I don’t keep in mind a lot of the 2000s, the last decade I used to be born, however I keep in mind NBC’s The Greatest Loser (2004-2016), which got here to thoughts whereas studying Sophie Gilbert. The Greatest Loser was a recreation present by the use of humiliation, pitting obese Individuals in opposition to one another to drop physique fats by way of grueling exercises, and as shortly as attainable. Merciless trainers with uncommon tender moments would push contestants more durable — the sweat dripping onto every treadmill and the cheers after every contestant’s weekly weigh-in (typically reaching the double digits within the first couple weeks) all instructed this was about optimistic change, overcoming adversity.
Certainly, with a contemporary view, The Greatest Loser‘s sadism is obtrusive. These folks desperately wanted their lives to alter, and with a $250k prize, they pushed themselves into unhealthy territory. I keep in mind seeing Rachel Frederickson, the 14th season’s winner, wanting gaunt as she celebrated slimming from 260 to 130 kilos. Her too-slim body was chastised simply as a lot as her being previously obese was: Twitter lit up with anorexia allegations. After all, her journey was dangerous, however her occupying each extremes demonstrated how the general public responded to ladies on the time — too fats, too skinny, you lose both method.
It’s this contradiction that The Atlantic author Sophie Gilbert explores in her debut e book Lady on Lady, a broad-reaching and exhaustive excoriation of the layers of sediment that weigh on the fashionable lady’s physique, sexuality, and psyche. “Each journal I learn throughout my teenagers and twenties, each TV present that includes a doe-eyed teenage star with seen clavicles, appeared to include the identical message: shrink,” she writes, which makes a present like The Greatest Loser really feel like a satirical parody of the period’s misogyny. Gilbert’s meticulous analysis reveals that there was no place for ladies to cover within the Nineties and 2000s, an age that formed how women and men choose, suppose, and see one another and ourselves.
Its title comes from a preferred porn class, a medium that Sophie Gilbert argues is “the defining cultural product of our instances.” She writes within the introduction, “It fascinates me that a lot of what I used to be attempting to determine stored coming again to porn. [It’s] the factor that has formed greater than something how we take into consideration intercourse, and, due to this fact, how we take into consideration one another.” This isn’t solely associated to misguided tv characters like Lena Dunham’s coming-of-age sequence Women’ Adam Sackler (Adam Driver), who fantasizes about seeing a sexually open-minded Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) as an 11-year-old junkie getting despatched “dwelling to your mother and father lined in cum,” however can infiltrate each state of affairs we see a girl in — on {a magazine} cowl or behind a podium.
Such an epidemic is debilitating; even when a girl is in energy, or makes an attempt to ingratiate themselves by way of masculine formality, we oftentimes can not acknowledge them as something however a sexual object. Sophie Gilbert mentions Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?, Jerome Tanner’s 2008 pornography video starring intercourse staff as parody variations of Sarah Palin, the primary feminine vice presidential candidate, in addition to Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. Kamala Harris’ assent to the 2024 Democratic nomination was equally marked with allegations that she “slept her solution to the highest”.
The chapter earlier than, “Lady Boss”, mentions how ladies in energy will be even worse; their gender doesn’t negate the cruelty and enterprise coldness a person has. She mentions Rihanna and Kim Kardashian, two ladies whose empires have attracted controversy, though Kim’s consuming dysfunction accelerants are clearly worse. Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty lingerie line sneakily trapped prospects into silent month-to-month subscriptions, which looks as if a logistical error reasonably than one thing she authorised. “What was extra perplexing,” Sophie Gilbert paraphrases from tradition author Kaitlyn Tiffany, “was that any of those consumers’ parasocial relationships to Rihanna made them reluctant to publicly complain.”
A girl in energy should be seen pretty much as good. These are wholly completely different examples, however I can’t assist however consider the girlboss-ification of individuals like Elizabeth Holmes, or Jen Shah, two imprisoned scammers whose camp personas and huge personalities entice an irony-tinged crowd (myself implicated) to name them “iconic”. Or, one step additional, in Ghislaine Maxwell’s 2020 courtroom continuing, instructed to maybe deliver down Trump, commenters replied, “it was ALWAYS going to be a girl,” “Get it lady…” or included footage of Rosie the Riveter. Feminism, it appears, doesn’t exclude scammers or grifters.
Lady on Lady is at its most profitable when documenting the spiky media panorama of the period, reserved for younger ladies. Teen stars like Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Paris Hilton had been relentlessly shamed for what male commentators noticed as their sexuality, though they had been attempting to evolve to the requirements of the time. After the early Nineties wave of feminist, grassroots punk bands like Bikini Kill or Sleater-Kinney, youthful, sexier singers like Britney Spears or Spice Women popped as much as supply a glassy, enjoyable model of feminism that promised enlightenment by way of essentially detached actions. Lady Energy, Spice Women’ message, was propped up as a capitalist ploy by way of merchandise, Sophie Gilbert suggests, and stood for principally nothing.
