Katrice’s Reviews > Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves > Status Update

The trick postfeminist mass media had pulled off, as Natasha Walter argued in her 2010 book Living Dolls, was that it had co-opted words such as liberation and choice to sell women “an airbrushed, highly sexualized, and increasingly narrow vision of femininity”—one in which we were expected to choose a life of being both willing objects and easy targets.

In music, rock’s angry women were sidelined throughout the decade and replaced by pop’s much-younger, much-less-opinionated girls. In fashion, powerful supermodels who demanded to be paid what they were worth and supported each other were phased out in favor of frail, passive teenagers. As the 1990s went on, culture gradually redefined feminism from a collective struggle to an individual one.