Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

by Sophie Gilbert

I wanted to understand how a generation of young women came to believe that sex was our currency, our objectification was empowering, and we were a joke. Why were we so easily persuaded of our own inadequacy? Who was setting the agenda? Why, for decades and even now, has virtually every cultural product been so insistently oriented around male desire and male pleasure?

Postfeminism was vague; it seemed to define itself mostly in opposition to a boogeyman version of feminism, encouraging women to embrace casual sex, spend with abandon, and be as stereotypically girly or overtly sexy as they desired. All these things were insistently sold as being empowering, a word that now makes me deeply suspicious any time I encounter it in the wild.

As the 1990s went on, culture gradually redefined feminism from a collective struggle to an individual one. Instead of an inclusive movement that acknowledged intersections of race, class, and gender, we got selective upward mobility and rampant consumerism.

I’ve always wondered why people diminish girlhood as somehow cosseted or twee, when the reality of coming-of-age as a young woman is so raw, filled with emotional violence and literal blood.

There was no one way to be a Spice Girl, because Girl Power as an ideology was as malleable as Play-Doh. It was for everyone.

For millennial girls, buying things was suddenly being presented as a political act—one that negated the need for other kinds of activism. To invert a quote from The Handmaid’s Tale, the riot-grrrl movement wanted women to have freedom from: sexual violence, abuse, injustice, fear. The Spice Girls embodied freedom to: have fun, earn money, pursue pleasure. There are no prizes for deducing which ideology was easier to package and sell.

Some historians and critics have theorized that as hip-hop became a bigger business, major labels demanded that artists depoliticize their work. As a result, the anger and frustration once aimed at injustice in America was simply redirected toward women.

And as outspoken women proved their power commercially and collectively as touring acts, they were replaced on the radio and in the media by teenagers who didn’t—or couldn’t yet—complain.

The sexual confusion of the 1990s, with its voyeurism and its fear of the future, created a space where it was all too easy to appropriate and commercialize female sexuality for profit, using pornography as both a look book and an instruction manual. But at the same time, porn was adapting to a world in which it was no longer on the margins. The more mainstream culture ripped off its imagery and its sexual excess, the more pornographers, to be able to stand out from the masses, had to go to extremes.

American Pie signaled the beginning of a new cultural fixation with adolescence: with the freedom, friendship, and misadventures it affords boys and with the sexual vulnerability it enforces on girls.

By the time American Pie came around, in 1999, it was cinematically commonplace to portray teenage girls as either scheming, hypersexual vixens or chaste, pluckable Madonnas.

Cher sees her reputation, her social status, and her future as all being at stake.

Voyeurism is a recurring theme in the movie, and for all its prurience, I’m grateful to American Beauty for how it shows Angela’s performing eroticism for the male gaze in the way all teenage girls learn that they’re supposed to do. The film allows us to see that her displays of sexuality are dishonest, far removed from what she might actually want if she were given the space to figure it out.

While the boys get to experience coming-of-age stories, the girls, having been imbued with all the sexual privilege and presumed experience, are allowed no such awakening of their own.

What’s Your Number has a distinct thesis underneath the pratfalls. Ally’s exes, generally, are awful: commitment-phobic, creepy, power abusers, obsessed with puppets. For years she’s been running around, trying her best, openheartedly doing her utmost to connect with people. Is it possible, the movie wonders, that she’s not actually the problem?

The researcher Shannan Palma has analyzed to what extent the tenets of incel entitlement seem drawn from what she calls “fairy-tale logic,” or “a mode of magical thinking typified by the belief that certain functions, fulfilled correctly and in the right order, lead to predictable outcomes.” Stories—from Beauty and the Beast to Knocked Up—have long affirmed the idea that undesirable men can be redeemed by beautiful women. (Beauty and the Beast, Maria Tatar has argued, was originally written to prepare young French girls for arranged marriages to wealthy older men, and the feeling that they might have been dispatched by their families to share their lives with a monster.) This no more indicts the Grimm brothers for incel beliefs than it does Judd Apatow, who told The New York Times in 2007 that there was a “nerd’s fantasy” embedded in many of his films: the wish that “somebody would take the time to get to know us, and love us, warts and all.” It does, though, point to the stickiness with which stories take root inside our minds. Especially when there’s no counternarrative. Incel mythology, with its “chads” and “stacys,” is at least as ridden with archetypes and moralistic projection as any children’s story. And the resentment incels feel seems to be based on what they see as feminism’s fundamental perversion of the way things ought to be: the “refusal” of women to play their proper roles in redeeming men and offering them a happy ending. “The potential for violence,” Palma...

