"None of us are born with a voice in our head that tells us how awful we look..."

I sat down with Sophie Gilbert, Atlantic writer and author of new book Girl on Girl, to talk about how pop culture quietly turned women against themselves...

The brilliant author and journalist Sophie Gilbert

As a teenager in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I thought the culture around me was empowering. That’s what we were sold; girls were loud, sexy, and visible. Our TV screens were filled with makeover shows showing us that all it took to harness our feminine charms was new ‘flattering’ clothes, better beauty skills and at the extreme end, huge weight loss and cosmetic surgery. We were sold “girl power” by five thin, mostly white women. We were told that wearing Playboy merch made us cool girls. But beneath the glitter and lip gloss was something darker: a world that taught us to compete, to contort ourselves, to be seen more than heard.

I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with journalist Sophie Gilbert, whose brilliant new book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves unpacks exactly that era. Sophie’s writing - she's an award-winning writer at The Atlantic - has always cut through the noise. And this book is no different; it’s part cultural deep-dive, part unlearning, part therapy.

If you’ve ever flinched at old photos, wondered why you’re so hard on yourself, or felt like you had to perform femininity just to belong - this one’s for you.

---

A: My first notion of empowerment was the Spice Girls; I’m curious to know how you felt about this time?

S: Spice came out in 1996, when I was just 13, and it felt like one of those moments in cinema where things go from black-and-white to full colour. They were just so vibrant. And fairly instantly I remember feeling like I could buy our way to being just like them: I coveted the Buffalo boots that Mel B wore, and the Spice Girls-branded Polaroid camera, and I definitely had the Spice Impulse body spray. It was this moment of incredible commercialism that I don't think any artist could get away with now, but I remember just craving all these things that felt like they might somehow make me a part of this pop-culture phenomenon. Then after Britney Spears "Baby One More Time" came out a couple of years later, I mostly remember loving the music but also discussing with my friends how we were being harassed a lot more by van drivers when we were wearing school uniform.

A: You’ve highlighted that pop culture taught women to see themselves as “things to silence, restrain, fetishise or brutalise.” How did this manifest in your own life?

S: It's hard to answer this succinctly because it could be a book all on its own. But briefly: I starved myself for the entirety of the 2000s. I fully internalised the idea that all of my worth was associated with what I looked like, and obsessed over whether what I looked like made me sufficiently appealing to men. I objectified myself because I thought it would make me feel powerful. But what kind of power is entirely reliant on someone else's approval?

May 1999 - Just Seventeen or J17 as it rebranded to!

A: How do you think beauty culture in the aughts fuelled internalised misogyny?

S: We were taught, constantly, to find fault with ourselves. I remember reading Just Seventeen when I was maybe 12 or 13 and agonising about whether I had cellulite, and copying the leg exercises to "lengthen" my calves (impossible), and doing quizzes with my friends in which we were encouraged to rate each other's attractiveness and write down our suggestions for areas of improvement. This would have been in the '90s, so an early kind of conditioning in terms of judging ourselves and other women. And then, in the 2000s, the internet took off and reality TV created a new kind of celebrity that was all about visibility, and the tone of celebrity media suddenly became very cruel, I think because we all disdained these beautiful women whose only purpose was making us look at them.

A:You resist writing in the first person in Girl on Girl. How close did your own story come to shaping the narrative, and why did you hold back?

S: I don't know that I actively resisted it, I knew from the beginning that I was more interested in writing a book of historical cultural criticism than a memoir, mostly because that's the kind of writer I am. There are so many memoirists who I'm in awe of, and whose writing has changed my life with its honesty and its clarity. But I'm a critic, and I've tried all different kinds of writing over the years and I think I'm just best at analysing things outside of myself. It was less a choice than an acknowledgment of what seemed to be working as I started writing. With Girl on Girl, too, my hope was that every reader would be able to bring their own experiences of this era to the book and project themselves into the narrative. I wanted to leave space for all different kinds of interpretations and readings of the era.

A: Your book maps the rise of porn aesthetics in mainstream fashion and media. Did you find any early beauty imagery- fashion shoots, ads, celebrity styling - that especially shocked you for its influence?

S: So much! There was an ad for Clinique Dramatically Different Moisturising Lotion in 2006 (above) which featured a model with a visible dash of lotion from her eye down to her mouth. Obviously it was intended to evoke the idea of the money shot. There was an American Apparel ad from 2010 in which the photographer posed female models in a human pyramid, emulating the photos of sexualised torture of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib (which themselves seemed to be emulating porn). There was so much empty provocation - people making images for no specific purpose other than outrage, which I think anticipated a lot of where we are now.

