Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Coming up later this week, Sarah Snook. Yes, it's Snook. Rhymes with Luke and Duke. Sarah Snook will be here. You may know her as Shiv in the HBO series Succession. Now she's starring as all 26 roles in the new Broadway production of The Picture of Dorian Gray. If you've ever had a hard time bringing up a difficult subject with a friend, we'll get some advice from a psychologist. Dr. Marisa Franco joins us to talk about how to navigate honest conversations with your pals. Plus, she'll take your calls. That's in the future. Let's get this hour started with a conversation about how pop culture has impacted feminism.

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Sophie Gilbert's new book is titled Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. In it, The Atlantic writer argues that 21st-century pop culture presented a version of womanhood that was infantilized, sexualized, and heavily policed. She writes, "There was a moment at the beginning of the 21st century when feminism felt squashed by a cultural explosion of jokey extremity and technicolor objectification. This was the environment that millennial women were raised in."

"In it, it informed how we felt about ourselves, how we saw each other, and what we understood women as a collective to be capable of. It colored our ambitions, our sense of self, our relationships, our bod and our art. I came to believe that we couldn't move forward without fully reckoning with how the culture of the aughts had defined us." The book is out now, and Sophie Gilbert joins me in studio. It's nice to have you here.

Sophie Gilbert: Thank you so much. It's so nice to be here.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we'd love for you to weigh in. What did the early 2000s teach you about feminism or what it meant to be a woman? What's an example of early 2000s pop culture that left you feeling that you felt was problematic? Did you have any pop culture that made you feel a certain way during this period? Also, how did you fight back? Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. I want to say one more thing. The book is out tomorrow, we should say.

Sophie Gilbert: It is out tomorrow.

Alison Stewart: It is out tomorrow. Well, people get in line tonight. That's all you need to know.

Sophie Gilbert: Yes. It's fine.

Alison Stewart: You say the early 2000s was marked by the rise of post feminism. What does that mean?

Sophie Gilbert: Post feminism is a little bit hard to define because there wasn't really anyone waving a flag for it. It was just this ideology that emerged, really, in media. It was the idea, I think, that feminism had achieved everything it ever would or needed to, that women were free now to live however they wanted. That feminism, as it had iterated, was boring and restrictive. Now women could be free.

They could dress however they wanted. They could go out and be sexually liberated. It was embodied, I think, by things like Sex and the City. It was very much this celebratory vibe that celebrated, among many things, spending money. It was so caught up in the culture of the moment, but it was very individualistic. I think with post feminism came a lack of focus on what women still needed to achieve.

Alison Stewart: The first wave of feminism came in the early 1900s, getting the right to vote. Second wave was '63 to '80, about having the same rights as men under the law. The third wave started about '92, around Anita Hill. It was inclusive. Kimberly Crenshaw came up with intersectionality, had the riot grrrls. It was all good. You write, and this is really interesting, that in the early 2000s, feminism moved from the collective pursuit to an individual one. What happened when feminism became about the individual?

Sophie Gilbert: It was so interesting. It happened almost earlier than that, in the middle of the '90s, and I'm so sorry to say, because I love them so much, but one of the bands that really embodied the shift was the Spice Girls. Because before that, obviously, the riot grrrl movement was very political, and they were agitating for change and for freedom for women from sexual harassment, sexual assault. It was this very-- not angry, but it was a very activist movement. They had this slogan, girl power, which was all about trying to put two terms that people wouldn't associate together and to see what they could do with them.

Then the Spice Girls came along and they were-- I remember them so well when I was a teenager, just loving how colorful it was and how fun and how poppy the music was and how everything was spectacle, and it was just really exuberant. They reappropriated the slogan Girl Power. But the way that they used it, it didn't really stand for anything. It was this, again, this celebratory, girl power, woohoo. But. But without demanding anything or wanting change.

What happened with the Spice Girls is they were so good at selling things. I think they had something like $500 million worth of brand deals in their first two years as a band. The minute that people saw how good they were at selling things, they globbed onto more pop artists and certainly younger pop artists, younger women who they felt would be equally good at branding as branding tools.

Alison Stewart: The big difference between the 21st century and previous was the Internet. It's hugely. What did the Internet unleash or let loose that perhaps was on the decline, or at least in hiding?