The period’s fixation on magnificence, femininity, and our bodies is infamous. The relentless onslaught of degradation and disgrace ladies confronted in movies, from movie star and mainstream journalists, or corrupt, attention-seeking creeps like Perez Hilton and the bigger tabloid trade, may solely instill within the minds of younger males the best way to see and deal with these (to them, inferior) folks. An August 2004 Rolling Stone cowl story on Lindsay Lohan with the phrases “Sizzling, Prepared, and Authorized!” features a slimy anecdote by author Mark Binelli: “[She] has been eighteen for just below every week when she tells me her breasts are actual. I didn’t ask (gents by no means do), although my reporting (discreet visible fact-checking, a goodbye hug) appears to substantiate her assertion.”
Within the UK, a gossip journal, Warmth, featured the “sidebar of disgrace”, pointing out “celebrities’ errant cellulite dimples, sweat patches, or tummy bulges.” Paparazzi would lie on the street, ready for an upskirt shot of stars getting out of vehicles. “Once they offered the photographs, Sophie Gilbert writes, “it was unfailingly their topics who had been shamed.”
Sophie Gilbert on Women Who Really feel Like Actual Girls
It’s no marvel some artists, reckoning with this media blitz, turned their focus inward. A lot of Lady on Lady‘s part on feminine auteurs revolves round Nora Ephron’s quote from her 1983 novel, Heartburn: “If I inform the story, I management the model.” It goes deep into Lena Dunham of Women fame, and ping-pongs to Canadian novelist Sheila Heti and pop artist Taylor Swift, three of essentially the most unflinchingly uncooked writers of the fashionable age.
The place Darren Star’s Intercourse and the Metropolis (1998-2004) sequence was principally fantasy, Lora Durnham’s Women (2012-17), its Millennial next-of-kin, was muted and flat when it debuted in 2012. The intercourse scenes had been dour, the nudity was sensible, however the central theme is the disillusionment younger folks really feel within the face of unfettered optimism. Consequently, the women hang around, try to make artwork, however often stall of their careers and lives. It’s a shrug of a present, a day that begins at midday. “[Girls is] telling to me,” Sophie Gilbert writes, “that what offended folks most about Dunham throughout her early years in tv was her conviction that she had one thing value saying.”
Women was disarmingly much like actual life, with no Hollywood sheen, which some folks took as laziness or self-importance. Heti’s novels are equally pragmatic, loosely autobiographical, documenting the method of forming your identification or relationship to motherhood. “A obligatory course of for ladies writers throughout this second was acknowledging that the mythology of up to date womanhood was totally false, with the intention to create one thing much less fairly and extra truthful,” Gilbert writes. Intercourse and the Metropolis’s martinis and theater had been traded out for Women’ beer and unhealthy concert events.
Artists throughout this period typically strived to make their work come as near actuality. Sophie Gilbert mentions Jennifer Ringley, who livestreamed her day by day actions within the late Nineties, and Marie Calloway, a author whose exposé of sexual assault included pictures with the person’s cum on her face, visible candor which was considerably replicated in Lila Shapiro’s February 2025 New York Journal story on Neil Gaiman. “The purpose of her personal work, one senses, is for there to be no hole, nothing that permits for self-flattery, self-embellishment, and even self-protection,” Gaiman writes about Calloway, however the identical will be prolonged to Dunham or Heti.
“When the corporeal type of your physique is the one factor standing between you and materials wealth, why be sentimental about what occurs to it?” Gilbert asks. This could consult with stars who increase their faces and our bodies to satisfy the wonder requirements of the time, but additionally to celebrities who take management of the narrative and their sexuality by leaning in. Madonna’s 1992 Intercourse pictures e book and Janet Jackson’s albums, notably The Velvet Rope (1997) and Janet (1993), welcomed followers in more and more intimate methods. “Do you suppose that I’m that individual you watch on TV?” Jackson coyly asks on 2004’s steamy Damita Jo. In the event you’re entertained, what’s the distinction?
Lady on Lady is commonly disheartening just for the mountain of misogyny Sophie Gilbert presents — nevertheless it’s in some way not a heavy learn. Analysis is ample on how American and British society has mistreated ladies, but additionally an emphasis on their iconoclastic artwork. Society goes by way of waves of progress and regression — our present period is a bleak nadir — however logically, it has to pivot. Although it can take unlearning who will get to inform which tales, Gilbert ends, “I do essentially consider artwork can sometimes allow a top-to-bottom reconfiguration of all the things we’ve ever discovered ourselves believing.” It’s one in all life’s biggest pleasures, even.
