July 23, 2025 • 35 mins
Growing up in the '90s and early 2000s, we were told a lot of lies about what women want, what women should be, and what men fantasized about. What unrealistic standards are we still unlearning, what does it have to do with porn and 9/11, and are things any better now? Sophie Gilbert, the author of Girl on Girl, takes us through it.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
What era of feminism do you think we're in right now?
Is there a new era like in ten years? What
do you think we're going to say about this time?
Looking back?
Speaker 2 (00:11):
I have four year old twins.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
I have a boy and a girl, and I see
the ways in which people are raising kids now is
so different from even how I was raised, I'm sure
from how you were raised. Like the ways in which
we teach kids to think about their own bodies, to
think about caring for each other, the ways in which
we teach them to think about what boys and girls
are capable of, and how to be friends with each other.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
I mean I have to feel hopeful. You have to
hope that kids are being set up for a future
where they think about each other differently and they respect
each other.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I do think we could be in a moment where
people really want to they want something new, and it
almost feels like the times are so desperate for it,
the way things are shifting, like, I feel a lot
of hope and optimism. We have the power to shape
(01:03):
the way we think, to correct the cultural wrongs of
the past for future generations.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
But first we have to.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Take a long, hard look at what we're untangling ourselves
from I'm hopewittered and welcome to voiceover a space where
we're learning and unlearning all the myths we're taught about
love and relationships. I was born in nineteen ninety six,
(01:32):
the same year Wanna Be By the Spice Girls came out.
Little did I know that was a turning point in
culture that meant I would be thrust into a childhood
inundated with young, beautiful, skinny girls who danced, sang, partied,
and most importantly, were shiny objects of male desire. At
(01:53):
least that's what I was told. That's the model of
womanhood that I was supposed to achieve. People Brittany Lindsay
and Paris were the pinnacles of cool girls. I was
personally looking up to Hillary Duff and Mary Kate n Ashley.
I now know that these women's personas were images crafted
that portrayed unrealistic standards, that we were so mean to
(02:18):
these young girls learning to exist in the public eye.
But what I absorbed about womanhood, sex, and desire at
this time is still something I'm trying to unlearn. My
next guest, Sophie Gilbert, and her new book Girl on
Girl made me realize just how ingrained those values are
in my very being. It looks back to the culture
(02:41):
of the nineties and early two thousands to examine the
way it warped womanhood as an experience to be consumed
for men, and how that affected how women see themselves.
It goes deeper than tabloids and music videos to some
unexpectedly dark places. I found it so fast and think
(03:01):
this is critical reading for anyone who's trying to untangle
what you actually want from what.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
You were taught to want.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
I also want to acknowledge during this interview, I was
getting over a cold, so my voice sounds a little
raspier than usual, but it's kind of nice. Here's my
conversation with Sophie. I loved reading about the term girl power.
I loved reading about its origin and how it was
(03:31):
taken and turned into something so much sweeter and so
much more marketable for listeners. Can you walk through that
transition that the term girl power took?
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Yeah, so I should say I'm forty two now. So
I was a little bit too young for Riako. I
think I was thirteen in nineteen ninety six one I
when the Spice Girls debut as a band. So that
was my first introduction to the term girl power. I'd
never heard it in its original in its original iteration,
so it was really interesting to go back and to
(04:04):
learn about the moment when girl power as a slogan
was created, and it was created by two members of
the band Bikini Killed, the punk band, who were trying
to pair two words together that no one would normally associate,
and so they decided to put together girl and power,
and the intention of pairing those words was to make
people think, like, why don't girls have power? Why do
we assume that girls and power don't go together? Like
(04:25):
it had all this energy behind it, and it had
sort of a lot of force and intention and rit
Girl as a form of punk music was all about
carving out space for women in music and speaking out
about sexual assault and misogyny of all different kinds. And
it was this really kind of ferocious activist movement that
was full of intention and power. And then the Spice
Girls came along, and I described it recently to someone
(04:48):
as that moment in movies when everything goes from black
and white to color, because they were so colorful, they
were so vivid, they were so vibrant, and I remember
at thirteen just being like ah in thraw wanting to
buy everything that they were selling, and they were selling
a lot. They had something like five hundred million dollars
worth of commercial deals within the first year and a
(05:09):
half as a band.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Like they had.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
Body spray, they had ry lollipops, they had everything. Someone
told me on'n too they had a spiceculls toaster.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Oh my gosh, of course, I mean, I'm sure, I'm
sure of court anything you could imagine.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
But back then it was just this moment where they
were just capitalizing on their massive instant global fame, almost
and they took this slogan girl power and they cleaned
it for themselves, But it was the ways in which
they used it Suddenly it had lost all its activist energy.
It wasn't about forcing people to think about girls in
power or society or assumptions about femininity or anything. It
(05:42):
was just about celebrating what girls are doing in media,
like it was about celebrating their presence as a band.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
One of the best things I think you wrote about
that specifically is when you were like girl power was
now turned into running around like toddlers and knocking everything over.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
It's what they do in the video of for Wannabe,
Like they just storm into this event where they're not
invited and they start like throwing things on the ground
and like dancing on tables, and it really reminded me
of my total is it?
Speaker 1 (06:11):
And of course no, And like immediately I thought that
visual was like so clear and such a clear way
to see that transition from like girl power as a punk.
I don't want to say angry, but a little bit
angry at all, which is good, which is good. Like
I think when it comes to women in our anger,
(06:31):
like we are so not allowed to express that anger.
And the Spice Girls, I think just took everything out
of it that was difficult.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
So much of this book it's like, Okay, I'm shocked.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
I haven't thought about it that way, But now that
I'm thinking about it that way makes sense completely. When
you talked about how a lot of your research kind
of came back to the porn industry, can you tell
me about what made you realize porn had kind of
infiltrated every piece of our culture and media.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
It was funny because originally I did not think pornan
would be so prominent throughout the book, But I had
all these questions, right, like, how did the culture of
the two thousands get so cruel? How were we persuaded
to be so judgmental and so vicious towards ourselves towards
other women?
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Why was reality TV so cruel?
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Why would we so mean to Brittany in Paris and
Lunday and Amy and all these women who we just
kind of were stalked by photographers for the best part
of a decade, and wanting to understand the why of that.
A lot of the cruelty seemed to keep coming back
to this shift in porn that happened really around the
late nineties, and it was sort of the result of
(07:45):
a lot of things. I think in the book, I
mentioned the AIDS crisis being one thing that suddenly prompted
a lot more sort of frank discussion of sexuality in
media as a matter of public health, Like suddenly people
couldn't be skittish about sex anymore, Like there was the
to be a lot more explicit about how, for example,
AIDS was transmitted as a virus, and that required a
(08:06):
lot more openness about sex and media. But the nineties suddenly,
like they were just this kind of heavily sexualized decade,
like the president had a sex scandal, Like people I
think previously had never thought about the president's venis. But
you know, I remember learning about blowjobs when Hugh Grant
was arrested when I was maybe thirteen, twelve or thirteen.
