Tracing the roots of today’s anti-feminist backlash
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In March, a plane carrying British-born influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate landed in Florida. Travel restrictions on the duo, accused of human trafficking and rape in Romania (and, separately, in the U.K.), were lifted after alleged pressure from U.S. officials. The brothers, who promote misogynist content online, have been outspoken supporters of President Trump. The administration denied any involvement, but the message sent to those watching in the U.S. was clear: The boys — in their frattiest, porniest, most abusive iteration — were back in town.
But did they ever really leave? That question is at the heart of two new books that explore women’s role in culture and the backlash it so often inspires. Sophie Gilbert’s “Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves” scrutinizes the music, film and television of the early 2000s to show how sex, sold as liberating to young women of the time, was more often used as a cudgel against them. Tiffany Watt Smith, as a historian, takes the longer view in “Bad Friend: How Women Revolutionized Modern Friendship,” an examination of female friendship and the centuries-long efforts to control and patrol it.
Gilbert, a staff writer at the Atlantic, meticulously documents the explosion of highly sexualized content in mainstream American culture. As it became more easily accessible on the internet, pornography permeated every aspect of cultural life: “Porn’s dominance in popular culture came much like Ernest Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy: first gradually, then suddenly.”
Fashion led the charge: Gilbert shows how an industry dominated by male photographers and founded on the exploitation of (primarily powerless and young) female bodies was an experimental hothouse for the integration of porn into mass culture. Much of this teetered on the boundary between porn and art, as photographers used sex, sometimes unsimulated, as a way to signal their transgressive credentials.
Gilbert supports the rights of people to consume and to create porn. But she takes issue with the contradictory message that porn in its current iteration sends to girls: “They could be liberated while on their knees.” Sex might have been liberating if it was something millennial girls could have opted out of or something that reflected their desires rather than those of men. Instead, porn was largely dominated by male fantasies, and withholding sex was less a choice one could make than a sign of prudish backwardness or, even worse, a denial of men’s God-given rights.
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My favorite chapter of the book by far is about movies of the early 2000s. Rewatching “American Pie” or “Eurotrip” now, you cannot ignore the absurd pornographic tropes, from naked women being watched without their knowledge to sibling incest. As Gilbert points out, in these movies, women are complicit — the theory is that they secretly want to be spied on, desired, subjugated. For men, their flimsy resistance is just a ruse to make men’s lives more difficult: “Sex is the goal, virginity the antagonist, and girls the gatekeepers … standing in the way of the heroes’ glorious and rightful destiny.”
This book jolted me back to my own millennial girlhood, as I grew up more or less during the time Gilbert describes. I distinctly remember sitting in my senior-year English class while two boys behind me discussed whether or not women could be funny. Both concluded that no, women could not be funny — where were any examples to the contrary? I remember grasping for names of female comedians and coming up dry. The tsunami of female talent to come — the likes of Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, Ali Wong, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson of “Broad City” — would not hit our screens for several years. I simply had no reference points.
This encapsulates the strength of Gilbert’s book as an analysis of millennial culture, but also its limits. Gilbert largely glosses over the fact that the 2010s unleashed a veritable onslaught of female talent on the cultural world. This centering of female perspectives is exactly what the stereotypical resident of the so-called “manosphere” is reacting to today. Gilbert argues that mainstream culture from the 2000s to today has been extremely effective at promoting post-feminism, a vision of liberation that says women can enjoy their equal rights as long as they don’t talk too much about them and are willing to take their tops off. I would argue that we are well beyond that, as today’s manosphere believes in reasserting inequality between the sexes rather than tolerating an equality that they believe harms men. That said, even if some of Gilbert’s analysis feels 10 years out of date, it is nonetheless a reminder of where we come from as a culture, and a reinvigorating exhortation not to return there.
After reading “Girl on Girl,” I felt almost sticky with proxy humiliation, as Gilbert evokes example after example of female abasement in pop culture. Watt Smith’s “Bad Friend” proved a much-needed curative. Watt Smith deftly takes us across time and space to show how female bonding has often weathered cultural backlash to emerge intact, albeit sometimes changed, on the other side.
We learn that school- and college-age girls in the late 19th century developed such strong emotional attachments to classmates that some institutions panicked in response, banning hand-holding and communal hair washing. English writer and women’s rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft was so obsessed with her best friend that after her friend died, Wollstonecraft wore a mourning ring made of her friend’s hair until her own deathbed. We are taken to 1950s suburban America, where Watt Smith upends our negative stereotypes about PTA moms, showing that they were in fact the engine behind radical childcare reform. We meet an all-female Christian sect from the 12th century, which gave older women the rare freedom of living unaccompanied by men, before fast-forwarding to house-sharing models for single older women today.
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All these iterations of female friendship received their fair share of hatred and handwringing in the popular culture of their time. These friendships were broken up by violence, censored in films or simply abandoned by women themselves in the face of the dominant patriarchal norms. Women have sometimes been their own worst enemies, holding themselves — and their friends — to unattainable standards. But Watt Smith’s book shows that while female friendships may ebb and flow, fortunately for us, they persist: We need them to share information, to become the people we are, to share childcare duties, to watch over us as we age. Through all the backlash, these friendships nevertheless persist. It seems the girls never left town either.
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