GIRL ON GIRL: How Pop Tradition Turned a Technology of Ladies Towards Themselves, by Sophie Gilbert
There have been a number of passages in Sophie Gilbert’s blistering, sobering e book “Lady on Lady” that challenged my selective nostalgia, making me wince. In the event you too got here of age across the late Nineties and early aughts, put together to have the balloon string of sentimentality pried out of your grip. The celebration’s over. It’s been over.
And it’s for the very best, Gilbert, a author for The Atlantic, makes clear as she guides readers chronologically down the rabbit gap of well-liked tradition from the Nineties to right this moment, connecting the dots to disclose a beforehand uncharted map. Her e book is a course correction of types, taking a holistic tack to elucidate our present sociopolitical actuality: one through which ladies’s hard-fought features are quickly eroding, and males and boys are in crisis.
Throughout 10 rigorously researched however by no means stuffy chapters, Gilbert has compiled maybe the primary complete examination of turn-of-the-millennium mainstream, cool-kid traits and ephemera, and the way they have been largely molded by these in energy to promote a era of ladies and younger ladies reality-warping lies: that self-objectification is empowerment, that disciplined conformism is a lifelong challenge, that sexism is comedy.
Gilbert was drawn to this topic, she writes, “as a result of the cruelty and disdain expressed towards ladies through the aughts appeared to be extra important than it’s usually given credit score for.” Consider the general public dissection of and collective sneer towards pop darlings struggling psychological well being crises, like Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan, or the contemptuous remedy of Hillary Clinton throughout her 2016 presidential run.
