Business Book Review: Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert

Stephen Grootes speaks to Bronwyn Williams, Trend Translator and Future Finance Specialist at Flux Trends about Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert, and how the book exposes the ways pop culture’s treatment of women is driven by business incentives from media monetising humiliation and outrage, to tech platforms, brands and advertisers profiting from visibility, data, and the commodification of female bodies.

Listen to the interview in the audio player below. 

Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves is a nonfiction book by culture writer and critic, Sophie Gilbert.

This book looks at how movies, TV shows, music, magazines, internet culture and advertising shaped the way women think about themselves from the late 1990s through the 2000s and 2010s.

Gilbert argues that, instead of pushing forward the ideas of equality and empowerment from earlier feminist movements, pop culture often did the opposite.

The media began to celebrate women mainly as objects, things to look at, judge, or compete with, rather than as full people with agency.

Reality TV, music videos, movies and celebrity culture started teaching young women that being desirable and fitting narrow beauty standards was more important than anything else.

The book also explores how sexualised content, including internet pornography, influenced mainstream culture.

Gilbert suggests that these cultural forces normalised unhealthy ideas about gender and relationships and helped push back against earlier gains in women’s rights.

Speaking to Stephen Grootes on The Money Show, Bronwyn Williams, Trend Translator and Future Finance Specialist at Flux Trends says modern media has shaped society for the better and for the worse. 

"What it's really speaking about is how feminisms as we know it, where it has collided with capitalism as we know it today has put women into this impossible choice of either being exploited or exploiting yourself, and somehow that's more empowering."

- Bronwyn Williams, Trend Translator and Future Finance Specialist - Flux Trends

"Of course, the normalisation of porn or 'pornification', which is the world we're in today. So what the author does is take you on a whiplash tour of the history of that increasing commoditisation of oneself that has been effectively the current stage of feminism that we find ourselves in." 

- Bronwyn Williams, Trend Translator and Future Finance Specialist - Flux Trends

"This idea that you have to sell yourself in order to provide. You have to look good for Instagram, and that of course means you will get more attention. You can get more money if you get more likes."

- Bronwyn Williams, Trend Translator and Future Finance Specialist - Flux Trends 

Scroll to the top of the article to listen to the full interview.