When Y2K nostalgia started creeping into the culture a few years ago, a lot of women who’d lived through the era were bemused. People really wanted to go back to a time of diet culture and Harvey Weinstein? A time before Beyoncé’s Beyoncé, where using the word “feminism” as a celebrity was considered a one-way ticket to nobody listening to you ever again?
But of course, so much of early 2000s culture was fun—candy-colored and addictive, from the fashion to the music to the incredibly engrossing television. And so much of it is now fully baked into our daily experiences. The 2000s were the birth of reality TV as we know it, not to mention the dawn of putting your entire existence on the internet. For better or for worse, they were the moment many of us began seeing our lives as content, and shaping ourselves—our stories, our bodies, our faces—accordingly.
In her new book Girl on Girl, Sophie Gilbert unpacks the pop culture of the 2000s and its ongoing halo effect with uncommon clarity. Moving from transgressive ‘90s photo shoots to Terry Richardson in the ‘00s to the rise of livestreaming and social media, she makes the convincing argument that so much of what underpins so much of our culture’s treatment of women comes from the mainstreaming of porn.
Along the way, she tells a complex story that weaves together “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” America’s Next Top Model, American Apparel, the Real Housewives franchise, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, Lena Dunham, Issa Rae, Glossier, Sophia Amuroso’s Girlboss, diet culture, body positivity culture, confessional essays and XOJane, the 2016 election—basically everything that’s happened in pop culture over the past 25 years. Below, she talks to Bazaar about how the book came together.
I was surprised by how much of your argument is set up by fashion in the ‘90s—the way it celebrated transgression and sexuality and a kind of youthful vulnerability, exemplified by Corinne Day’s famous photos of Kate Moss.
I was surprised by that, too. What I wanted to know was, where did this moment of celebratory porno chic come from? And it really seemed to start in alternative media in the ‘90s, with this edgy, transgressive, boundary-pushing ethos of fashion, and also this need to celebrate and reclaim sex after AIDS and take it back as something that could be presented as a source of joy. But then also on the flip side of that, there was this fetishization of teenage girls and the idea that they were safe in the AIDS era because they weren't, I don't know, sexually active or something. There was so much creepiness.
It was pushing back against the status quo, but it was also often really problematic.
Especially coming out of the Reagan ‘80s, where there was the Moral Majority movement and this conservative era of popular culture, I think people in the ‘90s felt the need to rebel in all these interesting and complicated, ultimately not always ideal ways. There was this real sense of taking culture back.
And then porno chic went mainstream, influencing everything from beauty standards to reality TV. Many of the elements of 2000s culture that you're discussing in the book are now so enshrined in culture that it’s a little bit like you’re describing water to a fish. Did you find that it was hard to remove yourself enough to get perspective?
I just had questions that I wanted to try and answer. I think one of the interesting things about porn is that it’s possibly America's most popular cultural pastime, but no one really talks about it that way. It's this kind of shadow cultural product that people engage with on their own or in secret, sometimes with their partners, but for the most part alone, and it's very personal. And so there hasn't been the analysis in quite the way that I wanted to do. And I have been comparing it to reality television, which is this other product that's hugely, vastly influential but is often dismissed as trash. People don't want to think about it critically, or don't care to be told that it's significant.
Yes! Especially in that era, there was a lot of dismissing things as trash, even as they were becoming the dominant culture.
There was a lot of dismissing things as jokes, too. And I find that really knotty. If someone does something offensive, but they tell you that they're joking, it takes away your ability to critique it. It takes away your ability to push back because suddenly, instead of you being the wronged party, you are the offending one because you are spoiling the fun. You're the killjoy, you're the scold. That messaging, I think, is very powerful.
Do you remember when Katherine Heigl had a very mild criticism of Knocked Up, and she was ruined for it? Everyone was so outraged that a woman would dare to criticize something. And I think that kind of exemplifies what was really tricky for our generation during this moment. If you did dare to claim that something was a tiny bit sexist or to have even a moderate issue with it, there would be such an uproar. It was like, what's the point? You're not going to change anyone's minds. I think the distance of time is really helpful on that front because it makes things so much clearer.
I wanted to ask you a little about 2000s diet culture. I think there’s now this conventional wisdom that it was bad, but in the book, it feels like you wanted to go past that and dig a little deeper.