Sophie Gilbert: What was so interesting to me in the research for this book was how many of our-- like, very crucial Internet platforms now came out of the desire to see women, like to look at women online, and assess women's hotness.

Alison Stewart: That's what Facebook was.

Sophie Gilbert: That's exactly what Facebook was. I think originally the prototype for Facebook was like a Hot or Not website. Google images came about because Jennifer Lopez wore that iconic dress, the Versace dress, to the Grammys, cut very low in the jungle print. She looked incredible. There was such a high demand online to see pictures of her wearing that dress that Google, I think, created Google Images as a result.

One of the precipitating factors for YouTube was actually nipplegate when one of the developers wanted to see pictures of Janet Jackson and what happened to her during the Super Bowl performance. He realized there was no way to easily access videos online. You have all these major components of the Internet that were built out of this quite puerile impulse. I think the biggest shift was really the real explosion of porn and how popular it became as this really dominant cultural pastime.

How I hadn't quite, I think, assessed before I started working on the book how much it impacted directly the culture of the 2000s and how much suddenly porn was this very influential creative force on virtually everything on fashion and music and TV and movies, but also even on things like books.

Alison Stewart: Give me an example of how porn could be seen in fashion.

Sophie Gilbert: If you remember the fashion of the 2000s, you remember so much, barely there it was. It was just acres and acres and acres of skin. Also, I think there's an example in the book. The photographer Terry Richardson released a coffee table book in 2005 called Terryworld. It's available in Internet Archive, if anyone wants to look at it, I would say Brace yourselves.

Alison Stewart: Not safe for work.

Sophie Gilbert: It is not safe for work. No. I'm trying to think how I can say this in public radio terms, but there's a lot of pictures of his penis in there and things he has done with his penis. It's quite disturbing photos to me now. There's models being dragged around by their hair. There's models who look to me as though they might be in pain. It's disconcerting now to-- This was a book that, at the time, was celebrated in a gallery show, and lots of celebrities went. It really embodies what we call Pornochic, how trendy it was in that particular moment and how hip porn was and how much people saw it as like a force for sex positivity and all these really important things.

Alison Stewart: How did porn shape the way women were portrayed in other forms of culture, TV, movies?

Sophie Gilbert: One example I always give, I think in the book, I start by going back to the year 1999 when I was 16 years old, very much curious about womanhood, curious about the 21st century and what it might mean. There were three things that happened that year that really seemed to embody what it meant to be a woman. Or what it meant to be a girl, I should say. There was Britney Spears on the cover of Rolling Stone in a pink and black polka dotted bra, clutching a Teletubby doll. Quite a transgressive image in lots of ways.

There was American Beauty, the movie which I saw in theaters, I remember, and absolutely loved. But as an adult now, I realize it's a movie about a middle-aged man's sexual fixation on his teenage daughter's best friend, which no one seems troubled by in the moment. I think it won five Oscars, including Best Picture. But watching it now, now I have my own children, I'm like--

Then at the end of the year, the Abercrombie & Fitch holiday catalog came out, which I think was targeting 13 to 18-year-olds. It had all these fairly sexually explicit images. Also an interview with Jenna Jameson, the porn star, in which she was harangued by the interviewer repeatedly to give him sexual favors. Again, this was a catalogue for a fashion company very much aimed at teenagers. I think it gives you some sense of what an influence porn was having on pop culture in that moment before it really metastasized into the 2000s and the particular cruelty of that era.

Alison Stewart: You write in your book, Sophie, that movies in the aughts hated women. You give a long list of films. Shallow Hal, which is written by the Farrelly brothers. Knocked Up, written by and directed by Judd Apatow. White Chicks by the Wayans. Do you blame the makers of these movies, the writers and directors, or do you blame the studios who gave them the green light?

Sophie Gilbert: It's really hard unless you're steeped in the culture of the era, as I was during much of the research, to convey how much all the culture of the era was down on women in general, how much hating women, making fun of them, being like, "Ugh, girls," was generally accepted form of-- It was just the vibe. This was the vibe of Girls Gone Wild and so many iconic cultural products of the time.

