Girl Power and the Faux Feminism of the 1990s
Episode 504 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: Sophie Gilbert
The girl power era was not what we remember.
If you were “coming of age” or raising girls 30 years ago, you probably remember the 90s as the era of low-rise jeans and girl power. Author and The Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert has similar memories of these formative years, but she also questioned just how authentic that feminist call to arms really was.
In Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, Sophie explores the social messaging that planted some pretty problematic ideas in the minds of young and teenage girls (and people of all genders), and she was kind enough to talk through her discoveries with me shortly before her book drops today.
What happened to feminism in the ‘90s?
Sophie explains that each feminist movement seems to have believed the work is done and seeks to scorch the earth that came before. Just think of how today’s Gen Z cringes at so many of the moves Millennials make. In much the same manner, the third wave feminism of the late 80s and early 90s—think civil rights activists like the Riot Girls—gave way to the post-feminism of the Spice Girls, Sex and the City, and Ally McBeal.
The focus shifted from the decidedly unsexy collectivist pursuits, like reproductive rights and anti-discrimination laws, to the bubble gum pop of the 1990s sex-positive, self-improvement, individualistic messages. A watered-down and much more marketable tone emerged, and Sophie notes that there’s no question consumerism played a role in this shift. In the mid-90s and 2000s, young women had more buying power than ever before, and brands were guaranteed to sell millions of anything emblazoned with the Spice Girls’ faces on it.
Why were we all so swayed by ‘Girl Power’ feminism?
Reading Girl on Girl left me feeling like I’d been gaslit all those years. Here I was watching shows like Sex and the City and admiring and aspiring to that freedom, power, and independence. Meanwhile, in reality, we were all being sold a fleeting sense of “empowerment” through sexual appeal from the male gaze.
It was relentless: music, film, television, advertising—it was impossible to avoid the shiny new message that, surprise, women did have power: sexual power. And given the shortage of strong women in media in the past, is it any wonder we flocked to this isolated example of feminism?
Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with striving for, having, or exerting sexual power. The problem arises when we’re led to believe, as we were in the post-feminism 90s, that it was the only type of power we should want or could ever wield.
How can we jumpstart positive change?
Girl on Girl couldn’t come at a better time. We’re in a painful era of backlash against women’s rights that threatens the very progress made by the feminists before us. When we look at the lack of public outrage—where are the bra burnings and the marches these days?—it’s easy to assume most of us have just accepted our fate in a patriarchal world. But Sophie stresses an overlooked factor in our apparent complacency: women are busy. Who has time to march in front of legislatures when ever-widening gaps in the social safety net mean we barely have time to sleep and eat between the salary-gathering, caregiving, and housework the economy demands we prioritize?
The good news, Sophie says, is that there’s a less energy-intensive way to react against this systemic destruction of women’s rights: we can start by talking more about it.
What would a world in which women have true and lasting power look like? We need to fix the taboo nature of conversations around women’s power. If it’s an open topic, we can discuss and think about what kind of power we want to create for ourselves. We can figure out how to work together to rekindle some of that vital collectivist energy from the ashes of the individualism that contributed to our separation and silence these past decades. We have so much language and clarity we didn’t have back then, Sophie stresses, so much knowledge and experience to start exerting the many kinds of power available to us.
What feelings do Sophie’s deep dive into nostalgic feminist pop culture bring up for you? What do you remember of the Spice Girls’ era of empowerment? Jumpstart that goal of more open communication around this topic by raising your voice in our Courage Community on Facebook or our group on LinkedIn!
Related links from today’s episode:
Order your copy of “Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves”
Learn more about Sophie’s work
“Becoming the Third Wave” by Rebecca Walker
“The End of Men” by Hanna Rosin
“Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” by Susan Faludi
“Holding It Together: How Women Became America's Safety Net” by Jessica Calarco
Discover impactful ways you can TAKE ACTION
for positive feminist change:
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[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 504. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up. Today's episode is one for my fellow millennials out there.
[INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
What we are going to do today is, excavate what on earth was going on in the 1990s and 2000s as it related to being a woman and how we absorbed cultural messages that made us feel powerful at the time but perhaps weren't as empowering as we remembered them. And what my hope is, is that this conversation can lead us down a path towards regaining and reclaiming our rights and our power as women, particularly as we think about generations that follow us. So whether you're a Gen X’er, Boomer, Millennial, or Gen Z’er are listening, we're going to really take a deep dive and a walk down memory lane when it relates to the 90s and early aughts culture of feminism.
Joining me to break all of this down is Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at the Atlantic, where she writes about television, books and pop culture. She won the 2024 National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism and was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Critical Criticism. She lives in London but has spent a good amount of time in New York and D.C. and she's out with a brand new book, Girl On Girl How Pop Culture Turned A Generation Of Women Against Themselves.
I've had a chance to read some of this book and let me tell you, it feels more urgent than ever. What the book really asks is what happened to feminism in the 21st century? This is timely, now more than ever in a period of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the women's movement's power, focus and currency threatens decades of progress. In the book, Sophie identifies an inflection point in the 90s and 2000s when the energy of third wave riot girl feminism collapsed into what she describes as a regressive period of hyper objectification, sexualization and infantilization.
So joining me to break all of this down and help me understand what on earth happened to us in the Sex in the City era of feminism and where that leaves us today is Sophie Gilbert. Sophie, welcome to the Bossed Up podcast.
SOPHIE: Oh, thank you so much for having me.
EMILIE: I am delighted to have you. You know, I'm no pop culture expert myself, but having read some of your book Girl On Girl, I feel like I'm talking someone with a PhD in 90s and aughts culture. So first of all, congratulations on the new release. It's amazing.
SOPHIE: Thank you. It did feel a little bit like, I mean, I shouldn't say this because people actually do get PhDs in 90s and aughts culture, and they're very, very clever and they have done a lot of research,...
EMILIE: Yeah.
SOPHIE: …but it did feel the process of reading, and watching, and revisiting was quite intense for this book. So thank you.
EMILIE: Yeah, it shows in the work. So, one of my first impressions was reconciling my own millennial nostalgia for the 90s and for the 2000s, which I think, you know, all trends are cyclical. So we've seen some of those butterfly clips come back in vogue lately, right? But I had this idea of how empowering that period of time was to be coming of age as a young girl and woman in the 90s and 2000s.
And reading your book really kind of made me feel like I'd been gaslit that whole time. Like, what had been packaged as empowerment was, in fact, exploitation. And it just didn't align with the era of, like, girl power that I remembered it as. Can you help me understand, like, your big thesis around what that era was like for women?
SOPHIE: I love the way you phrase this question, because it gets at the heart of it, I think, which is for me, that the reason I wanted to write the book was to figure out why we believed this messaging. Like, why it was so, why we were all gaslit in this way, like, why it felt so easy to believe that, sort of being sexual was empowering. And I think the reason is because it was, it was so. It was so fun.
EMILIE: It was so fun. Yeah.
SOPHIE: Yeah. I mean, I think I was about 13 when the Spice Girls first came out. And I just remember being enthralled to them. Like, they were so fun and they were so gorgeous and their clothes were so technicolor, and it was so poppy. And it was the aesthetic, the packaging, the music, everything was just delightful. And so sort of, it's only coming back in retrospect and seeing things in context that you maybe see them a little bit differently. But definitely, like, I remember just the sort of bubblegum nature of it, how sort of spectacular it was and how fun and how much you wanted to be like those women and to, and to buy the things that would make you feel just like them.
EMILIE: Totally. And that, I think, was key, right? The consumerism as activism is how we were sold and commodified, you know, as the good consumer girls that we were. And so what's the dark side of that? You know, the light side is this bubblegum pop and girl power era. But what was really going on beneath the surface? I mean, I know that's the whole context of the book, but how would you summarize that sort of darker side to things?
