How 2000s Culture Messed Us Up

Is it weird that I really love talking about all the ways the formative culture of my teens screwed me up? Maybe it’s just cathartic — talking with someone else who’s spent time in the postfeminist ideological trenches, trying to unpack all of the contradictory messaging about who we should be and how we should act. Sophie Gilbert has been deep in that muck for years writing her new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, and is here to help answer your excellent questions on how all of this took root in the ‘90s, the slutty cool baby girl ideal, the weird dude raunch movies, why we don’t know how pants are supposed to fit, the abomination of Bride Wars, and much, much more. Listen and let’s navigate all this accumulated sludge together.

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Show Notes:

• Buy Girl on Girl here!!!!

• You can read Sophie’s back catalog of writing at The Atlantic here — I really love this Madonna piece from 2023

• Follow Sophie on Instagram and Bluesky

• Listen to the official playlist of Girl on Girl on Spotify!

• Read an excerpt from Girl on Girl here

• This is a POSTER you can BUY ewwwwwww

• The Gail Porter FHM cover that was projected on to parliament

• An interview with Porter about the moment and its aftermath

• The Jenna Jameson interview in the Abercrombie & Fitch “Naughty or Nice” Christmas catalog:

• The Angela McRobbie work on postfeminism and “romantic individualism” I reference

• The trailer for the horrible movie Bride Wars

• The surveilling eye at work in Jennifer Lopez’s “If You Had My Love”

• My piece on Jennifer Lawrence and The History of Cool Girls from 2014

• The Katherine Heigl Vanity Fair interview where she calls Knocked Up “a little sexist” (and it then ruins her career)

We’re currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:

• Evangelical Summer Camp, past and present

• The intersection of technology and parenting (especially how mothers are surveilled)

• REGIONAL ACCENTS!!!! (We have a accent/dialect expert as co-host!)

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment. You can ask about anything, it’s literally the name of the segment!

• As always, you can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here

For this week’s discussion: What cultural sludge of the ‘90s and 2000s did this bring up for you?

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