He was arrested for picking up a sex worker in
(08:26):
Los Angeles, and I remember asking my aunt at the time,
like what had happened and her telling me, and me
made my own like I'd never use those terms. But
it was like this new openness, I think because there
was so much going on in the media that was
suddenly so sexual. Not suddenly, but this willingness to sort
of discuss it in tabloid form was pretty new, I
think for media row And then also, of course, underlying
(08:49):
everything was the huge rise in the number of people
watching porn as their cultural pastime. I mean, it's hard
to measure because people don't often confess openly about their
poor habits, but one statistic in the book is in
the mid eighties, just when VHS was first launch, there
was something like sixty six million rentals of pornographic vhs
(09:11):
is in America in a single year, and by the
mid nineties, it was closer to seven hundred million. Wow,
that was huge, like tenfold rise in the number of
people were renting porn just on vhs. And then of
course the Internet happened, and that was just like really
massive growth again because it was this whole new world online.
There was this sense that it was like fun and
it was liberating and it was exciting, and it was
(09:33):
all across culture, like it was in music videos, it
was in fashion magazines, like everything suddenly was like much
more sexualized than it had been before. And a result
of that, I think was that porn, which by its
nature is transgressive, had to become more extreme to get
people to keep paying for it. And so you do
see this sort of shift towards extremity and towards cruelty
(09:53):
that then filtered out, I think, into the culture and
the rest of the two thousands.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
You bring up American Pie, and I mean, we could
go a hundred different ways on how to talk about
like how this specifically impacted culture and mindsets when it
comes to gender and sex. But can you speak to
how you think that movie and movies like it shaped
the way men and women understand sex.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
So I just remembered seeing American Pie when I was sixteen,
I think, in high school and seeing it with a
bunch of my friends male and female, and not really
thinking much of it, like I think, feeling like, oh,
that's like it was funny, we loved at it, like
there was some raunchie scenes whatever, but it really did
seem to kind of ignite something among my male friends
(10:38):
in terms of feelings of entitlement and feelings of it
sort of seemed to give them license, I think, to
think about sex is not just something that is important
in terms of the relationships that you're in and something
that you discuss with your girlfriend or like it was.
It seemed to be something much more that you could
use as bragging rights with other boys.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Totally, and it certainly you.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
See the way in which American Pie, I think portrays it,
which became very very popular in the movies that came after,
is that it's this kind of heroic path from like
boy to man, right, and if you lose your virginity,
it cements your sort of transition into adulthood, your transition
into like full blown masculinity, and it's it's seen as
this like real, real kind of hero's journey in the
(11:23):
very sort of traditional narrative sense. But what that does,
I think is it kind of takes away agency from
women or it certainly like distracts them from the question
I remember feeling as a girl, like there's much less
emphasis on what do we actually want, Like what do
you desire? What is important to you as a as
a girl or as a woman in that time. And
I think something that came out of that that I
(11:45):
see more and more now is like this refusal to
accept that women are fully fledged human beings who are
equal to men, who deserve credit, equal who have like
equal humanity, who have equal agency, who deserve like equal
respect and attention. I feel so much now. It's certainly
an online culture, this idea that like menages superior, and
women in so many factions of the internet are just
(12:08):
not seen as fully human. In some ways, what.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
It brought up for me was the fact that like
nobody gets to be fully human, Like the men don't
get to express their softness and like you said, express
their need for love, where like everybody has to be
a character. It really takes away everyone's agency, Like to me,
nobody is winning.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
Something you talk about is fairy tale logic.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Which is this idea that someone needs to break their curse,
so to speak, and that there has to be some
villain that is withholding that prize or that ending that
they want. How do you think that fairy tale logic
is still kind of showing up today?
Speaker 3 (12:52):
When I went back to look at the movies, it
was astonishing to see how little movies in the two
thousands cared about women, right, and how women really was
tootyped in like three ways. They were either sex objects,
or they were like boring skolds, or you know, they
were like the wives who didn't want their husbands to
go to Las Vegas.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
There was sort of no narrative potential for women.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
And I mean, obviously there are exceptions, but there was
also this real trend in filmmaking of showing kind of
these slubby, not super appealing men who didn't have their
lives together and weren't kind of prepossessing in anyway, who
were redeemed by the love of a woman who was
much much, much hotter the.
Speaker 4 (13:35):
Like.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
There are so many movies that told this story, and
it really is like kiss a frog storytelling throughout the
course of the two thousands, like I'm thinking obviously knocked
up the forty year Old Virgin. I mean a lot
of these very funny like in some of these very
very sweet films, But when you look at the pattern
that is then created and the culture that is created
around that pattern, and you see like a good five
year period where all our movies are about sort of
(13:56):
men being redeemed by the love of a super hot
and very forgiving woman, that does send out a message
that I think people are absorbing. And it was much
less to me about focusing on any one thing than
about identifying the message and figuring out what it was
telling us and what we in turn took away from it.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
And I think it also says something about like we're
resonating with it. It did well at the box office,
so like what foundation had already been laid for that
movie to come in and be so impactful and then
to be able to be repeated over and over and
over again. It's like Chicken or the Egg kind of
conversation to me.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
And that's the money aspect of it too, Like the
Spice Girls were so successful that people saw dollar signs
that sent us away from this era of like empowered
women in rock towards sort of much more heavily sexualized teenagers.
I mean, the success of American Pie just meant that
we had like infinite imitations and they go, yeah, I think,
progressively worse as the two thousands went on, and a
(14:52):
lot more misogynistic.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
And so it's always.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
About kind of trends in any different kind of form
of media that it always about replications money and trying
to make more money.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
I want to take a bit of a I guess
a darker turn. Oh boy, yeah, sorry, I'm unsure if
American Pie came out before or after nine to eleven.
But you bring up the war in this book, and
one of the reasons why it's so important is because
again we've seen this resurgence of women starving themselves, like
ruining women in the media, like women losing their rights.
(15:39):
And one of the things that is a common thread
between these two times is the American impact in the
Middle East and watching war kind of unfold in front
of us. I don't want to say I'm glad you
put it in, because it's difficult to use the word
glad in the same sentence as this moment in like
American history, but I do think it shines light also
(16:03):
on things that are happening right now in the Middle
East again because of America. So what did you want
readers to understand about how sex and domination are operating
not just in culture but also kind of in how
America sees itself. And what did you want readers to
take away from bringing up this specific very.
Speaker 4 (16:25):
Dark moment in American war crimes?
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Oh my god, so dot it like that?
Speaker 3 (16:33):
APPI Grape was a prison camp in Iraq where American
soldiers kept Iraqi prisoners. I think it was around two
thousand and five, two thousand and three, maybe photographs emerged
of scenes of very heavily sexualized torture of Iraqi prisoners
by American soldiers. And I knew that I had seen
the images. I'd been appalled by them like contemporaneously back then,
(16:56):
and I remember Iraqi prison is being hooded and held
on and human pyramids. But what really shocked me when
I went back to revisit the images was how much
they seemed to be kind of emulating porn.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
And then if you look at them.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
As sort of photographic archetypes, they seemed to be capturing
a moment in which the meaning of photographs was changing,
Like photographs were going from this thing that you did
with your family, its special occasions, like you know, you
take pictures at them, moll, you take pictures at weddings,
you take pictures at Christmas. Suddenly there was a shift
in technology. It was much easier to capture photos, and
you would they sort of had it. It changed the
(17:34):
meaning and in the ways in which we were all
taking them and using them and replicating them.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
And that obviously had its own.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Impact in terms of I'm sure you remember, like the
rise of sex tapes and the rise of sexual imagery
and nudes being passed around without women's consent, and there
was a sort of photographic imagery where we all had
to figure out like what the boundaries would be, of course,
and so looking at these pictures in which the American
soldiers were sort of posing with thumbs up, they reminded
me of a lot of not just the porn, but
(18:05):
also with a lot of fashion imagery shot by a
photographer called Terry Richardson who was known for this very
like highly sexualized sort of kind of ironic jokey but
like often pictures of his penis, pictures of naked medals,
like a lot of sexual content in his photographs, and
I wasn't the only one to notice that. He himself
had written about it in a book of his work,
where he'd mentioned that the Abi Grave images to him
(18:27):
just looked like porn and that was just what people
did now. They kept like photographs of sexual encounters and
they showed their friends and it was kind of new normal.
