Pop culture's war against women

In How Pop Culture Betrayed Millennial Women, Maya Salam reviews Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert (NYTimes, May 1, 2025).

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.”

Later:

Throughout the book, she pushes against the narrative that pop culture is merely a distraction from hard news, arguing instead that it is inextricable from some of the most traumatic events of this century. The photographs of abuse taken by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib were the definition of torture porn, she writes, “ideologically and aesthetically aligned with movies that often seemed to present a revenge defense for acts of extreme humiliation and violence.”

There's more at the link.