From trainwreck to tradwife: in conversation with Girl on Girl's Sophie Gilbert

The noughties are a rich text

Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She won the 2024 National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism and was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. Vogue called her, “Lionel Trilling for the TikTok generation”, but having read Sincerity and Authenticity, I’d say she’s a lot more fun. I interviewed Sophie last night for The Trouble Club, about her new book of non-fiction, Girl on Girl: How Pop-Culture Turned A Generation of Women Against Themselves. This is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.

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Sophie, I folded down every single page of Girl on Girl, to the point where my system was no longer useful. Like you, I am fascinated by the 90s and 00s. We’re millennials that can’t stop speaking about being millennials.

I think it’s formative. In this period of—I hate calling it this—mid-life, where we are often raising our own children and revisiting the environment in which we were raised, I think it makes sense that we would think about the impact that it had on us. I’m part of a much larger group of people, including you, who are revisiting this time. I think it’s important! Girl on Girl was meant to be about the 2000s. But when I was doing the research for the book, trying to understand what made the 2000s so cruel and destructive to women, a lot of it traced back to the 90s.

You started writing this book in 2022. Motivated by the roll back of Roe v. Wade, you wanted to find the roots of what you saw as this “cruelty and disdain towards women”. You found its roots in the 90s. You describe this time as the emergence of ‘post-feminism’. What does that mean?

Post-feminism became very popular over the course of the 90s. It’s very hard to describe because there wasn’t a manifesto or clear ideological framework. It was more a reaction to feminism. It was the idea, especially in media, that feminism had achieved everything that it ever could. Post-feminists could be fun and wear mini skirts and be flirty and have sex with men in a liberated way. It was less a philosophy, more of a spirit. It was captured very well in culture, with Sex and The City and Bridget Jones.

You start the book at the beginning of the decade, when American culture was incredibly polarised after the AIDS crisis. There were, you write, two wildly divergent schools of thought at this time: New Traditionalism and New Voyeurism. What did the two modes stand for?

During and after the AIDS crisis, sex became associated with deep anxiety. We’d had the liberation of the 60s and 70s and then suddenly, everyone was terrified. And that manifested in culture as these two very different trends. The first one was basically, women go home, you’re safe there, as seen in movies like like Fatal Attraction. (It was Good Housekeeping who coined the term, New Traditionalism.) At the same time, in the second mode, New Voyeurism, you had people like Madonna who were really trying to reclaim sex as a source of joy and pleasure in people’s lives. Knowing that people were afraid of sex, they were very intent on performing it as much as possible. Madonna had her coffee table book, Sex, which was unabashedly sexual, and she was really leading the charge to reclaim sex in culture.

You cite three key motivating factors for the book, which all took place in 1999: Britney Spears on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, aged 17; the release of American Beauty (which won 5 Oscars); and Gail Porter being projected, nude, onto The Houses of Parliament.

I was thinking that you could actually find a crucial cultural event—one which had significant effects on popular culture and women’s rights and safety—every single year of the 90s: Lorena Bobbit chopping off her abusive husband’s penis, in 1993; Clinton and Lewinsky in 1995; the murder of JonBenét Ramsay in 1996 (covered in horrifying detail by The National Enquirer etc); Pamela Anderson’s sex tape in 1997. These really splashy, lurid, pop-culture moments, which I didn’t really understand as a form of violence until I was well into adulthood.

You’re so right, the 90s were this really provocative decade. One person who spoke to me for the book theorised that this was because, after AIDS, there was a need to be explicit about sex in a way that had been hushed up in culture before. It was a matter of public safety, there was a need to discuss condoms and safe sex. That mandated this quite graphic treatment in culture. I’m not sure it wholly explains what happened over the course of the 90s. One event that you didn’t mention—and this was how I learned what oral sex was; sorry to my step-mother in the audience—is Hugh Grant being arrested, in 1995.

That mugshot—I can recall it in detail. Let’s go back to your three totems, and let’s start with Britney who arrived in 1997, aged 16. She was so emblematic of the paradox of this age: she had to look super sexy, but be a virgin. When Justin Timberlake revealed they had had sex, it basically trashed her career.