But the images from Abbi Groupe seemed to really reflect
It's something that we had all absorbed, I think, which
was this use of sex as a kind of affirmation
of male dominance and of male power, and the ways
(18:47):
in which that was being used in this Iraqi prison
camp was also something that was being felt across culture
more broadly. So it is a very dark chapter and
I'm sorry, I'm sorry for everyone, but it felt that
was one of the kind of light bulb moments for me.
Oh and then I think I found from twenty ten
and American apparel add this stage female models and a
human pyramid that seemed to be directly imitating the Abi
(19:10):
Grave images as well, and that just seemed like this
conflation of I don't know, fashion and sex and abusive imagery,
but also this sense of like some human bodies being
worth less than others was very dominant throughout the media
of the time as well, so it seemed important to
kind of note it.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
I'm so glad that you did. I think it was
a really important thing to shine some light on. And
like you said, it was like there was no really
rules around like respect when it comes to photo and
I think that does maybe bleed into the era of
just like hounding female celebrities, you know, like you get
into the Britney spears of it all, the Lindsay lowhand
(19:50):
of it all, the paparazzi is so relentless to get
a photo of them no matter what, Like what do
you think that era did to us when it comes
to how we see women, especially kind of women who
are going through some really deep pain, Like how we
disregarded Amy Winehouse so deeply, and how everyone saw her
(20:11):
downfall not as something to mourn but as something to
almost expect and as something to blame on her. Like
how do you think we're still kind of carrying that
with us? And what are your kind of extended thoughts
on that.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
I think one thing you identified that's really important is
there's this pattern constantly with imaging technology, and I see
it now with AI as well. When some form of
new technology is developed or as launched, people are so
enthusiastic to kind of jump on it and adopt it
and utilize it, there's no time to kind of develop
(20:46):
ethical frameworks for how to use it or like I said, boundaries,
And so you know, you see it in the rise
of photography. You see it in the rise of the Internet, certainly,
and certainly with regard to sexual imagery, but also just.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
In the tone of the Internet.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
And like with suddenly the access that we were being
given almost twenty four to seven towards famous people's lives,
it was unprecedented and it was wholly new. I think
that suddenly you had this industrial paparazzi complex where they
weren't trained photographers. They were just like often like very
young men on the back of scooters with cameras that
(21:20):
they'd rented for and best buy, and they were stalking
famous women because there were huge amounts of money to
be made. And I think what that did to all
of us was because we hadn't had this kind of
access before, because we hadn't had this kind of relationship
or this like real intimate access, I guess to celebrity.
It made it seem almost like they weren't real people,
(21:42):
like they were characters in a new form of entertainment
that we were all watching.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
In real time.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
I don't know, maybe that helps me explain why the
tone of the Internet was so cruel, certainly like the
early days of blogging, but also just the treatment of celebrities.
And I came to understand too that some of it
was about how the nature of celebrity had changed because
of the Internet, because of reality television. Like before the
two thousands, if you were famous, it was usually because
you were good at something, or you were famous for
(22:09):
a reason that you were an actor or a singer
or a sports star, or there was a talent that
you had that had made you famous. Where suddenly, with
the Internet and with reality TV, all you needed to
be famous was to be visible. And so there were
people like Paris Hilton who were really good at playing
up that visibility. Kim Kardashleian obviously in her whole family.
They're really really good at trading visibility for fame and
(22:29):
at knowing what people want to see, and it sort
of seeming relatively untouched by the criticism that they get,
and like that's the bargain of their fame. But I
think what that did for a lot of us, it's
this real nature of overexposure, right where you see people
so much that you get you get sick of them,
sort of judgmental in a way that you maybe wouldn't
(22:50):
be if they had another job that they were doing.
Like if they're literally just famous because people take pictures
of them, it's a lot easier to be kind of
scathing in your critique, and that judgment I think is
certainly encouraged, like reality TV, where we're really really encouraged
to sort of hate often on the people that were watching.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah, I mean the untangling of reality TV in this
book was so interesting. The Internet was a product of
reality TV. I thought TikTok was a product of reality TV,
but your book really shows that, like it's more the reverse,
Like cam Girls kind of were the first introduction into
(23:25):
reality TV.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
In general, reality TV?
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Would you say good or bad when it comes to representation?
Speaker 3 (23:34):
I mean it's so interesting to me as a genre
because I think when it started it had this really
anthropological bent, right, Like it was really curious about human
nature and if you go back to a lot of
the shows that seem to have inspired reality TV in
the fifties, like Canda Camera, these shows that were sort
of staging experiments almost with human people who didn't know
(23:57):
they were being filmed. There was this really sociological need
to kind of understand what humans were capable of. And
I remember watching Big Brother in the UK when it
first launched here, and I don't know, it was fascinating.
It was like watching humans and Human Zoo and all
these manufactured situations to prefer stress and conflict and stuff,
but at the same time seeing people form relationships and
(24:19):
be pragmatic about working together to like to do the
challenges that they were given and things like that. It
was really really incredible television in a way that I
had never experienced before. But then very quickly again like
money comes in, there was this wave of producers. It's
always it's the story of the book. Yeah, who realized
how much cheaper reality TV was than making, say, a
(24:41):
dramatized show with a bunch of factors and makeup and wardrobe.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
And camera crew and stuff like.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Instead, you could just film real people who were not
paid union rates, and you quickly had into kind of
the Wild West era. I think there was one special
that I mentioned, the book called Who Wants to Marry
a Multimillionaire that took fifty women and made them compete
for the and in marriage of a supposedly wealthy man
who none of them had ever met. Whereas really like
women being sold off like catty but in a pageant,
(25:08):
you know, so that's like a swim i aportion. And
I think one of the most appealing formats that just
got repeated over and over and over again was this
idea of pitting women, especially in competition against each other,
like you see it in The Bachelor, you see it
in Flavor of Love, and I think you see it
to some extent now and shows like Selling Sunset, this
idea that women all have to compete for limited resources.
(25:30):
And again it emphasizes like individualism, and it de emphasizes
working together and sisterhood and the sense of like what
women are capable of when we're united.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
But yeah, is it good or bad? I don't know.
It's I don't want to come for anyone's favorites.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
It kind of makes sense that the Girl Boss era
came after a reality TV Can you talk about what
the girl Boss era got wrong and was it always
going to fail like from the beginning, or is it
another story of capitalism chains everything?