SOPHIE: I think there are two things at play. I think one is distraction. And so, what was interesting to me in the first chapter of the book, I get into sort of how music is an interesting way to see these different battles in feminism throughout the 90s and see how they play out. And so you have this phrase, girl power, which started as a kind of punk royal girl slogan, and it was used by bands like Bikini Kill and the Zines. And the Zines were very political, and they were ferocious, and they were not bubblegum. They were sort of unafraid of being hostile. They were very activist. They advocated for, you know, reproductive rights, and they were very sort of antisexual violence. And I think for a lot of girls in that era, this messaging was very thrilling.
And this slogan, girl power, was then reclaimed by the Spice Girls in the mid-90s in a very different way. And that, to me, sort of exemplifies the shift between third wave feminism and what we call post feminism. The Spice Girls are kind of a really interesting exemplar of post feminism because it was this. It was this movement that developed out of the idea that feminism had achieved everything it would ever achieve or needed to achieve, and that women were now free to do whatever they want, behave exactly like men, get drunk, sleep around, most importantly, shop. I think women had a lot of consumer power toward the end of the 90s. And so, in some ways very smart people in marketing were catching onto this.
So you have this shift in what girl power means, and that kind of explains a little bit what's going on in feminism. But then also the idea of girl power, as the Spice Girls exemplified it was really about buying things. I mean, they had so many consumer deals. They had something like a billion dollars worth of deals by the end of the 90s. They had partnerships with everyone, like just name a big brand, the Spice Girls were aligned with them. And in part, this was because marketing gurus had figured out that teenage girls had a lot of money to spend.
But the flip side of that was that it really neutralized the messaging. You can't sell things if you have this sort of angry, hostile, activist messaging. Not. I shouldn't call it hostile, because that implies that it wasn't saying important things. And it was. But it's much harder to have those kind of branding deals if you have a sort of ferocious political message like the riot girls had. And so that's why girl power, in a sense, became so anodyne and really sort of empty, I think, as a slogan.
EMILIE: Yeah, well. And I see those two things as so related, right? This sort of obsession with girl culture and then taking all that energy and turning it into consumer power as opposed to political power, right? It was very strategic.
SOPHIE: And it's not just about turning it into consumer power. I think we get into this a little bit later in the book. But it's also about turning that energy inward. So you had this sort of third wave movement that was very. It had tangible goals in terms of what it could achieve as a sort of collective movement for other women. And then what you see with post feminism is it sort of encourages a much more individualist way of thinking about things that also becomes much more about improvements any girl can do to herself. So that ties in with the spending money theme. But it's also. It sort of encouraged this much more self focused, beauty obsessed, kind of commercialist movement in that sense.
EMILIE: And even you get into the girl boss era, which we're very intimately familiar with here. Podcasted now for almost a decade, you've preempted so many of my questions, which is good, because this is exactly what I want to talk about. And we here at Bossed Up have kind of been on this evolutionary journey of recognizing the trappings of individualism and coming back to a more collectivist or trying to come back to a more collectivist approach.
Let's start with some definitions, because you've mentioned post feminism a few times. What was the third wave of feminism? Can you help give us that sort of historical context? Third wave feminism and then post feminism? And how did we see us culturally making that shift?
SOPHIE: Yeah, it's a little bit difficult to define because there's never anyone in the moment who sits down to write a manifesto and is like, I am, I mean, in the case of third wave feminism, someone actually did. So that was. [LAUGHTER] But usually you're sort of historically, you're looking back and you're trying to pinpoint things without that guidance. But for me, third wave feminism emerged out of, really the Clarence Thomas hearings, I think helped solidify things a bit. Where you had Anita Hill speak out in her Senate, in Clarence Thomas's Senate confirmation hearing. And you had. It was a little bit like the Me Too era and what happened with Brett Kavanaugh more recently.
But when she said her piece in public and was pilloried for it you did see this sort of mass reaction from women that was very activist in spirit. I think 1992 was the year. It was called the year of the Women in Congress because so many women were running for office. And there was this energy that was very sort of focused in that sense. It was about actually like, we're not going to take this anymore, and we have things to say and we will demand some of our power back. And I think Rebecca Walker, who is the daughter of Kara Walker, the writer, she wrote a piece for Ms. Magazine that was called Becoming the Third Wave. And it was about exactly what she saw in that moment and what she identified as needing to change. So it was very powerful.
