Author: Sophie Gilbert
_Sophie Gilbert_
Reading time: 21 minutes
Synopsis
Girl on Girl (2025) looks at how pop culture told a harmful lie to a whole generation of women. This lie said that being treated like an object was actually a form of power. The book shows how postfeminism in the 90s, the rise of a porn-like style, and the growth of gossip news made women watch themselves closely. This still changes how we think about female strength, worth, and goals today.
What’s in it for me? Learn about the lie that still shapes your life.
You probably remember the pop culture from when you were growing up. The music, the magazines, the movies – they seemed like fun, just a part of your life. It’s not surprising that all this shaped you in ways you can’t quite see. What if it also helped you understand what you wanted, what you dreamed of, and what it means to be a woman?
In this summary, we will follow that story from when it started in the 1990s to how it affects us now. You will get a new way to see why our culture values some types of women more than others. By the end, you will be able to understand the hidden ideas that still guide your life and dreams every day.
Let’s begin.
Blink 1 – How postfeminism started
In April 1999, Britney Spears held a Teletubby doll on the cover of Rolling Stone. She wore a black bra and pink underwear. One month later, marketers showed a huge naked picture of children’s TV presenter Gail Porter on London’s Houses of Parliament. In September, the film American Beauty came out. It was a famous movie about an older man’s sexual thoughts about his teenage daughter’s friend.
At that time, everyone called these moments funny or shocking. They said it was just a joke. But these cultural moments really showed something else: women’s power was about sex. It was about being young, getting attention, and being ready to laugh along – even if you were the joke. This idea would shape the next twenty years.
This idea had a name: postfeminism. This way of thinking, pushed by the media, appeared in the 1980s and 1990s. It was a reaction to women’s activism and was made stronger by a campaign to speak badly about the women’s movement. In 1982, Susan Bolotin wrote in The New York Times Magazine that young women were already saying they had no link to feminism. The campaign worked: feminists were seen as unhappy and loud. But these young women still enjoyed the freedoms that feminists had won for them.
Postfeminism used the language of freedom. It took words like “choice” and “empowerment” to sell a very sexual, limited idea of what it meant to be a woman. Casual sex and lots of shopping took the place of working together for change. Personal happiness replaced changing society. The Spice Girls showed this change perfectly. They took the strong “Girl Power” slogan from riot grrrls and made it a very commercial catchphrase.
A generation of young women learned this lesson: sex was like money, being treated like an object meant power, and you were always the joke. What happened? Women felt very inadequate. Only buying something new could make them feel better for a short time. These messages came through the look and ideas of pornography. Porn became the most important cultural product of our time. It spread into music videos, art, fashion, politics – everything in the mass media.
The effects were clear. A social psychologist in 2013 found a link: women who often saw themselves as objects were less likely to get involved in activism and social justice. When seeing yourself as an object becomes normal, working together for change becomes impossible.
Adrienne Rich understood this many years ago. She said that looking back at our past helps us survive. We must understand the ideas that fill our minds before we can know who we are. Looking back today shows the clear plan behind the rise of postfeminism. You can see it clearly through 1990s music culture, where this style first started and then spread.
The plan happened through those specific cultural things from around the year 2000. Each one taught the same lesson in different ways. The pop star holding a Teletubby, the naked picture on government buildings, the Oscar-winning film about wrong desires – they all made a certain idea of female sexuality seem normal. This idea was linked to being young and available.
The clever part was making it seem “uncool” to fight back. If you disagreed, it meant you couldn’t take a joke, couldn’t handle irony, or weren’t fun. You either took part in being treated like an object, or you were called uptight. Either way, the system won.
Twenty-five years later, we can name what happened. Private things became political in the wrong way – group action disappeared into personal shopping choices. Empowerment meant buying things, showing the right image, and laughing at the right jokes. The revolution was changed and sold back to us. You can see exactly how this happened by looking at 1990s music culture.
Blink 2 – How feminism was changed
To understand how this change happened, look at what happened to female anger in 1990s music. The decade started with strong, active energy from a movement called riot grrrl. This was an underground feminist punk scene that showed real anger through women’s experiences. Bands like Bikini Kill were central to this movement. It was very political and asked for more space and respect for women in the music business.
In 1991, Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail from Bikini Kill were thinking of ideas for their fan magazine. They wanted a word that usually didn’t go with “girl.” Vail suggested “Power.” This is how Girl Power was born. It was a strong, anti-capitalist call for an angry girl rock revolution. The movement spread through underground magazines and small shows, building a feminist community from the ground up.