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yeah, I mean the girl Boss era.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
It's sort of hard to define, but it traces back,
I would say to the book by Sophia Marisso who
was the founder of a fashion brand called Nasty Girl,
and she wrote a memoir in twenty fourteen called Hashtag
girl Boss, which was all about how she had gone
from like a dumpster diving freagin to this founder of
this business and how it was like a one hundred
million dollar company. And it was very much this idea
(26:41):
of like rags to riches that I think was sort
of intoxicating in culture at the time.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
The idea that anyone could make.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
It as a founder, as a well you needed was
an idea in the right work ethic. And a lot
of this I think you're right was like completely enabled
buy reality television because it was all built on women
as kind of like mottos, almost like.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Women as icons.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
And the Gubbles era was all about women as being
very attached to the brands that they were selling and
being very visible and being in all the imagery and
like wearing the makeup and wearing the clothes and being
on the cover of Forbes.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
And also be like being chosen in so many ways,
being chosen at work, being chosen in love, being chosen,
like being the one who is above everyone.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Else and looking the right way.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
Of course, like absolutely all of these women were sort
of conventionally attractive in all the right ways, and often
they were white, and they were good marketing icons for
their brands. And it collided with this moment as well
in which Cheryl Sandberg, the Facebook executive, published lean In,
which was supposed to be a kind of manifesto for
(27:49):
female leadership and female empowerment in the workplace, which also
was just again all about individual power. And it was
this idea of like trickle down feminist that if enough
women could achieve power for themselves, they could then change
things for the women who had come after them. But
it wasn't about like organizing with other women to say,
(28:12):
for parentally or for policies that might actually create meaningful
change for women in American life. It was all about like,
get that money, get that position, get that power, and
then after that you can, you know, try and do
the best you can to make things better.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
For other women.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
So in some ways it was just it was very
much this individualist, like tope, bad kind of feminism that
was not actually about working to make the world better
for women real large.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
It's really such a patriarchal take on feminism, Like it's
really such an old school, male dominated like if you
can act like them, you can be like them, and
you can get money like them. And I remember I
was in college when Lenin came out, and I am
such it was such a product of the future is female.
(28:57):
Like I absolutely was like sixty when Parks and rec
was on and Hillary Clinton was running and Cheryl Sandberg
was coming out, and I was like, this is going
to change everything, you know. So it really kind of
like got me too, and it sells, you know what
I mean. And it does like separate ourselves from each other.
(29:18):
And I think when we're separated from each other a
sort of again, capitalism kind of wins. The systems that
are in place really win. I was so surprised by
sort of a piece of the ending of the book
when you brought up romance as sort of one of
(29:39):
the ways to fight against what feminism has turned into.
You quoted Alice Evans and she said one of the
biggest drivers of gender equality is romantic love, specifically loving
men who want women to thrive. I know this is
a bit off topic from lean in, but maybe it's
(30:03):
connected in a way of like that era of feminism
does not quite talk about love in the sort of
bell hooks Eric from type of way when it is
collective and with respect and with understanding and everything. So like,
do you think in general as a culture we kind
of love good men?
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Of course?
Speaker 3 (30:22):
I mean, my god, I've been thinking about this non
stop recently, because when you think about what do women want,
like this perennial question right when you look at the
men who are the kind of the internet's boyfriend and
anyone given moment, men like I don't know, years ago,
it was ben At, it come about now it's Pedro Pascal.
We've had a like poor Moscows and all these men
in the interim who we sort of attached to. And
(30:43):
the one common quality I would say that they all
have is they all seem like they like and respect
women totally, which is such a small thing. You see
this culture and line of like men wanting to get
jacked and ripped and like to look a certain way.
They're not doing it because it's what women want. They
don't care about what we want. They're doing it to
compete with each other. Right, What women want, I think
is to feel valued, to feel respected, to feel affirmed,
(31:03):
and to feel like the people who were in relationships
with cus is fully human. And it's this quality I
think that is making romantic fiction right now so popular,
and like you've seen this real rise in the number
of people reading romance novels. Like the thing about romantic fiction,
I would say, more than any other genre of culture,
is that it's always put women first. It's always put
women in the center, it's always focused on the female gaze.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
It's always thought about.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
What women want and what women deserve, and it's been
kind of unapologetic about that throughout its history.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
And so yeah, I.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Mean it makes total sense to me, within this moment,
when there's so much misogyny online and so much misogyny
in our politics, that women especially are being drawn to
this genre of entertainment that is just very firming in
so many ways. Alice Evans, I think it was a
substec she wrote, but it was completely fascinating to me.
Like the idea that you can tell how a society
(31:56):
thinks about women by the significance that it places on
mantic love. Was really fascinating to me because it proves
something that I think is like the thesis of the book,
which is like culture is never just about entertainment. It
teaches us what to believe. It teaches us like how
to think about ourselves and how to think about other people,
and how to sort of settle own ambitions and our
own ideas for life.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Speaking about sort of modern culture cultural icons right now,
I'm wondering if you think we're in a new era,
like we have so many feminist artists Chapel Roone, Sabrina Carpenter, Donci, Like,
there's so many like beautiful artists right now who are
strong in their boundaries and who don't really back down
(32:37):
in the way they express their sexuality. Specifically, I'm wondering
about Sabrina Carpenter. She's been such a debated figure right now.
What is your take on Sabrina and her the way
she's playing into sexuality.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
I mean, I've been talking about this book for the
most two months now, and I would say every time
I've done a book event or a panel or something
like someone has.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
Brought her up. Really she is.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
Yeah, she's so fascinating and I think she's perplexing to
a lot of people because she presents this version of
sexuality that in some ways feels very old fashioned, because
it's like fembot blonde, like a lot of pain, a lot, right,
but it seems to be so heavily ironized, and she
knows exactly what she's doing and she's not worried about
what people think of her.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
I think is the most interesting thing.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Like she's doing exactly what she wants, and she's making
the music that she wants, and she's getting the attention
that she wants, and she's doing what she feels necessary
for her as a form of creative expression, and like
God bless her for it. But at the same time,
the understanding that none of us exist in a vacuum,
and that there's always the context of her making this
(33:44):
kind of imagery now and in a world where woman
ah like losing rights rapidly and being stereotyped as you know,
sexual objects again in a way that we haven't since
the two thousands. I mean, the contextualization of it was
really interesting to me. I find Chapelone so thrilling because
I think she doesn't think it all about the male
gaze of menon or how like men are just not
(34:05):
part of her esthetic expiration or creative journey. Like everything
that she's doing, she's sort of Madonna like in that way.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
It's all about her.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
It's all about her desires and her sense of fun
and playfulness, and her music is so great. So there's
so much to be really thrilled with, I think in
terms of the culture that's being made right now, and
to celebrate and to sort of see how far women
have come and to hope that that leads us somewhere
near in the future.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Once again, thank you to Sophie for taking the time
to talk to me. We are certainly adding this book
to the Boys Sober syllabus. I think all of this
is information that will help us along the path of
healing from the wounds of our cultural past. And on
that note, let's talk next week. Boy Sover is a
(35:04):
production of iHeart Podcasts I'm Your Host, Hope Ordered. Our
executive producers are Christina Everett and Julie Pinero. Our supervising
producer is Emily Meronoff. Engineering by Bahid Fraser and mixing
and mastering.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
By Aboo Zafar.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
If you liked this episode, please tell a friend and
don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to boy Sober
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, and wherever you get
your favorite shows.