But in the middle of the 90s, the word post feminism, I think, was first used in the 80s. It was kind of. Every feminist movement, I think, always feels the need to scorch the ground that came before it a little bit.
EMILIE: Which is sad, talk about girl on girl, right?
SOPHIE: Yeah.
EMILIE: It's sort of like every generation of women seems to rediscover their own version of claiming their rights and in doing so, dismissing the shoulders upon which they stand, right?
SOPHIE: Yeah.
EMILIE: There's something to that.
SOPHIE: And I think of the way that Gen Z find millennial feminists are cringe and they are sort of embarrassed by all our antics online. But, yeah, post feminism, it sort of emerged out of the idea that feminism wasn't necessary anymore, which I think in the 80s was up for debate. Susan Faludi wrote the book Backlash early in the 90s, um, describing this backlash against second wave feminism in the media. But also around the same time, women were doing pretty well in the workplace and they were making gains and society. And so I think it was sort of relatively easy to be sold on the idea that second wave feminism was embarrassing. Those women were, you know, prudes. They were frigid…
EMILIE: Men hating.
SOHPIE: …yeah.
EMILIE: Yeah.
SOPHIE: They, you know, didn't shave their armpits or whatever like this. All the. All the horrible cliches about feminists, I think, were utilized by post feminism. And the exemplars of it, I think are Bridget Jones is a good one because she's very likable. She's very daffy. She's obsessed with her sex life and her love life, and I think doesn't really think about work at all. I love Bridget, I should say. I'm not describing her.
EMILIE: Yeah. And she became this new archetype for, like, a hot mess, right?
SOPHIE: Yes. And Ally McBeal all the same, like her of the, Like, a very well educated lawyer, very capable, but she's, you know, hallucinating dancing babies and she's falling over her heels all the time.
EMILIE: Yeah, yeah.
SOPHIE: Carrie Bradshaw was another one, you know, romantically obsessed, had way too many shoes, couldn't manage her finances. Like, career was sort of erratic. So these were really the women of post feminism, I think, not by their own fault. It was just sort of this collision of characters who all seemed to capture something in the spirit of the time.
EMILIE: Right. And I recently on my most recent maternity leave, was watching a few episodes of Sex and the City, finding myself, you know, holding a newborn for hours on end. I was like, oh, let me throw on some old Sex and the City episodes. And I turned to my husband after watching a few of these and was like, this did not age well at all. [LAUGHTER] This is not the empowering, you know, cinematic, like, liberation show that I remember it being. I was like, no wonder we were all sex obsessed.
I was re-reading Hannah Rosin's, The End of Men recently, which gets into some of the rise of women and this, like, kind of cultural angst over, are women becoming too powerful and too successful and poor men, like, shouldn't we be caring more about them? And there is a lot of that happening right now. This male victimhood narrative, which I think has its valid arguments. But I was re-reading her book and recalled this entire chapter devoted to hookup culture on college campuses. Like, my gosh, isn't it unbelievable? Women are just having casual sex. And then I'm watching Sex and the City and going no wonder we were all having casual sex. This is, like, sort of the pinnacle of powerful, independent, single women in New York. And you're like, oh, my god, what. What a kind of sex obsessed, like, cultural moment we found ourselves in. And your book comes back to, surprisingly, to me, pornography as being a huge part of this cultural zeitgeist. How does that all connect for you?
SOPHIE: Well, I think the thing about Sex and the City, that really was a kind of a sort of a light bulb moment for me when I was writing the book, because I had always watched the show, and I remember watching it like you in the 2000s and wanting to be those women so badly and loving their outfits and thinking their version of friendship was just intoxicating. But when you go back and you revisit it as an adult and you sort of know a little bit more about life and relationships, you realize that it's not the thing that really never comes up in the show is sex for pleasure. It's sort of sex as consumption. It's, like, about collecting experiences and talking to your friends about them over brunch and having funny stories to tell and seeing yourself as, like, a grand millennial adventurer, like, independent, strong, empowered woman. Condoms in my bag kind of thing. You know, and I think, no, there's nothing wrong with any of that. But the pleasure part for me is really what's missing.
