If I Speak - 76: How porn went mainstream and changed everything w/ Sophie Gilbert

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

*Support the show by copping the If I Speak Baggu bag – it’s ethically made, comes in two colours and is available from shop.novaramedia.com* Ash and Moya talk to Sophie Gilbert about the pornification of the ’90s and ’00s – an era when riot grrl gave way to girl power, the supermodel was replaced by […]

Hello and welcome to, if I speak, I'm Ash Sarker, with me as always is. Moylaude McLean clocking in for business. Clocking in, you know what, don't make it sound. like it's a shift. This is a vocation. A passion. It's a passion that I invoice for and therefore I think it does count as work. Passion that I invoice for. We are not alone. We are joined by Sophie Gilbert, author of Girl on Girl, a dissection of the pop culture of the 2000s and what it did to us politically, socially and the ways in which feminism seem to go from this dominant powerhouse in the 80s and 90s to post 9-11 being a, I hope that's a fair assessment of what the book is

about. Sophie, how are you doing? Oh, I'm good. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I've been really thrilled for this one. Yay. Cannot wait to make you regret it. Are you ready for our traditional icebreakers? Yes, so ready. Born ready. Great. So this is just a way of helping the audience to get to know you in a way which is both profound and also easily digestible.

So question one, if you had to choose one 2000's reality show to participate in, which one would you pick? Oh, God. Might, and this is a... a very like this is a very flawed box of um things to choose for i might be america's next top model um because as as as as horrific as it could be and as mortified as i would be to be weighed and then waxed to stand in front of the panel of judges and have them tell me all the ways in which i'm failing at womanhood um at least they gave them something to do do you know what i mean

i don't think i would last very long in a house say with flavor flave or um i would certainly were not lost in The Bachelor. I'd have no patience for that whatsoever. And then I don't think I would care for being yelled at by Gillian Michaels on the biggest loser. So yeah, maybe, or maybe Big Brother, actually, that might, that might be a bit. Like early days of Big Brother with Sada and Craig and original cast, maybe I could make it through that one. See, Big Brother is the one that I don't think that I could do at all. Too, too intrusive. You know, the idea of early morning farts being picked up by a microphone is just too distressing. to countenance that's the bit where I'm like oh I think I would get through because I would just

decide that I would cook for everyone and then they would need me like I would just take over the kitchen and I would be in charge of meal prep and that way I could sort of live with what I was eating but also be an integral part of the community that no one could really fight with or question I think it's so interesting that you picked the ones that rely on either you know friendship with other women or just friendship in general and rejected all of the ones that involve romantic interaction with men and for that reason you are now promoted if i speak third host because that is exactly what we would do what an honour wow i didn't even that wasn't intentional but i think yeah that's it was unconscious i i picked up on it straight

away because i'm like no love island i'll never do love island never no no question two question two um were there any two thousand's fashion or makeup trends that you can remember participating in or that you can care to admit to participating in. Yes. So this has somehow not come up during the promotional tour until now. But when I was 17, I was in a steps video. That's exactly the response I was hoping for. Thank you.

Which was what? It's called Stomp. A lesser known steps. Yeah. So I did a lot of acting at school, and I was in a youth theatre company that my school kind of ran on the side. and they had a casting notice for girls who were tall and vacant.

Isn't that cute? Wow. What a way to be chosen. Were you like, I'm vacant? No, I didn't tell me. For some reason, my drama teacher was like, Sophie. So I got to go be in an extra in a steps video. And yeah, they were all very, I'm chatted with H.

And the reason why I'm coming to this now is because I wore a bright red handkerchief top. And I had, if you look at it now, I have a butterfly. Clips. I have glitter. It's like, it was 2001, I think. So it was like very, very Y2K fashion. Wow. This is very important to me because everybody clip your hands. Yeah. Steps was the first concert I got taken to. As a child. I don't think I chose it, but you know when your sort of like family wants to attach you to something. I was more of an S Club 7 kid. Yeah. But we did have the Step CDs and I was taken to Steps as my first concert. Wow. So I know Stomp. We're gonna snap. You know the dance moves. Not very good at the dance moves

Like I said, I was more S Club 7 I like natural I was more of a classical child I understand I step did have some bangers though Like when you go back now and you listen Good, good pop music I only know the like cover of

Tragedy that they did And it had this head move Tragedy And then there was also the like What's the one where It was like cowboy Carter Cowboy Carter You know the one I'm talking about

It's um Roo skin, baby, it's with me, and baby. I'm session. It was full line dancing. Like, I definitely knew all the choreography to that one. We used to line dance. And I'm old enough that we literally did line dance to it at parties. We still had a discuss.

It's nice. Don't worry. I think we're only like a couple years down. Run it back. It was a classic. Run it back. All right. Incredible.

Incredible. Great. Great anecdote. All right. Final question. If your personality were a goop wellness product, which would it be? Oh, the one thing I'm really a sucker for because a dermatologist told me to start using it when I was, I think, just in my 30s, and I have ever since, and I do think it's made a difference

is vitamin C. So probably I would be some kind of vitamin C serum, but I know that's very boring. I'm not going to be like a jade egg or a, like, I don't think I'm quite boring. So, yeah, probably like a nice under-moisterise a serum. Moyer, if you were a Goop Wellness product, which one would you be? I could see you as a vaginal egg. Squatting, waiting. I don't know the catalogue of Goop well enough to be brutally honest.

They have a lot of like powders. So you could be like a moon juice. You know those weird like $50 juice things that you mix into smoothies? I think I am just a serum of some sort. I mean, the wellness products I like most of the ones that make you look like you just put your face in a pile of goop. So I think, I think I would also vitamin C. My God. The way it fades my dark marks, wow.

It really does work. Yeah. It really does work. You can't have it first, guys. And it doesn't have to be expensive. You can just get a regular old, like. I'm on the super drug. Yeah, exactly.