Mainstream culture quickly weakened this real rebellious energy. By 1996, the “Girl Power” slogan belonged to the Spice Girls, a group created by music producers who put an ad in a newspaper. The two movements were very different. Riot grrrl grew naturally from women making art to show their political beliefs. The Spice Girls completely changed the message.
Their “Girl Power” perfectly showed postfeminism. Jessica K. Taft, a sociologist, said it was created to stop feminism. It replaced calls for social change with celebrations of individual power and shopping power. Their smart idea was to show what a young girl thought adulthood was like – attractive, always positive, and easy to change like clay.
While “Girl Power” was being softened and changed, a darker music trend appeared: boy anger. Hip-hop’s strong anti-establishment energy often turned against women as the genre became bigger in the 90s. The very negative male world of nu metal made this hatred of women even stronger. Bands like Limp Bizkit and Korn took the most hateful parts of hip-hop and added silly, childish behaviour to it.
This created a cultural trap. Real female anger was pushed aside. Music by men became openly hostile. The music industry’s outspoken, angry women were almost overnight replaced by pop’s girls – younger, much less opinionated figures who would be carried into the new century, presented in a very specific and newly common style.
That style came directly from pornography. The change was not small. Christina Aguilera’s “Dirrty” video showed her in chaps with no crotch. Paris Hilton’s sex tape started her career. These were not just single events. They were clear messages teaching young women that being sexually available meant success.
The effects went beyond entertainment. Studies started to show the mental cost. Girls as young as six worried about being sexy. Eating disorders shot up. Depression rates among teenage girls doubled. The promise that being treated like an object would bring empowerment actually brought the opposite: a lot of worry and a feeling of not being connected to true desires.
Blink 3 – The rise of porno chic
The less-opinionated girl who appeared at the end of the 1990s came in a very specific style that would define the 2000s: porno chic.
This was not just about the adult film industry moving into mainstream culture. High fashion, art, and advertising completely took on porn’s visual style. They became obsessed with its looks and items. The style showed flat lighting, subjects with no feelings, wood-panelled recreation rooms, and ugly consumerism – everything felt raw, daring, and most importantly, profitable.
Photographer Terry Richardson became the main person for this style. He gave Hollywood stars and models that cheap, sweaty, clear look. His bright-flash photography created a slightly surprised, not-quite-human feeling that became the decade’s signature. His 2004 book Terryworld showed this moment perfectly – a mix of art, porn, and fashion photography that said everything was just a big joke.
Richardson himself was very honest about what he wanted to do. Working in real pornography would not be hard, he explained. The real surprising act was to be in the mainstream and get away with it. But doing this needed a new kind of model.
The strong, athletic supermodels of the early 1990s, like Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, and Naomi Campbell, were slowly removed. Designers and photographers got tired of working with models who knew their worth. They wanted someone easier to control, so they created the “waif”: thin, pale, young-looking girls who didn’t yet know how to use their power or say no.
Kate Moss became the symbol of this change. Her 1990 cover shoot for The Face captured the new style: natural, childish, not perfect. Years later, she told the darker truth behind this supposedly free look: she was pressured to take her top off for that shoot. When she posed topless for Calvin Klein at seventeen, she felt weak and scared. Calvin loved that innocence, she said – they used her weakness.
It turns out all of this was planned. The waif look created a standard for women that was passive, weak, and easy to use. A new media machine was about to show this standard fully.
Reality TV became very popular in the early 2000s, bringing porn aesthetics directly into American homes. Shows like The Girls Next Door made the Playboy mansion lifestyle seem normal. Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie used their sex tapes to start their careers, teaching young women that scandal plus sex meant fame.
Social media then made everything happen faster. MySpace, Facebook, and Instagram taught girls to present themselves like visual products. The selfie became a way to show you were available. Every photo needed the right angle, the right pout, the right amount of skin. The way of looking at things through porn, which Richardson brought to fashion photography, became the usual way to show yourself.
By 2010, this style was so deeply rooted that questioning it seemed old-fashioned. Pole-dancing classes were sold as a type of exercise, Brazilian waxes became normal grooming, and the line between empowerment and being treated like an object blurred until it disappeared completely.
Blink 4 – The surveillance machine
That usable standard of femininity, now made stronger by reality TV and social media, was built on an even deeper idea: watching yourself. The first person to do this was Jennifer Ringley, a nineteen-year-old college student. In 1996, she connected a webcam in her dorm room to a website. The “Jennicam” showed her everyday life online, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Ringley called her project a “virtual human zoo” – and millions of people watched her eat, sleep, and talk on the phone. She had created the plan for a new type of entertainment. It was based on the idea of complete, uncensored access to other people’s private lives.
