In 2021, JD Vance instructed Fox Information that senior Democrat girls have been simply “childless cat girls”, missing cultural or social worth in contrast with their married and procreating counterparts. When Taylor Swift appeared down the barrel of this insult with a publish on Instagram displaying her posing with beloved feline Benjamin Button (from Time journal’s photoshoot naming her 2023’s particular person of the 12 months), 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 thousands and thousands of ladies held their breath.
When Sophie Gilbert, a Pulitzer-nominated journalist and critic on the Atlantic, was writing Lady on Lady, the 2025 Trump administration was only a worrying risk. However Gilbert’s account of ladies’s degradation for the reason that early 90s by way of popular culture sounds a crescendo of doom in the 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. However it’s the patriarchy, silly.
Born within the 80s, Gilbert wished to higher perceive the world of her girlhood, and the sexualised energy girls have been taught to worth in themselves and scrutinise in others. Madonna and riot grrrl have been “switched out” for male-managed woman bands, and music moved away from “offended and abrasive and thrillingly highly effective” visions of social injustice to the vanilla choices of “woman energy”. Gilbert recounts the rise and fall of Britney Spears, the publicity of the Kardashians and the exploitation of fashions resembling Kate Moss in opposition to wider tendencies 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 have been “blunted by mass tradition”, which skilled girls to not be shrill, to not be a prude, and to not get (visibly) previous. Gilbert claims that girls have been turned in opposition to 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 relatively than challenged by Sheryl Sandberg’s individualist company motion in 2013 imploring girls to #LeanIn.
Gilbert writes that in style tradition is invariably “calibrated to male need”, which has ushered in “cruelty and disdain” in the direction of 51% of the inhabitants, notably if they don’t seem to be white. Girls are instructed they’re by no means adequate, however higher could be purchased: contouring, surgical enhancement and weight-reduction plan promote a really perfect that “can’t truly be humanly attained” however could 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 major faculty youngsters, no surprise 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 due to this fact 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 Fantasy, 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 Lady on Lady focuses on the place popular culture has gone fallacious for girls, I loved Gilbert’s reward for Madonna, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Chris Kraus’s resistant voices, and her guide would have benefited from extra. In her conclusion about potential bulwarks in opposition to girls’s dehumanisation, Gilbert begins to make an intriguing argument about romantic love as a power of gender equality and respect, however this runs out of steam.
When Gilbert was pitching Lady on Lady, potential editors wished 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 inquisitive 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 beneath which porn could be a power for good, which appears vital to know with a view 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 Lady on Lady struck by Gilbert’s skilful marshalling of proof and chic writing, however in search of a bolder declare about the place the true downside lies and what could be accomplished about it.
Kate Womersley is a health care provider and educational specialising in psychiatry