You could forgive a twenty-three-year-old raised on the punishing work schedule of the child performer for any of this, but in the realm of reality TV, Simpson was seen as failing at the most fundamental of all roles: wifehood.

Reality television offered a voyeuristic peek into the lives of the rich and famous, but it was sanitized at best and completely staged at its most spurious; meanwhile, here was actual unfiltered footage of Hilton doing things that were never intended for public view. With this context collapse in mind, it’s a little easier to understand how so many people relished watching what Hilton has likened to revenge porn.

More than ever before, people’s exteriors were understood to reflect their inner identities, both of which seemed malleable and endlessly improvable.

We’re taught as children about inner beauty—about the magic of difference, about there being no one way to look or feel beautiful. I grew up watching “We All Sing with the Same Voice” on Sesame Street, an ode to kids of different ethnicities from different cultures all singing together; I read to my children now from We’re Different, We’re the Same, a picture book with the same ethos. But what makeover shows relentlessly emphasized during the aughts was the idea that there was only one way for women to look: intensely feminine, straight, sexy, middle-class, and White, or at least with any visible signs of difference chiseled into submission.

In a 2004 essay for the London Review of Books, the writer Hilary Mantel noted that the ideal woman of the era had “breasts like an inflatable doll, no hips at all, and the tidy, hairless labia of an unviolated six-year-old.” Such a form, it’s worth noting, can’t actually be humanly attained. It has to be purchased.

Femininity is as much a prize to be flaunted as is wealth; the implication is that the two are inextricably linked.

Sex was also embedded in the show, not as an intimate element but as a mechanism through which both fame and fortune can be won.

Torture porn is not porn—it’s not made to produce arousal or pleasure. But it does, in much the same way as a lot of porn does, reduce human beings to pieces of flesh and meat, to be manhandled, skewered, and dissected while we watch.

While auteurs were rendering sex on film with joyless shrugs, and horror directors were crafting scenes so bloody and jouissant that they felt sexual, porn was itself evolving. “The looks of actresses and styles of pornography change and shift every few years, along with the tastes of viewers,” a Los Angeles Magazine profile of a new teenage star named Sasha Grey explained in 2006. “Sasha is not blond and endowed like [Jenna] Jameson. But with her pale, adolescent looks and a penchant for extreme hardcore scenes, she is a girl of the moment.”

Every adult should be free to have sex however they want with whoever consents to join them. I’m not interested in kink-shaming, and I’m not remotely opposed to porn. I’m curious, rather, about how culture conditions desire, and what it means that the impulse to inflict violence on women is often blindly sanctioned in a sexual context in ways it would never be otherwise.

The nature of how women were being treated in mass media wasn’t an aberration. Rather, it was the most logical place for postfeminism’s ideals to lead. The women we were being conditioned to hate were too visible. (As they were often forced to be by the men who wouldn’t stop taking pictures of them.) They were too sexual. (Which, it had been reiterated over and over again, was a woman’s primary form of currency.) They were famous for nothing. (Thanks to a moment when the nature of celebrity had been upended, and women’s bodies were considered to be in the public domain.) They were failing at the postfeminist project by taking its instructions, in the parlance of popular magazines, “too far.” (They were too thin, too fake, too intoxicated, too narcissistic, too much.)

Technology was also starting to transform celebrity coverage and the business of media. In 2002, the former Financial Times journalist Nick Denton launched Gawker, an intentionally irreverent portal for gossip and media news that was ruder and more scathing than a mainstream publication had ever been before. Gawker’s sister site, the sex- and porn-oriented Fleshbot, debuted as a spin-off in November 2003, distinguishing itself by being one of the first places to publish Paris Hilton’s sex tape.

Tabloid magazines had led the way in offering a more unfiltered look at celebrity life. But blogs had no filters at all; they published anything they could get. It was around this time that photographers started actively pursuing what are now called “upskirt photos”—images of a woman’s underwear or lack thereof. Adult men would lie on the ground while young female stars were stepping out of cars to try to capture what was essentially nonconsensual pornography, and when the photographers succeeded, it was unfailingly their subjects who were shamed.

failures.” Around the beginning of the aughts, the nature of celebrity—what it meant to be famous, what a person could become famous for, how we in the general public understood and related to people with fame—began to change, in ways that would have striking repercussions.

What had begun on reality television as a simple trade, humiliation for exposure, was turning into something darker. The crueler online commentary got, the more clicks it seemed to receive in return.