EMILIE: Yeah. If anyone, Samantha kind of embodied that piece a little bit.
SOPHIE: Yeah. But it's. It's, again, it's so much of the sort of adventure, pioneering spirit. And I do think. I think the problem is there were so few other portrayals of sex that were as fearless as Sex and City at the time. So girls did absorb a lot from that show, for good and for bad. But, you know, I have a group chat that is devoted to Sex and the City, and we're constantly, like, finding old episodes where them were repeating, texting each other.
EMILIE: Yeah, well, that's so interesting. You write, quote, power for women was sexual in nature in the very beginning of your book. And I didn't recognize that until kind of going through the 90s and 2000s with you on this journey. That is reading your book. And Sex in the City really embodies that. Like sex not for pleasure, but sex as a form of power, right? And power over others or power over oneself. What's wrong with that? Is there anything wrong with that?
SOPHIE: I think what's problematic about that idea for me is that it was the only kind of power that we were being allotted. And it's also the way that it was framed in the era. It was a kind of power that was very specifically connected to youth. And I think about this now as I am aging like, all elder millennials are. You think about this lack of, I think about my own fears about aging and what it means sometimes. And I think one of the things I am aware of is that I will feel less powerful because simply, I don't fit into this, like, young superstar, you know, the mode of the young woman who has the world at her feet. I think that was a very enthralling mode in media at the time.
But when we sort of pay too much heed to that, we don't allow women the things that actually make them powerful and capable, like experience. And, I don't know, all the things that you learn when you do a job for decades at a time, and the wisdom that you get as you just live as a woman in this world and talk to other people and read and watch things and think about yourself and get to know yourself. So there's something about fetishizing sexual power that sort of cuts women off from other kinds of power and influence, I think.
EMILIE: Yeah. And it's just not necessarily lasting in that same way.
SOPHIE: Yeah. It gives us an expiration date.
EMILIE: And I think millennial women are having our well earned midlife crisis. [LAUGHTER] Your book really fits neatly into that timeline for us, honestly. You write, you know, that we essentially have been seesawing erratically between, like, cultural dominance and backlash. And when we think about women's power in the 90s and 2000s, you can be anything you want to be. You brought me right back to watching the Barbie movie not too long ago, right? Which is a recent example. But I left the Barbie movie as a, as I consider myself a professional feminist, right? Someone who's been working in the feminist trenches now for over a decade.
I left the Barbie movie crying, and I could not stop crying. And my husband's like, what is going on? And I was like, I can't even go into the house yet. My in-laws were here babysitting for us. And I was like, I'm gonna need a second. Like, why is this so deeply upsetting to me? And it was because we had this cultural moment where, again, like, in the 90s, we were promised this utopia of, like, women, you can be anything you want to be. And we broke all the blockbuster records.
And at that same time, I knew what was happening with actual rights, right? With reproductive rights being stripped away with, like, actual structural collectivist gains that generations of feminists before us had worked so hard for were slipping away. And I found this, like, celebration of Barbie to be so hollow and so deeply, like, sad to me. Kind of like Sex and the City of like, all of us applauding a form of power that was not real and not as meaningful as the power we were actively losing, you know?
SOPHIE: Yeah. I think I should say I also consider myself a professional feminist. I love that term. I'm going to put it on my cards now.
EMILIE: [LAUGHTER] You should.
SOPHIE: I think one of the things I really deeply felt during the Barbie movie was we go through life and I think we're so conditioned to just feel things the way they are and to feel the familiarity and to maybe not question things always when, because they're just our lived experience and it's our daily lives, and we don't always get agitated by things. But when you have something like that movie and it flips the way that things are gender wise, so you suddenly have a female Supreme Court, a female president, like women running the show. Women in power.
There's a book by Naomi Alderman called The Power that I think was published around, I can't remember, sometime around 2018 maybe. And the premise of the book, it's a speculative novel, is that women suddenly evolve to develop a skein in their hands that allows them to electrocute people at will, which sounds like this sort of zany sci-fi setup. But what it actually does is reverse the balance of power because suddenly women can hurt men, they can defend themselves, but they can also choose to hurt people at will. And so you, she does a, Naomi Alderman does a really good job in the book of sort of thinking out this thought experiment. What would happen if suddenly women were the powerful ones, if they were physically dominant, if they could do anything they wanted, like, how would that society function?