Boot super drug high street. Ash, what would you be? You're a niig or not? I think that I'm fundamentally too on. comfortable with having a body to be a vaginal egg. I wish I could be, I wish I could be, you know, I'm a vagina egg, but I'm afraid I'm not. I think some kind of scented candle. Oh, I think.

I aspire to be warm and fragrant. Aw. You are warm and fragrant. That is actually, you're the scent mask. But this is actually quite telling, like what kind of scent, what fragrance would you be? For a candle, I love a, I don't know how to say this word. So it's the first time I'm trying to say it out loud. Bergamo.

Bergamot. And tea scents. I love a black tea or a green tea or a white tea scent for a candle. Anything with like tobacco or leather notes. Disgastin. Nice bitter orange and the roly for me. Oh. Right.

I love that. So they smell amazing. Right. We've got book to talk. The best thing about this book is I came across it completely organically. I know, they told me this. You were in foils. I was in foils and I was just finishing doing a talk for someone else.

And I was like 8pm and I walked through foils and unfortunately when I walk through a bookshop, I find it very hard not to buy books. And I picked up girl on gun and I was like instantly I have to have this. I must have this. And it did not disappoint. It was basically an intersection of everything I've ever wanted to read. Oh my God! Which was great. So in girl on girl, just a quick summary, which Ash did earlier, but I'll reiterate.

So you're trying to explore why feminism, which was moving at such a great pace. We were going really well, a good lick. At the 1980s, early 1990s, lost its bite, fell off a cliff. How could we get to a place today where women extoll the virtues of marrying rich as a feminist act and frame cosmetic surgery as an empowering mood? and you write at the very beginning the more research that you did the more things came back to porn

which I felt was such an interesting to say because it was like I tried to get away from this thing but the porn was just there yeah um yeah so I just want to quote a little um abridged quote which you say the influence of porn charges through music in the opening institute of Lil Kim's hardcore in Fiona Apple's unsettling video for criminal

it's an art and fashion in Jeff Coons' explicit Made in Heaven series in David Bailey in Rankin's 2003 photographic series, the pair nicknamed Pussy Show. Terry Richardson, the Y2K obsession with the visible G string. Porn is discernible in the perplexing sexual relationship between Hannah and Adam on girls. I had to put the last line in because I know half our audiences have gone,

we're going to talk about girls. Okay, great. And I should say that the subtitle of this book is how pop culture turned a generation of women against themselves. So the book does cover everything from girls to horror movies like hostile. It even gets to photographs of torture by US soldiers in Iraq. And it, as I said, is basically an intersection of all my interests. It's so up to date, you've got a Zempic in there, Monjaro.

Crammed it in at the end. Well done. Cramed it, but amazingly done. So reading it, I was struck by this question. You know, there's so many ways, like, routes we can go down. We'll start with porn. Hopefully we'll get to some of the others because there's lots I'd like to cover. But, you know, the influences of porn is so clear in shaping the representative. of women in this cultural sphere. But is porn the cause of the backlash? Or is it just the vehicle for the patriarchal backlash? That's what I wanted to know.

Like, first of all, do you think porn alone was quelling the women's movements or was it a vehicle for something else? What was going on? Talk us through that bit of the 80s and 90s. The thing I really think, I sort of came to think, after all the research, is that nothing in the book is directly connected in terms of did this thing.

spark this as a consequence but everything is diffusely connected um and initially it is funny because I came up with a title before I wrote the book proposal it was sort of lying awake at night you know when you lie awake and you fret I was fretting um thinking about what I really wanted to take on a big project and I was trying to make sense of a lot of things in my head and I just came to the title girl on girl it seemed to encapsulate a lot of ideas that were sort of running through my mind in terms of enter a female conflict and women's identity and pop culture. So I wrote it down on my phone. You know the next day, normally you look at the nights you write on your phone in the

middle of the night and they're complete like nonsense garbled words. But this one made sense. And I knew that it was sort of winking at porn, but I had no idea that porn would be such a major topic in the book. But the more research I did, as you noted, like the more everything seemed to come back to porn having such a massive influence on the culture of the era. and especially when I I thought initially I would focus on the 2000s

but so much happened in the 90s that seemed really crucial to this period and all the questions that I was asking about like how did this happen how do we have Terry Richardson making a coffee table book of pictures of him putting his penis next to passed out models like how did that happen and also it was on display in an art gallery in New York

and lots of famous people were there a lot of the seem to come back to shifts that happened in the 90s sort of the impact of AIDS I think was really it was really crucial in terms of portrayals of sexuality and culture. The 90s was this period of kind of tabloid, insane tabloid scandal.

I mean, things like Bill Clinton, but also I personally learned what a blowjob was when Hugh Grant was arrested on Hollywood Boulevard. And I was staying with my cousins and I had to sort of ask my aunt the next morning, you know, what did he do? And she finally told me and then I just died shrunk into myself

because I was so mortified by being told about sex by my aunt. Bill Clinton was my first celebrity impression that I knew how to do. No. So I was about six. And because I could remember him really well being like, I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. That's really good.

And so I was like six and just like doing it around the house all the time. And mom was like, well, I guess she's watching the news. Wow. So yeah, I mean, but you see how it sort of filters out into the cultural water that we were all kind of, the air that we were breathing and were being raised in this very like, kind of seamy environment of tabloid scandals in the 19. And in terms of porn, did it directly influence the ways in which women were perceived? I don't know.

But I have come to think that you cannot have something become as influential culturally as porn did during this moment and have it often, not exclusively, not exclusively, but often portray women and are degrading and hateful. And even if you just look at the power dynamics, like porn is usually a field in which women are catering to men. and men are the ones whose pleasure is paramount, whose pleasure is depicted on screen. Like, how could that not then influence the dynamics of how we all went on to live our lives? So, like, directly, I'm not sure, diffusely, absolutely, like everything was impacting everything else.