The pop stars at this time were a conflation of both New Traditionalism and New Voyeurism. They were expected to dance and perform sexually—their appeal was all in how well they performed sex—but they were absolutely not supposed to have sex, because that would not sell to America. So it was this really impossible bargain.

As Paris Hilton said, it’s about being sexy, not sexual. And then in the early 00s, purity rings became really popular in America, especially in the Disney stars: Demi Lovato, the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus. Why was virginity so sellable?

In the 90s, there was this swathe of movies that quite openly sexualised young girls: Leon; Beautiful Girls; The Babysitter, with Alicia Silverstone as a babysitter who three men have an obsessive crush on; Stealing Beauty, where all these adults are in a room discussing who would get to take Liv Tyler’s virginity. There was this really priapic gaze on teenagers. Esquire had an annual issue in the 90s called ‘Women We Love’, and there was a sidebar called ‘Women We Would Like To Wait For’. And one year it included Kirsten Dunst, who at the time was 13. And I think it was because with all this fear and anxiety around sex, there was a sense that teenagers were safer, because they had not yet been sexually active.

Chris Moyles offering on live radio to take Charlotte Church’s virginity when she turned 16.

It was really licensed by the culture, then, in a way it is—thankfully—not now.

In media at that time, teenagers who did have sex, were punished. Chloe Sevigny’s character in the 1995 film, Kids, has sex once and gets AIDS.

Americans were really hung up on what you could see on network television. Do you remember The OC?

Obviously! When Marissa died, I had a panic attack. I rewatched it about 5 years ago and thought, okay, it’s a little sad. But not worth the hyperventilation.

[I refuse to write out hahaha, but Sophie laughed in response.] Remember the brief lesbian relationship between Marissa and Alex? Josh Schwartz had to write 12 different kissing scenes, so he could keep one. This was after nipple gate [when Janet Jackson’s nipple slipped out during a performance at the Super Bowl in 2004] and every kissing scene got cut. Everyone was terrified about sex.

She was properly cancelled for that nip slip.

There was a theory now that it was to redirect outrage because of the Iraq war. A way to distract American media consumers, that was not about a scandal in the Middle East.

Yeah, don’t think that worked. How much did internet porn, which became widely available and free when the internet went mainstream in 1994/1995, contribute to the pornification of this era?

The thing that was really interesting to me about porn, is that it was really popular long before it arrived on the internet. When VHS launched at the end of the 70s, 75% of the tapes that were made were pornographic. There is always a thread throughout technology, where the early adopters are using it for sex. In 1985, there were around 60 million graphic VHS rentals in the US and in the mid-90s it was closer to 700 million. So you have this ten-fold increase of people watching sex at home, even before the internet. Naively, going into writing this book, I did not expect porn to play such a big part of it. But of course, you cannot have this thing taking up so much time in people’s lives and it not impact the culture. It’s in people’s imagination in a way that then played out with what we then saw in the 2000s.

Back to Madonna. It’s easy to forget what a maverick she was. The risks she took, the shit she got. What’s interesting about [her 1992 book] Sex, is that it was anarchic and perverse. But, to quote you quoting bell hooks:

“Tragically, all that is transgressive and potentially empowering to feminist women and men about Madonna’s work may be undermined by all that it contains that is reactionary and in no way unconventional or new”.

In short, you write, “However radical Sex was intended to be, it could only be as subversive as its interpretation would allow”. I think that that is what’s happened with Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album cover. The internet discourse around that has been huge.

Massive, yes. I was surprised at how massive it was, because you think we’re beyond being shocked at this point. There’s one theory, that because we are siloed in our own communities now—there is no single mass place where we all consume media—she had to do maximum provocation to get maximum attention. The idea is that you get people TikTokking and doing Instagram posts and writing Substacks and you hit inflection point. Which she did do.

But I think your point is more crucial, which is, even if she’s doing something subversive, or transgressive, and creating an image which is an expression of her desire, you can’t remove that from the environment within which we are all seeing that image and processing it, which is one in which women are having their rights taken away. It’s very difficult to decontextualise it in that way and it assumes that people are much more media savvy than they are. I think Sabrina Carpenter is allowed to create an image like that, to sell her work. But I think the public is allowed to respond to it, and critique it, as they have.

