Girl on Girl review by Josh

*** This review contains some NSFW content - it also cuts off at the end due to GR character limit.***

Feminism has always been a moving target. It has meant different things to different people, and no group can claim full ownership of the term. The issues of central concern to feminists have shifted over time as the aims of earlier generations—most notably suffrage—were realized. By 1990, when Girl on Girl begins, women had obtained (with very limited exceptions) formal legal equality throughout the developed world—an achievement that would have seemed unthinkable a century earlier.

However, as Susan Faludi argued in her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, these advances provoked a strong conservative reaction. Faludi maintained that conservatives sought to convince the public that the challenges faced by American women in the early 1990s were caused by feminism itself. Marilyn French expanded on this argument in 1992 with The War Against Women, and the idea of an “undeclared war” on women has remained a durable feminist trope ever since. In most feminist accounts, men are cast as the primary perpetrators of this war, though it has always been impossible to ignore the presence of vocal anti-feminist women. Girl on Girl partially flips this script: Gilbert appears to accept that there is a war on women, but she argues that many of today’s ground troops are other women.

The fundamental challenge feminism has faced as a coherent political movement for much of the past half century is that its core political aims had largely been achieved. Earlier feminist struggles focused on formal legal barriers: the right to vote, own property, obtain birth control, attend universities, and hold public office. These were problems of law. Once the law changed, the problem—at least in theory—was solved. Economic and social equality, by contrast, cannot be achieved by legislative fiat. As a result, these forms of inequality persisted long after the legal apparatus that sustained them was dismantled. A similar dynamic plays out in racial inequality, though with important differences.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 marked the end of the historical regime of explicit legal discrimination. The inclusion of sex as a protected class was not the result of feminist lobbying; it was added by conservatives in an unsuccessful attempt to derail the bill. For nearly a decade afterward, the provision was largely ignored. It was not until the 1970s that feminist agitation pushed the EEOC—the agency created to enforce the Act—to pursue sex-discrimination cases seriously. By the late 1980s, however, it was at least possible to imagine women working in nearly any occupation.

This brings us to the infamous gender pay gap. In 1990, the median woman’s income in the U.S. was roughly 71 percent of the median man’s—an increase of about 11 percentage points compared to thirty years earlier. This reflected women’s gradual entry (often in small numbers) into higher-paid and higher-status occupations previously dominated by men. There remains a persistent misunderstanding about the pay gap: that it is primarily caused by men being paid more than women for the same job. This is illegal and, from what I can tell, accounts for only a small portion of the gap. Most of it is driven by occupational segregation. Male preschool teachers do not earn more than their female peers—they all earn very little. Low-paid occupations such as early childhood education, cosmetology, and retail are disproportionately female, while high-paid occupations such as engineering and senior management remain disproportionately male.

Absent the abandonment of a market economy, the only viable way to close the pay gap would be for women to move en masse into highly paid, male-dominated occupations. Because such occupations are, without exception, highly competitive, this would necessarily mean that some men who might otherwise have held high-status positions would need to settle for lower-status work. The political environment that produced Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 was not so different from the one that produced Donald Trump’s victory thirty-six years later. Both men won landslide margins among white male voters, sufficient to overcome large losses among Black and Hispanic voters and either slim support or outright losses among women. Both ran on platforms promising to restore white male authority, perceived as having been eroded by gains made by women and racial minorities.

To many observers in the early 1990s, the United States appeared to be on a precipice. The ancien régime—in which political and economic power was overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of white men—seemed to be fading. At the same time, low-skilled blue-collar union jobs were disappearing, leaving many young men facing an uncertain future. They knew they could not replicate their fathers’ lives and saw few viable alternatives. Meanwhile, they observed women and minoriti