In Girl on Girl, Sophie Gilbert of The Atlantic examines cultural artifacts from the 1990s and 2000s, tracing how media of that era portrayed and molded women who grew up surrounded by its messages. The book examines everything from 2000s “torture porn” movies to early reality TV shows to the rise and fall of the “girlboss.”
Gilbert’s book largely disabuses me of any nostalgia for the ’90s and ’00s, even as such nostalgia now seems to be trending culturally. The cruel fat-shaming of all but the thinnest women, the open sexualization of teenage celebrities, and the startlingly misogynistic teen sex comedies have thankfully fallen out of style. The fixation with violent pornography, on the other hand, hasn’t receded so much as it’s become so common as to no longer register as taboo.
Recent teen comedies almost never play sexual violation for laughs the way American Pie did. But while open misogyny is less tolerated in mainstream culture now, contemporary teen boys don’t need to flock to R-rated movies to see women in compromising sexual situations, as they might have in the infancy of internet porn. Gilbert’s book shows just how difficult it is to mold culture from on high (a lesson age-verification advocates might do well to consider). After all, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
