Girl On Girl – How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert

I’m a child of the 60’s and 70’s, so when I saw the title of this book it really struck a chord with me. I remember my mother and her women friends celebrating the era of ‘Women’s Lib’ and listening to Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman being played seemingly on repeat.

My generation benefitted from what these women set in motion. I went to a girl’s school, where there was no question that girls could, and had to, do everything. But then I went out into the real world and the Old Boy’s Network slapped me in the face.

Since then, I have witnessed what seems to be a backward trajectory of attitudes towards women, both from men and from women themselves. Why are young women so obsessed with their appearance? The proliferation of products, diets and the pressure to live a ‘perfect’ life in a ‘perfect ‘ body…it seems that in many ways we have moved backwards. Artificial nails, boob jobs and ‘appearance medicine’ were not a thing. At the risk of sounding old, where on earth did it start to go ‘wrong?’

This very detailed examination by Sophie Gilbert helps to explain how the rise of post feminism, and social media amongst other things has shaped how women’s relationships with themselves and other women has evolved.

This book is split into chapters that cover the evolution of pop videos in the 1990’s through to the effects of reality TV, the change in social landscape after 9/11 and a very confronting look at the rise of pornography. It’s very USA-centred and there are a lot of American TV programmes and movies mentioned that may not be familiar to many of us. But the way our society is now instantly shareable and shared, the effects have spread to all corners of the globe.

As Gilbert states in her introduction “Analysing history together is, above all, an expression of hope: We try to understand all the ways in which things went wrong so that we can conceive of a more powerful way forward.”

Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at the Atlantic. She won the 2024 National Magazine Award for Reviews and criticism and was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. She lives in London.

Reviewer: Rachel White

Hachette