‘Girl on Girl’ explores how Internet pornography’s rise helped normalize misogyny

Girl on Girl, the treatise on the seismic shift in pop culture of the late 1990s/early 2000s by Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert, opens with one of the most enduring images of that time: the 1999 Rolling Stone cover featuring Britney Spears.

The then-teenage pop star is reclining on magenta satin sheets, clutching a Teletubby doll — the purple one, another lightning rod for controversy — her shirt open, revealing a satin push-up bra in bad-girl black.

In many ways, that image was a cultural bellwether of all that was to come: the objectification, infantilization and hyper-sexualization of girls and women by popular culture.

With Girl On Girl, Gilbert, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, offers a clear-eyed survey of an era when feminist “Riot Grrrl” women were replaced by girls — pliable, exploitable, profitable girls.

The book is chronological, divided up into sections with “girl” in the title — Girl Power, Girl Fight, Gossip Girls, Girl Boss — to examine, in dizzying, harrowing detail, all the ways in which the late ’90s and the early aughts were no friend to women.

From teen sex comedies such as American Pie casting women as the gatekeepers of sex to reality TV’s meat-market appraisal of women, Gilbert takes a sharp critic’s view of the culture of the era, and how it normalized misogyny.

She treats her subject matter seriously because it is serious. Sometimes people dismiss pop culture as frivolous when it actually has the power to shape social mores. We are what we eat, the adage goes; it follows that we are what we consume in other spheres as well.

As Gilbert discovered through her research, all roads lead back to the advent of internet pornography. The aesthetics of porn had a far-reaching — and sometimes insidious — influence, including into IRL bedrooms.

The chapter Final Girl, which explores the rise of violence in porn and other media, is particularly terrifying in its lurid detail. (If you’re looking for a feel-good read, this is not it.)

A lot is packed into these chapters — each individual cultural example on its own could likely merit a full-length book treatment — but taken all together, the effect is like looking at a completed jigsaw puzzle; we knew each individual piece was bad, but the whole is devastating.

Gilbert mentions that publishers wanted her to insert more of herself into the book; save for a few instances, she mostly does not. Girl On Girl could have benefitted from more of a personal touch; the writing sometimes feels distant and anthropological. If the whole point is to understand how this culture made women feel, and the lasting scars it left, it could have been helpful to have a millennial guide in Gilbert, who was 16 in 1999.

Lately, culture’s been feeling very Y2K. The alarming rise of Skinnytok — the pro-anorexia, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” messaging of the early aughts repackaged for the TikTok generation — and Ozempic bringing back impossible Hollywood body standards. Girlbosses, Girl Dinners, Tradwives, Instagram Face and cosmetic surgery, skin-care obsessed Sephora tweens. A reality TV star in the White House.

Gilbert draws a straight line between then and now, but manages to end on a hopeful note. We have the language now, she notes. We can name the misogyny, the objectification. We can understand, clearly, the harms of the culture we consumed back then — the culture we might even find ourselves nostalgic for now.

To wit: on Instagram there was a trend of millennial women making videos critically addressing and reflecting on the era at the heart of Girl On Girl and how it made them who they are. The soundtrack? Billie Eilish’s aching song What Was I Made For?, from Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.

Jen Zoratti is a Free Press columnist and a millennial who was 14 in 1999.