What era of feminism do you think we're in right now?
Is there a new era like in ten years? What
do you think we're going to say about this time?
Looking back?
Speaker 2 (00:11):
I have four year old twins.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
I have a boy and a girl, and I see
the ways in which people are raising kids now is
so different from even how I was raised, I'm sure
from how you were raised. Like the ways in which
we teach kids to think about their own bodies, to
think about caring for each other, the ways in which
we teach them to think about what boys and girls
are capable of, and how to be friends with each other.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
I mean I have to feel hopeful. You have to
hope that kids are being set up for a future
where they think about each other differently and they respect
each other.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
I do think we could be in a moment where
people really want to they want something new, and it
almost feels like the times are so desperate for it,
the way things are shifting, like, I feel a lot
of hope and optimism. We have the power to shape
(01:03):
the way we think, to correct the cultural wrongs of
the past for future generations.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
But first we have to.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Take a long, hard look at what we're untangling ourselves
from I'm hopewittered and welcome to voiceover a space where
we're learning and unlearning all the myths we're taught about
love and relationships. I was born in nineteen ninety six,
(01:32):
the same year Wanna Be By the Spice Girls came out.
Little did I know that was a turning point in
culture that meant I would be thrust into a childhood
inundated with young, beautiful, skinny girls who danced, sang, partied,
and most importantly, were shiny objects of male desire. At
(01:53):
least that's what I was told. That's the model of
womanhood that I was supposed to achieve. People Brittany Lindsay
and Paris were the pinnacles of cool girls. I was
personally looking up to Hillary Duff and Mary Kate n Ashley.
I now know that these women's personas were images crafted
that portrayed unrealistic standards, that we were so mean to
(02:18):
these young girls learning to exist in the public eye.
But what I absorbed about womanhood, sex, and desire at
this time is still something I'm trying to unlearn. My
next guest, Sophie Gilbert, and her new book Girl on
Girl made me realize just how ingrained those values are
in my very being. It looks back to the culture
(02:41):
of the nineties and early two thousands to examine the
way it warped womanhood as an experience to be consumed
for men, and how that affected how women see themselves.
It goes deeper than tabloids and music videos to some
unexpectedly dark places. I found it so fast and think
(03:01):
this is critical reading for anyone who's trying to untangle
what you actually want from what.
Speaker 4 (03:06):
You were taught to want.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
I also want to acknowledge during this interview, I was
getting over a cold, so my voice sounds a little
raspier than usual, but it's kind of nice. Here's my
conversation with Sophie. I loved reading about the term girl power.
I loved reading about its origin and how it was
(03:31):
taken and turned into something so much sweeter and so
much more marketable for listeners. Can you walk through that
transition that the term girl power took?
Speaker 3 (03:43):
Yeah, so I should say I'm forty two now. So
I was a little bit too young for Riako. I
think I was thirteen in nineteen ninety six one I
when the Spice Girls debut as a band. So that
was my first introduction to the term girl power. I'd
never heard it in its original in its original iteration,
so it was really interesting to go back and to
(04:04):
learn about the moment when girl power as a slogan
was created, and it was created by two members of
the band Bikini Killed, the punk band, who were trying
to pair two words together that no one would normally associate,
and so they decided to put together girl and power,
and the intention of pairing those words was to make
people think, like, why don't girls have power? Why do
we assume that girls and power don't go together? Like
(04:25):
it had all this energy behind it, and it had
sort of a lot of force and intention and rit
Girl as a form of punk music was all about
carving out space for women in music and speaking out
about sexual assault and misogyny of all different kinds. And
it was this really kind of ferocious activist movement that
was full of intention and power. And then the Spice
Girls came along, and I described it recently to someone
(04:48):
as that moment in movies when everything goes from black
and white to color, because they were so colorful, they
were so vivid, they were so vibrant, and I remember
at thirteen just being like ah in thraw wanting to
buy everything that they were selling, and they were selling
a lot. They had something like five hundred million dollars
worth of commercial deals within the first year and a
(05:09):
half as a band.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Like they had.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
Body spray, they had ry lollipops, they had everything. Someone
told me on'n too they had a spiceculls toaster.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Oh my gosh, of course, I mean, I'm sure, I'm
sure of court anything you could imagine.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
But back then it was just this moment where they
were just capitalizing on their massive instant global fame, almost
and they took this slogan girl power and they cleaned
it for themselves, But it was the ways in which
they used it Suddenly it had lost all its activist energy.
It wasn't about forcing people to think about girls in
power or society or assumptions about femininity or anything. It
(05:42):
was just about celebrating what girls are doing in media,
like it was about celebrating their presence as a band.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
One of the best things I think you wrote about
that specifically is when you were like girl power was
now turned into running around like toddlers and knocking everything over.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
It's what they do in the video of for Wannabe,
Like they just storm into this event where they're not
invited and they start like throwing things on the ground
and like dancing on tables, and it really reminded me
of my total is it?
Speaker 1 (06:11):
And of course no, And like immediately I thought that
visual was like so clear and such a clear way
to see that transition from like girl power as a punk.
I don't want to say angry, but a little bit
angry at all, which is good, which is good. Like
I think when it comes to women in our anger,
(06:31):
like we are so not allowed to express that anger.
And the Spice Girls, I think just took everything out
of it that was difficult.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
So much of this book it's like, Okay, I'm shocked.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
I haven't thought about it that way, But now that
I'm thinking about it that way makes sense completely. When
you talked about how a lot of your research kind
of came back to the porn industry, can you tell
me about what made you realize porn had kind of
infiltrated every piece of our culture and media.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
It was funny because originally I did not think pornan
would be so prominent throughout the book, But I had
all these questions, right, like, how did the culture of
the two thousands get so cruel? How were we persuaded
to be so judgmental and so vicious towards ourselves towards
other women?
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Why was reality TV so cruel?
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Why would we so mean to Brittany in Paris and
Lunday and Amy and all these women who we just
kind of were stalked by photographers for the best part
of a decade, and wanting to understand the why of that.
A lot of the cruelty seemed to keep coming back
to this shift in porn that happened really around the
late nineties, and it was sort of the result of
(07:45):
a lot of things. I think in the book, I
mentioned the AIDS crisis being one thing that suddenly prompted
a lot more sort of frank discussion of sexuality in
media as a matter of public health, Like suddenly people
couldn't be skittish about sex anymore, Like there was the
to be a lot more explicit about how, for example,
AIDS was transmitted as a virus, and that required a
(08:06):
lot more openness about sex and media. But the nineties suddenly,
like they were just this kind of heavily sexualized decade,
like the president had a sex scandal, Like people I
think previously had never thought about the president's venis. But
you know, I remember learning about blowjobs when Hugh Grant
was arrested when I was maybe thirteen, twelve or thirteen.
He was arrested for picking up a sex worker in
(08:26):
Los Angeles, and I remember asking my aunt at the time,
like what had happened and her telling me, and me
made my own like I'd never use those terms. But
it was like this new openness, I think because there
was so much going on in the media that was
suddenly so sexual. Not suddenly, but this willingness to sort
of discuss it in tabloid form was pretty new, I
think for media row And then also, of course, underlying
(08:49):
everything was the huge rise in the number of people
watching porn as their cultural pastime. I mean, it's hard
to measure because people don't often confess openly about their
poor habits, but one statistic in the book is in
the mid eighties, just when VHS was first launch, there
was something like sixty six million rentals of pornographic vhs
(09:11):
is in America in a single year, and by the
mid nineties, it was closer to seven hundred million. Wow,
that was huge, like tenfold rise in the number of
people were renting porn just on vhs. And then of
course the Internet happened, and that was just like really
massive growth again because it was this whole new world online.