And I felt the same way with the Barbie movie because you see this sort of, like you said, it's a utopia. It's this vision of a dream. And then it makes you realize how much you're lacking and how really what you're being offered are sort of crumbs at a time and they don't feel like enough, but they're also all you're going to get. So it's sort of a harsh wake up call. But at the same time, I mean, we were talking about the lovely packaging of these sort of bubblegum products and that movie was so beautiful. And there is a reason why girls love Barbies because. And boys, boys love Barbies too, because they're gorgeous and they're fun and they're fun to play with and their outfits are amazing.
EMILIE: Yeah, it is kind of reminding me. Your whole book is reminding me of the concept of problematic faves, a term that was introduced to me from my former co-host of, uh, the podcast Stuff Mom Never Told You, Bridget Todd. She said, look, we could do a whole series on problematic faves, the things that we love but are problematic. And really looking back at the 90s and 2000s, there's a lot of those examples.
So I guess my question for you is. And we have more to talk about, but how did you process all of this? Like you went back and excavated culture for us and there's a lot of problematic undercurrent to what we might remember with nostalgia and love. How should we think about that era and how should it inform how we think about the era we find ourselves in now?
SOPHIE: We can choose to think about that era any way that is helpful and productive for us. Like, for me, I had all these questions about why I think I had felt certain ways that I felt in my teens and twenties, why I put myself in certain situations, why, you know, I had such education in some ways, that had been geared to sort of not have me not put myself in the. Not believe all these messages and not behave in those ways. But they were so much less enticing than what was sort of surrounding us at the time in media. And the thing that surprised me going back is just how relentless it was. I mean, this was coming from everywhere. It was in music, it was in film, it was in art house cinema, it was in TV. It was everywhere. Like, as young women during that moment, we were. The message was unifying, and it was impossible to avoid.
So I think we can think about it in ways that feel productive. We can still obviously cherish the things that we love. But the idea that I keep coming back to, and I come back to it at the end of the book, especially thinking about more recent television and, like, the trope of the train wreck in TV and film is that there are still so few cultural examples of women in power where that power is not sexual in nature. There just aren't that many. I mean, people think about, like, Leslie Knope and Hillary Clinton are basically the two, and they're kind of the same person.
EMILIE: Yeah, interesting.
SOPHIE: Yeah, they're just aren't that many cultural examples. And culture, I think, is so powerful in terms of setting our dreams and our ambitions in ways before we can really think actively about things. It informs what we want, what we identify with. And so, you know, people keep asking me, what do we do? And in some ways, I have no idea. But in others, I do think that where we find ourselves now in this moment, where it feels like power, is very hard to grasp for women. Thinking about it culturally and what it might look like and what it could do for us might be a way forward. And one thing I keep thinking about, too, is, like, influence is a kind of power, and women are very good at using that and at doing things with it. So that's one theme. But there are so many others, and I would love for people to think about this who are much better at thinking creatively than I am.
EMILIE: Well, it is funny how you came to mention Instagram as such a culturally dominant pivot point or inflection point. And women dominate Instagram when it comes to influence. So how can we use that influence wisely to aspire to real power, not just sexual power, not just, even just like, the power of approval of others. Like, how can we actually create measurable progress in a world where our political gains are slipping away and are being rolled back? I think every day at this rate in America at least.
SOPHIE: I think it comes back to this idea of thinking collectively, thinking less about our own lives. Not that those are not important, and not that our own professional ambitions and dreams and our own homes and families are not important. They are. But I think what is good for women in general will also be good for women individually. And so I know people have laughed at the second wave idea of like consciousness raising me meetings, but, but I think there is something in that idea of like meeting. I mean, we do it all the time anyway. Like I meet with other mums from my kids school and you know, we have book clubs and stuff. But I think there is. It would be really fascinating to see women sit down and ask, ask themselves exactly those kinds of questions, like, what, what do I want? What am I doing this for? What is my aspiration? Like, what would make me feel powerful and what could I use that power to achieve?
