I’m fascinated by sex, in the least strange way that will hopefully not cause a call from my mother. I care about it as an academic, a writer and a cultural reporter. In my time as Ms., I’ve dedicated hours towards analyzing the significance of Sabrina Carpenter’s hair getting pulled or Sydney Sweeney’s marketed bathwater, because they matter more than we think. Sex is a reflection of power, power that extends from the most intimate parts of our lives to our art, our careers, our laws.
More recently, I’ve noticed a continued online discourse surrounding female celebrities and their sexual expression, each commenter hell-bent to answer the central question: what does it mean for a woman to be feminist in her sex life? In covering aspects of this debate, I haven’t aimed to decisively answer this question because my cultural fascination with sex goes beyond blunt criticism. It’s a personal investment for not only myself, but for all women who pick themselves apart, anxious in their own desire: Do I like this? Why do I like this? Am I wrong for this? Why is “this” even an option?
By this, I generally mean the female experience of sex, something I’ve since come to realize expands to every corner of girl and womanhood—writing, art, politics, music, fashion, TV, blog posts—and most all of which Sophie Gilbert documents her latest book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. Gilbert’s recent release is a fastidious archive of ‘90s-2000s popular culture, attempting to understand the innate feeling of female subjugation that Gilbert felt compelled to interrogate with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
“It just felt like things had gone very wrong. It was sort of symbolic,” Gilbert explained to me during our recent interview, “but it [also] felt like there was this kind of numb acceptance that’s interesting. And I wanted to know where that sense of disempowerment came from.”
Tracing the source of disempowerment for all American women is a tall, if not impossible, order. But in Girl on Girl, it becomes instantly clear that porn has played a pervasive role—“We are all living in the world porn made,” writes Gilbert—an argument that has critics raising an eyebrow on all sides. In her New York Times article, “The Delusion of Porn’s Harmlessness,” Christine Emba argues that Gilbert shies away too much from roundly condemning porn, writing, “While Ms. Gilbert is unsparing in her descriptions of pornography’s warping effect on culture and its consumers, she’s curiously reluctant to acknowledge what seems obvious: Porn hasn’t been good for us.”
Conversely, Dayna Tortorici, in her New Yorker article, “What Did Pop Culture Of The Two-Thousands Do To Millennial Women,” suggests that blaming porn entirely, despite its undeniable impact, is an oversimplification. “What is she really saying?” Tortorici questions, “That hardcore porn was responsible for [Russell] Brand’s abuse, for the paparazzi’s harassment of [Britney] Spears, and, further down the line, for the rise of Donald Trump and the overturning of Roe v. Wade? Gilbert wouldn’t stand behind such outsized claims, which is why she doesn’t make them. But she seems equally reluctant to see porn as anything but the master key to male supremacy.”
Interestingly, though porn appears to be at the crux of Gilbert’s analysis, the book was never supposed to be about it. Gilbert recounted “having not remotely wanted to write a book about porn, or even tangentially related to porn,” and yet, after doing the research, “it just was impossible to ignore, because it was everywhere—it was the biggest cultural product of the time and still is in lots of ways.”
It’s hard to read Girl on Girl and deny the sheer force of porn. Especially potent are the first few chapters, which center heavily on the music and fashion industries. Gilbert walks readers through the steady dissemination and domination of sex from strictly pornographic content to mainstream pop culture. “Porno-chic” was the exciting new frontier of unprecedented aura. “What felt novel was how cool it was, how supposedly empowering and liberating and potentially lucrative,” Gilbert explains.
Sex imbued models, actresses, everyday people with a new air of delicious transgression that was at the same time glamorous and accessible as compared to straight porn. Half-exposed breasts and S&M could now be found in Abercrombie Ads, New Yorker pages and the mall. And apparently, dick-pick coffee table books were the next hot commodity. Notably, this era of porno-chic was perceived as liberating for women, ushering a new wave of post-feminism which argued “that feminism had achieved what it needed to and now women were largely free to behave just like men, sexually liberated and socially empowered,” as Gilbert writes.
There is, of course, good reason to question how “liberating” this porno-chic culture really was. The creator of that infamous but still popular coffee-table book, fashion photographer Terry Richardson, featured pictures of Richardson choking out models, shoving his penis in their faces, and grabbing others, apparently unconscious, by the hair. Abuse allegations inevitably followed, and Richardson could not have been the only one. Many of the models and starlets at the time were mere teenagers, their innocence a part of their allure. Whether or not their work was consensual—underage teens cannot consent to be in porn, though fashion blurred those lines—does not diminish porn’s inevitable hand of exploitation embedded in its newfound liberation.