You don’t look at it and think, “Wow! That’s so radical”. It’s a young, pretty blonde woman—

On her knees.

What Madonna’s book established, you write, is that “porn was now art”. Something Jeff Koons took to stomach-churning lengths. (Again, genuinely curious how Ilona’s arsehole would land, now.) It’s wild to think now that Terry Richardson shot a campaign for Katherine Hamnett in 1995, which was just models being upskirted. That was the whole campaign. (In 2003, you have the infamous Gucci advert—by Mario Testino—with a G shaved into the model’s pubes.)

Terry Richardson was the pioneer of the upskirt. By now I think he’s known for abusing models, and abusing models often in the photographs, but Terry Richardson’s first major campaign was upskirting these models. He used to say, “It’s not who you know, it’s who you blow. There’s not a hole in my jeans for nothing.”

He’s very much working again. Have you seen that? And Mario Testino. Plus ca change, and all that.

I have seen that. But remember, the allegations against Richardson started in 2007. And he wasn’t cut from Conde Nast until 2017.

You have some amazingly niche and fascinating nuggets in this book. For instance, a 1997 cover of Dazed and Confused featured a scratch and sniff panel over Helena Christensen’s boobs. Why would you need to sniff them? What would they smell of? Did you trawl through magazine archives to find them?

I did not get the magazines themselves, but you can find anything online. Internet Archive is an amazing resource! I found a list of American Apparel ads throughout the years and they have one at the end, where the photographer had staged the models in a human pyramid, to emulate Abu Ghraib. The degradation of women in American media is pretty clear, there.

I mean. My god. So, online porn takes off in the mid-90s. So does MTV. How do those things conflate in popular culture to shape girlhood and the performance of girlhood?

Music videos transformed the way music was consumed, from a thing you listened to, to a thing that you watched. And the consequences for women were that suddenly, the way that you looked as an artist was important in a way that it had not been before. And then you saw all these performers like Cyndi Lauper and Madonna breaking out—who were very savvy about aesthetic presentation—and I think that mirrors a lot of what we see on Instagram, now, and the rewards that go to performers who are able to present themselves in a certain way.

In terms of girlhood, the trend of sexualising teenagers throughout the 90s and the huge number of people watching porn, means that it all gets to the place where those three things that I start the book with, in 1999, happen. It becomes apparent to teenagers that sex is power. It’s everywhere. It’s in magazines, music videos, Gail Porter’s bum on the Houses of Parliament. At the time I thought, oh, okay. Now I think, what a message to women! You do not belong in this building, making the laws; you belong projected on to them, in a soft core picture.

And they didn’t pay her. Or ask her permission. She talks about it on the Loaded doc. And how she would go on to all these comedy show panels and would be made to participate in a joke, that was not a joke.

No, she’s a punchline. You’re told as a woman you have to succeed in this way and then when you do, you are mocked and critiqued. There was really no way to win for female celebrities, in that moment.

I made an audio doc about Britney Spears in 2021, and one of things I found most shocking to revisit as an adult, is the archive footage of her smashing the car with her umbrella. She was only in her mid 20s. She had two kids under 1. (Her sons are only 11 months apart.) She was breaking up with her husband. And she had 30 men chasing her, day in day out, screaming profanities at her, for over five years. I cried re-watching the clip.

Two kids, she’s not yet 25, she has postpartum depression, her husband is suing her for custody. Everyone is critiquing her for being a bad mother because in one photo she almost dropped one of her kids. What’s almost worse, is that the condition of her being accepted back again [into pop-culture prime] is that she performs this sexy dance at the VMAs. And that she performs it sexily enough that everyone goes, okay, Britney! You can come back. And then when she comes out in the bikini, and she kind of shuffles through the moves, everyone was incredibly cruel to her, because it was just seen as more confirmation of her failure, her failure at fulfilling this impossible role.

You quote Amanda Hess:

“I saw a new mother being forced to do a sexy dance for America . . . to inform whether she got to keep her children.”

That’s just so well put. It reminds me of Jessamine Chan’s book, The School For Good Mothers. You have to do these impossible things for your children. Pretzel yourself into impossible shapes.

