Wordfest presents Sophie Gilbert

Wordfest presents Sophie Gilbert

Don’t miss your chance to hear Atlantic staff writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert and find out why everyone’s talking about her latest book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves.

Heather O'Neill, one half of The O'Neill Reads talk show at Wordfest's Imaginairium, gives Girl on Girl her highest recommendation: “This book had me transfixed from page one. Gilbert explores the postfeminist movement. How feminism moved in the 90s into a period of girlish objectification, where young women and girls were embracing their objectification and commodification, as though it were empowering. If we want to situate this in terms of artists: How did we go from the raw rage and energy of PJ Harvey and Bjork to the Lolita-esque consumerism of Spice Girls and Taylor Swift?”

Explore these and other Big Ideas with Gilbert when the conversation kicks off at 7 PM, hosted by Wordfest’s Creative Ringleader Shelley Youngblut. This show also includes an audience Q & A and book signing, fueled by Shelf Life Books. You can place an order for Girl on Girl here.

We are grateful to Penguin Random House Canada for making it possible to connect you with Sophie Gilbert.

About Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves.

Named an anticipated title for 2025 by LitHub, The Washington Post, and the Toronto Star,  this is a blazing critique of how early-aughts pop culture turned women and girls against each other—and themselves—with disastrous consequences. An urgent read that addresses questions around the current regression of feminism.

When did feminism lose its way? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of reactionary cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress. 

Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at The Atlantic and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, provides one answer, identifying an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the energy of third-wave and “riot grrrl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Gilbert mines the darker side of nostalgia, training her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the unattainable aesthetic of Victoria’s Secret ads and explicit music videos to a burgeoning internet culture vicious towards women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period’s dominant themes back to the explosion of internet porn, tracing its widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness. 

Gilbert paints a devastating picture of an era when a distinctly American confluence of excess, materialism, and power-worship collided with the culture’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amidst a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and how it continues to shape our world today.

About Sophie Gilbert

Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she writes about television, books, and popular culture. She won the 2024 National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism and was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. She is also the author of On Womanhood: Bodies, Literature, Choice. Before joining The Atlantic in 2014, she was the arts editor at Washingtonian, where she won three Society of Professional Journalists awards for arts reporting and criticism. Gilbert has previously written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Republic. She lives in London.

Website: sophie-gilbert.com
Instagram/Threads: @sophiegilbertwrites
Bluesky: @sophiegilbert.bsky.social

About Host Shelley Youngblut

Shelley Youngblut is the CEO & Creative Ringleader of Wordfest. She was the recipient of the 2020 Calgary Award for Community Achievement in the Arts and the 2018 Rozsa Award for Arts Leadership. She also won the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Western Magazine Awards. Youngblut was the founding editor of Calgary’s award-winning Swerve magazine and has created magazines for ESPN, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Nickelodeon, Western Living, and The Globe and Mail. She was also a former pop-culture correspondent for ABC World News Now and Canada AM.

Facebook @ShelleyYoungblut 
Instagram/Threads: @youngblutshelley
Bluesky: @youngblut.bsky.social 

Be Curiouser

• The Severance Twist I Can’t Forgive. -The Atlantic
• The Story That’s Holding Taylor Swift Back. -The Atlantic
• #Me Too: What’s Next. -BBC World News
• Essential cultural criticism. But brace yourself—it ain’t pretty. -Kirkus Reviews