There was this sense that it was like fun and
it was liberating and it was exciting, and it was
(09:33):
all across culture, like it was in music videos, it
was in fashion magazines, like everything suddenly was like much
more sexualized than it had been before. And a result
of that, I think was that porn, which by its
nature is transgressive, had to become more extreme to get
people to keep paying for it. And so you do
see this sort of shift towards extremity and towards cruelty
(09:53):
that then filtered out, I think, into the culture and
the rest of the two thousands.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
You bring up American Pie, and I mean, we could
go a hundred different ways on how to talk about
like how this specifically impacted culture and mindsets when it
comes to gender and sex. But can you speak to
how you think that movie and movies like it shaped
the way men and women understand sex.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
So I just remembered seeing American Pie when I was sixteen,
I think, in high school and seeing it with a
bunch of my friends male and female, and not really
thinking much of it, like I think, feeling like, oh,
that's like it was funny, we loved at it, like
there was some raunchie scenes whatever, but it really did
seem to kind of ignite something among my male friends
(10:38):
in terms of feelings of entitlement and feelings of it
sort of seemed to give them license, I think, to
think about sex is not just something that is important
in terms of the relationships that you're in and something
that you discuss with your girlfriend or like it was.
It seemed to be something much more that you could
use as bragging rights with other boys.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Totally, and it certainly you.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
See the way in which American Pie, I think portrays it,
which became very very popular in the movies that came after,
is that it's this kind of heroic path from like
boy to man, right, and if you lose your virginity,
it cements your sort of transition into adulthood, your transition
into like full blown masculinity, and it's it's seen as
this like real, real kind of hero's journey in the
(11:23):
very sort of traditional narrative sense. But what that does,
I think is it kind of takes away agency from
women or it certainly like distracts them from the question
I remember feeling as a girl, like there's much less
emphasis on what do we actually want, Like what do
you desire? What is important to you as a as
a girl or as a woman in that time. And
I think something that came out of that that I
(11:45):
see more and more now is like this refusal to
accept that women are fully fledged human beings who are
equal to men, who deserve credit, equal who have like
equal humanity, who have equal agency, who deserve like equal
respect and attention. I feel so much now. It's certainly
an online culture, this idea that like menages superior, and
women in so many factions of the internet are just
(12:08):
not seen as fully human. In some ways, what.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
It brought up for me was the fact that like
nobody gets to be fully human, Like the men don't
get to express their softness and like you said, express
their need for love, where like everybody has to be
a character. It really takes away everyone's agency, Like to me,
nobody is winning.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
Something you talk about is fairy tale logic.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
Which is this idea that someone needs to break their curse,
so to speak, and that there has to be some
villain that is withholding that prize or that ending that
they want. How do you think that fairy tale logic
is still kind of showing up today?
Speaker 3 (12:52):
When I went back to look at the movies, it
was astonishing to see how little movies in the two
thousands cared about women, right, and how women really was
tootyped in like three ways. They were either sex objects,
or they were like boring skolds, or you know, they
were like the wives who didn't want their husbands to
go to Las Vegas.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
There was sort of no narrative potential for women.
Speaker 3 (13:14):
And I mean, obviously there are exceptions, but there was
also this real trend in filmmaking of showing kind of
these slubby, not super appealing men who didn't have their
lives together and weren't kind of prepossessing in anyway, who
were redeemed by the love of a woman who was
much much, much hotter the.
Speaker 4 (13:35):
Like.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
There are so many movies that told this story, and
it really is like kiss a frog storytelling throughout the
course of the two thousands, like I'm thinking obviously knocked
up the forty year Old Virgin. I mean a lot
of these very funny like in some of these very
very sweet films, But when you look at the pattern
that is then created and the culture that is created
around that pattern, and you see like a good five
year period where all our movies are about sort of
(13:56):
men being redeemed by the love of a super hot
and very forgiving woman, that does send out a message
that I think people are absorbing. And it was much
less to me about focusing on any one thing than
about identifying the message and figuring out what it was
telling us and what we in turn took away from it.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
And I think it also says something about like we're
resonating with it. It did well at the box office,
so like what foundation had already been laid for that
movie to come in and be so impactful and then
to be able to be repeated over and over and
over again. It's like Chicken or the Egg kind of
conversation to me.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
And that's the money aspect of it too, Like the
Spice Girls were so successful that people saw dollar signs
that sent us away from this era of like empowered
women in rock towards sort of much more heavily sexualized teenagers.
I mean, the success of American Pie just meant that
we had like infinite imitations and they go, yeah, I think,
progressively worse as the two thousands went on, and a
(14:52):
lot more misogynistic.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
And so it's always.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
About kind of trends in any different kind of form
of media that it always about replications money and trying
to make more money.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
I want to take a bit of a I guess
a darker turn. Oh boy, yeah, sorry, I'm unsure if
American Pie came out before or after nine to eleven.
But you bring up the war in this book, and
one of the reasons why it's so important is because
again we've seen this resurgence of women starving themselves, like
ruining women in the media, like women losing their rights.
(15:39):
And one of the things that is a common thread
between these two times is the American impact in the
Middle East and watching war kind of unfold in front
of us. I don't want to say I'm glad you
put it in, because it's difficult to use the word
glad in the same sentence as this moment in like
American history, but I do think it shines light also
(16:03):
on things that are happening right now in the Middle
East again because of America. So what did you want
readers to understand about how sex and domination are operating
not just in culture but also kind of in how
America sees itself. And what did you want readers to
take away from bringing up this specific very.
Speaker 4 (16:25):
Dark moment in American war crimes?
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Oh my god, so dot it like that?
Speaker 3 (16:33):
APPI Grape was a prison camp in Iraq where American
soldiers kept Iraqi prisoners. I think it was around two
thousand and five, two thousand and three, maybe photographs emerged
of scenes of very heavily sexualized torture of Iraqi prisoners
by American soldiers. And I knew that I had seen
the images. I'd been appalled by them like contemporaneously back then,
(16:56):
and I remember Iraqi prison is being hooded and held
on and human pyramids. But what really shocked me when
I went back to revisit the images was how much
they seemed to be kind of emulating porn.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
And then if you look at them.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
As sort of photographic archetypes, they seemed to be capturing
a moment in which the meaning of photographs was changing,
Like photographs were going from this thing that you did
with your family, its special occasions, like you know, you
take pictures at them, moll, you take pictures at weddings,
you take pictures at Christmas. Suddenly there was a shift
in technology. It was much easier to capture photos, and
you would they sort of had it. It changed the
(17:34):
meaning and in the ways in which we were all
taking them and using them and replicating them.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
And that obviously had its own.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Impact in terms of I'm sure you remember, like the
rise of sex tapes and the rise of sexual imagery
and nudes being passed around without women's consent, and there
was a sort of photographic imagery where we all had
to figure out like what the boundaries would be, of course,
and so looking at these pictures in which the American
soldiers were sort of posing with thumbs up, they reminded
me of a lot of not just the porn, but
(18:05):
also with a lot of fashion imagery shot by a
photographer called Terry Richardson who was known for this very
like highly sexualized sort of kind of ironic jokey but
like often pictures of his penis, pictures of naked medals,
like a lot of sexual content in his photographs, and
I wasn't the only one to notice that. He himself
had written about it in a book of his work,
where he'd mentioned that the Abi Grave images to him
(18:27):
just looked like porn and that was just what people
did now. They kept like photographs of sexual encounters and
they showed their friends and it was kind of new normal.