I do think there was a really good New Yorker profile by Tad Friend, I think from around 2011, of the actress Anna Faris. I think he quoted a producer in that story saying, "We just don't want to make movies about women, and if we don't want to, we won't. If we don't have to, we won't." There was very much this lack of curiosity about women's stories and this idea. I think people hadn't really figured until the movie Bridesmaids came out that women might actually be a valuable movie-going demographic on their own right.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert. We're discussing her new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. Listeners, we want to hear from you. What did the early 2000s teach you about feminism? What's an example of early 2000 pop culture that made you feel particularly problematic towards women? What aspects of the aughts culture made you feel a certain way? What did you do to fight back? Give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC.

We're going to talk about thinness in the 2000s figure. Let's listen to one example of an episode of America's Next Top Model from-- She's gasping. This is from 2005, where they're discussing the body of one of the models. For the record, she is very thin. We should say that out loud. In this photo shoot, they have dressed her up as an elephant. Let's listen.

Model 1: But I hate to say it, they had to do a lot of bodywork on you in retouching.

Model 2: At home, pretty much, I try to eat right, and we come here, my towels, everything is thrown off.

Model 3: [Stop. If you're sporting a gut, then you turn to the side and disguise it.

Model 1: You knew. Be honest with yourself and don't point the finger because nobody will retouch a picture as much as we did this picture.

Alison Stewart: What do you see was the main driving force behind the obsession with thinness in the 2000s?

Sophie Gilbert: It's really hard to know where it came from, but I do think one thing that happened with the rise of the Internet was suddenly people were just visible and suddenly able to be visible in a way that they hadn't been before. Also, at the same time, you had the rise of reality television, which was putting mostly predominantly women on display. It was creating this idea, which I think comes across in a lot of the beauty culture and the diet culture of the era, that anyone can be visible now because they have the same tools, and anyone therefore can turn their body into their career, their source of income. If you can do that, why wouldn't you?

There was this really explosive rise in plastic surgery during the 2000s and in different cosmetic procedures. You had a lot of shows on reality TV. There were lots of makeover shows like The Swan and Extreme Makeover, but there were also-- The Biggest Loser, obviously, is another one. It's really funny listening to clips like that and then some of the episodes of The Biggest Loser that I watched from back then, because it's just such cruelty. It's such cruelty. You gasp seeing it now? Because I think we've come so far since then, which is cheering in lots of ways. We really understand how damaging those kinds of comments and that kind of critiquing can be.

Alison Stewart: Given the world that you lived in for writing this book. I'm curious, and if you don't have an opinion, it's fine. What do you think Ozempic and GLP-1s, how this will affect the issue of fatphobia?

Sophie Gilbert: I had to get into this very briefly in the book because obviously it was looking back at an era when these drugs were not available. I think what is a little bit discouraging is that actually, looking at the history, we had come a long way with the body positivity movement. In 2016, I think you had Ashley Graham on the cover of Sports Illustrated. You had the plus-size range-- Not the plus size, but like the range of Barbies with different kinds of body shapes that was released, which was a really significant moment in, I want to say, in toy making, but it was significant for those of us who grew up with Barbies.

It felt like we were making such progress. There have been studies done that show that when girls are exposed to body-positive content, it does change the way that they feel about themselves. They report feeling more positive and more happy with themselves after they see body-positive content online. I think drugs like Ozempic they seem to have incredible health purposes. They seem to be really, really, really useful and to be revolutionizing healthcare in some ways. I think what does worry me is the cultural impact, as always, just to now that very thin and very slender bodies are possibly easier to achieve than they once were.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Rupa, who's calling from Asbury Park. Hi, thank you for making the time to call All Of It today.

Rupa: Of course. Can you hear me okay?

Alison Stewart: I hear you great.

Rupa Great. I wanted to say two things. I was actually working on my MFA about the male gaze and the late aughts.

Sophie Gilbert: Oh, wow.

Rupa: I was thinking about that John Berger quote all the time that men look at women, women see themselves being looked at. One of the most shocking things that I saw in my research was just over the years, the growing similarity between the covers of Playboy and Vogue. The same amount of skin being shown, the same poses, and just how odd that was.

Another thing was, again, this is a bit later in the aughts, but there was a very prominent Lady Gaga interview at the time where she was asked if she considered herself a feminist. She basically said , "No," and continued to say, "I'm not a feminist. I love men. I hail men." It just seemed like such a misstep by somebody who was so iconic at the time and considered to be a feminist.

