It’s to Gilbert’s credit that she makes a cohesive history emerge from this morass of references...that arise out of this era ... Throughout, her organization is as confident and nimble as her arguments ... The informed and persuasive essays in Girl on Girl stand alone, even as they build on one another. A chapter on the early years of reality television is exceptional ... This ground is well-trod, but rarely trod so well. Gilbert knows when to supply deft nuance.
Blistering, sobering ... Across 10 rigorously researched but never stuffy chapters, Gilbert has compiled perhaps the first comprehensive examination of turn-of-the-millennium mainstream, cool-kid trends and ephemera ... Her research is admittedly 'bleak' at best, but Gilbert isn’t concerned with softening the blow. Instead, she’s intent on snapping millennials out of any instinct to idealize the decades that shaped us.
Indisputably clear ... Chapter by chapter, Gilbert methodically shows how the backlash against second- and third-wave and riot grrrl feminism fueled the rise of incel culture, trad wives, the stay-at-home girlfriends on TikTok, and much more. There is a lot to unpack here, but it is well worth the effort.
Gilbert’s assessment of the era is damning, and likely to resonate with readers of her generation ... But Gilbert is oddly silent on this pitiful bouquet of pick-me behaviors in Girl on Girl. Though the book is laced with suggestive personal asides and hypothetical questions that gesture at the ill effects of pop culture on young women, it doesn’t include an account of how women actually responded to the material it so assiduously documents ... The removal of the protagonist from this story—the viewer who perceives and acts in response—gives the book an elusive, lopsided quality. On the one hand, it is an exhaustive account, a formidably thorough excavation of pop-cultural artifacts whose disdain toward women is often stunningly blunt ... On the other hand, it is a strangely untethered document, evidence marshalled for an unknown case: a long list of causes in search of a presumed effect ... Reading Girl on Girl as a member of its target audience is a conflicting experience, alternately tedious and engrossing, unpleasant and therapeutic ... The collected material makes a persuasive case for self-forgiveness. If you contorted or disfigured yourself to fit into this moment, the book seems to say—if you 'participated in your own oppression' by getting the memo and acting on it—don’t blame yourself. This was the water; you were just a fish ...
Less persuasive are the conclusions Gilbert draws about porn. There’s a whiff of something old school in them, a half-buried paranoia about pornography’s role in women’s diminished power in the United States that recalls the feminist anti-porn line of the nineteen-eighties ... Possessing neither the ambition of the Dworkin-MacKinnonites nor the materialism of their socialist and Third Worldist contemporaries who traced the source of women’s oppression elsewhere—to racism, colonialism, and economic inequality—Gilbert’s argument finds itself at a dead end ... Gilbert alludes to collective power, but remains hazy on what it is to be used for, and ends her book looking out onto a familiar cramped horizon. Representation matters, she tells us, and, if we can rewrite our limiting storytelling models, we can remake the world. Yes, representation matters, but culture alone can’t do the work of politics, and neither can cultural critique.
Gilbert’s sustained close reading of the 1999 comedy American Pie is an especially thrilling study of how media shapes us. All I remembered from my single viewing, decades ago, was the sensual encounter between Jason Biggs and the titular apple pie, but Gilbert recognized the origins of incel culture ... [Gilbert's] approach has given me new tools to examine incidents from my own life, from how I internalized pop culture to more personal run-ins with misogyny ... Girl on Girl is hard to read ... But it also led me to pick up my phone, again and again, to text old friends. 'Remember this?' I’d ask, sharing a picture of Jessica Simpson in her high-waisted jeans. Everyone did—and as we reminisced, all of us nearing 40, it seemed like we were finally ready to be angry about it.
Gilbert retreats from voicing her full indignation ... I finished Girl on Girl struck by Gilbert’s skilful marshalling of evidence and elegant writing, but looking for a bolder claim about where the real problem lies and what can be done about it.
A carefully buttressed and sharply written analysis that takes into account a dizzying number of cultural products and characters ... Truly, Gilbert deserves a medal—not only for her observations and conclusions, but for navigating the sludge she had to wade through to get there. Essential cultural criticism. But brace yourself—it ain’t pretty.