And that's really what I wanted to try to chart in the book as you go through the different chapters and the different genres. Do you think that rise of porn, though, that was a direct backlash? Like, the pornification, so what I'm trying to get is, like, the pornification of women in the cultural sphere. you talk about Snoop Dog having those women on leads.

We're talking about, you know, the tabloid coverage. I remember very distinctly, one of my first sort of like formative sexual awakening moments was reading about Mel B having a threesome with strippers in toilets in the news of the world or like Robbie Williams getting like fully naked in a video. Yeah. Like those are two moments that stick in my head and they were very seamy, very like seedy. And do you think this like pornification, this degradation of women in the public sphere that became art, became culture, became Terry Richardson, is that a direct backlash to

the feminist movements that were going on in like the late 80s, the 90s? You talk about riot girl in that and how that gave way to this completely sanitised girl power movement by the spice girls. Was porn just the way that people were like, actually, this is so violent, this is so like demeaning. What a great way to respond to what's going on. I don't know if it was that intentional. I do think there was... Yeah, unconscious. Yeah, there were backlashes throughout the 90s to amounts of power that women had gained in culture.

And I think you can see it really clearly in fashion. You had the supermodels, the Christie's and the Naomi's and the Cindy Crawfords and they all worked collectively and they were paid enormously well. And Christy would say, I'm not going to do this show unless you hire Naomi. And they were really like bonded together as a group.

And the fashion designers came to really resent I think the profiles that they had, the fame that they had. And especially the power that they had like what would what they would demand for themselves not demand that makes it sound like they're entitled but like what they asked for um and so there was this push in fashion to sort of shift those women out and to replace them with much younger models like that's when you start to see 16 year old kate moss arrive in the era of heroin sheik and these kind of very frail kind of smaller physically but also smaller in terms of personalities these girls who are

much more pliable and easy to control um and then in music as well as you just mentioned you had this really political force of rock music in the 90s and punk music and riot girl and women who were very vocal about sexual assault and who were absolutely had political intentions with their music and the slogan girl power initially came about because two of the women in bikini kill wanted to put two words together that would be a provocation. Like the idea is like what two words can we put together that no one would normally pair and girl and power came together as and it was supposed to make people think like why don't girls have power?

Why do why do those words not come together? it. And then, of course, the spice girls reclaimed it. And it kind of, it became a lot more celebratory and it lost a lot of its meaning in the process. But porn, I think, we've always wanted to watch people have sex and to see sexual imagery. Like, there are cave paintings of giant fallacies. And the minute that the printing press came out, someone started making lithographs of sexual imagery. Like, it's just, it's our innate impulse, I think. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that whenever technology advances, and you can see it now with AI, they're such a gold rush

and there's such an immediate shift to make money from new technology and especially in terms of to make money by using it for sexual imagery or to sort of sexually gratify men in some way which I think we're seeing now with chatbots but

the figures on point one of the figures I found out that blew my mind was that when VHS was launched in the mid-70s at launch 75% of the tapes that were being made were pornographic because that was just like this people just, I think

I think grasped very early on that people wanted to watch sex in their own homes. They didn't want to go to movie theatres. They didn't want to be risk being embarrassed or to go to these places that were really kind of sleazy and surrounded by other men. They wanted to watch porn in their own homes and we always have. So I do think a lot of the rise in production of porn was about making money more than it was directly about subjugating women and subjugating women just happened to be what people responded to.

I mean, in the book you write about Sasha Gray. And I remember Sasha Gray and I also remember going on the Tyra Bank show for Tyra to like read out the names of some of the, some of the films she was in, like, anal destruction. And like, you know, there was this sort of staging on conventional broadcast media where you'd bring the porn performer on to sort of do a bit of concern trolling, right? And using the extremity of what this performer's doing as a way. of getting more people to tune into your program. And you're seeing the exact same thing

happen right now with Bonnie Blue. You're seeing that happen with the Channel 4 documentary and I was really interested in the way in which the Times were using their interview with Bonnie Blue to push for new subscribers. They were paying for advertising to push this interview. But you write about Sasha Gray and I remember her very well

because the things that she were doing were certainly atypical, shall we say? that considered atypical in terms of the median sexual repertoire, so choking, gagging, spitting, vomiting, pitting, like the stuff which is degrading, right? The erotic thrill is from the fact it's degrading for those who enjoy that kind of thing. And the way in which she was talking about it is like, well, this is what I genuinely want to do. It genuinely turns me on. And I remember that both at the time, and I think for quite a long time afterwards,

this was the same argument that feminists would have, which is, well, if a woman wants to do it, who are you to say that she can't or that it's inherently degrading or bad or wrong? And for me, anyway, what that shows is just the extent to which liberal individualism had poisoned everyone's mind, because the only way you could think of engaging with this issue is what's going on in the head of the person who's doing it and not what's happening when this becomes a dominant image in pornography and then becomes part of the mainstream pornographic repertoire. I mean, slapping, choking, gagging. This is considered ordinary in porn now, whereas maybe 20 years ago it wasn't so ordinary. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly it. All of the sort of public-facing

feminism, not that there was a lot in the 2000s, but it was very very. individualistic. It was all about fulfilling your own individual needs and, like, getting that bag and, like, making yourself powerful and successful no matter what the impact on other women might be. And you can see that ethos really in reality television, I think, better than anywhere else. But you're exactly right. Like, it sort of was presented to us as a matter of freedom. And what was lost in that was any understanding of what might happen when this kind of treatment of women becomes normalized. And that's not to be, like, sex negative or to shame anyone, but at the end of the book, there's a really fascinating

