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

Men who write about their lives tend to be canonized as brave auteurs of the human experience; women who do the same are guilty of oversharing.

Femininity is as much a prize to be flaunted as is wealth; the implication is that the two are inextricably linked.

Cosmetic surgeries were widely touted and understood to be fixes for the imperfect self, with reality shows in particular hammering home the message that becoming skinny, hot, and sexy would totally change a person’s life.

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.

Postfeminism was vague; it seemed to define itself mostly in opposition to a boogeyman version of feminism, encouraging women to embrace casual sex, spend with abandon, and be as stereotypically girly or overtly sexy as they desired.