This was a good read, although more therapeutic than enlightening. Sophie Gilbert catalogues the portrayal of women in pop culture in the ‘00s and 2010s, surveying music, reality TV, teen comedies, celebrity journalism, and Girl Boss feminism.
Having spent my most impressionable years in that era, it was helpful to revisit things that had faded in my memory and interrogate how that might have shaped me. The discourse around women and women’s sexuality was horrible: the jokes about waiting for child actresses to turn 18, the expectation of women to act as sexual gatekeepers for men, the level of scrutiny applied to women’s bodies. At the time, I read feminist criticisms of all these things, but when you’re 16 you have no frame of reference for how else the world could be. The distance, education, and worldliness I acquired over the last two decades have enabled me to better assess the wretchedness of that time, and Gilbert’s well-structured and comprehensive book was a means of reviewing the era.
Still, I think Gilbert doesn’t quite manage to transcend beyond cataloguing. In the Introduction, she writes,
My main goal was to reframe recent history in a way that might enhance my own perspective. But what became clear was how neatly culture, feminism, and history run on parallel tracks, informing, disrupting, and even derailing each other.
I was therefore excited to see more interweaving of history and culture; however, I found this aspect lacking. Events like the Great Recession and Obama’s election were mentioned, but these passages often felt more perfunctory than really revelatory of shifting attitudes or mutual disruption or derailment. For example, in the introductory passages to her chapter on confessional auteurs (e.g., Taylor Swift and Lena Dunham), Gilbert writes
Barack Obama’s election in 2008 seemed to signal that the future would be postracial and postfeminist—a progressive America that was bruised by the Great Recession but optimistic about the possibilities of a new intellectual age. Looking inward for inspiration, writers offered up a new wave of prickly, difficult studies of the self.
Obama’s election convinced many people that hope and change were possible. Few lives were left untouched by the Great Recession, and many Americans lost their homes and jobs. However, Gilbert fails to illuminate how these political events ended up producing “prickly, difficult studies of the self.” I think part of the challenge is that Gilbert is a cultural reporter, not an economics or political reporter, and seemed shy about venturing too far from her beat.
In addition to remaining rooted within the cultural realm, Gilbert’s analysis is limited by its narrow focus on the 2000s and 2010s and the years immediately leading up to them. To her credit, she astutely begins her narrative in the 1990s music scene, populated by fully-grown, independent women writing political songs. She identifies the teen-dominated pop of the early 00s as a manufactured reaction to scenes like Riot Grrrl:
I can’t help but read the arc of music in the 1990s as an explicit response to women’s taking control of their art, their image, and their careers…. And as outspoken women proved their power commercially and collectively as touring acts, they were replaced on the radio and in the media by teenagers who didn’t—or couldn’t yet—complain.
Gilbert continues to emphasize how one cultural movement was a response to another — Girls, for example, was Dunham’s reaction to “a cultural climate that ogled and sneered at women, even loathed them.” But Gilbert doesn’t look back further than the 90s. What can we say about early 21st century attitudes towards women in the context of the century of rapid change in women’s liberation that came before? Nor does Gilbert look forward. What can we say about the portrayal of women in the mid-2020s based on her survey of the 00s and 10s? She does muse a little about current trends, but her analysis remains shallow and contradictory:
In moments when I’m galled by archaic trends given a modern twist—tradwives, bimbo chic, stay-at-home girlfriends, twelve-year-old skincare influencers—it’s consoling to remember that most women watching have both newfound language and skepticism that I couldn’t have dreamed of while watching Girls Gone Wild or the video for “Money Maker.”
This optimism proves unfounded when we recall the many feminists writing about objectification, pornography, beauty standards, purity and youth standards, etc. long before the turn of the millennium. Perhaps this misplaced optimism is symptomatic of Gilbert’s neglect of older feminist movements, but even the Riot Grrrl scene, discussed by Gilbert at some length, anticipated some of the patriarchy and sexism of the 00s and 10s in its critique.
Gilbert identifies in the various trends of the 00s and 10s a unifying ideological current: postfeminism — exemplified by characters like Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw:
Less an explicit ideology than a mechanism to attract media attention and sell things, postfeminism emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a reaction to women’s activism, bolstered by the sense that second- and third-wave feminists were somehow inhibiting our collective freedom…. Postfeminism was vague; it seemed to define itself mostly in opposition to a boogeyman version of feminism, encouraging women to embrace casual sex, spend with abandon, and be as stereotypically girly or overtly sexy as they desired. All these things were insistently sold as being empowering[.]
I found this term useful, but not fully compelling. Postfeminism is more of a vibe than an ideology, defined by what it is reacting against than what it is pushing for. To better grasp its development, it would have been fruitful to compare it to the other reactionary currents of the era (e.g., anti-science, anti-diversity) and to reactionary currents arising from earlier waves of feminism.
Still, while I found the analysis overall shallow, I thought the book was a rewarding read. I’d recommend it for millennial women or others who were shaped by the sexism of the time, or those with a particular interest in pop culture history. Reading is not a process of passive absorption of information, and Gilbert’s book provides the reader with plenty of fodder for reconsidering the era.
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