Girl on Girl summary

In April 1999, Britney Spears clutched a Teletubby doll on the Rolling Stone cover while wearing a black push-up bra and pink panties. A month later, marketers projected a sixty-foot naked image of children’s TV presenter Gail Porter onto London’s Houses of Parliament. September brought American Beauty, that critically acclaimed film about a middle-aged man’s sexual fantasies about his teenage daughter’s best friend.

Back then, everyone called these moments ironic. Transgressive. Just pranks. The winking postmodern sensibility masked what these cultural moments actually broadcast: women’s power was sexual. Youth, attention, and willingness to laugh along – even when you were the punchline. That sensibility would shape the next twenty years.

This sensibility had a name: postfeminism. The media-driven ideology emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a reaction to women’s activism, bolstered by a smear campaign against the women’s movement. Writing for The New York Times Magazine in 1982, Susan Bolotin observed that young women were already disavowing any personal connection with feminism. The campaign had worked: feminists were seen as unhappy and shrill, even as young women embraced the freedoms those feminists had won for them.

Postfeminism’s trick was co-opting liberation’s language. It stole words like “choice” and “empowerment” to sell a highly sexualized, narrow vision of femininity. Casual sex and rampant consumerism replaced collective action. Individual self-fulfillment replaced social change. The Spice Girls perfectly embodied this shift, taking riot grrrl’s ferocious Girl Power slogan and turning it into a hypercommercialized catchphrase.

A generation of young women absorbed the lesson: sex was currency, objectification meant empowerment, and you were always the joke. The result? Deep inadequacy that only the next purchase could temporarily soothe. The delivery system for these messages came through pornography’s aesthetic and logic. Porn became our era’s defining cultural product, seeping through music videos, art, fashion, politics – everything in mass media.

The effects were measurable. A 2013 social psychologist tracked the correlation: women prone to self-objectification showed less inclination toward activism and social justice pursuits. When self-objectification becomes normal, collective action becomes impossible.

Adrienne Rich understood this decades ago, arguing that revisiting our past is an act of survival. We have to grasp the assumptions saturating our thinking before we can know who we are. Looking back from today’s perspective reveals the deliberate script behind the postfeminist takeover. You can trace it precisely through 1990s music culture, where the aesthetic first took hold and spread outward.

The script played out through those specific cultural artifacts from the turn of the millennium, each teaching the same lesson through different channels. The Teletubby-clutching pop star, the naked projection on government buildings, the Oscar-winning film about inappropriate desire – they all normalized a specific vision of female sexuality tied to youth and availability.

The genius lay in making resistance seem uncool. Objecting meant you couldn’t take a joke, couldn’t handle irony, or weren’t fun. Participate in your own objectification or be labeled uptight. Either way, the system won.

Twenty-five years later, we can name what happened. The personal became political in reverse – collective action dissolved into consumer choices. Empowerment meant buying products, projecting the right image, laughing at the right jokes. The revolution was repackaged and sold back to us, and you can trace exactly how this co-option worked by looking at 1990s music culture.