Girl on Girl attempts to chart the cultural misogyny and violence of the 1990s and 2000s through pop culture, offering a retrospective analysis that will feel familiar and validating to younger Gen X, millennials, and older Gen Z.

Unfortunately, it ultimately feels shallow and timid. While useful as a compendium of the biggest pop culture moments of the era, the information won't be new to anyone who has taken part in modern feminist discussions.

The book's argument focuses on how shock value became the quickest way to gain attention and profit in the digital age, with the rise of the internet, digital cameras, reality television, and social media.

Particularly thought-provoking was Gilbert's paralleling of American culture's obsession with violent revenge and humiliation to American political events such as Abu Ghraib. Gilbert shows that America's cultural appetite for humiliation and revenge reflected the same voyeuristic cruelty as its foreign politics, intrinsically tying the personal to the political.

By linking pop culture and American politics, Gilbert plays on the double entendre of "Girl on Girl" by detailing how girls and women were forced into certain categories by the constantly shifting culture, often resulting in outward displays of internalized misogyny that harmed everyone.

The book's argumentation is sound, but it could have gone even further. Her extended focus on violent porn is emotionally evocative but dominates the conversation, leaving the rest of her analysis feeling shallow.

There's also a serious lack of inclusion of intersectional perspectives, especially lacking in queer and trans thought, something that the author hand-waves away in the introduction as "the culture was hetero-and-cis-normative at the time so there's not much to say". She does take care to talk about how Black women were especially targeted during this time, but not in any sort of depth beyond gesturing vaguely at misogynoir. Glaringly, Gilbert critiques porn without engaging sex workers themselves, those most actively resisting the industry’s abuses.

By the end, Girl on Girl falls back on a frustratingly liberal framework, positioning Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris as figures that ‘could have helped reset the culture,’ implying their losses stemmed purely from conservative misogyny, or that their girlboss imperialism would somehow lead to the dismantling of the systems Gilbert critiques.

Girl on Girl succeeds as a digestible timeline of pop culture misogyny but ultimately feels politically lacking. By omitting marginalized voices, and concluding with a liberal framework that valorizes figures like Clinton and Harris, Gilbert undercuts her own critique of capitalism and #Girlboss feminism. It’s a useful primer, but one that stops short of offering the structural analysis and radical imagination needed for feminism’s future.