We Survived Girls Gone Wild Just to Get Tradwives?

Under the Influence with Jo Piazza

Jo Piazza, Influence Inc.

Society & Culture, Parenting, Kids & Family, Personal Journals, Technology

4.3 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What do Britney Spears, American Pie, Girls Gone Wild, and the rise of trad wives on TikTok all have in common? More than you think. In this episode, we dive into the cultural stew of the late ’90s and early 2000s with Atlantic critic Sophie Gilbert, author of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. From foam fingers to foam parties, we unpack how the sparkly, bedazzled, and disturbingly sexist pop culture of that era shaped millennial womanhood—and how it's all come back in a new package labeled "soft girl aesthetic." We talk Britney, the Spice Girls as proto-influencers, and what it means that the same culture that objectified Monica Lewinsky now celebrates trad wives on TikTok. This is a conversation about memory, marketing, media—and what happens when we mistake sexualization for empowerment. Read Sophie's great piece in The Atlantic here. You can grab her book Girl on Girl here. Join our newsletter community here. Pre-order EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU here. Visit our lovely sponsors here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Are you looking for the perfect summer read? Look no further than everyone is lying to you,
0:05.2	the Tradwife murder mystery that everyone is talking about. I would be lying if I said that I didn't
0:10.4	want you to order everyone is lying to you right now so that it shows up on your doorstep on July 15th
0:15.2	and you can devour it in one sitting while wearing a nap dress and stealing your neighbor's sourdough.
0:20.5	Everyone is lying to you is an absolute delight, but don't take my word for it.
0:24.5	Publishers Weekly said it is darkly entertaining and delivers the goods.
0:28.6	New York Times bestselling author Sarah Shepard called it a fun, twisty mystery that she was obsessed with.
0:34.8	And my own husband told me that I am a sick, sick person for writing it. I mean,
0:39.2	seriously, order now before J.D. Vance bans it.
0:47.4	What were you doing in 1999? I had just started college. I joined the Tridelt sorority. Make all of the Delta, Delta,
0:56.7	can I help you, help you, help you, help you jokes that you want? I loved it, every minute of it.
1:02.5	And my girlfriends and I were dressing up to go to a frat party looking exactly like Britney Spears in the Hit Me Baby One More Time video.
1:11.5	The late 90s and early odds were a gorgeous, beautiful, and super fun time to be a young woman.
1:18.8	They were also incredibly fraught and terribly toxic in numerous ways.
1:24.3	Despite all the nostalgia that we have for that time period right now, there was a serious problem with how pop culture treated young women.
1:33.7	Third wave and riot girl feminism collapsed into this period of hyper-objectification and sexualization.
1:41.5	Today we're talking to Atlantic critic Sophie Gilbert about her new book,
1:45.6	Girl on Girl, how pop culture turned a generation of women against themselves.
1:51.9	Gilbert trains her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era
1:56.8	from American Pie to Britney Spears.
2:00.7	Any woman around my age is going to identify with just how era from American Pie to Britney Spears.
2:08.3	Any woman around my age is going to identify with just how deeply these pop culture icons burned themselves into our brains.
	...

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