Culture
Book Review: ‘Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves,’ by Sophie Gilbert
“The nature of how women were being treated in mass media wasn’t an aberration,” Gilbert goes on. “The women we were being conditioned to hate were too visible.”
Her examples are abundant, and span genres. In music, there was the replacement of the defiant and gutsy female icons of the ’80s and early ’90s — Madonna, Janet Jackson, Kathleen Hanna — with Y2K pop’s much younger and less opinionated girls: Spears, Jessica Simpson, Christina Aguilera. In fashion, the sidelining of powerful supermodels who demanded to be paid their worth (Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista) in favor of frail, passive, American Apparel-esque teenagers.
The phasing out of the golden age of rom-coms made way for a surge of teen-sex and adult bromance comedies — “American Pie,” “Scary Movie,” “The Hangover” — that either fetishized younger female characters or cast adult women as “shrill, sexless nags or trampy, adulterous harpies.”
“Movies in the aughts hated women,” Gilbert writes, and she has a stack of receipts to prove it.
Then came the explosion of makeover shows that disguised cruelty as tough love, and reality dating shows that continue to pit a parade of interchangeable women against one another for the affections of the same male stranger. Women’s personal desires, the author says, have become indistinguishable from the desire to satisfy men’s “perennial fantasy of an emotionally uncomplicated, sexually available woman.”
In the 2000s, the emergence of streaming and social media swiftly cleaved the self to accommodate a digital counterpart, making “reality” content ubiquitous and blurring it with actual reality. The transition gave women especially the ability “to assess in real time how the world wanted to view us — and adjust ourselves instantly in response.”
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of classic lines. This week’s installment highlights observations from future or alternate worlds depicted in popular science fiction. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’re intrigued and inspired to read more.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of books that made huge impacts on society after they were published — some of them even spurring changes to American laws. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
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