Sophie Gilbert:
I’ve always understood feminism personally just to mean, do you believe that women are equal human beings, and do you believe that they should have equal rights to and society under the law? And that seems kind of simple to me, but I’ve understood through my research, it’s not, you know, it’s not always been so simple.
One of the questions I wanted to understand in my book was how I think music is a useful example, how in the music of the 1990s, went from this really kind of ferocious activist moment of the early 90s, so many women in rock and roll making really impassioned music about, you know, about womanhood, about subjects like sexual assault, really political music in lots of ways, how went from that energy to pop stars of the 2000s who were sort of very highly sexualized, didn’t really speak up for themselves, weren’t allowed to in many ways, and who then were really targeted by media across the course of the 2000s, sort of wanting to understand how that shift happened.
It also came to tell me a little bit about what happened in feminism during the 90s as well. And this shift from third wave feminism at the beginning of the 90s and things like the Year of the Woman and Anita Hill’s Senate testimony towards post feminism, which was less an ideology, I would say, than a kind of trend in media that told women that they’d achieved everything they ever needed to, that there was no longer any point in protesting or in activism. They should just go out and celebrate all the freedoms that they’d achieved.
And often that meant spending money, which is why I think it was appealing to lots of people. But that shift from third wave feminism to post feminism seemed to really play out in the culture of the 90s in ways that profoundly impacted what happened after.