Women deserve better histories

In 2008, threatened by the emerging Kardashian empire, Paris Hilton compared Kim Kardashian’s arse to cottage cheese in a trash bag. Some time before this, the two reality stars had given Hilton’s chihuahua a pregnancy test on Hilton’s own show. Sophie Gilbert’s new book, Girl on Girl: how pop culture turned a generation of women against themselves, is full of anecdotes from the last 30 years of celebrity rivalries and public scandals. For her, these hold the key to recognising what afflicts modern woman — and, more importantly, why she seems to be losing the culture war. 

The book begins in a tone of personal and collective despair. In 2022 Roe v. Wade was overturned, and in 2024, “a competent, accomplished, empathetic woman” lost the presidency to an orange convicted felon for a second time. She, like every blindsided liberal in 2016, asks why this came to pass. Gilbert finds her answer in the misogyny of the popular culture of the late 90s and early aughts. She blames our present predicament on a few things: the self-exposure encouraged by the age of reality TV and social media, an inevitable bitter backlash to the progress made by third wave feminism and later the #MeToo movement, and — as the title suggests — porn. 

Much of her analysis of popular culture is fascinating. She points out the difference between the first Real Housewives of Orange County and their equivalents 18 seasons later — the former in hindsight distinctly ordinary looking. In the early days, Reality TV was marketed as social experiments, making ordinary people celebrities through consensual surveillance of their everyday lives. Now, as the novelty of the technology has worn off, only the everyday lives of celebrities are of interest: Celebrity Big Brother has long outlived the original. She diagnoses and criticises the excesses of the dawn of the digital age: “girl boss” female celebrities exploiting para-social relationships with their fans to sell them questionable products, the “identity consumerism” encouraged by the plastic surgery industry, and rampant invasion of children’s privacy through celebrity culture.

But her genuine insights come to seem a bit hollow, as she continuously contradicts herself in order to prove, or at least pay lip service to, her “intersectional” credentials. After pages of condemning exploitation of young white female stars, she writes that “Being White, Kardashian could capitalize on culture’s condescending gaze without being exploited by it.” She also points to the world of Reality TV, elsewhere vapid and deeply problematic, as definitive, and presumably celebration-worthy, when proving that “gender can be performed.” When women get plastic surgery, they’re being pitifully manipulated by popular culture; but in the case of trans women “the labor they’ve put in, and the totality of the makeovers they’ve endured in order to become fully themselves” is admirable and empowering. She similarly praises Reality TV shows like I am Jazz which follows the life of trans kid Jazz Jennings as “thoughtful, sensitive portraits of transition.” Clearly the concern for children’s privacy only goes so far.  

Elsewhere too her appeals to intersectionality feel shoehorned in. Early on, she warns that the “heteronormativity, gender essentialism, and a rigid binary” that marked the historical moment she was investigating “limited [her] ability to write outside those frameworks.” Towards the end of the book, she finds it fascinating how “women and nonbinary people” grapple with their cultural limitations, despite this marking the first mention of the latter. It feels like a cop-out to blame her “heteronormativity” on her subject matter — surely she was the one who chose to write a book about “women” in what might be called “gendered language” and to focus on female representations as entirely interchangeable. 

She treats as a truism that any “female” development in popular culture would relate directly to a “female” political moment. She quips that she should have seen Clinton’s defeat coming when the 2016 all-female Ghostbusters flopped: “If America wasn’t ready to even temporarily cede a fictional world of hearse-driving, ecto-plasm dodging paranormal investigations to women, it could hardly have been expected to give one of us the nuclear codes.” I for one can think of countless more plausible explanations for Clinton’s loss than the limp reception of a bad film. She proves these connections through at best questionable studies, like one that showed men who had listened to misogynistic songs added more hot chili sauce to women’s sandwiches, “suggesting a subconscious desire to punish them.” A spicy thought. Colour me shocked they didn’t command the women to make their own. 

Exploration of the appeal of Reality TV is also halted by the insistence that its influence is down to evil advertisers and internalised misogyny rather than the returning eyeballs of an, as she notes, largely female audience. The last thing she could concede was that women had any agency in the shaping of the culture that draws them in — still less consider that we might enjoy bling, fame, and catty celebrity squabbles. It is ironic then, that she finds Sheila Heti’s preference for male friends and honest reflections on her relationship to womankind “problematic” for her work, “because it makes anything she writes in a woman’s voice odd or manufactured.” Perhaps her education in queer theory blinds her to the fact that ambivalence towards the feminine is an entirely normal part of womanhood. 

This impressive study in remaining entirely politically correct leaves us none the wiser about woman’s fate in the culture wars

Gilbert does not wear her learning lightly. All of her quoted authorities are scholars of media, gender or other “studies” subjects who seem to have taken over any claims to expertise on the modern history of women. The feminist scholar Victoria Browne wrote in a paper on Mary Wollstonecraft that “contemporary western feminist theory often has a lamentably superficial engagement with its own historical canon.” Here, what should have been a glaring indictment of the discipline was waved off as a cutesy quip. Similarly to Gilbert, the failures of the Tumblr inspired academia that plagued the worst excesses of “woke” in the late 2010s are simply tragic: “The quality of thought, the layers of analysis being added to every trending topic virtually in real time were richer and more erudite than they had ever been, and yet what did it all actually mean?” 

What, indeed, does it all actually mean? Gilbert stresses that she is not anti-porn, or “interested in kink shaming.” She can’t even completely condemn child publicity or plastic surgery. We won’t be able to shed light on the condition of contemporary womanhood until we free women’s cultural history from nice-sounding and convenient, but ultimately lazy musings. Despite her astute, and often funny, observations, this impressive study in remaining entirely politically correct leaves us none the wiser about woman’s fate in the culture wars. The window into the world of modern celebrity remains the most enjoyable part of the book: I for one might just begin Keeping up with the Kardashians.