But the images from Abbi Groupe seemed to really reflect
It's something that we had all absorbed, I think, which
was this use of sex as a kind of affirmation
of male dominance and of male power, and the ways
(18:47):
in which that was being used in this Iraqi prison
camp was also something that was being felt across culture
more broadly. So it is a very dark chapter and
I'm sorry, I'm sorry for everyone, but it felt that
was one of the kind of light bulb moments for me.
Oh and then I think I found from twenty ten
and American apparel add this stage female models and a
human pyramid that seemed to be directly imitating the Abi
(19:10):
Grave images as well, and that just seemed like this
conflation of I don't know, fashion and sex and abusive imagery,
but also this sense of like some human bodies being
worth less than others was very dominant throughout the media
of the time as well, so it seemed important to
kind of note it.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
I'm so glad that you did. I think it was
a really important thing to shine some light on. And
like you said, it was like there was no really
rules around like respect when it comes to photo and
I think that does maybe bleed into the era of
just like hounding female celebrities, you know, like you get
into the Britney spears of it all, the Lindsay lowhand
(19:50):
of it all, the paparazzi is so relentless to get
a photo of them no matter what, Like what do
you think that era did to us when it comes
to how we see women, especially kind of women who
are going through some really deep pain, Like how we
disregarded Amy Winehouse so deeply, and how everyone saw her
(20:11):
downfall not as something to mourn but as something to
almost expect and as something to blame on her. Like
how do you think we're still kind of carrying that
with us? And what are your kind of extended thoughts
on that.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
I think one thing you identified that's really important is
there's this pattern constantly with imaging technology, and I see
it now with AI as well. When some form of
new technology is developed or as launched, people are so
enthusiastic to kind of jump on it and adopt it
and utilize it, there's no time to kind of develop
(20:46):
ethical frameworks for how to use it or like I said, boundaries,
And so you know, you see it in the rise
of photography. You see it in the rise of the Internet, certainly,
and certainly with regard to sexual imagery, but also just.
Speaker 2 (20:59):
In the tone of the Internet.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
And like with suddenly the access that we were being
given almost twenty four to seven towards famous people's lives,
it was unprecedented and it was wholly new. I think
that suddenly you had this industrial paparazzi complex where they
weren't trained photographers. They were just like often like very
young men on the back of scooters with cameras that
(21:20):
they'd rented for and best buy, and they were stalking
famous women because there were huge amounts of money to
be made. And I think what that did to all
of us was because we hadn't had this kind of
access before, because we hadn't had this kind of relationship
or this like real intimate access, I guess to celebrity.
It made it seem almost like they weren't real people,
(21:42):
like they were characters in a new form of entertainment
that we were all watching.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
In real time.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
I don't know, maybe that helps me explain why the
tone of the Internet was so cruel, certainly like the
early days of blogging, but also just the treatment of celebrities.
And I came to understand too that some of it
was about how the nature of celebrity had changed because
of the Internet, because of reality television. Like before the
two thousands, if you were famous, it was usually because
you were good at something, or you were famous for
(22:09):
a reason that you were an actor or a singer
or a sports star, or there was a talent that
you had that had made you famous. Where suddenly, with
the Internet and with reality TV, all you needed to
be famous was to be visible. And so there were
people like Paris Hilton who were really good at playing
up that visibility. Kim Kardashleian obviously in her whole family.
They're really really good at trading visibility for fame and
(22:29):
at knowing what people want to see, and it sort
of seeming relatively untouched by the criticism that they get,
and like that's the bargain of their fame. But I
think what that did for a lot of us, it's
this real nature of overexposure, right where you see people
so much that you get you get sick of them,
sort of judgmental in a way that you maybe wouldn't
(22:50):
be if they had another job that they were doing.
Like if they're literally just famous because people take pictures
of them, it's a lot easier to be kind of
scathing in your critique, and that judgment I think is
certainly encouraged, like reality TV, where we're really really encouraged
to sort of hate often on the people that were watching.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
Yeah, I mean the untangling of reality TV in this
book was so interesting. The Internet was a product of
reality TV. I thought TikTok was a product of reality TV,
but your book really shows that, like it's more the reverse,
Like cam Girls kind of were the first introduction into
(23:25):
reality TV.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
In general, reality TV?
Speaker 1 (23:29):
Would you say good or bad when it comes to representation?
Speaker 3 (23:34):
I mean it's so interesting to me as a genre
because I think when it started it had this really
anthropological bent, right, Like it was really curious about human
nature and if you go back to a lot of
the shows that seem to have inspired reality TV in
the fifties, like Canda Camera, these shows that were sort
of staging experiments almost with human people who didn't know
(23:57):
they were being filmed. There was this really sociological need
to kind of understand what humans were capable of. And
I remember watching Big Brother in the UK when it
first launched here, and I don't know, it was fascinating.
It was like watching humans and Human Zoo and all
these manufactured situations to prefer stress and conflict and stuff,
but at the same time seeing people form relationships and
(24:19):
be pragmatic about working together to like to do the
challenges that they were given and things like that. It
was really really incredible television in a way that I
had never experienced before. But then very quickly again like
money comes in, there was this wave of producers. It's
always it's the story of the book. Yeah, who realized
how much cheaper reality TV was than making, say, a
(24:41):
dramatized show with a bunch of factors and makeup and wardrobe.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
And camera crew and stuff like.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Instead, you could just film real people who were not
paid union rates, and you quickly had into kind of
the Wild West era. I think there was one special
that I mentioned, the book called Who Wants to Marry
a Multimillionaire that took fifty women and made them compete
for the and in marriage of a supposedly wealthy man
who none of them had ever met. Whereas really like
women being sold off like catty but in a pageant,
(25:08):
you know, so that's like a swim i aportion. And
I think one of the most appealing formats that just
got repeated over and over and over again was this
idea of pitting women, especially in competition against each other,
like you see it in The Bachelor, you see it
in Flavor of Love, and I think you see it
to some extent now and shows like Selling Sunset, this
idea that women all have to compete for limited resources.
(25:30):
And again it emphasizes like individualism, and it de emphasizes
working together and sisterhood and the sense of like what
women are capable of when we're united.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
But yeah, is it good or bad? I don't know.
It's I don't want to come for anyone's favorites.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
It kind of makes sense that the Girl Boss era
came after a reality TV Can you talk about what
the girl Boss era got wrong and was it always
going to fail like from the beginning, or is it
another story of capitalism chains everything?
