The feminist movement feel more fragile than ever despite decades of progress. Cosmetic surgeries are at an all-time high, Ozempic is bringing back “heroin chic” and TikTok trad-wives are on the rise – after four waves of feminism, what went wrong?

Pulitzer Prize finalist and Atlantic critic Sophie Gilbert, explains this is not a unique moment. Feminism felt just as fragmented in the early 2000s, when the momentum of third-wave feminists and riot girls was squashed by lad culture and the commodification of Girl Power.

Gilbert’s exposé of mainstream TV, film and music that aped pornography to pander male gaze, after scanning thirty years of pop culture, from Madonna, the Spice Girls, and the Kardashians, to MySpace, #GirlBoss and Real Housewives. Revealing the toxic pattern of progress and misogynistic backlash. Girl on Girl shows how every form of media, heavily influenced by the rise of porn, has shaped and warped women’s relationships with themselves and other women.

Young women who were miserable in their bodies, self-proclaimed “ugly  ducklings”, were separated from their homes and families for months and subjected as many cosmetic procedures- breast implants, dental fixes lifts, fillers  to turn them into visions of plastic perfection.

These women were denied mirrors during this purgatory. Gilbert’s book Girl on Girl is erudite guide to misogyny that characterised US and UK pop culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s. 

According Gilbert Pop culture is a serious business and it turned young women against themselves. “ We each have decades of internal wiring informed by the works we grew up with” Gilbert writes.

Gilbert identifies as unique to the dawn of digital age, how mainstream fashion, films, television, magazines and music absorbed the aesthetics and tropes of pornography.

“One of the consequences of the Aids crisis was that explicit representations of sex were no longer a taboo- as they were vital for education and public health, as media revelled in its newfound freedom. What felt novel was how cool it swa, how supposedly empowering and liberating. “

Terry World an highly sexualised internationally sleazy 2004 book by Terry Richardson, then one of the world’s top fashion photographers, who diluted his preferred aesthetic of naked and semi-naked women simulating on performing sex acts by shooting porn-lite campaigns  for mainstream women’s fashion brands such as Sisley and Katharine Hamnett. After allegations sexual misconduct, Richardson’s fortunes reversed around the time of the #MeToo movement. Fashion’s “naughty Knave” denied the accusations but the brands fell away all the same.

Gilbert frames the millennium era as one of extreme provocation of a race to shock partly down to emerging technologies that made porn more readily available, connecting its effects to subsequent setbacks for feminists.  Hillary Clinton’s treatment during the 2016 US Presidential election, and the reversal of Roe vs Wade in 2022 – “the tacit confirmation that progress for women is not and never will be linear”.

We cannot move forward without fully reckoning with the ways pop culture has defined us.

Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert, John Murray £20/ Penguin Press $30, 352 pages.