a grrrl on "Girl on Girl"

thoughts on Sophie Gilbert's new book, a plea for pleasure, & yes, Sabrina Carpenter's album cover

artist unknown. words: bikini kill.

I have a lot of early memories about sex in the media. My little brain lingered when I heard something that I didn’t fully understand, while a red curiosity flushed my body. The jokes about a stain on Monica Lewinsky’s dress, the sexually-charged Drew Barrymore characters I gravitated towards, the news about Pee-wee Herman’s arrest in a porn theater. I was fixated on movies featuring AIDS storylines, partly, I think, because they also taught me about queer sex and condoms. And later, as I got older and understood more, I participated in accepting the sort of ambient sexual norms du jour that Ariel Levy would coin in 2005 as “raunch culture,” perhaps most emblematic in the Girls Gone Wild phenomenon. 

Sophie Gilbert’s new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, picks up here, and she illuminates some of the most egregious moments of early 2000s culture that we collectively embraced as normal: the non-consensual video recording of Nadia in American Pie (who later got deported for masturbating on a webcast she didn’t know about) that was played for laughs; the driving pulse of Oscar-winning American Beauty that relied on middle-aged Kevin Spacey’s lustful infatuation with his daughter’s seventeen-year-old best friend; countless examples of predatory journalism targeting young female actresses, including the 1994 feature in Esquire magazine called “Women We’d Be Willing to Wait For” with images of thirteen-year-old Kirsten Dunst and fifteen-year-old Christina Ricci. Gilbert rightly elucidates the severely misogynistic problems of this era, and it was sobering to confront them all back to back. Alongside the generative curiosity I had about sex in the media, I also know I became susceptible to the damaging messages I received, perhaps most evident in the twenty year struggle I had with eating disorders, all of which began alongside increasingly shrinking Calvin Klein models. Gilbert is not wrong to name that these depictions have consequences. 

But this is where my praise for Gilbert’s argument loses steam. Gilbert is a sharp thinker and a clear and compelling writer, but her framing and ultimate conclusions fall into the same tired traps of liberal feminist critique. To start, Gilbert traces the rise of postfeminism as being rooted in the AIDS crisis, after which she argues two camps were formed: the New Traditionalism that “preached old-fashioned family values” and the New Voyeurism, which “embraced sex, but as a spectator sport.” Despite her focus on the role of AIDS, however, she doesn’t mention anything about queer artists or thinkers who contributed to both sub- and popular culture. Without much of a bridge, Gilbert then jumps ahead to the Riot Grrrl movement, which I was glad to see, since popular  writing about Third Wave feminism often leaves them out. But then Gilbert says this: “Women in music in the 1990s were angry and abrasive and thrillingly powerful. And then, just like that, they were gone—replaced by girls.” 

She goes on to describe the rise of postfeminism the way that too many feminist writers who ignore the Riot Grrrl movement in the first place tend to do, as a time exclusively of consumption, objectification, and a ubiquitous male gaze. “At this point,” she laments, “pornographic imagery and tropes had also been wholly absorbed by popular culture.” 

The detrimental impact of pornography is the linchpin of Gilbert’s thesis. She insists that it is porn that caused so many body image issues in women, without ever acknowledging the history of racist and eugenic weight loss trends before the advent of internet porn, and without ever naming that porn actresses and models are absolutely more diverse (in nearly all ways) than Hollywood cast pools.¹ She also blames porn for the Esquire magazine feature on under-age girls without mentioning how young girls (and boys) have been harmed by adult men for centuries, usually in their houses and churches, and long before the porn boom that Gilbert is specifically decrying. She also seems to blame porn for men’s lack of communication skills during sex and for women’s participation in BDSM; these arguments, as usual, leave men off the hook for being decent, and suggest that the only way a woman would want to be submissive is to appeal to men’s desires. 

Still she insists, at one point in the book, that she is “not remotely opposed to porn.” Do you want to guess who she uses as an epigraph to open the first chapter of the book? It rhymes with Shmandrea Morkin. 

I feel like a broken record, but I will keep saying it: insisting that porn is the problem willfully ignores root causes of gender-based violence. It’s ahistorical and insulting to all of us who have been harmed. Can porn be a symptom of patriarchy? Sure, of course. Does it cause a culture of mistreating women? I don’t know, maybe you could ask literally any woman who lived before the advent of mass mediated sexual imagery. My guess is they would say there is something else in the water.²

Feminist arguments like this are simply not engaging queer thought, and are definitely not engaging with queer sex workers. Gilbert evokes AIDS and then completely erases the voices of queer activists who were on the front lines of the struggle, including people like Amber Hollibaugh, Cherríe Moraga, and Gayle Rubin, who were also the leading voices of the Sex Radicals. These were the queer women who were fighting against Anti-Porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin (who, if it wasn’t clear, Gilbert cites). There was (and is) an entire community of queers who built clubs and wrote books and made meaning of and through kink and BDSM, and it is perpetually baffling to me that heteronormative feminists just pretend this history (and present) doesn’t exist. The Sex Radicals were committed to a radical, anti-capitalist and anti-racist politics, and insisted on understanding sex as something that wasn’t always-already harmful; they were hell-bent on protecting the right to pleasure. In a 1981 conversation with Moraga, Hollibaugh reflected on her own relationship to D/s: “I don’t want to live outside of power in my sexuality, but I don’t want to be trapped in a heterosexist concept of power either. But what I feel feminism asks of me is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.” 