Disgust is one of the most powerful human responses and one of the least studied. The history of misogyny is defined by expressions of repulsion toward women and their bodies—pervasive ideas across culture, art, and religion that we are somehow unclean or putrid or, to use a term that was weaponized against Hillary Clinton, “nasty.” Disgust is often triggered by fears of overt female sexuality: In the nineteenth century, a doctor in New Orleans who performed clitoridectomies on children described female masturbation as “moral leprosy.” Over the past decade, social psychologists have also found that a person’s sensitivity to disgust might be closely tied to their politics, impacting how they feel about gay rights, premarital sex, and gender equality. “When we experience disgust,” Kathleen McAuliffe wrote in The Atlantic in 2019, “we tend to make harsher moral judgments.”

It’s hard not to deduce that the specific tone of celebrity coverage in this moment was also fueled by an ongoing cultural taste for degradation, the more extreme the better. In 2005, when Paris Hilton played a minor role in the horror remake House of Wax, a marketing campaign for the movie posted ads around Los Angeles with the tagline “See Paris Die!” (In the scene itself, she’s impaled in the head with a spear, a nasty and discernibly sexualized end.) There was a certain kind of visual horror in images of famous women brutalized in movies and visibly disintegrating in real life that suited the moment. Commentators seemed nonchalant, even sanguine, about the idea that some of the women whose antics occupied the cameras could die.

The logical extension of objectification is dehumanization. Since the late 1990s, young women in the public eye had been framed across media as sexy, entertaining, uncomplicated dolls, paid to entertain but never complain. Some understood the bargain.

There was little public sympathy in this moment for anyone who suffered with addiction or had psychological issues or couldn’t cope with being constantly besieged. Rather, women were eaten up by onlookers as the kind of archetypes that have been used to demonize them throughout history: sluts, whores, bad mothers, trainwrecks, manipulators, gluttons, wastrels.

Many of these works seemed rooted in arrested development. Girlhood was no longer a temporary phase but a prolonged state that reached almost to midlife. But part of this stylized extended adolescence, it seems to me now, was about allowing room for experimentation. Girls are allowed to be vulnerable—to overshare, to overanalyze, to unburden themselves, to embarrass themselves, to fail.

After a decade of being prized primarily as decoration, it seemed as though many women had minimal interest in their work’s being pleasing or even palatable. What they wanted, as Ezra Pound wrote of modernism, was to create portrayals of life made wholly new.

Narcissism, in fact, was a general complaint—it’s a word that no woman who insists on framing herself as a subject can escape.

But his comments also underscored the reality that bodies like Dunham’s, while the predominant form for women, were so rare on television at the time as to feel viscerally jarring. By objecting, Stern only seemed to strengthen Dunham’s resolve. Hannah continued to be naked on Girls, not just as a political assertion of presence but also as a delineation of character. Being so exposed underscored her strangeness, but also her vulnerability.

With her nude scenes, Maria San Filippo argues, Dunham “detaches female nudity from women’s heterosexualized desirability, repositioning it instead in contexts of naturalism and female intimacies.”

What Heti and Dunham both seemed to be grappling with during the early 2010s was how to make meaningful art in a cultural climate that ogled and sneered at women, and even loathed them.

For women, self-revelation was both reassuringly familiar and excitingly political.

Writing online was also a way to assert difference, in an environment where women seemed to all look and behave the same, and to refine the art of composing yourself as a character.

One of the reasons I’m so conflicted over confessional writing is that women’s stories are only a relatively recent addition to the literary canon—and that at their best, they demand not just sympathy but control.

It’s worth noting here how differently Girls tends to be received now, both by millennials rewatching the series and younger viewers discovering it for the first time. What seemed in 2012 like the myopic narcissism of a privileged few now rings more like the first accurate—if incomplete—portrait of the internet generation.

Somehow, though, Swift became enshrined as the chronic oversharer, the tale-teller, the furious and vengeful woman scorned.

By asserting how much she felt, Swift was underscoring her own humanity and that of girls everywhere.

Ultimately, it’s not surprising that so many artists in the 2010s, having experienced a decade in which the most intimate details of women’s turbulent lives were appropriated callously for entertainment, decided to claim ownership of their own narratives before others could do so. Or that they often chose to deconstruct storytelling itself to try to approximate the fragmented, chaotic nature of what being alive felt like. And yet, to me, the writing of this era was also doing something more productive: contouring reality to try to make space for something else and to imagine all the ways in which things could be, somehow, different.

For women, Instagram was the apotheosis of postfeminist promise, a platform that rewarded femininity, self-surveillance, and consumerism with constant dopamine hits and, sometimes, fame and fortune.

The women we tend to associate with the girlboss era now, for better or worse, are inextricably linked with the rise of Instagram. They broadcast the aesthetic details of their lives as public figures, drawing significant numbers of followers for the ways in which they projected a distinctly feminine kind of power. But they also shrewdly capitalized on all the ways in which Instagram had commanded our attention.