I started thinking about writing this book early in the 2020s, in a moment when time no longer seemed linear, progress no longer felt inevitable, and every ugly trend I’d come of age with as a Y2K teen had looped its way right back around.
Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign in 2016, followed by the explosion of testimony regarding sexual abuse and harassment that manifested as the #MeToo movement a year later, made certain realities self‐evident. The recreational misogyny of the aughts was back, this time with new technology and a cult figurehead, Andrew Tate, who’d once appeared on the reality series Big Brother while under investigation for rape.
Wives and girlfriends’ tabloid obsession had been reinvented for TikTok, where doll‐like women murmured in affectless monologues about living the financially dependent dream of a “soft, feminine life.” The body‐positivity movement, which had done its utmost to claim space for normal bodies in media and retail, was rapidly being shunted out of favour by the rise of weight‐loss medication and a whole new crop of women with whittled-down waists and jutting rib cages.
Everything old was new again, and yet things were also darker and more disengaged.
In 2022, the overturning of Roe v. Wade marked the most tangible rollback of women’s rights in half a century. Culturally, the motif of the moment was impossible to avoid, and it seemed to pinpoint how small our collective ambitions had become.
Women my age were suddenly trading friendship bracelets and decoding messages supposedly embedded in pop lyrics with the intensity of CIA cryptographers. We went on girl trips, traded girl talk, had “hot girl summers,” and picked at girl dinners. In 2023, I put on my best millennial‐pink blazer – the one I wear for panel discussions – and stood in a line of women all equally psyched to have our photos taken in an adult‐sized doll box, as if a moment of visual solidarity could make up for losing our reproductive rights.
The Barbie world, with its all‐female Supreme Court and hegemonic femininity, only made it clear that we were all still playing with scraps of power. At the end of 2024, once again, a competent, accomplished, empathetic woman was beaten in the US presidential race by a failed businessman and convicted felon whose platform was elevated by some of the most proudly vicious misogynists and white supremacists in modern memory. Who wouldn’t want to be a girl again, given the alternative?
So much of this malaise felt familiar. There was a moment at the beginning of the twenty‐first century when feminism felt just as nebulous and inert, squashed by a cultural explosion of jokey extremity and technicolor objectification. This was the environment that millennial women were raised in. It informed how we felt about ourselves, how we saw each other, and what we understood women as a collective to be capable of. It coloured our ambitions, our sense of self, our relationships, our bodies, our work, and our art. I came to believe that we couldn’t move forward without fully reckoning with how the culture of the aughts had defined us.
With this book, I wanted, from the position of a critic, to excavate how and why every genre of entertainment at this time –music, movies, TV, fashion, magazines, porn – was sending girls the same message, one that we internalized with rigor.
I wanted to understand how a generation of young women came to believe that sex was our currency, our objectification was empowering, and we were a joke. Why were we so easily persuaded of our own inadequacy? Who was setting the agenda? Why, for decades and even now, has virtually every cultural product been so insistently oriented around male desire and male pleasure?
I didn’t necessarily expect to find all the answers. My main goal was to reframe recent history in a way that might enhance my own perspective. But what became clear was how neatly culture, feminism, and history run on parallel tracks, informing, disrupting, and even derailing each other. I also became fascinated by the echoes – connections, repetitions, and trends across time and genres. They’re still reverberating now, as we continue to seesaw erratically between progress and backlash.
For more from Glamour UK’s Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.