study by a sociologist that finds that the best correlation between women's status in a society is basically how that society feels about romantic love. And that's not to say romantic love is the most important thing. But generally, if you live in a society that values romantic love, it means that it perceives women as fully fledged human beings. It sees them as worthy of honour, not honour, but like worthy of respect and care and attention and love. And that sounds quite simple, but

it just makes me think like this, when you have something like this kind of degradation of women becoming so mainstream, so quickly, but also in a cultural forum that is enormously popular that no one talks about, it does filter into our subconscious in terms of what we think women deserve. And another interesting sort of example of why that matters is I think you can see romantic fiction becoming so popular at the moment

because it is still this genre that affirms that women deserve love, women deserve care, women deserve respect and women are like worthy of having what they want. And that we just don't see that very often in culture. I think that's such a fascinating point because you're also watching the narratives of romantic. Like rom-coms are back. Romanticity is huge. This whole, it's not a new genre, but it's exploded. In a way, I, a committed rom-com reader, have not seen for many years.

We're seeing a renaissance. And meanwhile, at the same time, I don't think, as you say, that's disconnected from the rise in overt misogyny, both practiced by men and by women, that I'm witnessing on the reality TV shows. Like this series, I don't know, you probably did not watch this year's UK Love Island. I did not. I'm so sorry. No, no, I was sucked in by TikTok because what was happening was so distressing.

I was like, I have to see what's going on. What happened? I've not. I've not watched it. Okay. So actually, both seasons of Love Island this year, US and UK, feed perfectly into what Sophie is talking about. So the US one, I've never seen such loveless seasons of Love Island. The actual romantic connections were so few and far between. They were constantly plagued by these, you know, allegations of people are game playing, people are doing this and that. But the main thing that came out of the US Love Island is this is one couple that, that, became so popular. They weren't even a couple. They didn't become a couple until the final week. The audience basically shipped them into becoming a couple. And there's so many accounts dedicated to them. There's so many.

All the people who identify as being on Book Talk also have this couple as like their Stan couple, is how they refer to it in the, and they attach so many narratives that you see attached to sort of romantic see. And they say it opening, they're like, this is my ship. every day and they're like making edits they're doing all these things and i've never seen it to that level like i've seen it low level it's almost like um what you would see coming out of you know the twilight era or the romantasy era um that level of like shipping is of these are fictional people like real investment real real investment but also investment beyond even the parasocialists it's this

whole fantasy world they've built around this one connection which they they actually sort of engineered they were so popular and people were making like there's chemistry that i swear the producers engineered ways to get them together. At one point they were voted out. Oh my God. Separately. And they were with other people too. And the producers brought them back and said, you can come back to the island if you couple up. And then that didn't work. And then they got rid of the person that one of the people were in. And then they had to couple up. And then finally they were like, oh, maybe we should see what it is. And then they learned about how popular they were. And now they're a couple. It's actually fascinating to watch how this was willed into being, this love story.

They're like, oh, it's a perfect love story. And then on the UK version, the misogy it's misogyny levels that I haven't seen since about season one or two oh god the level of the level of degradation the level of sort of men just completely compulsive lying to the faces of the women and the women aiding and abetting it you talked at the start about interwoman conflicts and I'm really interested in what sparked you to write this book like what was the intra-woman conflict you were seeing because I want to talk about the post-feminism sensibility identify which is one of my favorite passages of the whole book book. But yeah, tell me about this interim conflict you were seeing because I see it everywhere,

but you articulated in such a way. I was like, oh, yes, that's it. Yeah, I think a lot of it, we sort of seen different iterations of it throughout different eras. And a lot of it you see now on TikTok was originally around on Twitter and then before that in reality television. But it's, it's partly main character syndrome. It's partly this idea of scarcity. Like only a few of us can thrive and survive in this sort of post-feminist hellscape. So, like, for you as a woman to get what you need to succeed, to be powerful, to be rich, other women have to fall. And I think that is a sort of, it's an archetype. It's a sort of structure that we absorbed from reality TV and have never really moved on from.

This sort of pitting of women in competition against each other for sometimes the affections of a man, sometimes for the grand prize of, you know, money or social media influencers or whatever. whereas what we've always seen throughout feminism in all its different iterations is that the gains that we make and the fights that we win are ones that we win when we are able to put disagreement aside and work together and realize that we are not working for our own success or our own power we're working to elevate all other women and the benefits will come it's fighting for like the rising tide that lifts all boats exactly and for a much more collectivist vision of feminism where we really are caring for each other and and thinking about women as a as a as a powerful force, a united force. I mean, that doesn't mean we can't disagree and that doesn't mean that we won't, but that is the only time we've ever really been able to make gains that have made tangible improvements in the lives of women. Well, I want to read out this passage, the post-feminist sensibility one, where you're quoting the sociologist Rosalind Gill, because it's so good. So in 2007, the sociologist Rosalind Gill theorized that post-feminism was less an ideology than a sensibility. It's identifying features included.

the obsessive monitoring of one's own and other women's bodies, a preoccupation with self-discipline and self-surveillance, a makeover paradigm, an emphasis on the individual gratification over collective effort, a belief in gender essentialism, the understanding that men and women are intrinsically and naturally different, and a preference among women to present themselves as active sexual subjects rather than passive objects.

And do you know, you talk about that in the context of reality TV, but when I read that, what I thought was TikTok. Yeah. Wow. Do you go on TikTok much? Do you see that much there? I tried to go on TikTok as all good people promoting a book do, and it just pried my elder millennial brain. Like, I'm still, I think I'm just too old or I'm too slow, or I can't move that fast. It was like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and I got overwhelmed very quickly. I am on Instagram, so I do get, you know, I get all the reels about Lindsay Lowen's face and all the horrible content that is served up to women in their 40s. But no, but I think you're exactly right.

