Sophie Gilbert with Amanda Hess, Zoe Haylock and Anna Marie Tendler: Girl on Girl

Pulitzer Prize finalist and Atlantic critic Sophie Gilbert joins New York Times cultural critic Amanda Hess, Vulture’s Zoe Haylock, and bestselling author Anna Marie Tendler to celebrate the launch of Gilbert’s groundbreaking new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves — a searing examination of feminism at the dawn of the 21st century.

What happened to feminism in the 21st century? In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point — a growing tide of feminist energy crashed into a period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Why? In Girl on Girl, with literary precision and journalistic rigor, Gilbert taps into the dark side of nostalgia to examine what the film, music, television, fashion, and tabloid journalism of this era can tell us about the cultural regression at the turn of the century — and how these forces continue to ripple through our own era. The result is a devastating portrait of a time when a distinctly American blend of excess, materialism, and power worship collided with the culture’s most reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic impulses.

What was behind the American media’s hostility to women in the spotlight? How did the gaze of the paparazzi and the gleeful cruelty of early reality TV shape the era of social media and internet culture? In a special conversation between three renowned cultural critics — and a celebration of the launch of Girl on Girl — hear Gilbert, Hess, Tendler, and Haylock shed new light on the pop culture and politics of our moment by looking back to the dawning of the new millennium.