It would have made for a richer book, if Gilbert took some of these perspectives into account. Instead, she erases queer voices and says Riot Grrrl ended—then she paints a picture of a post-9/11 society in which no feminist movement existed at all. 

You can imagine my surprise since this is the exact era when I became a feminist. Here is the other problem with mainstream feminist writing: it imagines feminist movements through a very narrow, anti-intersectional lens. I became a feminist through the anti-war movement (and joined a group with a queer feminist who introduced me to Bikini Kill; riot grrrl was not dead). I called myself an anti-capitalist and an anti-imperialist before I called myself a feminist, but it was in those radical spaces that I found the women, queers, and books, who would give me language for making sense of patriarchal violence. When feminists envision Feminism™ as only showing up in the Suffragettes, or under the umbrella of Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem, or even through riot grrrl punk shows, it loses all coalitional power and erases the long history of feminist struggle within radical movements. Any feminism worth anything at all has to be inextricably linked to a fight against capitalism, the state, ecocide, white supremacy, and genocide. Some of the most celebrated feminist thinkers began in groups like the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, anti-prison, and anti-war movements. Many of us strengthen our feminist muscles within groups that are seemingly about “other issues” because we are fighting patriarchal tendencies within those groups. This too is feminist movement work! 

I’d be remiss not to note that Gilbert does address the US military. In her chapter on post-9/11 media violence, Gilbert asserts that porn and popular media got more violent, and specifically more sexually violent, in part due to the cultural energy of vengeance that permeated the era of the so-called “war on terror.” She then reviews sexual content from the era, with a focus on depictions of female submission as proof of increased violence. Here she is on French art critic Catherine Millet’s carnal memoir³: “Millet’s account…rarely mentions pleasure” and instead focuses on “accumulation and submission—in being the most prolific, most willing, most objectified object she can be.” ….. GILBERT, GIRL, THAT *IS* THE PLEASURE!!!!!⁴ I am begging people who do not have a relationship to kinky sexuality to stop writing sweeping statements about kinky sexuality. So much discourse about kink requires people sticking their fingers in their ears and “la la la”-ing to drown out the voices of all the people who have a different experience. (This is true about sex work discourse, too). Ignoring (or refusing to believe) people who participate in the thing you’re writing about is not a great way to do criticism. 

This is also the chapter where Gilbert does some wild gymnastics to blame porn for the inherent sexual violence of US empire. She reminds us of the abhorrent images from Abu Ghraib that showed prisoners naked, chained, hooded, in pyramid form and various other forms of humiliating and sexualized torture. The reason for this sadistic behavior from people literally trained by a racist colonial superpower to dominate and annihilate their enemy? Porn. It’s porn, says Gilbert. The soldiers, she clarifies, “weren’t explicitly trying to make porn—it was just how they had internalized expressions of dominance and power.”⁵....Was it not maybe the brainwashing by the military industrial complex that tempted them to exert a level of dehumanizing authority over human beings whom they were ordered to see as “evil”?⁶ Just asking questions!!!

somehow this book makes the Fiona Apple video (which Gilbert cites as another example of porn culture in the mainstream) seem more dangerous than the fucking war machine.

So, yeah, I had some problems with her argument. 

Gilbert concludes with apt but liberal reflections on the current moment. She rightfully bemoans the sexist treatment that Kamala Harris received during the election, but, unsurprisingly, gives Harris a tacit pass for participating in the mass murder of women in Palestine. She frets about the growing trend of trad wives and twelve-year-old skincare influencers (agreed, worrisome), and bimbo chic (disagree, not worrisome). She lands on the need for new storytelling models. New stories are necessary, though of course this is not enough. 

I am engaging with Gilbert at all because I think this book is smart enough and important enough to hold accountable, and because this is such a common pattern in mainstream feminist criticism. I love thinking seriously about pop culture, but when criticism ends there—or when it extends only to electoral politics— it puts us back on another spin around the hamster wheel. The root cause of misogyny and gender-based violence is deeper and messier than any media censorship or election could solve. The good news is there are huge swaths of radical thinkers and activists who have been writing, organizing, struggling, messing up and trying again to address these issues beyond the same, stuck liberal frameworks. We don’t have easy answers—and we certainly don’t all agree on how to get there—but we’re making dents and fissures, and I wish, genuinely, that more liberal feminists would consider joining us.⁷ 

This feels especially urgent because anti-porn arguments are not just insufficient, they are also incredibly dangerous. Whether it’s using porn as an excuse to conduct a gay witch hunt against Paul Rubens⁸ or shutting down a website like Backpage that kept thousands of marginalized sex workers safer from violence, the state will always use sex panics as a weapon of control. Anti-porn feminists continue to offer fodder to reactionary talking points and to a general ethos that the state should have control over what women and marginalized genders do with their bodies. Any ‘win’ that empowers the state will be a pyrrhic one.  

