In 2021, JD Vance instructed Fox Information that senior Democrat girls had been simply “childless cat girls”, missing cultural or social worth in contrast with their married and procreating counterparts. When Taylor Swift seemed down the barrel of this insult with a put up on Instagram displaying her posing with beloved feline Benjamin Button (from Time journal’s photoshoot naming her 2023’s particular person of the yr), she embraced the position of killjoy, rejecting Vance’s try to divide girls. However even this gesture of defiance and solidarity was not sufficient to push again the pink tide of misogyny and corruption: Trump was elected to a second time period, the US was denied a feminine chief, and tens of millions of ladies held their breath.
When Sophie Gilbert, a Pulitzer-nominated journalist and critic on the Atlantic, was writing Woman on Woman, the 2025 Trump administration was only a worrying chance. However Gilbert’s account of ladies’s degradation because the early 90s via popular culture sounds a crescendo of doom in direction of this current second. With what she calls a “wry nod” to lesbian porn, you’d be forgiven for concluding from her title that Gilbert thinks girls are the issue. But it surely’s the patriarchy, silly.
Born within the 80s, Gilbert needed to higher perceive the world of her girlhood, and the sexualised energy girls had been taught to worth in themselves and scrutinise in others. Madonna and riot grrrl had been “switched out” for male-managed lady bands, and music moved away from “offended and abrasive and thrillingly highly effective” visions of social injustice to the vanilla choices of “lady energy”. Gilbert recounts the rise and fall of Britney Spears, the publicity of the Kardashians and the exploitation of fashions resembling Kate Moss towards wider traits within the music scene, tabloid rags and actuality TV, the artwork world, promoting company boardrooms and our Instagram feeds. She argues that the guarantees of third-wave feminism had been “blunted by mass tradition”, which educated girls to not be shrill, to not be a prude, and to not get (visibly) outdated. Gilbert claims that girls had been turned towards each other, neutralising the efficiency of feminism’s promise. In the meantime, post-feminism was fed by porn (“the defining cultural product of our instances”) and opportunistic capitalism, facilitated quite than challenged by Sheryl Sandberg’s individualist company motion in 2013 imploring girls to #LeanIn.
Gilbert writes that well-liked tradition is invariably “calibrated to male want”, which has ushered in “cruelty and disdain” in direction of 51% of the inhabitants, notably if they aren’t white. Girls are instructed they’re by no means adequate, however higher might be purchased: contouring, surgical enhancement and weight-reduction plan promote a super that “can’t really be humanly attained” however might be bought, now with a single click on. Getting by as a lady in post-feminist instances means not taking apparently misogynistic music, artwork and TV too critically, whereas girls are being exploited, mocked and assaulted in plain sight, as #MeToo belatedly attested. When porn is in all places, most worryingly on the telephones of main faculty kids, no marvel 38% of ladies within the UK mentioned they skilled “undesirable slapping, choking, gagging or spitting throughout intercourse”. The blokeish “irony-as-defence motif”, which nudges girls to be in on the gag, denies the reality that sexist and racist cultural merchandise profoundly change the way in which society thinks about girls and subsequently how girls are handled.
Are there any options? Gilbert’s writing pays tribute to feminist texts that got here earlier than her, from Naomi Wolf’s The Magnificence Delusion, Susan Faludi’s Backlash and Ariel Levy’s Feminine Chauvinist Pigs, to Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and Amia Srinivasan’s The Proper to Intercourse, all of that are quoted at size. Whereas Woman on Woman focuses on the place popular culture has gone incorrect for ladies, I loved Gilbert’s reward for Madonna, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Chris Kraus’s resistant voices, and her ebook would have benefited from extra. In her conclusion about potential bulwarks towards girls’s dehumanisation, Gilbert begins to make an intriguing argument about romantic love as a drive of gender equality and respect, however this runs out of steam.
When Gilbert was pitching Woman on Woman, potential editors needed extra of her first-person voice. She felt “conflicted” about feminine confessional writing, and refused. The result’s that Gilbert retreats from voicing her full indignation. She insists she’s “not curious about kink-shaming, and never remotely against porn”, even whereas diagnosing porn as an unquestionable supply of hurt to girls. Furthermore, Gilbert doesn’t describe the circumstances below which porn is usually a drive for good, which appears essential to know with the intention to determine when to be what the scholar Sara Ahmed has known as a feminist killjoy: “somebody who speaks out about types of injustice, who complains, who protests, who says no”. I completed Woman on Woman struck by Gilbert’s skilful marshalling of proof and stylish writing, however on the lookout for a bolder declare about the place the true drawback lies and what might be accomplished about it.
Kate Womersley is a physician and tutorial specialising in psychiatry
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