Producers and networks quickly saw that they could make money from this spying. This desire shaped how reality television shows were made. From the start, this type of show acted as a popular cultural pushback against women’s rights. This new format was much cheaper to make than scripted drama. It also made women fit into the oldest, most simple roles. The world of reality TV pushed women to be either quiet, happy housewives or crazy, dehumanized sex objects.
The genre’s surprisingly old-fashioned idea was shown most clearly and wrongly by the 2000 special “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire.” Fifty women competed, like in a beauty contest, for the right to marry a rich man they had never seen. The show was so clearly bad that even viewers did not like it.
So, producers gave that wrong idea a romantic look and repackaged it as The Bachelor. This more pleasing version used tricks to sell the same main concept: a woman’s only way to happiness was by competing with other women for a man’s approval. These shows became strong ways of cultural training. They constantly spread a message about women that was very effective because it felt so familiar. They taught many viewers that a woman’s worth was directly linked to how well she met the desires of others.
This new culture of being constantly watched, judged, and valued only for being hot and passive created the perfect place for an even more harmful industry. The cameras that had been focused on unknown contestants and reality stars were about to turn toward the most famous women in the world.
The system was now ready. Young women had learned the lessons of postfeminism through pop music. They had learned the visual language through porno chic photography. Reality TV had taught them to show themselves as objects for an audience. Each part of the system supported the others. This created a cycle that would soon be impossible to escape. Everything was set for turning female celebrities into products. Even the biggest stars would find themselves stuck in the same limited roles that reality TV had started.
Blink 5 – Living with the consequences
The industrial phase of paparazzi photography had arrived. Forget the single beautiful photo – this was about constant chasing by groups of young men with digital cameras. Technology made it possible, but what really caused the rush was new platforms that always needed content. Gossip blogs like TMZ and Perez Hilton exploded, creating a media world that needed a constant stream of stars to fill its pages. These sites were ruder and more critical than mainstream publications had ever been before. They had no filters at all.
This machine turned the lives of famous women into a huge, multi-platform soap opera. The public was constantly flooded with images, videos, and updates of celebrities breaking down right in front of them.
The year 2007 became the worst point. In January, Lindsay Lohan checked into rehab. In February, Anna Nicole Smith died from an overdose. This led to a media frenzy that even included video of her dead body being taken for television.
But Britney Spears was the main target of the industry. Her problems with divorce and her fight for child custody were written about with extreme cruelty. Coverage of Spears alone made up a quarter of one major photo agency’s money, according to one estimate. The public was watching Britney fall apart and suffer right before our eyes. This went beyond reporting; it became a public show of humiliation.
This culture of disgust was the clear, harsh end result of the postfeminist promise. The system needed to change for the new decade ahead.
Then came the Girlboss era. After the 2008 financial crisis, the idea of working very hard became very popular. This new way of thinking was defined by “Lean In,” a 2013 book by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. Her message changed “Girl Power” for company boardrooms. It said that women should stop waiting for companies to change and instead work hard to climb the career ladder. This idea valued economic success over the sexual empowerment of the past. It changed the focus from changing the whole system to individual success.
Business owners like Sophia Amoruso perfectly branded this identity with #Girlboss. She made business seem cool and worthy of Instagram posts. The same postfeminist idea returned – individual expression sold as empowerment, then used to sell products. Everything from luggage to lipstick used this language.
So where does change begin, you might be asking? First comes understanding. You must spot the ideas that fill everyday culture – the ones that feel so normal you barely notice them anymore. Once you see these patterns clearly, you can start rewriting the main ideas. You can create completely new stories about female power and what women can do.
Think about what has been offered so far: the shamed celebrity who was public entertainment, the hardworking business owner who gave up everything for success. Each model limits our imagination in its own way. They create narrow paths for what female achievement can look like.
The future needs completely different stories. Stories where female authority exists without excuses or conditions. Where ambition doesn’t need a cute hashtag to be accepted. And where success means more than just personal gain at any cost. These new stories will not appear on their own. They need careful creation, a clear rejection of the old patterns, and the courage to imagine something truly new.
Final summary
In this summary of Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert, you’ve learned how postfeminist pop culture purposely replaced real female power with a commercial, sexual idea.
This process started in the 1990s when riot grrrl’s strong “Girl Power” was taken and changed by created groups like the Spice Girls. This plan defined the 2000s as a porn-like style became common. At the same time, reality TV taught women that their worth came from competing for a man’s approval.
The culture of constant watching reached its harsh peak when the gossip industry made money from the public breakdowns of stars like Britney Spears. This history changed into the 2010s Girlboss – a media-friendly ideal that rebranded individual hard work and shopping as the final form of female empowerment.
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Source: https://www.blinkist.com/https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/girl-on-girl-en