I understand some critics’ resistance to blaming everything on porn because I don’t necessarily think that porn, especially the overtly dangerous kind, was itself a major actor in Gilbert’s illustrated history. Tortorici argues that Gilbert’s few examples of porn were far too extreme to merit any major influence. In her chapter, “Final Girl,” Gilbert discusses the rise in violent “torture” porn, which masked the acute pain and suffering at the core of what was “just sex” in many creators’ and viewers’ eyes. This kind of porn was often literally abusive. Tortorici cites a particularly harrowing example of notorious porn producer “Max Hardcore,” who blatantly tortured the women he worked with. However, Tortorici hesitates to believe that Hardcore was at all representative of porn’s so-called violent shift. “It’s an extreme example,” she writes, one that Gilbert “offers—as representative of porn’s violent turn, which, she argues, inspired a parallel trend towards sadism and misogyny in mainstream culture.” Tortorici ultimately finds this claim lacking in “explanatory power.”
Women’s lives had become a performance, and yet, a performance they were acting out themselves, one they felt they had control over
Tortorici’s hesitance is valid, but even so, violent sex was prevalent in the mainstream before the rise of torture porn. Similarly disturbing to the details of Hardcore were the popular hip-hop lyrics cited in chapter one, “Girl Power,” ones I’ve probably heard several times in the car, but that on paper made me sick to my stomach. In response to female rappers using their music to protest discrimination and promote female pleasure, male rappers’ music became more vengeful, more violent. There was talk of sex with minors—“Who said that hoe ain’t old enough/If she could bleed then she could fuck”—grotesque vitriole—“Fuck you titty sucking blue balled bitch…ass licking piss sucking cunt”—and even murder fantasies (Eminem wrote about killing his own girlfriend and disposing of the corpse).
These lyrics weren’t fringe, nor were they a direct product of hardcore violent porn, which actually arrived more as an attempt to distinguish true porn from mainstream media. Instead, the existence of such extremes like Max Hardcore only confirms what was happening to women in the mainstream. This music, along with exposing fashion magazines, photoshoots with traces of abuse and wide-eyed, sexualized teen stars, was a reflection of how women’s lives were becoming pornographic: exposed, vulnerable and receptive of anyone’s pleasure, violence, or both. “So much of this century’s popular culture has presented women as spectacles: chaotic, melodramatic, hypersexualized recipients of attention,” Gilbert summarizes. This exact description reads as pornographic to me, having no limits, no boundaries, an exaggerated performance of the self; one that, more dangerously, came with the illusion of control.
Indeed, while Gilbert’s book is full of men driving porno-chic, what I found interesting was how women voluntarily participated in acts of proclaimed sexual liberation that some may perceive as self-exploitation. Madonna was a leading example of a woman who endeavored into her own era of porno-chic, publishing an arguably more successful coffee-table book simply titled Sex. The book features a carousel of images that juxtaposed imagery and tone: some leather-clad and sensual, others masculine and dominating, some giggling and gagging (“She goofs off, laughing and pulling faces as if to neutralize the tension of depicting herself bound to a chair—pulled tightly by her platinum-blonde hair.”)
Gilbert positions Sex as toying with porno-chics competing purposes: to liberate or subjugate women. “In presenting herself both as sexual subject and object, she was reclaiming some of the power that had been taken from her in the 1980s,” referring to when her nudes were published, without consent, by Playboy and Penthouse. As Madonna’s brother recounted her situation, she had “nothing more to lose anymore, nothing more to hide.” Ultimately, this is the precarious mentality that Gilbert posits as the byproduct of porn’s normalization. Young women of the early aughts came to realize that their sexual exposure and exploitation was inevitable, and with that out of the way, perhaps it could become newly empowering if they could learn to control it.
And many women did seem to hold onto that sentiment, especially because exposing themselves was a guarantee to be seen. Curiously, many elements of 2000s pop culture had less to do with actual sex and more so self-exposure, often reading as equally pornographic to me. Gilbert’s chapter on the rise of Reality TV, “Girl Fight,” documenting the mounting public desire to see everything, was particularly interesting to me because of the added element of “control” that came with self-documentation. “The boundaries of reality and ‘reality’ were breaking down,” Gilbert writes, “We would soon be able to assess in real time how the world wanted to view us—and adjust ourselves instantly in response.”
Women’s lives had become a performance, and yet, a performance they were acting out themselves, one they felt they had control over. I was especially disheartened by the chapter “Beautiful Girls,” which illustrated how transformation reality TV shows such as The Swan—where contestants (the ugly ducklings) underwent a gratuitous amount of plastic surgery to hopefully be chosen as “the swan”—encouraged viewers to see themselves through this lens of strict scrutiny and “want more” for themselves. Gilbert cites an incisive Susan J. Douglas quote that encapsulates the twisted message of these shows: “That it is precisely through women’s calculated deployment of their faces, bodies, attire, and sexuality that they gain and enjoy true power.”
This spur of self-documentation and presentation had a purported goal of self-improvement, the guise of making these choices for yourself, not for others. But there was always an undertone of performance, and subsequently, invasive and at times violent scrutiny that made even beauty standards of the time feel pornographic.
