Book Review: ‘Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves,’ by Sophie Gilbert

Gilbert was drawn to this subject, she writes, “because the cruelty and disdain expressed toward women during the aughts seemed to be more significant than it’s often given credit for.” Think of the public dissection of and collective sneer toward pop darlings suffering mental health crises, like Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan, or the contemptuous treatment of Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential run.

“The nature of how women were being treated in mass media wasn’t an aberration,” Gilbert goes on. “The women we were being conditioned to hate were too visible.”

Her examples are abundant, and span genres. In music, there was the replacement of the defiant and gutsy female icons of the ’80s and early ’90s — Madonna, Janet Jackson, Kathleen Hanna — with Y2K pop’s much younger and less opinionated girls: Spears, Jessica Simpson, Christina Aguilera. In fashion, the sidelining of powerful supermodels who demanded to be paid their worth (Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista) in favor of frail, passive, American Apparel-esque teenagers.

The phasing out of the golden age of rom-coms made way for a surge of teen-sex and adult bromance comedies — “American Pie,” “Scary Movie,” “The Hangover” — that either fetishized younger female characters or cast adult women as “shrill, sexless nags or trampy, adulterous harpies.”

“Movies in the aughts hated women,” Gilbert writes, and she has a stack of receipts to prove it.

Then came the explosion of makeover shows that disguised cruelty as tough love, and reality dating shows that continue to pit a parade of interchangeable women against one another for the affections of the same male stranger. Women’s personal desires, the author says, have become indistinguishable from the desire to satisfy men’s “perennial fantasy of an emotionally uncomplicated, sexually available woman.”