East City Bookshop welcomes Sophie Gilbert to discuss her book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, in conversation with Tayla Burney.

Note on Format: This hybrid event will have both an in-person component with limited seating as well as a virtual broadcast via Zoom Webinar. Both in-person and virtual attendees will be able to pose questions to the author during audience Q&A.

ABOUT GIRL ON GIRL

From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of early aughts pop culture

What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent after a period of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.

Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and “riot grrrl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Gilbert mines the darker side of nostalgia, training her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. And what she recounts is harrowing, from the leering aesthetic of American Apparel ads and explicit music videos to a burgeoning internet culture vicious toward women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period’s dominant themes back to the explosion of internet porn, tracing its widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.

Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence of excess, materialism, and power worship collided with the culture’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and how it continues to shape our world today.

Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes about television, books, and popular culture. She won the 2024 National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism and was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. She lives in London.

Tayla Burney is a long-time public radio producer who specialized for years on author interviews and book events. Now on the Programming team at NPR, she helped launch the Book of the Day podcast and is a regular contributor to Books We Love. Tayla's 8 minute reader newsletter is available at taylaburney.substack.com. She hopes you spend all of your book dollars at local indies and have at least two library cards to your name.