Books on women in pop culture, female friendship examines anti-feminism

In March, an airplane carrying influencers of British origin Andrew and Tristan Tate landed in Florida. Restrictions on the duo, accused of treats human beings and rape in Romania (and separately, in the United Kingdom), were raised after Presumed pressure from US officials. The brothers, who promote misogynist content online, were French supporters of President Trump. The administration denied any involvement, but the message sent to those who watched to the United States was clear: the boys – in their most fratt, the most porn and the most abusive – were back in town.

But have they already left? This question is at the heart of two new books that explore the role of women in the culture and the backlash that inspires it so often. Sophie Gilbert's “Girl on girl: how pop culture has transformed a generation of women against themselves“Evaluates music, cinema and television from the beginning of the 2000s to show how sex, sold as a liberator to young women of the time, was more often used as a waste against them. Tiffany Watt Smith, as a historian, takes the vision of “Bad friend: How women have revolutionized modern friendship“, An examination of female friendship and efforts of several centuries to control and patrol it.

Gilbert, editor of the Atlantic, meticulously documents the explosion of highly sexualized content in the general public culture. As it has become more easily accessible on the Internet, pornography has permeated all aspects of cultural life: “The domination of porn in popular culture has proven a bit like the description of Ernest Hemingway of bankruptcy: first gradually, then suddenly.”

Fashion has led the charge: Gilbert shows how an industry dominated by male photographers and based on the exploitation of female bodies (mainly helpless and young) was an experimental greenhouse for the integration of porn into mass culture. Much of this changed on the border between porn and art, as photographers used sex, sometimes not simulated, as a means of reporting their transgressive references.

“Girl on Girl” by Sophie Gilbert meticulously document the explosion of highly sexualized content in traditional American culture in the early 2000s.

(Urszula Soltys)

Gilbert supports people's rights to consume and create porn. But she disputes the contradictory message that porn in her current iteration sends to the girls: “They could be released on his knees.” Sex could have been liberating if it was something that millennial girls could have retired or something that reflected their desires rather than those of men. Instead, porn was largely dominated by male fantasies, and the retention of sexual relations was less a choice than one could make a sign of prude delay or, even worse, a denial of the rights given by God of men.

My favorite book chapter concerns the films of the early 2000s by far. Revarding the “American pie” or “Eurotrip” now, you cannot ignore the absurd pornographic tropes, of naked women monitored without their knowledge of the incest of brother. As Gilbert underlines, in these films, women are accomplices – the theory is that they to want to spy, desired, submitted. For men, their fragile resistance is only a cunning to make the lives of men more difficult: “Sex is the goal, virginity the antagonist, and the girls the guards … which hinders the heroes of glorious and legitimate destiny.”

This book sent me back to my own daughter of the millennium, when I grew up more or less during the moment that Gilbert describes. I distinctly remember to sit in my senior English class while two boys behind me discussed the question of whether women could be funny. The two concluded that no, women could not be funny – where were contrary examples? I remember grasping the names of female actors and drying up. The tsunami of the female talents to come – people like Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, Ali Wong, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson of “Broad City” – would not hit our screens for several years to come. I simply had no reference points.

This sums up the strength of Gilbert's book as an analysis of the millennium culture, but also its limits. Gilbert largely goes into the fact that the 2010s sparked a real attack on female talents on the cultural world. This centering of female perspectives is exactly what the stereotypical resident of the so-called “Manosphere” reacts today. Gilbert maintains that the dominant culture of the 2000s to today has been extremely effective in promoting post-feminism, a vision of liberation which says that women can take advantage of their equal rights as long as they do not speak too much of them and are ready to remove their top. I would say that we are far beyond that, because today's manosphere believes in the reaffirmation of gender inequalities rather than tolerating an equality that believes to harm men. That said, even if part of Gilbert's analysis feels 10 years old, it is nevertheless a reminder from where we come to an invigorating culture and exhortation not to return.

Tiffany Watt Smith's “bad friend” is an examination of female friendship and efforts of several centuries to control and patrol it.

(Sarah noons)

After reading “Girl on Girl”, I felt almost sticky with humiliation by proxy, because Gilbert evokes the example after the example of female abasement in pop culture. Watt Smith's “bad friend” turned out to be a good need. Watt Smith skillfully takes us through time and space to show how the female link has often resisted the cultural reaction to emerge intact, although sometimes changed, on the other side.

We learn that girls of school and university age at the end of the 19th century developed as strong emotional attachments to classmates that certain institutions have panicked in response, prohibiting handling and community washing of hair. The English writer and militant of women's rights Mary Wollstonecraft was so obsessed with his best friend that after the death of his friend, Wollstonecraft wore a mourning ring made of her friend's hair to her own deathbed. We are taken to suburban America in the 1950s, where Watt Smith upset our negative stereotypes on the mothers of the PTA, showing that they were in fact the engine behind a radical reform of child care. We meet a fully female Christian sect of the 12th century, which gave older women the rare freedom of life not accompanied by men, before quickly anticipating the models of sharing houses for older women singles today.

All these iterations of female friendship have received their just part of hatred and sagging hands in popular culture of their time. These friendships were broken by violence, censored in films or simply abandoned by women themselves in the face of dominant patriarchal standards. Women have sometimes been their worst enemies, standing – and their friends – to inaccessible standards. But Watt Smith's book shows that if female friendships can refuse and sink, fortunately for us, they persist: we need it to share information, to become the people we are, to share the childcare tasks, to monitor us as they get older. Through all reactions, these friendships nevertheless persist. It seems that girls have never left the city either.