What We Did To Britney

And every other girl who grew up in the 90s and early aughts

I’m writing this from my childhood home in Massachusetts, where I grew up as a child of the 80s and 90s. Where I furiously scribbled into my journal about how I hated everything and no one understood me. Where I (ACTUALLY) did the “I must I must I must increase my bust” exercise(???) from Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret. Where I learned to view my body in comparison to Kate Moss and the models gracing the cover of Seventeen Magazine. Where I innocently watched Baywatch with my sister thinking it was a show about - lifeguards? Where I diligently swirled Noxzema in neat circles into the zits on my chin praying it would cure not just the zits but everything else that was wrong with me. Where I knew deep in my bones that I was not ____ enough.

YOUR FACE BELONGS TO A SKINCARE CONGLOMERATE.

Many adult women describe their girlhoods as hormonal roller coasters they’re immensely grateful to no longer be riding, but it was only after reading Sophie Gilbert’s brilliant new book Girl On Girl: How Pop Culture Turned A Generation Of Women Against Themselves¹ that I began to rethink how the pop culture of my youth specifically informed my particular flavor of adolescent agita and self-loathing. And frankly, I’m amazed any of us made it out of the early aughts in one piece! If you vaguely feel like growing up as a millennial girl was sorta rough, this book will underscore how truly hellish it actually was.

Recent media has certainly considered how the pop culture of the 90s and early aughts wreaked havoc on girls and young women. See here, here, and here. But Sophie’s book is the first piece of media I’ve encountered that contextualizes the connections between the sexualization of Britney Spears, Girls Gone Wild, the phenomenon of the cool girl guys’ girl who’s totally chill with sexist jokes, and ultimately, today’s tradwives. It’s a stunning compendium of the cultural forces that have formed so many millennial women, for better or worse. You weren’t crazy. But the cruel and relentless exploitation of women’s desires and bodies during your most vulnerable years absolutely was.

The first thing I felt after finishing your book was shock that I’m as ok as I am ha. I was born in 1981, and I’m rather stunned I made it through the nineties and early aughts more or less unscathed. As a girl, I DEFINITELY thought I had to embody chill-ness in order to be valuable to men (and yeah, I definitely thought if I wasn’t valuable to men, I was unimportant and boring), but it could’ve been SO MUCH WORSE. I’d love to know how researching this book–which is rife with details about the rampant misogyny coursing through so many millennial women’s formative years–made you think/rethink about your own history.

Right? I was born in 1983 and no one really tells you the freedom that being in your forties will bring in terms of clarity: You care so much less about what other people think than you ever have, and you trust your own opinions and instincts so much more. Part of what made me want to write this book was the desire to confront parts of my own history that, the older I got, made me more and more uneasy. And becoming a parent really amplified things, because I felt so protective of my own children and wanted so fiercely to be able to insulate them from some of the things I went through.

I’m sure you felt this, too, but being a teenager in the moment when Britney Spears emerged, and when porn was really dominant on the internet and starting to filter into mainstream culture, felt like having a specific target on your back. There was such a cultural fascination in the late ‘90s and early 2000s with teenagers—the countdown clocks for when the Olsen twins would turn 18, the fetishization of underage stars in movies and Esquire photoshoots and music videos. It did all feel like it was giving license to men to creep on girls in a way that had previously been at least slightly frowned upon. In the introduction, I think I write about wanting to understand how we were all so easily compelled to go along with this objectification, and what I was shocked by during my research was not just seeing how awful the treatment of girls and young women was during this era, but also how bombarded we were with the same messaging across every form of entertainment. Knowing this has helped me make peace with certain things, because not only did you and I get through it, for one thing, but we also came out all the more determined to scrutinize and challenge sexism in all its forms.

Speaking of “chill” and the “guy’s girl,” and the “not like the other girls” girl and of course, the “cool girl,” what sort of politics do all of these archetypes represent? I’m struck by how I never gave a second thought to why these ideals existed (or who they served) as a girl, and I think that’s the central harm in many of these waves of misogyny–the people most vulnerable to them can’t see the roots informing them. I guess this is also a question about hindsight when it comes to culture!

I think there’s an amount of self-protection involved in deciding that you’re going to let people have what they want, even if that means diminishing yourself and your own needs and your own individuality. And I understand it. Gone Girl, which to me inculcates the concept of the “Cool Girl” in that immortal monologue from Amy Dunne, was published in 2012, after a decade of media that had been fully characterized by the vicious judgment and even outright hatred of women. Women were being torn into strips on gossip blogs and lampooned in popular comedies and condemned on the news, all for not fitting into an impossibly narrow, approved standard of modern womanhood. We’re raised to want to fit in, to be patted on the head by people in power, and to be popular, and so the idea that you can protect yourself from critique by being the “right” kind of girl—the kind tailor-made to appeal to men—makes sense. It’s only with retrospect that you can see all the limitations it imposes.