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yeah, I mean the girl Boss era.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
It's sort of hard to define, but it traces back,
I would say to the book by Sophia Marisso who
was the founder of a fashion brand called Nasty Girl,
and she wrote a memoir in twenty fourteen called Hashtag
girl Boss, which was all about how she had gone
from like a dumpster diving freagin to this founder of
this business and how it was like a one hundred
million dollar company. And it was very much this idea
(26:41):
of like rags to riches that I think was sort
of intoxicating in culture at the time.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
The idea that anyone could make.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
It as a founder, as a well you needed was
an idea in the right work ethic. And a lot
of this I think you're right was like completely enabled
buy reality television because it was all built on women
as kind of like mottos, almost like.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Women as icons.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
And the Gubbles era was all about women as being
very attached to the brands that they were selling and
being very visible and being in all the imagery and
like wearing the makeup and wearing the clothes and being
on the cover of Forbes.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
And also be like being chosen in so many ways,
being chosen at work, being chosen in love, being chosen,
like being the one who is above everyone.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Else and looking the right way.
Speaker 3 (27:29):
Of course, like absolutely all of these women were sort
of conventionally attractive in all the right ways, and often
they were white, and they were good marketing icons for
their brands. And it collided with this moment as well
in which Cheryl Sandberg, the Facebook executive, published lean In,
which was supposed to be a kind of manifesto for
(27:49):
female leadership and female empowerment in the workplace, which also
was just again all about individual power. And it was
this idea of like trickle down feminist that if enough
women could achieve power for themselves, they could then change
things for the women who had come after them. But
it wasn't about like organizing with other women to say,
(28:12):
for parentally or for policies that might actually create meaningful
change for women in American life. It was all about like,
get that money, get that position, get that power, and
then after that you can, you know, try and do
the best you can to make things better.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
For other women.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
So in some ways it was just it was very
much this individualist, like tope, bad kind of feminism that
was not actually about working to make the world better
for women real large.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
It's really such a patriarchal take on feminism, Like it's
really such an old school, male dominated like if you
can act like them, you can be like them, and
you can get money like them. And I remember I
was in college when Lenin came out, and I am
such it was such a product of the future is female.
(28:57):
Like I absolutely was like sixty when Parks and rec
was on and Hillary Clinton was running and Cheryl Sandberg
was coming out, and I was like, this is going
to change everything, you know. So it really kind of
like got me too, and it sells, you know what
I mean. And it does like separate ourselves from each other.
(29:18):
And I think when we're separated from each other a
sort of again, capitalism kind of wins. The systems that
are in place really win. I was so surprised by
sort of a piece of the ending of the book
when you brought up romance as sort of one of
(29:39):
the ways to fight against what feminism has turned into.
You quoted Alice Evans and she said one of the
biggest drivers of gender equality is romantic love, specifically loving
men who want women to thrive. I know this is
a bit off topic from lean in, but maybe it's
(30:03):
connected in a way of like that era of feminism
does not quite talk about love in the sort of
bell hooks Eric from type of way when it is
collective and with respect and with understanding and everything. So like,
do you think in general as a culture we kind
of love good men?
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Of course?
Speaker 3 (30:22):
I mean, my god, I've been thinking about this non
stop recently, because when you think about what do women want,
like this perennial question right when you look at the
men who are the kind of the internet's boyfriend and
anyone given moment, men like I don't know, years ago,
it was ben At, it come about now it's Pedro Pascal.
We've had a like poor Moscows and all these men
in the interim who we sort of attached to. And
(30:43):
the one common quality I would say that they all
have is they all seem like they like and respect
women totally, which is such a small thing. You see
this culture and line of like men wanting to get
jacked and ripped and like to look a certain way.
They're not doing it because it's what women want. They
don't care about what we want. They're doing it to
compete with each other. Right, What women want, I think
is to feel valued, to feel respected, to feel affirmed,
(31:03):
and to feel like the people who were in relationships
with cus is fully human. And it's this quality I
think that is making romantic fiction right now so popular,
and like you've seen this real rise in the number
of people reading romance novels. Like the thing about romantic fiction,
I would say, more than any other genre of culture,
is that it's always put women first. It's always put
women in the center, it's always focused on the female gaze.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
It's always thought about.
Speaker 3 (31:28):
What women want and what women deserve, and it's been
kind of unapologetic about that throughout its history.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
And so yeah, I.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Mean it makes total sense to me, within this moment,
when there's so much misogyny online and so much misogyny
in our politics, that women especially are being drawn to
this genre of entertainment that is just very firming in
so many ways. Alice Evans, I think it was a
substec she wrote, but it was completely fascinating to me.
Like the idea that you can tell how a society
(31:56):
thinks about women by the significance that it places on
mantic love. Was really fascinating to me because it proves
something that I think is like the thesis of the book,
which is like culture is never just about entertainment. It
teaches us what to believe. It teaches us like how
to think about ourselves and how to think about other people,
and how to sort of settle own ambitions and our
own ideas for life.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Speaking about sort of modern culture cultural icons right now,
I'm wondering if you think we're in a new era,
like we have so many feminist artists Chapel Roone, Sabrina Carpenter, Donci, Like,
there's so many like beautiful artists right now who are
strong in their boundaries and who don't really back down
(32:37):
in the way they express their sexuality. Specifically, I'm wondering
about Sabrina Carpenter. She's been such a debated figure right now.
What is your take on Sabrina and her the way
she's playing into sexuality.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
I mean, I've been talking about this book for the
most two months now, and I would say every time
I've done a book event or a panel or something
like someone has.
Speaker 4 (33:01):
Brought her up. Really she is.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
Yeah, she's so fascinating and I think she's perplexing to
a lot of people because she presents this version of
sexuality that in some ways feels very old fashioned, because
it's like fembot blonde, like a lot of pain, a lot, right,
but it seems to be so heavily ironized, and she
knows exactly what she's doing and she's not worried about
what people think of her.
Speaker 2 (33:22):
I think is the most interesting thing.
Speaker 3 (33:23):
Like she's doing exactly what she wants, and she's making
the music that she wants, and she's getting the attention
that she wants, and she's doing what she feels necessary
for her as a form of creative expression, and like
God bless her for it. But at the same time,
the understanding that none of us exist in a vacuum,
and that there's always the context of her making this
(33:44):
kind of imagery now and in a world where woman
ah like losing rights rapidly and being stereotyped as you know,
sexual objects again in a way that we haven't since
the two thousands. I mean, the contextualization of it was
really interesting to me. I find Chapelone so thrilling because
I think she doesn't think it all about the male
gaze of menon or how like men are just not
(34:05):
part of her esthetic expiration or creative journey. Like everything
that she's doing, she's sort of Madonna like in that way.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
It's all about her.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
It's all about her desires and her sense of fun
and playfulness, and her music is so great. So there's
so much to be really thrilled with, I think in
terms of the culture that's being made right now, and
to celebrate and to sort of see how far women
have come and to hope that that leads us somewhere
near in the future.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Once again, thank you to Sophie for taking the time
to talk to me. We are certainly adding this book
to the Boys Sober syllabus. I think all of this
is information that will help us along the path of
healing from the wounds of our cultural past. And on
that note, let's talk next week. Boy Sover is a
(35:04):
production of iHeart Podcasts I'm Your Host, Hope Ordered. Our
executive producers are Christina Everett and Julie Pinero. Our supervising
producer is Emily Meronoff. Engineering by Bahid Fraser and mixing
and mastering.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
By Aboo Zafar.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
If you liked this episode, please tell a friend and
don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to boy Sober
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, and wherever you get
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