So this was the paparazzi gold rush. There weren’t any laws, so paps could shoot up a celebrity’s skirt. They was a popular trick where they would stick their foot out so they celeb would trip, whereupon they’d flash a camera in their eyes so they’d be unable to see—and then you’d get this picture of said celeb with huge pupils, looking shocked, falling over. They looked drunk, high, out of it.

The irony is they the paps would photograph these women as if they were on the edge—thus driving them to the edge. Keira Knightley once said, after Scarlett Johansson got run off the road in LA, that she told some paps that she’d end up killing someone if they didn’t stand back a bit, and one said, “We’d get more money if you did”. How could that not make you feel completely insane?

There was this moment in 2007 when paparazzi culture really reached its peak. Anna Nicole Smith overdosing on drugs and then her body being wheeled out on live television happened just a few days before Britney shaved her head. 2007 was also the year Paris Hilton went to jail and Nicole Richie went to jail and Lindsay Lohan went to rehab and Mischa Barton got arrested. It was this cavalcade of women breaking down.

The circumstances they were living under were atrocious. They were stalked 24/7. They went outside and they had adult men lying down, to try and capture pictures up their crotch, which we would now understand to be non-consensual pornography, but back then were called ‘upskirt’ photos. It was an astonishing period of industrial paparazzi. The internet had created all this space, that suddenly needed filling, and we were ferociously curious about celebrities at that time. There were a number of bloggers, like Perez Hilton and TMZ and Hollywood Tuna who made names for themselves by posting more and more and more pictures of celebrities doing things every day. The worse the pictures, the better.

But also, reality tv had really changed the bargain of fame. There didn’t have to be reason for fame. All you had to do to be famous, now, was be visible. Some people, like Kim Kardashian, and Paris Hilton, were—are—very good at performing visibility. But what that meant, is that because these women were famous for nothing except visibility, it was easier to critique them.

And then that bled into celebrity culture more widely.

People now felt they could react to celebrities in a certain way.

Mila Kunis [in 2020, on The Armchair Expert pod] cited Perez Hilton as the moment the media got “ugly”. She says he invented trolling. It’s an interesting idea. What do you think?

I think it’s probably true.

Did you ever watched the comeback series of The Hills, in 2019? It was called New Beginnings. There’s a scene where Mischa Barton, who was now a castmate, is made to sit down with Perez Hilton to discuss how he made her life hell twenty years prior. Just this constant stream of pictures that he’d scribble all over, badly, using the Paint tool; this awful stream of things about how desperate and sad and trashy and slutty she and other young female celebrities were. He’d do it like it was a speech bubble, do you remember? It’s so uncomfortable to watch. I can only imagine she needed the job, and her being cast was dependant on her doing that scene or something.

You know why [Perez Hilton] did that? It’s because if he just ran the pictures, he’d have been sued. But if you slightly transform them—say, by scrawling horrible nicknames or drawing ejaculate coming out of people’s mouths—you can claim fair use, because you have transformed them.

Wow. That’s clever. Dreadful, but clever. Let’s jump back to what was going on in music. In the early 90s, music was this form of feminist protest. Kathleen Hanna (frontwoman of Bikini Kill and pioneer of the Riot grrrl movement) and Madonna and Courtney Love. And then the Spice Girls co-opted ‘girl power’ and Riot grrrl died out.

a Riot grrrl zine

You have this explosion of manufactured girl bands and boy bands, and then you have the emergence of hip hip and rap, which has incredibly violent lyrics. A classic of the genre being Eminem’s Stan. Which I loved. Can you imagine if it came out now!?

Think of the think pieces! The first chapter of my book is about how battles in music in the 90s reflect battles that were happening in feminism. And the shift that you see is how money just distorts everything. At the beginning of the decade, as you say, you have this band, Bikini Kill, who were trying to put words together that no one would expect to go together, to try and create a political slogan. The idea that they come up with is ‘girl’ and ‘power’— by pairing those words they are trying to make people think, why don’t girls have power? What would happen if girls did have power? So much of the punk music of the early 90s was about trying to change the world, to make things safer for women at music shows, to speak out about sexual assault. One of the early things that Riot grrrl was best known for is a list of men who date raped women, written on the wall of a college in the Pacific Northwest.