You write about the irreverent, fierce female musical artists of the mid nineties and how they all but disappeared towards the end of the decade, and were replaced by girls like Britney Spears (sorry I can’t seem to stop talking about girls lol). Can you talk about this fascinating shift from women (often angry and full of opinions) to (in some cases) actual children who sort of seemed custom made for a particular male gaze (and a male insecurity)? So much of the book is about backlash, but this transition in particular is really striking.

It is! Chapter one is all about how four different battles in music during the 1990s reflected the same battles that were happening in feminism. And the shift that really astonished me was how “Girl Power” went from a radical slogan in punk music and the Riot Grrrl scene that was advocating for specific freedoms for women to a kind of wishy-washy nothingburger of a branding tool associated with the Spice Girls. That’s not to indict the Spice Girls, whom I loved dearly as a teenager and still do. It’s rather to observe that once the music industry saw how astonishingly good they were at selling things (by 1997, the Spice Girls had made half a billion dollars in marketing deals alone), all producers wanted was to replicate that success. And that meant banishing women who’d made confrontational, loud, angry music about urgent issues, whom no brands wanted to endorse, and ushering in this new wave of sexy, pliant teenagers, often former child stars who’d grown up in the system and were happy to play by its rules, and star in its Pepsi ads. This shift was all about money, but the cultural impact it had was obviously much more wide-reaching.

You write about the first years of Instagram: “For women, Instagram was the apotheosis of postfeminist promise, a platform that rewarded femininity, self-surveillance, and consumerism with constant dopamine hits and, sometimes, fame and fortune.” What do you think of Instagram in its current iteration? There’s so much more awareness and scrutiny of tech-surveillance, but I think it’s generally still a platform devoted to a performance of womanhood that serves . . . men.

I try to call out my own hypocrisy as much as I can, and one of my failings is how much I love Instagram. I love the way it connects me with people—I love, Sara, seeing your brilliant excavations of Evie magazine and Severance and whatever Ballerina Farm is doing—and I love the way it lets me feel culturally informed even though I refuse to sign up for TikTok. But, if I’m honest, I’m as swayed by the dopamine hits of posting and new followers and pretty pictures as much as anyone. This is immensely popular technology for a reason. One of the lightbulb moments for me researching the book was seeing how directly Instagram was influenced by reality television, and how reality television in turn was influenced by the first wave of lifecasters—women who decided to live publicly in the early days of the internet as part of a social experiment. Their intentions were pure, but very quickly, it became obvious to them what people watching wanted to see. We’ve all become so accustomed since then to presenting ourselves in ways that will achieve maximum approval, and often that means not being authentic, or not being truthful about our real lives and selves.

All the stories about Meta and its total refusal to impose necessary safeguards or restrictions have made me really uneasy about staying on the platform. I wish there were other options. (I deleted my X account a few months ago.) But writing is quite a lonely endeavor and I do really appreciate the sense of community you get by being connected with other writers on Instagram.

I lost my shit when I read that “the same ingredients were almost without exception being praised and sold” by both Gwyneth Paltrow and Alex Jones.” But also! Of course! The pastel Qanon corner of the internet converts warrior mamas while the manosphere converts angry, lonely young men. But the end game is the same, right?

The idea of “horseshoe theory” is that the far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite ends of a political and cultural spectrum, are actually much closer together in terms of their disaffection from the mainstream. But yes, it is totally bonkers that Goop and InfoWars did, for a long time, sell the same kinds of supplements and make the same kinds of questionable health claims about their miraculous abilities. The end game is making money off of people whose lives are not giving them what they need, and to whom the prospect of an easy, quick fix or a clear scapegoat is extremely enticing.

You explain that the girlbosses of the mid-aughts succeeded as supposedly feminist icons because they conveyed a feminine type of power, and you note that there are still so “few cultural representations of women seeking and wielding power.” Do you think the trad movement will be so compelling once it’s clear that folks like Hannah Neeleman are “women seeking and wielding power?” Albeit in a distinctly feminine manner. I’m often asked to define “tradwife,” and at this point, I really don’t think a tradwife IS a tradwife unless she’s sharing her life/world view online. And yet, tradwives are still (for now) able to maintain that they’re all “just mamas living their lives.”

I love your writing on this so much because you underscore so emphatically how being a tradwife is a job—these women are content creators and influencers whose days are spent staging and setting up videos, filming videos, editing videos, making branding deals, and maximizing their reach. There’s a propagandizing aspect to it that always makes me think of Phyllis Schlafly and Serena Joy in The Handmaid’s Tale, going out to work to tell other women how important it is that they stay home. I do think that one kind of power that women have learned to wield extraordinarily well over the last three decades is influence. And having power over your own domestic sphere is a kind of power. But it’s not the same kind that men have historically exercised and valued, and the lack of cultural and imaginative portrayals of women exploring that kind of power for themselves is, I think, one of the biggest obstacles holding us back.