And I sort of know enough of TikTok and I do venture on and I try and follow the trends that are breaking and things that people are doing on there because it is culture now, like it is mass culture. And so if you want to look at what people are talking about, what people are thinking, what people are interested in, it's all there. But yes, exactly, like so much of what was first made tangible

about post-feminism and media through reality television is now all TikTok, Instagram. Because we're our own reality stars now. No, we exactly are. And we all, I think reality television in some ways taught us how to be, how to think about ourselves that way. Like it really set this kind of self-surveillance model where we got used to the idea that we might, you know, like live stream our hair appointments or like the idea that we're

all the own, we're the stars of our own social media feeds just kind of waiting to be discovered. It really set that ideal. One of the things that you talk about in the book, which I thought was really interesting, was that 9-11 really changed what people engaged with in terms of pop culture, what was being made, the sense of what it was that people wanted. In what ways do you see there having been a shift, you know, sort of like pre-9-11 to post-9-11, of how women were being depicted in reality television or other forms of pop culture?

Yeah, I would say 9-11 itself wasn't so much. of an influence on depictions of women, but it did directly influence the two kinds of trends in media, where I think people realized right away that everyone wanted to be distracted and that the best way to distract people was to serve them. I interviewed a psychologist, a media psychologist during COVID, to ask her why everyone was suddenly streaming contagion. And she said that during a sort of mass traumatic event like that, there are two things that people do. They either try to anesthetize themselves with like very comforting fluff. So like, you know, you watch einogot and make something, make a cosmopolitan on a Instagram feed. Or you watch a

sitcom you've seen 27,000 times and you know it's safe and you're comforted and everything's fine. Or other people lean fully into the horror. So they want to know exactly what kind of situation they're in and they stream things like contagion or like outbreak or movies that are sort of much more connected with what they're living through at the time. So people after 9-11, towering inferno, for example. And so the idea, the idea with 9-11, I mean, you do see this intentional push by producers to suddenly put a lot of reality competitions,

especially like kind of pro-American reality competitions that were quite kind of jingoistic, like American Idol premiered the year after 9-11, for example. But there was this real shift towards reality fluff. But then on the other hand, I think it was hard to move on from a lot of the violence that people had seen in imagery. in America for the first time for many people.

And so a lot of that sort of not necessarily violent imagery, but a sense of more darkness and the people who were leaning towards danger, I think there was a lot of that sort of appearing in culture at the time that people also were drawn to. And certainly when the images from Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison came out, they were a sort of real watershed moment because they showed that Americans were capable of astonishing acts of sadistic cruelty. And the imagery, I think, was very hard to unsee.

And so that sort of got absorbed into people's imaginations in a very tangible way. I mean, one of the things that you suggest when you're writing about Abu Ghraib is that whether these American soldiers were conscious of it or not, they were making porn in a way that lots of people at the time were making poor. Like this was sort of a boom era of like so-called amateur pornography. You also had girls gone wild, which was this idea that, you know, normal girls on spring break could be cajoled once you get them drunk enough into disappearing into a tour bus and, you know, doing sex acts on camera. And I was interested in that idea that that porn was informing Abu Gray

because I suppose for me, and I wonder what you make of this, it's difficult for me to see the influence of porn and that era of porn specifically on Abu Ghraib when sexual degradation and taking photos of torture as a form of trophy that's been a part of what soldiers do as an occupying power since the invention of recording technologies. Yeah, I think it was less that they were intentionally making porn

that they were doing what porn was also doing at the same time which was like affirming male dominance and particularly a kind of sexualized male dominance as the preeminent form of power in that moment. I mean, when I went back and looked at the images, I'd obviously seen them before, but without having the cultural context to kind of understand really what was happening.

When I went back, all I saw was the photographs of Terry Richardson because the one guard who features in a lot of them, he has these aviator glasses, he has a mustache, and he's always like grinning and doing the thumbs up, which is like the standard Terry Richardson, pose from photography of that era and if you compare some of the abbey grave photos to images and terry world they're they're sort of identically posed in some ways like if you go back terry world is a book of coffee table photographs that it's a coffee table book of photography

that terry richards didn't released in 2005 often where he's the subject his penis is out he's holding his penis or like he's positioning it next to a model in some cases he seems to be choking female models with his penis um he's giving the thumbs up and he's wearing these glasses and he has a sort of mustache and it it's this kind of winking ironic look what I'm doing look what I'm getting away with vibe that I think is very much prevalent in those same images from Abbey Grabe and there's a sexualized humiliation of their subjects that is obviously different because they're prisoners, they're Iraqi men but the vibe is the same the intention is the same it's to humiliate the people who are being brutalized while affirming the

power of the people who were taking the pictures and being celebrated by the camera. Abby Graber is always a conversation killer. Everyone's like, oh, God. No, no, no. I mean, I totally agree that it was torture porn. I thought when you made that argument, it was so clear to me that these were all the same things. But then I increasingly see pornography is not a sexually exciting vehicle.

I think there's erotica and then I think there's pornography. And I think that Twain are not in the same category. And I think that pornography more and more just seeks to degrade and dehumanize, whereas erotica seeks to celebrate and worship. Yeah, exactly. I see them as different things. I'm not talking about erotica where they're like, oh, oh, it's burlesque, that to me isn't just erotica.

