Book Review: From incels to trad wives, culture critic probes 21st century backlash against feminism

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This article was published 28/04/2025 (332 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sophie Gilbert, a London-based staff writer for the Atlantic magazine, has taken a survey of the Anglo-American pop culture landscape, and her findings aren’t pretty. In a new book, “Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves” she concludes that after decades of social and political progress for women, the patriarchy has come roaring back in the 21st century with the new-old belief that women’s proper place is in the kitchen and bedroom, not the boardroom or the military.

As a millennial herself, Gilbert wanted to explore, from the perspective of a critic, how and why seemingly every genre of entertainment in the 2000s, from movies and music to TV and fashion, was sending girls the message that it was OK to look and act like a pinup girl again.

“Why were we so easily persuaded of our own inadequacy? Who was setting the agenda? Why, for decades and even now, has virtually every cultural product been so insistently oriented around male desire and male pleasure?” she writes.

The reasons are manifold, and the results indisputably clear. In music, the “ferocious activist energy of riot grrrls” gave way to the “ hyper-commercialized Spice Girls” over the course of the 1990s. Meanwhile, the emergence of hardcore rap celebrated misogyny and sexual violence against women. In literature and later in film, “Bridget Jones pioneered an enduring new female archetype: the trainwreck.” In fashion, powerful supermodels who knew what they were worth and demanded to be paid for it “were phased out in favor of frail, passive teenagers.”

But in Gilbert’s view, nothing was as influential as the proliferation of porn, which has trained both men and women to see the latter as objects, “as things to silence, restrain, fetishize, or brutalize.” She nods to it in the meaning of her double-barreled title. “Girl on girl” is both a genre of porn and an acknowledgement of the way women have been turned against themselves and each other by the forces of postfeminism.

Chapter by chapter, Gilbert methodically shows how the backlash against second- and third-wave and riot grrrl feminism fueled the rise of incel culture, trad wives, the stay-at-home girlfriends on TikTok, and much more. There is a lot to unpack here, but it is well worth the effort. Especially if you, like Gilbert, are still coming to grips with the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and the reelection of Donald Trump last year, demonstrating the evident appeal of his message to both men and a sizable minority of women.

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