La Voz de Galicia – July 18, 2025 →
I bought the book after hearing her speak in an interview about the reasons that led her to reflect on the “hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization” of women during the third wave of feminism. In her book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, The Atlantic writer Sophie Gilbert traces the history of feminism in the 1990s and early 2000s, reflecting on the role of internet pornography, its influence on pop culture, and the misogyny embedded in cultural production.
It’s undoubtedly a complicated topic, as early in the book she questions why the music industry began lowering the average age of its female artists. How “rock’s angry women were (…) replaced by pop’s much younger and much less opinionated girls” and how that shift was also evident in other industries, such as fashion.
And I have to admit that, in reading Gilbert, I felt a kind of relief in finding, in her voice, those same conflicting feelings about how women are represented in today’s music industry—about the complex relationship between “empowerment” and “objectification.” And even if we can’t do much about it, understanding where these influences come from helps us see why, at times, it seems like we’re moving backward when it comes to women and their rights.
Gilbert wrote that “the more research I did, the more porn seemed to have filtered its way through absolutely everything in mass media”. And I, who hadn’t been fully aware of its influence on my generation, learned a great deal from her reflections…