The self-care bible of the time, Skinny Bitch, sold its program on the premise that “humiliation gets results,” often mimicking the language targeted towards female public figures in major tabloids, many of which had sections dedicated towards cruelly assessing their bodies. The book deems readers “gross,” “lazy shits” and a “fat pig,” oddly mimicking the vitriol hurled towards women by male hip-hop artists a decade before. Yet women took this self-hatred as empowering fuel to become the “best” version of themselves.
Whether discussing hardcore porn or reality TV, Gilbert draws a critical through-line of what made women’s lives so “pornographic” in the early aughts. Women were valued as voluntary, public exhibitions, denied privacy and dignity at every turn. So the only choice became to claim liberation by choosing to play the inevitable part. “It was all about youth, attention, and a willingness to be in on the joke, even when we were the punch line,” Gilbert succinctly concludes. Young women’s sense of self was undeniably a cultural product, and at the same time, something incredibly personal and lasting.
Finishing Girl on Girl, I admittedly found myself in a miniature existential crisis. The immediate instinct is to take anything tainted by this damaging culture and remove it from ourselves. But this impulse is honestly an impossible black hole, one I have little desire to enter. I’ve mentioned this in a few of my articles, but I worry that interrogating the origins of female sexuality too often leads to policing women, the antithesis of Gilbert’s professed goal of Girl on Girl: to tell women that “none of it was our fault—none of it was anything that we were doing.”
Still, I can understand how this premise feels like a dead end. Despite knowing that none of what porn culture did to us—how we experience sex, beauty, relationships, our sense of self-worth—was or is our fault, the impact remains.
“I would have gone to my grave peacefully,” Tortorici claims, “had I never been reminded about the smug, horny entitlement of young men in the 2000s—I did not enjoy being reacquainted with male journalists’ gratuitous comments about teen girls’ breasts in Rolling Stone, or the haranguing of diet books like ‘Skinny Bitch.’” She chalks Girl on Girl up to “cataloging” with the simple aim of “self-forgiveness,” but fails to see any greater purpose other than feeling worse about the culture we grew up and continue to live in.
As opposed to other cornerstones of “feminist revision” that she cites—Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Simone DeBeuvoir’s The Second Sex, and Vivian Gornick’s article, “The Village Voice”—Tortorici finds “little comparative sense of agency or possibility in Girl on Girl—yes, representation matters, but culture alone can’t do the work of politics, and neither can cultural critique,” she concludes.
Certainly, Gilbert’s book does not offer many concrete solutions or steps towards unlearning the cultural influence of porn, and certainly not any proposed ways politics can make that indent.
However, while I believe that political action is essential to shaping culture (how can we feel truly liberated when our government is actively criminalizing the right to our own bodies), I read Girl on Girl as less of an actionable manifesto and rather, a personal history and intimate journey of self-discovery.
Culture can often be the determining factor of our authentic desire. Girl on Girl arms us with the cultural evidence to trust our guts, be honest with ourselves and pursue genuine desire and pleasure.
There is genuine power in not just knowing the culture that shapes you, but understanding how its narrative intertwines with your own life. “It’s really hard to know where culture ends and real, authentic desire begins—because so much of what we learn about ourselves is sort of absorbed from culture,” Gilbert admitted to me. Girl on Girl empowered me to deeply know certain aspects, desires, anxieties in my life that at times feel uncomfortably natural, parts of just “being a woman”—the pressure to be thin, craving attention from men, accepting violence as an inevitable part of sex—and understand that they have origins beyond myself.
In terms of what’s next, Gilbert admitted that there’s no set path to unlearning. But, she thinks “being willing to answer the question of what’s real and what is an effect, or a performance, is a really good place to start,” Gilbert suggested as a mindset for women to take on once imbued with such cultural knowledge. I find this statement particularly liberating because it focuses more on attitude rather than the acts or decisions themselves. It is OK to feel sexy in a cute busty top because you’ll turn men’s heads and that’s fun for you. It’s OK to want to be slimmer if you think you may feel healthier and happier. It’s OK to experiment with power dynamics during sex, even if it’s something you found on the internet.
What matters more is why you do these things—that it’s not out of an anxiety to perform, straining to be okay with what you think your partner, your friends, the media expect of you. Does what you’re doing feel right to you, genuinely?
Of course, as Gilbert stated, sometimes the two are impossible to separate. Culture can often be the determining factor of our authentic desire. But Girl on Girl arms us with the cultural evidence to trust our guts, be honest with ourselves and pursue genuine desire and pleasure.
Sometimes, a little bit, or a book-full, of assurance that you’re not crazy to feel discomfort is enough to take action with yourself. Which doesn’t have to be drafting a bill or protesting (though important), but can just be checking in with yourself, and making sure you don’t turn away instinct. Despite the media’s entitlement to comment on, invade and expose the most personal aspects of women’s lives, we know ourselves better than any magazine or TV show ever will.
Great Job Alex Lalli & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