Sophie Gilbert: I think feminism really has an image problem because there have been so many instances of celebrities saying this over the years. They literally say exactly that. I'm not a feminist. I love men. I love men too. I'm married to one. I have a son. I think whenever anyone says that, I try to say, "Do you believe that women should have equal rights under the law. Do you believe that women should have equal opportunities?" "You do. Okay, cool." That's all that feminism is, really. There are many different applications of it and interpretations, and you can take it any way, but basically, at its premise, it's that.

For some reason, and I think a lot of it does come back to this post feminist rejection of boring old. Boring old, stuffy old feminism. It's scoldy old rules about how women should behave. It has a branding problem, I suppose we could say. That's really interesting to hear about Vogue and Playboy. I did not know that. It makes total sense. I was remembering, actually, earlier this morning, that moment, I think in 2005, when you could not walk down the street without seeing the Playboy bunny on people's T-shirts and tops. It was just such a fetishized brand.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. We'll have more with Sophie Gilbert after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert. We're discussing her new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. Let's go to the phone. Sarah is calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Sarah.

Sarah: Hi. I just wanted to touch base on the reality shows you guys mentioned earlier. They started to come out like 20 years ago, specifically those Housewives shows. It always bothered me that it really just portrays women arguing with each other is really the main topic of the show. Then I will say the second point, I'll make it fast. As I've been a server for many years and I do feel I see more of a prevalence and talking about someone when they've left the table just to go to the bathroom when it's a group of girls. That there's not less shame involved and just seems-- I don't know, I feel like those shows had a big effect.

Sophie Gilbert: That's so interesting. I remember a while ago writing for The Atlantic a piece on reality shows and how they seem to really model themselves after Jane Austen novels, because you have a lot of women who are idle, like they don't really have enough to do, and so what do they do? This is not being very generous to the characters in Jane Austen, but I actually went back and reread Pride and Prejudice recently.

Ms. Bingley is quite catty about Elizabeth Bennet. There's a lot of trying to make Elizabeth look bad to Mr. Darcy. It's the same dynamic, I think, that you see on so many shows where conflict is really the engine that drives the show, that makes people watch. I don't know. I know that it's fun. Girl-on-girl violence, for want of a better term, has always been at the heart of the reality model. Producers have always seemed to sense that it will get ratings, but it is dispiriting, especially to imagine the impact that it has on real-life friendships.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Jocelyn from Brooklyn. Hi, Jocelyn. Thanks for making the time to call All Of It today.

Jocelyn: Hi. I'm so excited to be on. I love this topic that I was so excited about. It was crazy that one of the first things she mentioned was Knocked Up, which is a movie that I have such a special hatred for. [chuckles] I remember watching it in the theater and being so disgusted with it. It was 20 years ago. It still makes me so angry. The whole concept of it was so horrible.

The fact that Katherine Heigl would ever even look at the disgusting Seth Rogen. He was so gross. He was like this successful person. He was just loser, who I think he was-- It was basically like porn that he did for a basic, if you could call it a living. The whole concept. Then the fact that she would just keep that baby. Are you kidding? It infuriated me so much, and it still makes me really, really angry. I love that you guys are talking about this because it's apparently with everything, every TV show, movie, everything, music. Much was around us at that time. I'm excited about this book.

Sophie Gilbert: Oh, thank you. It was such a theme in movies at the time. The idea that these beautiful, high-achieving, very successful women should lower their standards essentially to end up with men who are often jerky, not very nice to them. I recently rewatched 27 Dresses. Poor Katherine Heigl. She was in lots of these movies. The interesting thing about Knocked Up, one of my central questions when I wanted to write the book was, why was it so hard to push back against the misogyny and the sexism of this era?

I remember this feeling of being like, I can't complain. If I complain about how I'm being treated, I will be a scold. People will think I'm boring. Katherine Heigl, I think, gave an interview to Vanity Fair in 2007 where she called Knocked Up a little bit sexist, which is not a strong criticism in any way or form. The pushback to her saying that was really extreme. I think the director, Judd Apatow, came out against her, and Seth Rogen spoke out against her, and there was this real, real backlash to the fact that she had made even this very benign comment about what is in fact, quite a sexist movie in lots of ways. It speaks to how hard it was, I think, for all of us who are in this moment, to try and protest it, even when we sensed, which was often had to do, that we were being mistreated.

Alison Stewart: This is an interesting comment. They made feminism a bad word, the exact same way they did with woke.