You write: “I’ve always wondered why people diminish girlhood as somehow cosseted or twee, when the reality of coming-of-age as a young woman is so raw, filled with emotional violence and literal blood. Do girls not suffer enough to be taken seriously?” If someone offered me a million dollars to relieve my girlhood (without my current wisdom), I would absolutely say fuck no. Every generation’s misogynistic underpinnings harm girls, but after writing the book, what do you think was unique about the 90s and early aughts in terms of girlhood?

The siren song of girl culture

Not for a million dollars. I remember, as a teenager, feeling so unformed—having no sense of who I was, or what I was capable of, or how I should be treated. Unless someone is very clearly affirming these things to you over and over again, how can you know? Meanwhile, what is being spelled out ad infinitum is your worth and value as a sexual object, your “power” as someone who can gratify the desires of others. Is it any wonder that these are the kinds of messages we did absorb? I know that teenagers today have it so much harder in so many ways–there are so many more platforms on which they’re vulnerable to attack. But what is different now I think is that it’s just not socially acceptable for an adult man to sexualize an underage girl in the way that was commonplace during the 1990s and 2000s. So if we’re clinging to signs of progress, there’s one. We have a much more informed sense of how vulnerable teenagers are.

You write about a 2006 sociology study that found men “who listened to violent or sexually aggressive lyrics (such as Eminem’s Superman” and Offspring’s “Self-Esteem”) were more predisposed to think negatively about women and to have thoughts of vengeance directed at them. Men in the study who listened to misogynist songs, when asked to make sandwiches for women and men, put more hot chili sauce in the sandwiches intended for women, suggesting a subconscious desire to punish them.” THIS IS SO UPSETTING. On the one hand, there’s so much pearl clutching when it comes to dissecting youth culture, on the other hand . . . THIS. What are your thoughts?

I’m so glad you pulled this bit out because it was one of the factoids in the book that really got stuck in my brain—how easily even ironicized and absurd performers can stoke feelings of rage toward women. I wanted to be clear in the book that there have always been moral panics stirred up against different artists, especially in music, and that we should always be suspicious of the impulses driving them. But, at the same time, we do absorb things from the culture we engage with, whether we mean to or not. And if a particular band or track walks like a misogynist and quacks like a misogynist, chances are it’s disseminating misogyny, whether it intends to or not.

Demi Moore is a cultural lightning rod when it comes to beauty and body norms. I recently listened to an episode of You Must Remember This about the erotic thrillers of the 1990s, and in an interview promoting Indecent Proposal (1993), Moore reflects on being asked to maintain a curvy sort of figure, when she preferred herself more willowy. I don’t think you’d ever see this sort of frankness in modern celebrity coverage. Now, it’s all “I run around with my toddler!” or “I don’t own a scale” or “I swear by [whatever health fad food].” Moore also broke people’s understanding of “good pregnancy” when she posed nude for Vanity Fair in 1991, and now of course, she’s winning awards for her portrayal of a woman obsessed with maintaining her appearance and engaging in intense beauty labor. When Moore herself is clearly a real person whose entire career has been forged on how “well” she performs beauty. It feels sort of ghoulish to even discuss, but I think Moore (and the politics of her body) says a lot about the eras you cover in your book. I’d love your thoughts.

(This makes me think of the scene in Notting Hill where Julia Roberts’ character says she’s an actress, so she’s essentially been hungry for a decade—such honesty!) Demi Moore was one of the women who came up in my research for the book over and over again. Her life and career just seemed to intersect so well with different trends and developments for women—the moment when she left Hollywood to raise her family in Idaho was a moment when the number of women in the American workforce was declining for the first time. She was nicknamed “Gimme Moore” for supposedly demanding paychecks that, while high, of course weren’t as high as those being paid to male movie stars at the time. And her butt was the subject of one of the first viral tweets, when her then-husband, Ashton Kutcher, posted an unflattering picture of her in a white bikini for a joke, in a moment when women’s bodies really seemed to be interpreted as being in the public domain.

I don’t really have a theory of why her personal biography aligns so neatly with the history of women in America. But I’ve loved seeing her success after The Substance, and the emergence of more roles for female stars after the age of 40. I also loved that, after she lost the Oscar, she looked pissed off, and didn’t seem willing or able to pretend that she was feeling gracious about losing. May we all be able to express our disappointments—and even our anger—more freely in the future.

1. In Pursuit readers can get 10% Girl on Girl by using the code “COUNTERTOP” at my beloved local bookstore, RiverRun, which ships online orders all over the country!