 Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, by Sophie Gilbert.
This book starts with a quote from Andrea Dworkin: "Woman is not born; she is made." Gilbert traces the rise of misogyny in music, fashion, TV and movies from the 1990s through the 2010s. She didn't set out to write a book on porn, but it turned out to provide the perfect template. The ideal woman - maybe the only acceptable woman - was portrayed as young, thin, preferably white, subservient, and sexually available. "Empowerment" came to be defined as pleasing men. In music, the term "girl power" originated with riot grrrl groups; it's now mostly associated with the apolitical Spice Girls. Rom-coms were replaced by sex farces where the woman was merely an obstacle between a man and his rightful sexual conquest. And celebrity culture normalized bizarre phenomena like paparazzi lying on the ground in hopes of getting "upskirt" photos to shame female celebrities. There were "countdown clocks" to when the Olsen twins and other child stars would be "legal." In the workplace, the fight for better material conditions (equal pay, child care, stopping harassment) gave way to Sheryl Sandberg's doctrine of "Lean In," telling women to adjust themselves better to the male-dominated workplace. As Sarah Wynn-Williams noted in Careless People, Sandberg's women employees tell a very different story than Sandberg did. Gilbert maps out some important points on the timeline: the media hostility toward Hillary Clinton during her presidential campaigns (2008 and 2016), the organized harassment campaign against women in the video game industry (2014-2015), and the rise of #MeToo (2017). Girl on Girl came out before the latest releases of the Epstein files, which show a depressingly predictable overlap between Epstein associates and people who publicly argued that #MeToo had "gone too far." The final chapter notes some positive developments: recent TV and movie portrayals of women as whole human beings, and some actual consequences for predators like Harvey Weinstein because of #MeToo. Gilbert mentions a theory by social scientist Alice Evans, suggesting that the status of women in a society correlates with whether that society values romantic love (as opposed to seeing women solely in terms of sex and breeding). I'm not sure I buy it; it seems to me that women's status correlates with whether and how women are valued as individuals, not in connection with a man. It's clear we have a long way to go. Popsugar Reading Challenge: "Pop" or "sugar" in the title. 52 Book Club Challenge: Has a dust jacket.
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