In 2021, JD Vance advised Fox Information that senior Democrat girls have been simply “childless cat girls”, missing cultural or social worth in contrast with their married and procreating counterparts. When Taylor Swift regarded down the barrel of this insult with a submit on Instagram displaying her posing with beloved feline Benjamin Button (from Time journal’s photoshoot naming her 2023’s individual of the 12 months), she embraced the function of killjoy, rejecting Vance’s try and divide girls. However even this gesture of defiance and solidarity was not sufficient to push again the crimson tide of misogyny and corruption: Trump was elected to a second time period, the US was denied a feminine chief, and thousands and thousands of girls held their breath.
When Sophie Gilbert, a Pulitzer-nominated journalist and critic on the Atlantic, was writing Lady on Lady, the 2025 Trump administration was only a worrying risk. However Gilbert’s account of girls’s degradation because the early 90s by popular culture sounds a crescendo of doom in direction of this current second. With what she calls a “wry nod” to lesbian porn, you’d be forgiven for concluding from her title that Gilbert thinks girls are the issue. Nevertheless it’s the patriarchy, silly.
Born within the 80s, Gilbert needed to higher perceive the world of her girlhood, and the sexualised energy girls have been taught to worth in themselves and scrutinise in others. Madonna and riot grrrl have been “switched out” for male-managed lady bands, and music moved away from “offended and abrasive and thrillingly highly effective” visions of social injustice to the vanilla choices of “lady energy”. Gilbert recounts the rise and fall of Britney Spears, the publicity of the Kardashians and the exploitation of fashions equivalent to Kate Moss in opposition to wider developments within the music scene, tabloid rags and actuality TV, the artwork world, promoting company boardrooms and our Instagram feeds. She argues that the guarantees of third-wave feminism have been “blunted by mass tradition”, which skilled girls to not be shrill, to not be a prude, and to not get (visibly) outdated. Gilbert claims that ladies have been turned in opposition to each other, neutralising the efficiency of feminism’s promise. In the meantime, post-feminism was fed by porn (“the defining cultural product of our occasions”) and opportunistic capitalism, facilitated somewhat than challenged by Sheryl Sandberg’s individualist company motion in 2013 imploring girls to #LeanIn.
Gilbert writes that fashionable tradition is invariably “calibrated to male need”, which has ushered in “cruelty and disdain” in direction of 51% of the inhabitants, significantly if they aren’t white. Ladies are advised they’re by no means ok, however higher might be purchased: contouring, surgical enhancement and weight-reduction plan promote a really perfect that “can’t really be humanly attained” however might be bought, now with a single click on. Getting by as a girl in post-feminist occasions means not taking apparently misogynistic music, artwork and TV too severely, whereas girls are being exploited, mocked and assaulted in plain sight, as #MeToo belatedly attested. When porn is in every single place, most worryingly on the telephones of major faculty youngsters, no marvel 38% of girls within the UK stated they skilled “undesirable slapping, choking, gagging or spitting throughout intercourse”. The blokeish “irony-as-defence motif”, which nudges girls to be in on the gag, denies the reality that sexist and racist cultural merchandise profoundly change the best way society thinks about girls and subsequently how girls are handled.
Are there any options? Gilbert’s writing pays tribute to feminist texts that got here earlier than her, from Naomi Wolf’s The Magnificence Fable, Susan Faludi’s Backlash and Ariel Levy’s Feminine Chauvinist Pigs, to Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and Amia Srinivasan’s The Proper to Intercourse, all of that are quoted at size. Whereas Lady on Lady focuses on the place popular culture has gone incorrect for ladies, I loved Gilbert’s reward for Madonna, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Chris Kraus’s resistant voices, and her ebook would have benefited from extra. In her conclusion about potential bulwarks in opposition to girls’s dehumanisation, Gilbert begins to make an intriguing argument about romantic love as a drive of gender equality and respect, however this runs out of steam.
When Gilbert was pitching Lady on Lady, potential editors needed extra of her first-person voice. She felt “conflicted” about feminine confessional writing, and refused. The result’s that Gilbert retreats from voicing her full indignation. She insists she’s “not excited about kink-shaming, and never remotely against porn”, even whereas diagnosing porn as an unquestionable supply of hurt to girls. Furthermore, Gilbert doesn’t describe the situations underneath which porn could be a drive for good, which appears vital to know to be able to determine when to be what the scholar Sara Ahmed has known as a feminist killjoy: “somebody who speaks out about types of injustice, who complains, who protests, who says no”. I completed Lady on Lady struck by Gilbert’s skilful marshalling of proof and chic writing, however searching for a bolder declare about the place the actual drawback lies and what might be accomplished about it.
Kate Womersley is a physician and tutorial specialising in psychiatry
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