That reminds me of that spreadsheet.

The Shitty Media Men list, yes. So this music was very intentional, it was very activist, it was overtly feminist. And then the Spice Girls came along, and I love them so much—as did you!—but they take this slogan, ‘girl power’, and they reappropriate it in this very post-feminist way and it’s loses all it’s momentum. It’s very celebratory, it’s like, Wahoo! Girl power. I can hang out with my friends and go shopping at the mall, but it doesn’t have the force anymore, that impact that Bikini Kill were trying to create. And what happened with the Spice Girls, is that they were just so successful. Within a year of being a band, they had $500 million worth of commercial marketing deals. When I was touring with the book in the States, someone told me that they had a Spice Girls toaster. I had the Polaroid camera, the Impulse body spray—

I had it, too. It smelt of fart spray. Genuinely. They had tried to combine five different women in one scent and that was the result. I still bought it.

People in corner offices realised that teenage girls had a lot of money.

And that they will literally buy anything, even if it smells like shit. I was actually a pre-teen then, and I did not have much money but I was willing to buy everything the Spice Girls sold.

At that point [the marketing execs] lost interest in promoting the music of these angry women who were talking about sexual assault and they re-orientated towards very sexy teenage girls who could sell things to other teenage girls.

There was that seminal TIME cover story [in 1994] that was like, the teenagers are the ones to sell to.

It was this naked cash grab for young girls. The hip hop element of all this is also really interesting. Hip hop also started as a form of protest. But it was nakedly political, and it was often anti-police, in a way that record executives were not comfortable with, especially after the Rodney King riots in LA [in 1992], and so there was this push to make hip hop—which needed a target, it needed an enemy—there was a push to make this target, women. Which is why hip hop became aggressively misogynistic in the 90s, especially on the West Coast, in a really flagrant way.

Sometimes they got arrested, and then it became this thing about free speech. And some public intellectuals defended them, saying that this was making art. It was Kimberlé Crenshaw who was the first person to make an intersectional argument about how impossible it was for Black women in that era, because if they criticised hip hop they were race traitors, but if they ignored the violence in the lyrics, they were undermining themselves and other women.

You also write so richly about film in this decade. The late 90s/ early 00s was an appalling decade for women in film. Or as you call it, “recreational misogyny”. How did films like American Pie (1999), American Beauty (1999), Shallow Hal (2001) feed into our ideas of girlhood?

I wanted to examine, starting with American Pie—which I saw when I was 16—how much it set up the idea that losing your virginity for boys was this heroic passage that would cement your shift from boy to man.

The bildunsgroman.

The hero’s journey. So American Pie has that scene with Nadia, where she is filmed without her consent and broadcast to the entire town and she’s dismissed and shamed and never heard from again.

Except she comes back for the next movie! And she’s very happy. Not bothered at all about being broadcast to the neighbourhood.

I forgot she comes back! What American Pie does is set up male entitlement. And in talking about what boys need, it ignores what girls want. They never get the chance to consider what is important to them. In many ways, it’s a sweet movie. It’s gentle in some ways, horrific in others. But its success spawned a series of movies which were so much worse and the early 2000s became this wasteland for movies. If you were a woman in a movie in the early 00s, you were a scold, you were a sex object, or you were a bitchy wife that didn’t want your husband to go to Vegas.

It’s funny to think about how Katherine Heigl fell out of favour—for like an entire decade! She has said no-one would cast her as she was too toxic—simply for stating that Knocked Up was a bit misogynistic. Or I think another thing she did, was point out that she didn’t want to work 14 hours days on Grey’s Anatomy. Fair enough? But she was destroyed for being ungrateful.

The big question of the book for me is, why did women not push back against the ways in which they were treated in this era? And I think Katherine Heigl is a good example of why. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2008, she very gently critiqued a movie that she was in, for being a little bit sexist. And the defensiveness with which people responded! The director and Seth Rogen accused her of being disloyal on Twitter. And as a result, her career, which had been on an upward trajectory, really suffered. And when you see that evidence, when you see what happens to women when they speak out, it’s very easy to internalise it. To think, it’s just not worth it.