A: You explore the link between toxic beauty ideals and reality TV’s voyeurism. How do you think today's beauty culture- IG filters, TikTok trends - compares? Is it worse? Or better?

S: The beauty industry is a lot more inclusive now, and less insistent that white skin is the default. But beauty culture is also much worse in how utterly dominant it is. It's the poisoned air we all breathe every time we're online. There's no escaping it. The idea that we can and should "fix" things about our faces until we all have the same totally artificial semblance of an external self is all over our social media. And we all have technology in our pockets that allows us to scrutinise our faces in ways that are totally unnatural.

A: How do you feel about the empowerment messaging women receive around everything from beauty and wellness to fashion and finance. Is thinly veiled marketing - or can it ever be genuinely empowering?

S: I would say there's an easy rule of thumb here: If someone is trying to sell you something by claiming that product is empowering, it's almost certainly not. If someone is encouraging you to try to source power or agency or self-esteem from within, without having to buy a particular product or subscription, they're worth listening to. Obviously there are people doing excellent work whose time is worth paying for: therapists, accountants, coaches. But a face cream or a pair of control-top underwear is more likely to enrich the person selling it than it is to empower you or anyone else.

A: What writing - books, substacks, anything - influenced you when writing GOG?

S: So many. I have a bibliography with hundreds of books on it, and the more I read now, the more I wish I could keep adding to my book forever. I have to say, not because of the context but out of real appreciation, I loved Ugly! It was so incisive and so beautifully argued - such a rousing call for both change and self-liberation. I also loved Flawless by Elise Hu, and how well it balanced a skeptical approach to beauty culture with an understanding of how enticing it can be. I love everything by Melissa Febos and wish every single day that I could write like her, but I can't. Amanda Hess is a brilliant, funny, incisive critic whose work I always run to read. I read a lot of academic books about reality television that blew my mind wide open, and would recommend anything written or edited by Brenda Weber, Racquel Gates, or Rosalind Gill. Jessica DeFino's Substack is brilliant, as is Angelica Bastién's.

Just a couple of Sophie’s brilliant critiques for The Atlantic

A: What's your relationship like with beauty and fashion now? Do you ever feel complicit buying into trends or beauty products, or have you found balance?

S: Going through a press tour, even a smallish one, is incredibly destabilising on this front because all of a sudden you're forced to see your own face on television (and on podcasts you recorded at 7am not knowing there was a video component) and in all the photos of live events. In my day to day life I'm usually fairly cloistered at home, in joggers. But being a person out in the world requires a lot more preparation. For one TV appearance I did in Toronto the makeup artist did some mild contouring and unfortunately it looked incredible, because I'll just never, ever commit to that kind of effort myself. So: Yes, I am complicit. But I'm also helped by my laziness. The nice thing about being in your 40s and having young children is that you just don't have time for the kind of elaborate, intense self-loathing I used to feel in my 20s.

A: Do you see a connection between the beauty rituals we adopted in the 2000s and today’s politicised debates over bodily autonomy and reproductive rights? What lessons can/should/must we learn from that period in time?

S: The thing I ended up taking away from my book is that nothing is directly connected and everything is diffusely connected. Can we blame beauty culture and misogynistic forms of media for, say, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the rise of the manosphere? No. Did they contribute to an environment in which women were encouraged to belittle and ruthlessly dissect themselves and other women, and did that preoccupation distract us from identifying what we need to make the world better for all women? Absolutely. Beauty culture encourages us to minutely focus on ourselves as things that need fixing, instead of thinking about the outward policies and systems we would otherwise choose to tear down.

A:Which modern public figure do you think is rewriting beauty culture in a healthy, powerful way?

S: Absolutely Chappell Roan (above). I love her so much. Her approach to makeup feels the same as my four-year-old daughter's when she grabs my eyeshadow palette: It's a creative project entirely ungoverned by the "need" to look a certain way. It's all about self-expression, play, the desire to make something extravagantly unnecessary and thrillingly bonkers. I love what Pamela Anderson and Alicia Keys are doing by rejecting the standards of visibility for women in the public eye.

A: Lastly - from everything you read about and wrote about for your book, what's the one thing you'd want people to know about protecting themselves against toxic cultural conditioning and how to prevent it from seeping into your life?

S: The one thing to know is that none of this is innate. None of us are born with a voice in our head that tells us how awful we look, how ugly we are, how worthless. We learn to talk to ourselves this way, which means we can unlearn it. It's the project of a lifetime, but it sets us free.

Get more Sophie: Buy Girl On Girl here. Check out Sophie’s brilliant words here. Read more about Sophie here.

Much love and thanks to Sophie - and do check out her book, it’s excellent!