EMILIE: Absolutely. In fact, you write culture gradually redefined feminism from a collective struggle to an individualist one when describing the 90s and 2000s. And I feel that deeply, right. Because Bossed Up started in March of 2013 when Lean In came out. And we've been riding that individualist, what you call sort of corporate feminist wave for over a decade. And I reflected a, a year or so ago, maybe now it's coming up on two years to see have we made any progress. And this hyper individualist approach doesn't yield much unless you already have a lot of privilege, right?
So for the most educated, for the most well off women, we've made some gains, but at what cost, you know, and we have not lifted all boats. The rising tide has not come in. And so, really we've been doing a lot of reflection here in the last year and a half about how can we take that approach of a more collectivist organizer approach, which was ironic because that's my background is political organizing. And how can we like, merge that with whatever wave of feminism we find ourselves in now? And so I think this is the era of women and political organizing. It's just a really, I don't know how you feel about this like, it frustrates me that it feels like women have to save the day.
You know, a lot of black women in America felt like when Kamala Harris was basically set up to have a very steep road ahead to the White House and did her damnedest to make it happen that do black women really need to save us all again? You know what I mean? I feel like there's this exasperation, at least for me. I'm a mom of two with, you know, not getting any sleep right now. Like, do we have to come back and get engaged politically to save the world from men running amok with it? Like, is that where we're at? I wonder how you interpret that.
SOPHIE: Yeah, I mean, I think also I was talking about this the other day, I was thinking, after Roe, like, why aren't we seeing more riots? Like, why aren't we seeing more furious riots in the street? Like, we're the majority of the population. Obviously we're not a monolith. We don't all want the same things. We don't all have the same backgrounds. But you would think there would be enough fury to sort of harness it. And I think one of the reasons why you didn't see it is because women are so busy.
There's a book, I think, by Jess Calarco called Holding It Together that is about women basically, in America, how they have filled all the gaps where the social safety net should be with their own work, with their own caring for children, and elderly relatives, and helping each other and how much the economy and the structure of American society is set up on, on women filling those roles. And it's really hard, right? We're all over tasked. We're all, many of us, really, really burned out. And this feels like one more thing to do.
EMILIE: Right? Where's the time for civic action is what I'm hearing.
SOPHIE: Yeah, but I don't know that it has to be that hard. And I do think, like I said before, there are ways of simply thinking about the question maybe, or making it more of an open topic. That could be a really good starting point. Just a subject that people talk about more and try to identify within themselves, what they actually like, if they really could change something, what would it be and how would they start?
EMILIE: Yeah, interesting. Well, I think we're starting that right here, right now.
SOPHIE: Right.
EMILIE: And so, I'm curious to hear how those listening kind of interpret this, because if we were to begin asking ourselves, okay, what would real power look like? And how can we raise girls and boys and, you know, folks across the gender spectrum as we enter our millennial middle age? You know, for those of us who are pursuing parenthood, how can we make this a different era for our girls than the one we're looking back on and going oh, wow. I thought that was empowering. But, you know, even the term empowerment, women's empowerment, raises an eyebrow now, doesn't it?
SOPHIE: Oh, my god. Every time I came across it while I was doing bit research, I started getting stress reactions because every time it came up, it was someone defending something that was absolutely not empowering. [LAUGHTER] And it was like, oh, this ad of this woman with her head cut off in a torture porn movie. It's empowering because she fights back. You're just like, no, the wonderborough ad with Eva Herzigová with her cleavage on display. That's empowering. And you're just like, no, none of this is what this word is supposed to mean.
EMILIE: Yeah, absolutely. And it does feel almost like I was being deprogrammed from a cult when I was reading your book.
SOPHIE: Oh, god, I'm so sorry.