And, importantly: these arguments rob us of pleasure. 

Here’s a relevant and timely anecdote: this week, a friend—a queer femme with very radical politics — sent me Sabrina Carpenter’s Instagram post promoting her new album. In it, Carpenter is on all fours while a man (presumably, as we can only see one leg and one hand) grabs a chunk of her hair. It’s what Gilbert would surely describe as an example of “pornification.” When I saw the cover, I *squealed* in delight. I’ve long celebrated Carpenter as a clear example of camp, (honorary) femme sexuality. Everything she does is with a wink. Queer femmes—like my friend who sent me the post and the dozens of queer femmes (all of whom have really excellent political values) who “hearted” my repost of the cover—have always understood the subversive and playful potential of hyper-femininity and kinky sexuality. Carpenter is like our straight little sister who is in on the joke, which is made all the more clear by her ambivalent (and sometimes comically misandrist) lyrics. 

The responses to the cover are an exasperating rehash of the feminist porn wars. And it’s getting us nowhere. 

In her excellent response to the Carpenter cover and backlash, Tracy Clark-Flory writes: “Carpenter is turning straight women’s impossibly fraught feelings into playful theater. Of course, there is capitalism and commercialism at play here; some will unironically celebrate Carpenter as a woman on her knees. But, given her talent for camp, there’s also potential for satire, subversion, and, not to be underestimated, fun.”

Yes, fun, please! I do not want to cede the terrain of pleasure to a realm of danger. I won’t. Here’s Amber Hollibaugh again: “It seems feminism is the last rock of conservatism. It will not be sexualized…..Well, I won’t give up my sexuality and I won’t not be a feminist. So I’ll build a different movement, but I won’t live without either one.” 

Over forty years later, let’s stop repackaging the same debate, and finally do right by the Sex Radicals legacy: let’s build a different movement. 

1. Of course there are certain types of porn that feature a very traditional blond/white/thin/big-breasted archetype, but there is so much porn out there, and many, many, MANY performers don’t fall anywhere close to that. Porn actresses and cam girls are leading ladies with crooked teeth, fat rolls, tattoos, scars, disabilities, and are certainly not all white; Hollywood would never. There are absolutely problems with harmful fetishization, but that’s not the only reason people are attracted to diverse bodies. Here’s a nice clip featuring diverse performers reflecting on this topic. And here’s Pornhub’s 2024 year in review, which really flies in the face of the idea that porn watchers are all pedos—actually, everyone is looking for Mommy. Also revealing in this report: statistically men are less likely than women to search for rough sex or BDSM. Take that how you will!

2.  I do take seriously studies that, for example, show a rise in non-consensual choking alongside the increase of choking imagery in porn, but again, that is a communication problem, not a porn problem. (Some people like choking, no wonder porn reflects that!) Critical media scholars are quick to push against easy cause/effect media studies—for example, the notion that violent video games create school shooters—since so many people engage in media, and only some people end up causing harm after. We shouldn’t lose that nuance when it comes to porn, especially because it lets men (and other genders) off the hook for being respectful sexual partners. If the fault lies in porn, then solution is to get rid of porn rather than demand that men (and other genders) learn better and more respectful interpersonal intimacy behaviors.

3. I don’t know Millet’s work, but it seems like she’s had some bad takes throughout her life. This isn’t a defense of Millet, but I do want to name that Millet’s description will likely sound pleasurable to submissives!

4. I am getting a little messy in this writing now, I know, but I swear to god you guys, I wanted to throw the book across the room when I read this. (But it was a library book, so I didn’t. <3)

5.  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

6. I mean, look at how nice and non-rapey Confederate soldiers were to enslaved women during the Civil War, before mass mediated porn started rotting their brains.

7. I didn’t used to feel so insistent that people join groups—I really believe we can practice the most radical politics by being good neighbors—but I would realllllly love more big name feminists to share space with people who are seriously critical of capitalism and the state. And not in a thinkpiecey “I can say capitalism is bad but never let myself imagine life beyond it” way, in a “we are actually thinking and imagining and building for a world without borders, police, and presidents” way. Or at least read people who have those values. Here’s one place to start: Dean Spade just interviewed adrienne maree brown, and his first questions was about amb’s relationship to anarchism. Spade and brown are two of the most generative queer and feminist thinkers, both largely informed by decades of women of color feminist writing and organizing, and they are both anarchists. Find out why. <3 Also, a plug: bringing more radical analysis into feminist spaces on questions related to sexual harm and sexual pleasure is the exact goal of my forthcoming book. Look for it in 2026.

8. I had a much longer essay in my brain about Pee-wee, but there was too much to say about the book, so he ended up being more of an aside. But this is my plug again to watch Pee-wee as Himself.<3