Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Thursday, May 1st, 2025, and this is a special episode of The Exert.

What happened to feminism in the 21st century? This is a foundational question at the heart of

cultural critic Sophie Gilbert's new book, Girl on Girl, how pop culture turned a generation of women

against themselves. In it, she argues that porn's long cultural shadow has resulted in the hyper-objectification

of women, presenting them as spectacles.

What can a critical look at the post-feminist era teach us about how women can view themselves

in a more empowered and healthy way? Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Thanks for joining us on the excerpt, Sophie.

Thanks so much for having me.

Chronography has been around essentially for centuries. You talk about its rising influence in the late 90s and early odds's technology allowed it to permeate American entertainment. You call it the

quote, defining cultural product of our times, unquote. What do you think were the

first signs of its impact on pop culture? When I first started researching this book, I knew it

wanted to be a sort of revisionist look at the culture of the 2000s, and I knew the late 90s

would be in there a bit. I had no idea, maybe this is naive, I had no idea that porn would be such

a huge part of the book. And it really only became that way because the more I researched

different kinds of media from the era, film, television, art, fashion, music, the more porn

seemed to have had a profound influence over everything. And I sort of understand it so

much better now, having learned about just how much pornography as a medium exploded in the

time between the, really the end of the 80s and then the beginning of the internet. Like, first

of all, porn became immensely popular as a VHS technology. And I think between 1985 and 1995, there was something like a tenfold increase in the number of people

who were renting pornographic tapes on VHS.

So by the mid-90s, it was something like 700 million VHS rentals a year of pornographic tapes.

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