Like, erotic can be lots of things, but I think porn and erotica are different. I think you're right, but for me, the distinction is, is that if I'm engaging with erotica because I'm reading something or I'm listening to something or I'm just like letting my imagination go cuckoo bananas, I'm putting myself inside an experience. and there is a sort of inhabiting of a subjectivity and imagining what it would be like to do this to be a subject rather than porn which is about seeing an object penetrated

seeing an object being done to. I mean there's a separation and a distancing and a dehumanisation. Yeah, that's what we're saying. I think we're saying is sort of the same thing which is like when subject, instead of like being subject, you become object and objects are just there to be possessed

but that's the difference between erotica and porn I think is subjectivity whose power and value is being affirmed in whatever is the matter at hand and I think a lot of erotica really does it does seek to affirm women and their power and they are very much

the centre of the gaze and the subject whereas a lot of porn I mean as you said actually women just have things done to them and it's all in service of sort of the male gratification and often the ritualized humiliation of women like that's become part of it more and more over time and even when it's not heterosexual porn it's still the same level of degradation and violence like i've said in the past that when i used to watch porn i've watched gay porn or

lesbian porn lesbian porn is the lesser of both but it's still done with a very particular gaze and very particular themes and gay porn is just it's the same levels of like brutal penetration going on. It's just because it's less easy for me to put myself in the mindset of the person to be penetrated. I think it was easy for me to consume but I just really don't watch much anymore

because we've talked about this in a previous show but I don't watch much anymore because I find it actually so disconnecting from the act of sex and sexual pleasure as I want it to be. Yeah, but you can really, I mean, you can really see the shifts in porn too. I mean, a lot of what feminists

were responding to about pornography in the 70s was the violence of it. There was a lot of violence in the porn of the 60s and 70s, but there was also this moment of the golden age, quote-unquote, where filmmakers really saw themselves as making artistic products. They really thought that they were making full movies and that they were sort of presenting sex. And you see this again in the 2000s in the book where filmmakers start playing the sex as a theme and as a subject in being like, what if we made real art that was also sexual?

Like, what would that look like? But as sexual imagery became much more mainstream over the course of the 90s, And you have things like HBO's real sex. And in the UK, we had Euro trash. I don't know if you guys ever watched it. Sex, et cetera as well. There was a lot more sort of mainstream sex in fashion imagery, in movies, sort of really all across different cultural products.

Porn, by its nature, I think, has to be transgressive. It has to be away from the mainstream to get people to pay for it, to consume it. That's its selling point. And so you do see the shift in the late 90s that porn becomes a lot more extreme, a lot more violent. There's a lot more focus. I think especially in the 90s, you see this real shift towards like anal. sex as a way of asserting power over women, particularly with this one studio.

And you can sort of see that shift play out and how the shift towards extremity then sort of trickles out into culture more broadly and into mainstream art. Is that also possibly to do with the changing economics of porn? Because the internet comes along, porn becomes much more freely available. You don't have to buy a magazine. You don't have to buy a VHS. You don't have to buy a DVD. And so then what it is you're putting on the internet is a reflection of who's paying for content.

Yeah. And inherently then going to be people whose preferences are somewhat atypical. And then that becomes a driving force of what's being depicted and what's being considered a mainstream porn act. That's all absolutely true. I think you don't really see the consequences of the internetification, if that can be my word of porn until the 2010. because that was really by a point where everyone was online. Everyone knew where they could watch porn online. Like the same consolidation of sites had really become the place

where everyone went to watch these free clips and they didn't charge for it. But throughout the course of the 2000s, I think people were still, I mean, there were even movies being made in the mid-2000s that had like multi-million dollar budgets and had sort of Sasha Gray, I think they had recognizable stars and it was still very much a production. Whereas after the 2010s, it became much more about, you know, like tube clips and things that people could watch on demand with certain key words. And that's when you start seeing the real shift towards like popular, like popular degrading terms and

things like that. But you're exactly right. I want to shift to another ubiquitous P word, which is Paris Hilton. Yeah. Paris Hilton pops up in the book a lot. I mean, you know, she's the sort of the poster girl of the early 2000s. And of course, becomes really famous because sex tapes that she you know makes and participates in making gets leaked and after that violation she sort of leans into

notoriety and a particular kind of fame and what I didn't realize but something that you point out is that without Paris Hilton three of the biggest names in gossip media Gorka Paris Hilton and TMZ like they probably wouldn't exist so could you could you tell me a little bit more about

the journey you took with Paris Hilton over the course of this book. Yeah, I mean, I think what, to go back a little bit even before her, the thing that surprised me most in the research was how many of our sort of staple internet sites that we use were established because people wanted to ogle women. So YouTube, for example, was created because two engineers were looking for footage of the Janet Jackson Nipplegate tape and they couldn't find a video easily available online. They made YouTube. Google Images was created because Jennifer Lopez wore that,

like Versace Green, Jungle Print dress. The Jungle Dress. Gorgeous dress. 2004, wasn't it? Yeah, to the Grammys. And people, it was the most, it became the most Googled term of all time very quickly. And so they created an image infrastructure so that people could pull up images online. That became Google Images.

Facebook obviously was created when Mark Zuckerberg wanted a way to rank and assess the relative hotness of his fellow Harvard undergraduates. So all these pillars of our internet, and they come from the equivalent of just the pure old eight-year-old impulse to Google boobies. Do you know what I mean? And so, Parish- Google boobies. I had to type it into my calculator. I know, and hold it upside down, Googlers, yeah. We did.

It was our vintage. But Paris Hilton, yeah, she was just the most famous woman in the world for a good portion of the 2000s. She was certainly the most Googled women in the world. She, and as you said, A lot of the major gossip sites, Perez Hilton, TMZ, Gawker's, I can't know, its porn site was called Fleshbot, I think. They launched with images of her, videos of her, clips of her. Fleshbot launched with the Paris Hilton sex tape, which by then was becoming easily

downloadable and easily viewable online. And she just became, she was like gold for them. She was always out, she would always pose, she was always wearing incredible outfits, and people wanted to see her, much like Kin Kardashian after her, but she was just very good at performing visibility for the cameras in a way that people wanted to interact with. And I think part of the pleasure was in disliking her and in disdaining her.

