Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves

 
　　女性主義如今遭遇了什麼難題？為何在文化與法律的層面，都出現開倒車的現象，過去幾十年間在女權上的進展，卻在二十一世紀陷入空前危機，這一切究竟是怎麼發生的？
 
　　作者指出，1990年代末至2000年代初，是女性主義從盛轉衰的轉捩點。在這個時期，第三波女性主義與暴女（Riot Grrrl）音樂運動的聲量逐漸崩解，而一股隱含著陰暗面的懷舊風正興起，她回顧當時的影視圈、音樂界、時尚領域和八卦媒體，細數狗仔猥褻的偷拍畫面、早期實境秀中惡意羞辱的手法，以及網路如何鼓勵女性把自己暴露於鎂光燈下，她將當時這些流行的主題，追溯到網路色情產業的興起，被過度被物化、性化、幼齡化的女性形象，逐漸潛入集體意識中，並展現廣大的影響力，逐漸形成流行文化。
 
　　本書作者蘇菲‧吉爾伯特（Sophie Gilbert）是大西洋月刊（The Atlantic）的資深撰稿人，其所撰寫的評論文章，曾入圍2022年普立茲獎決選名單，並榮獲2024年美國國家雜誌獎（National Magazine Award），是當代書籍影視及流行文化領域的傑出評論家。在這本初試啼聲的書作中，吉爾伯特敏銳觀察媒體文化對女權的衝擊與負面影響，讀者回顧媒體與流行文化史的同時，也將重新覺察、思索女權的未來方向。(文/博客來編譯)
 
書評媒體盛讚：
 
　　「在女權被削弱的此刻……作者提出一項強而有力的主張：是千禧世代的流行文化，讓一整個世代的女性與自己為敵。」——紐約時報（The New York Times）
 
　　「普立茲獎決選入圍者吉爾伯特精闢分析自1990年代暴女運動（Riot Grrrl）到2010年代正妹CEO（Girlboss）之間，橫跨三十年之間的流行文化……精彩絕倫。」——出版人週刊（Publishers Weekly）

＂Searing... rigorously researched but never stuffy... Gilbert has compiled perhaps the first comprehensive examination of turn-of-the-millennium mainstream, cool-kid trends and ephemera, and how they were largely molded by those in power to sell a generation of girls and young women reality-warping lies.＂ --The New York Times

＂So clear-eyed that it’s startling.＂ --The Washington Post

＂Entertaining and even energizing, transforming a dismal history into something like a rallying cry.＂ --The Boston Globe

From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of early aughts pop culture

What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress.

Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and ＂riot grrrl＂ feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Mining the darker side of nostalgia, Gilbert trains her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the leering gaze of the paparazzi to the gleeful cruelty of early reality TV and a burgeoning internet culture vicious toward women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period’s dominant themes back to the rise of internet porn, which gained widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness.

The result is a devastating portrait of a time when a distinctly American blend of excess, materialism, and power worship collided with the culture’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and continues to shape our world today.

Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes about television, books, and popular culture. She was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism and has previously written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Brooklyn Rail. She lives in London.