I was thinking about diet culture through a reality TV perspective for a lot of that chapter. I remembered shows like Extreme Makeover, but I think I hadn't quite put together at the time how much there was this idea being pushed on people watching that anyone could revamp themselves. Anyone could get surgery, anyone could make themselves skinny and hot. And in fact, because anyone could do that, wasn't it everyone's responsibility to do that?
The nature of celebrity itself was changing in such complicated ways during that exact moment. And so really all it took for lots of people to become famous was to be visible in the right kinds of ways, to be in the right kinds of places, to have cameras, to let themselves be fully exposed. There was this real committed dogma in reality tv that hotness would be everyone's ticket to success. Being hot was the ultimate American credential in that moment. It was the only thing that mattered, and it was the only thing that anyone wanted to see.
The 2000s was a period of backlash, and it feels like we’re currently in a similar moment. How are things different this time around?
I mean, it's so similar in so many ways. A certain kind of very juvenile masculine bro energy is ascendant on the internet in so many ways, and that definitely reminds me of the 2000s. The thing I hold onto is that mainstream culture hasn't really adopted those ideas. Mainstream culture still seems, at this point, to be resisting the worst things that you see on social media. And the types of stories that are being told, especially in film, are completely different from what we were seeing back then. There's so much more excavation of women's lives across different kinds of ages.
The Golden Globes this year were so cheering—all these women in their fifties and sixties doing the best work of their lives. Demi Moore actually came up in virtually every chapter of the book. She was the best paid actress in Hollywood, and then she was stripping on David Letterman during this real moment of stripper chic, and then she actually left Hollywood altogether to raise her children during this moment when the number of women in the American workforce was starting to decline for the first time. So she just seemed to sort of embody all these shifts in womanhood.
One of the first viral tweets was a picture Ashton Kutcher took of her butt in a white bikini. It was this very unflattering picture, and it was supposed to be kind of humiliating. But it also symbolized to me this moment where it didn't matter who you were, it didn't matter what kind of body you had—women's bodies were just public property and anyone could feel entitled to take pictures of them, to turn it into content and to make it go viral.
That was the beginning of something, I think, and then everywhere I looked, Demi was always there. I'm so thrilled for her with The Substance. She seems like she’s finally had the opportunity to really demonstrate her talent. And the fact that it came in her sixties is so interesting to me.
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves
How do you want the book to be received?
Obviously it would be nice if people buy a lot of copies, but it's more important to me that people find something in it that feels relevant to them. I wanted to be as thorough as I could. I knew that some people would come to it with an encyclopedic knowledge of, say, reality TV that would make mine look completely inferior, but they might not know other things. Everyone has different realms of expertise, but my hope is that I would be able to draw a broad enough picture that the kind of patterns would be obvious.
Especially in the UK, a lot of the reviews have been like, There are no solutions. She doesn't have any answers at the end, and I definitely do not have any answers. I'm so sorry for that. But I do think I have suggestions, and I think what's so clear in the book is the power of storytelling over politics, over governance.
I mean, the fact that the president now is a reality TV star is such a good example of that, but all these different realms of entertainment that people are derisive about are way more influential than we often want to imagine. And so my real belief is the way to improve things, to make things better, is to keep investing in people, making really great art, and hopefully it finds its audience.
I wanted to ask about the warmth and nostalgia that people feel for this era. Do you feel some cognitive dissonance there?
I think especially with the 2000s, it's so pink and it's so self-tanned, and the texture of it, with the sequins and the velour tracksuits—everything is just bedazzled and spectacular and excessive in these really thrilling ways. And so much of the music—I mean, you obviously always have nostalgia for the era that you grew up in because there's so much memory associated with that. I hear “The Thong Song” and I'm yanked back to 1999. There's so much that's fun, and I really didn't want to take any of that away.
I don't want to steal anyone's joy, but I think it’s important for us as women to understand where we came from, and for younger women to understand what we went through. Not just to be like “We suffered!” but because this stuff is so cyclical, I wanted to put the cruelty that inevitably will cycle back around in perspective, and to let them know that they don't have to sit with it or accept it in the ways that we often felt that we had to.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