I think certain images are seared onto the millennial brain, no doubt in part thanks to Heat magazine: Portia de Rossi in a black dress sort of surfing on the red carpet. Kate Bosworth crossing a road in a cami and jeans. Nicole Richie running down a beach. Nicole Richie’s famous leaked party invite when she said no one over 100 pounds was invited. (I think it was satire, but still.) And of course, behind it all, Rachel Zoe, the stylist to all these stars, the pioneer of Size 00, who is back, like everything from the Y2K, as a new castmate on The Real Housewives.

I think we’re going back to that time. I think it might be even worse this time. Not just because of Ozempic—which has very quickly changed the proximity and access to thinness—but because it’s now combined with this digital perfection and influencer culture. (See: The Skinni Societe.) Where you don’t just need to look great offline, you need to look great online. And the feats that young women will now go to are truly unprecedented. All these young women having butt surgery knowing how dangerous it is. It is not a secret anymore that plenty of people have died having it done. But it is still aspirational. The stakes are that high.

I agree, I think it might be worse now. In the 2000s it was very much an aesthetic. It was something that was celebrated for the way that it looked, in dubious ways. There’s a book I write about called Skinny Bitch, which was a diet book published in 2005, and it’s selling point was that it just yelled at the reader. It was like, You’re a fat pig! Don’t eat! For 200 pages. And then at the end, it closes with Namaste.

But I think what’s happening now, with things like SkinnyTok, there’s much more of an idea that this is a project of distraction for women. [On her Instagram, Sophie flags this piece by Annie Joy Williams for The Atlantic and this piece by Ellen Atlanta for Dazed. And I would also add that Polly Vernon has an interesting column in the current issue of Grazia, print only.] And there’s a real conservatism, certainly behind SkinnyTok, on the right, in the US, where the people who are making the most money from it, and are the biggest influencers, are also aligned with a Conservative agenda. And it does feel like it’s about keeping women small and quiet and obsessed with their bodies in a way that is so consuming that they don’t look outwards and see all the things in the world that they could change, because they can only see the flaws in themselves.

You started writing the book in 2022. If you started now, would you include tradwives? I was thinking this week: have tradwives become the new trainwrecks? By which, I mean, a new lightning rod for cultural criticism.

It’s really interesting. What they are doing is not particularly new, but they have harnessed this platform which is so visual and primed to stock our dopamine receptors in our head. Like when we see Nara Smith making hot dogs from scratch in a red couture dress.

Chewing gum from scratch!

So I kind of think of them as performance artists. I’m not all of them are that self-aware. But they’re not really being tradwives, so much as they are being content creators.

That to me is the most interesting argument about Ballerina Farm. Because traditional tradwifery is staying at home and your husband earning the money and controlling the purse strings. But with 10 million Instagram followers, I’m pretty sure she’s more successful than @hogfathering.

It’s the same as The Secret Lives of Mormon Housewives.

I am obsessed with that show. It’s so rich! Compared to other reality tv. The paradox and tension of performing religion and influencer culture at the same time. You’ve just reminded me to seek out series 2. Yay.

These are women who are performing the roles of submissive conservative Mormon housewives but they are also the breadwinners in their families and supporting their husbands. They are media girlbosses!

I want to end on where we are now, which seems to have come right back around to the marketing potential of girlhood. We have, you write “girl trips, girl talk, hot girl summer, girl dinners.” Is it time for us all to grow up?

Yes! No! I wrote it in 2022, when Roe v. Wade was being overturned, and at the same time, the Barbie movie came out—which had this all-female supreme court. I remember going to the movie in my pink blazer and feeling cheered up by the fact that when you see other women wearing pink, it’s this moment of solidarity. It’s pointless, and it meant nothing, but it was consoling. I understood it.

Because girlhood is this safe place. It makes sense to me, in this moment of regression for women in culture, a lot of us look to girlhood to feel that freedom to create, to feel nurtured, and feel safe again. But it is a little bit of a trap, I think. Because it stops you—and this is the big theme in the last chapter of the book—from imagining power. It shuts you off from the idea of what power might look like. Not just politically, but what does power look like in your own life? I do like the idea of shifting from our girl era into—and I hate this word, but—our empowered one.

Riot ladies?

Riot queens.