The question is, is it worth it?