EMILIE: Oh, yeah. That wasn't empowering, was it? And I'm like, you know, we. I don't know. I just. I feel like I'm arriving at this point in my life where I'm wondering, are we making the progress we think we are? And the answer is no. We're experiencing backlash. All movements for social progress take two steps forward and one step back. I get that. But, you know, making sure we're not taking five steps back right now is sort of where I'm at. And just to mention the fall of Roe and go back to that for a moment. The Democratic Party here in the US really made that central to their strategy in this last election cycle, and it didn't work. It did not work.
And so that outrage that we thought was there just isn't there. And I can't help but go back to the beginning of your book when you talk about the waves of feminism and how Gen Z is cringing over millennials, just like millennials were, you know, feeling embarrassment over their mom's version of feminism. We just. That girl against girl violence. That sort of way that we've all been conditioned to see other women as competition and not allies in this collective pursuit of justice is so destructive to our movement.
SOPHIE: Yeah. And also that sense of pragmatic adjustment to reality where no one can be, like, chronically stressed all the time about something, so you do adjust and you start to accept things. And, you know, for the generation who come after us who, like, maybe it will feel normal to sort of have to order, you know, Plan B on the internet from, you know, India or something, like, instead of being able to go buy it in a drugstore and that's horrific to me, but it might feel. It might feel normal. It's much harder to feel the loss of rights if you sort of haven't ever really felt having them, what it means to have them, what it means to need those services.
EMILIE: Absolutely. Wow. Sophie, there is so much more to talk about and thank you for joining us for this conversation. Hopefully, this dialogue is a step in the right direction. So for listeners who want to learn more about you and your work, where should they go to keep up with you?
SOPHIE: Thank you so much for having me and for reading the book and for thinking about it so thoughtfully. I really am so grateful. I am a staff writer at the Atlantic. My work is at theatlantic.com, I'm on Instagram, I'm Sophie Gilbert Writes. And my book Girl on Girl will be available, I think, in all bookstores and online on April 29th. So you can pre-order it or you can go buy it in person. And I will be so grateful.
EMILIE: Amazing. Well, congrats, Sophie. It really is such a triumph. If there's one last question I may squeeze in here. What did you take away from writing this book?
SOPHIE: Oh, this is such a good question. I had for a long time felt some shame, I think, about the way I behaved as a young woman and this book, writing this book and working on this book. I mean, it's not like I did anything really terrible, but, you know, you, you wish, I think I wish now that I am in my 40s, I wish I could sort of have, like, go back and pass on some of the things that I've learned and who to trust and who not to trust and what's important and what's not important and you know, things like that. And I think what was really wonderful about working on this book is just realizing that I could let all of that go because so much of it was not active choices that I was making.
It was stuff that I absorbed and it was hard not to absorb, frankly. I think all of us can feel that in some sense, like growing up when we did so, being able to sort of let some of that go. Not that I was, like, up at night thinking about it, but you know what I mean? Being able to let some of that go and realize that. Actually, I think we've all done pretty well considering, and we're talking about things now in a very productive way, and we're able to see things differently. And women today have language that we didn't have when I was a teenager. Like, we have so much of a sharper understanding of what's actually happening. So that clarity has been, has been really, really helpful.
EMILIE: I appreciate that and I share that experience wholeheartedly as I was reading.
SOPHIE: Thank you.
EMILIE: I hope listeners get their hands on a copy because it really is a trippy walk through time, honestly with you. And recognizing those cultural messages and how they influenced our own personal choices is such an empowering, empowering takeaway.
SOPHIE: Well, thank you so much. I'm so grateful.
EMILIE: Thank you. And now I want to hear from you. What do you make of what Sophie and I just talked about? What do you make of the Sex and the City era of the 1990s and 2000s? The Spice Girl version of women's power and bubblegum pop? I'd love to get your take. What do you remember about this time period with nostalgia? And what makes you kind of scratch your head and think, was that as empowering as I thought it was at the time?
Let's keep the conversation going as always in our online consciousness raising circles here at Bossed up, we've got the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook and the Bossed Up Group on LinkedIn where we keep the conversation going after each episode.
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And for more show notes and links to everything Sophie and I just talked about, head to bossedup.org/episode504 that's bossedup.org/episode504 and until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose and together let's lift as we climb.
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