And that's the sort of impulse that we've never really moved away from. On that pleasure, one of my favorite chapters simply because you referenced everyone that I've ever cared about was a girl on girls. So the all premise of the book, as we said, is how did pop culture turn a generation of women against each other. And in this chapter,

you're talking about sort of the altar, the Lena Dunham's, but you're also talking about the confessional essay. And you mentioned Emily Gould, who I'm obviously, like, I grew up on the Emily Gould's

of this world. I've read the way back machine heartbreak suit. Yeah. I know my, I know my, I know my Emily Gould. Oh my God. I know. And I was just really fascinated by,

that's the name I've not heard in a long time. I've probably, But this stuff, I don't think, gets pulled into the canon as much of why women have turned against you. And I wondered what your take on confessional writing, whether that's in, you know, products like girls, it's Lena Dun & herself, or people like Cat Marnell, people like Emily Gould. How did that both, you know, give women a way to talk about themselves, but also it was twisted to turn women against each other, judge each other, disdain each other? First of all, I love women's confessional writing. I feel.

very strongly that the canon of literature for the most part and especially the canon of history and a lot of, one of the things I'm sort of really insistent on with girl and girl is that this is history. I mean it's not history that people take seriously because it's about women and it's about famous women and it's about young women

but it is a history book more than anything else but our canon is all written by and written about men and so it's only relatively recently that we've seen women come forward and assert themselves as subjects worthy of attention. And I think one of the things that the writers of that era were doing that Emily Goals, the Lena Dunham's, were the Marie Calloways as well. She was another one who came up. They were asserting that they had value of subjects, but they were also trying to

make us see the conditions that they were living under and what the sort of recent years of history had done to them, what it had done to women writ large in this very fascinating confrontational, very honest way. And I think they had to be honest because especially during the 2000s, women were presented in culture as such, just like such train wrecks, such kind of airheads, such empty, like vacuous, failing kind of messes, like public messes. And so it makes sense to me that then in the 2010s you would have a lot of women come forward and insist on people seeing them with more honesty and seeing the reality of what they were living with. But my God, like, did it make people hate them? And the backlash, I think, was so

vitriolic because there was this element of how dare you consider yourself worthy of attention, worthy of our attention. And at the same time, all the people who were insisting that were the ones who couldn't tear their eyes away who were fascinated with these women in a really kind of ugly and hate-filled way. Like I remember when I would write about Kim Kardashian in the mid-2000s at the Atlantic, I would get these emails from readers who'd be like, how dare you sully this magazine of Emerson and Twain of the New England intellectual? And I would just be like, you're reading it. You know, people are interested.

And since then, I think we've become a lot more accepting that she is, in fact, very interesting as a subject and reflects different visions of womanhood and shifts in womanhood. And certainly is now one of the most powerful people in the world. But back then there was this outrage that I would consider someone like that as a subject. And I think that was sort of also the same outrage that was being focused on people like Emily. there's a difficult thing though because my mom um i talk about my mom a lot but she there are so many pop cultural figures who she absolutely couldn't fucking abide and parisilton was one of them parisilton was one of them in part because i think she thought that she was teaching girls to be stupid and so even if paris hilton one is a victim of a hugely um you know violating intrusive sexual

culture and continues to be when you think about the upskirting and the aggression of the paparazzi at the time. But I think there was something about the that's hot and that, you know, she was showing that it was possible to make an awful lot of money by performing stupidity for my mom and, you know, as her being a parent of two young women, she was like, this is poison. You know, this is poison in pop culture. And I think that it's important to, um, present this as history and also to present certain things as anthropology because I think about

what it's going to be like when the archaeologists of the future find our remains and they find Botox and filler and implants and file down teeth with plastic vineyard on the top. I wonder what they're going to make of it. I think that that's important. And I think that people can react with hostility to things that they don't like being a mirror to themselves. You know, you're the one clicking on it. So it's, you know, why you so angry? But there also aren't very many healthy or feminist ways to respond to a culture which is getting stupider, shitter, meaner, shallower, and creating kind of idols of womanhood, which are infantilized and, you know, they all speak like they've just been kicked in their head by a mule. Do you know what's the healthy way to object to it and to say that you can be different as a woman? First of all, I love your mom and I think she's right.

And I think one of the things that Paris was the master at before anyone else understood it even was understanding that visibility by itself was enough to be famous and sort of weaponizing attention. And in ways that have now become Bonnie Blue and influencers culture and so much of how we're living now came from this. Like before Paris, if you were famous, there was usually a reason. Like there was something that you were good at. You had a skill. You were an actor. you were a singer, you were a sports star, like there was something that you did that was the reason that people knew your name. Whereas something to do with the shift with reality television

and gossip media, suddenly all you had to do was put on a dress and go stand in front of photographers. And you had this sort of microgenre of people who were famous in the 2000s and who were characters on gossip sites. And I can't remember their names now because, like, I could barely remember their names at the time. But you know what I mean? Like there were certain people who would just go stand on red carpets in outrageous outfits. have their picture taken and that was enough teala tequila yeah i mean she at least had a reality show but there were there were people who would just wear like crazy crazy outfits and they would be on go fuck yourself the next day and we'd be like ooh um but paris really was the the master of that and to the

extent where when she starred in house of wax a horror film one of the branding campaigns for the movie was a series of posters all over hollywood that said see paris die um she does die in the movie she gets stabbed in the head but uh and she was fine with that she she sort of posed in front of the pictures laughing i think understanding that the ways in which people hated her and the ways in which people were being encouraged to hate her was all part of what she was good at it was all part of elevating her profile which to her was really the only thing that mattered because it was her it was her sort of performance of fame it was it was it was her art form in many ways and then kim obviously after her was was even better is there a bit of a three line maybe

between from marilyn monroe to paris hilton and the reason why i say that is because marilyn monroe was the master of being the dumb blonde who was in on the joke um and i i love the film gentleman preferblancs one of my favorite films and her delivery of you know a man being rich is like a girl being pretty it's not everything but it sure does help my gosh a really good impressions like this should be a whole this should be a whole feature in the podcast i always wanted to be rory bremner but like she She was in on the joke. You know, she was in on the joke.