Sophie Gilbert: Oh.

Alison Stewart: What do you think about that?

Sophie Gilbert: I think that's exactly right. They did. It's really easy to create a ghost version of something, like a really all the most negative possible interpretations of something, and to demonize it and then to just weaponize the word over and over again until people are sick of it. Sometimes I feel like I've used misogyny in my own writing so much, I can't use it anymore because it just feels like it has no meaning. Whereas something like woman hating it feels like it still has a bit of power left.

Alison Stewart: I was curious how you felt how the economic downturn in 2008, did it have a role in this in any way?

Sophie Gilbert: I think it had a role more in what came after. Because I remember I was living in New York in 2008. I was finishing up my graduate degree in journalism at NYU, and I just remember that feeling of catastrophe, like everything falling apart, wondering if I would ever get a job. I think so much of the women of my generation felt that at the time. It was this feeling of real catastrophe.

One of the ways in which we reacted to it was to hustle harder, to use the modern term. To have three jobs and to constantly be thinking about how we could best promote ourselves, present ourselves. If we could just grind hard enough, we would get a foot in the door and make it worthwhile. I think that really made something like the girl boss movement. It just made us a little bit more susceptible to what it was, preaching these values, the idea that you just need to work the hardest and be relentless and lean in as hard as you can, things like that.

Alison Stewart: That chapter is the one that I like the most.

Sophie Gilbert: Thank you.

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Alison Stewart: If I can say that.

Sophie Gilbert: Please.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Taylor. Hi, Taylor. Thanks so much for calling, All Of It.

Taylor: Hi. Thank you for having me. I was born in 2000. I started modeling in New York City around 2018. I really noticed the culture that our author is describing of girl against girl. It was really preyed on by agents and trainers, and anyone who had any success from young models' work. I find myself, no matter how far I get from that industry-- I'm thankful enough that I'm no longer in it. I still have deeply internalized misogyny. It seems to be my base to go back to. I wondered how our author if she deals with internalized misogyny and how she works against that.

Sophie Gilbert: Oh, Taylor, I'm so sorry. Fashion--

Alison Stewart: First of all, you write books about it, which is important. You speak out about it.

Sophie Gilbert: I do. I do try to write books about it. The nice thing about simply getting older, I'm 42 now, is you just don't care as much. You just feel like it's just not as important what the world thinks of how you look, and how the world responds to the things that you say and the things that you think, and the work that you put out. As you get older, just has more and more significance.

The fashion industry it's been so tough. That whole chapter about fashion and the way that models were treated as just faceless, nameless bodies and dehumanized in so many ways in so many of these shoots. That was one of the more upsetting ones for me to research. I'm sorry for your experiences. I know that, from my own experience that it does get better. It does get so much easier to love yourself. That's not to say I walk around every day being like, I look good today, but it is-- I think what happens as we learn more and more about how constant the barrage of this messaging is, it gets easier and easier to call it out and to reject it, especially to reject it when it's coming from us from ourselves.

Alison Stewart: What's more important is that you feel good. [unintelligible 00:26:36] you look good, but did you feel good?

Sophie Gilbert: Yes. Exactly.

Alison Stewart: Where do you see hope? Where around us in our culture, do you see hope? You might not, but I'm curious if there's any place that you think they're doing something right there.

Sophie Gilbert: I really do. I really do see hope in movies at the moment. I was thinking about the Golden Globes earlier this year and how many women on the red carpet are in their 50s, 60s, even 70s, and they were nominated for roles that in some ways were the most interesting, the most complex, the most demanding of their lives. I think about Demi Moore with The Substance and Nicole Kidman with Babygirl.

For the longest time, there really weren't any stories about women in film. To have this real proliferation of stories, not just about women, but about real things that women go through, like aging and beauty standards and motherhood and transitions into different eras of life, it feels so heartening to see the different range of stories and to see so many more female filmmakers being able to make their art. I argue at the end of the book that if anything can save us, it will be stories, because I really do believe that they help define our imagination and our sense of worth in so many ways. That, I think, is hopefully an optimistic note.

Alison Stewart: The book is called Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. My guest has been Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert. Sophie, thanks for joining us and taking our callers' questions and answers.

Sophie Gilbert: Oh, thank you so much for having me. Thank you, everyone, for calling. It was really great to hear your perspective.