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In 2004, the Fox TV network premiered The Swan, a reality makeover show that was possibly the most unsettling example of the genre ever made.
Young women who were miserable in their bodies, self-proclaimed “ugly ducklings”, were separated from their homes and families for months and subjected to as many cosmetic procedures — breast implants, dental fixes, lifts, fillers — as it took to turn them into visions of plasticised perfection.
The twist — there is always a twist — was that these women had been denied mirrors during this purgatory, which set up a show-closing reveal in which they saw their new selves for the first time.
“I have a waist! Thank you Jesus, oh my God!” sobbed Amy Williams, a 27-year-old aspiring singer with an entirely new face who, in her old, unvarnished body had “felt like the biggest loser”. Weeks of physical pain and jaw implants that left her eating puréed food and relearning how to open her mouth were forgotten as she clutched at herself in joyful incredulity.
Sophie Gilbert’s book Girl on Girl is a trenchant, erudite guide to the unfiltered misogyny that characterised US and UK pop culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It is also an exploration of that culture’s devastating effects on the young people — men and women — at the receiving end of its messages.
Pop culture, Gilbert argues, is a serious business, and it turned young women against themselves. She herself was a teenager in the 1990s. Now, as a writer with agency, she seeks to assess the era that formed her. “We each of us have decades of internal wiring informed by the works we grew up with,” she writes.
Gilbert digs out countless examples of putrescent moments of the era: from a subplot of gross-out teen comedy American Pie that turns a voyeur into a hero, to a feature in men’s magazine Esquire headlined “Women We’d Be Willing to Wait For”, a selection of famous teenagers under the age of consent.
What interests Gilbert is a phenomenon she identifies as unique to the dawn of the digital age: how mainstream fashion, films, television, magazines and music absorbed the aesthetics and tropes of pornography.
The tropes had always been around. But porn’s newfound dominance, she writes, came much like Ernest Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly: “One of the consequences of the Aids crisis was that explicit representations of sex were no longer taboo — they were vital for education and public health. Media revelled in its newfound freedom.” Later, she says, “What felt novel [in that era] was how cool it was, how supposedly empowering and liberating.”
Terryworld, for example, was a highly sexualised, intentionally sleazy 2004 book by Terry Richardson, then one of the world’s top fashion photographers. Richardson diluted his preferred aesthetic of naked and semi-naked women simulating or performing sex acts by shooting porn-lite campaigns for mainstream women’s fashion brands such as Sisley and Katharine Hamnett.
The most subversive thing, Richardson wrote in Terryworld, was “to be out in the mainstream and get away with it”. Except he didn’t. After allegations by models of sexual misconduct, Richardson’s fortunes reversed around the time of the #MeToo movement. Fashion’s former “naughty knave” denied the accusations, but the brands fell away all the same.
Gilbert piles up examples and the effect is both enervating and stunning. Did we really put up with that? What were the creative industries thinking? Could that blithe misogyny return?
She frames the millennium era as one of extreme provocation, of a race to shock, partly down to the emerging technologies that made porn more readily available. She connects its effects to subsequent setbacks for feminists, evident in the tradwives trend, 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”. Just this week, Richardson staged a return, shooting two covers for men’s magazine Arena Homme+.
Gilbert is a serious and attentive chronicler of a fraught era. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Hers is not the first book to cover this territory. Toxic (2023), by British journalist Sarah Ditum, examined women, fame and the noughties through a similar lens. They are two very different books that make the same point: that the recent past was a horrible place to be a woman.
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert John Murray £20/Penguin Press $30, 352 pages
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