As female achievement and visibility increased in higher education, the media, politics, and more, some people grew tired of being lectured by feminists and began to wonder: Do we even need them anymore' This attitude made up a dominant strain of popular thinking and discussion in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And as the defiant, gritty rage of third-wave feminism scrabbled for purchase, a new era of 'girl power' was rising up. As the Atlantic writer Sophie Gilbert tells it in her new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, young women of this time 'came to believe that sex was our currency, our objectification was empowering, and we were a joke.' Gilbert's book skewers porn, reality TV, and celebrities for their complicity in relegating women to the role of sex object and for warping feminism into a debate over individual choices instead of collective action. 'What I remember from my own life during this period from the 2000s was that...
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