And she was also hugely degraded by people's desire for her. You know, she was an object of contempt as well as an object of desire and fascination. Is there something there? Definitely. I think the difference with Marilyn is that she really wanted to be taken seriously. And I think she was deeply saddened by how she had to perform this kind of stereotype. Like she, there are pictures of her reading Joyce's Ulysses. And she obviously married Arthur Miller.

Wait, was it, Martha Miller? I don't want to fact check this. It was Arthur Miller. It was Arthur Miller. You know, when you have a book like Girl and Golda Does is full of facts that it is, I now never trust anything because everything has just like become a big, massive, like, gooey brain fact melt in my head. And I can't trust myself anymore. But yeah, she was married to Arthur Miller.

Like, I think she really was a lot cleverer and a lot more insightful, certainly, and curious in lots of ways than she was ever allowed to be on camera. So I think she was someone who was really struggling against. her public image whereas someone like Paris is someone who really embraces it because she knows that it's what what is essentially getting her paid at the end of the day. You know that Paris Hilton based her two voices off Marilyn Monroe's two voices. She like actively, she actively cites Marilyn Monroe and Rose amused and she says that she knew that she had the two voices. She had the baby voice on camera. And then when she was off camera, she had the higher, she had the lower pitch voice and she said that's how she created her Paris voice. Because on camera she was, it was a very

specific voice and then off camera when you hear paris hold on talk she's like you know it's much low in pitch it's much more straightforward so marlon morrose it was actually a direct inspiration for paris wow and that's fascinating too because so many of the cultural figures of the 2000s were obsessed with marinen like lindsay lohen is obsessed with kim kay yeah kim kay and an an Nicole smith there's a new there's a new book of essays by philippa snow that has an essay comparing maryland to anne and Nicole um and the sort of conditions of fame and womanhood and visibility that they lived under but it's really interesting interesting to me that this woman who was very unhappy with how she was being presented became

something that people then tried to emulate for themselves in the 2000s. Well, exactly. I think people obsessed with trying to, or women seem really obsessed with trying to live out her life and change the ending almost. Yeah. Because they're like, she had everything that we're told we can want. How could she be unhappy? Like if I did it, I wouldn't be unhappy. And then I suspect they'd get it and they're actually not that happy. Yeah, because it's a horrible way to live. It's a horrible, it's a horrible way to live. There was one other thing I wanted to ask about in relation to that move from the sort of Paris Hilton type of messy woman through the Emily Gould's to the messy woman that we have in pop culture now, which is the Sally Rooney messy woman. Yeah. Which is a lot more sort of like young millennial hasn't got her life together.

Atesa, I can't remember my name, Atessa, whatever is, my year rest and relaxation, you know. Post-Captivist. Yes, it's a completely different type of messy woman. And I think there's a backlash to that, which is coming in the form of the optimization. and the trad wives and you're seeing a moot like the back how do you how do you react

that was me dropping something a messy woman I'm a messy woman but it's like okay so you get Paris Hilton and then people are trying to assert themselves saying you know but we're complex intellectual beings

like we're very messy we have these relationships we shouldn't but you know we are cognitive we're not just airheads and then you get this mess that messy woman is sort of like the predominant thing

we're seeing in pop culture as a young woman and now it doesn't seem a coincidence to me that the new sort of visions of womanhood, especially in this post-family sensibility that we're getting, is this like totally gingham dress, perfect, stepford wife, that's the woman we're aspiring to be demure, you know, there's no mess anymore, we've beveled off all the edges. I wonder what you make of that. Well, one thing that comes up at the end of the book that has always frustrated me about storytelling about women in particular is that there are never

any portrayals of women, or there are a few, but very few portrayals of women having power. And it's something that I feel is hugely important because when you grow up with all these stories that are telling you what women are capable of, what they can achieve, what they can imagine for themselves, there just aren't really any cultural archetypes of women who are competent even or who use power for the good of others. I mean, I interviewed Tom Perotta, the author who wrote election a while back, and he was sort of befuddled by the fact that Tracy Flick had become this defining archetype for female politicians and then he realized that there just weren't any others. There were no other examples of women who were seeking out political

power for various reasons and so she's become the stereotype through like Leslie Knope and Hillary Clinton. It's always the sort of like aggressive blonde in a pantsuit. And certainly as you said after this sort of train, this 2000s decade of women falling apart in the public eye and then the 2010's confessional, here's what life is really like and then the messy women iteration. What frustrated me about so many of the, like, the really good comedies of the late 2010s, like the flea bags and the shows in that ilk, Broad City, is that they were all about train wrecks. And in some ways, like, that was why we love them, because we were connecting with these stories. And they were sort of different versions of women falling apart.

And they were more honest and they were less, like, degrading. But I just used to think, like, my God, my left arm for a story of a competent woman, or even just a woman who's, like, getting along. You know, she's getting by, she's making it work, she's sort of keeping everything together. It's not always perfect. But power, I think, is a really interesting subject because we never really take the time in our own lives to think about what we would do with it. Like what we would change, even in the small scale of our own lives, our own families, like our own friendships. What would we do if we have the power?

And then I think we've become so trained to sort of think of ourselves as projects to fix up, like things to make over. things to improve, that we never really turn that attention outwards and think about what we actually want to change in the world outside of ourselves. And so, I don't know if people glean this lesson from the end of the book, but that was the thing that I most wanted people to take away from it. Just this idea that you can stop focusing on yourself as something that needs a total overhaul or a total reformation and turn that gaze outwards and think, if I had the power, what would I do? What would I change? What would I make better for myself and for everyone? You know what I think actually is an interesting depiction of a woman who's like professionally

competent is in motherland. Oh my God, I was literally, while we were talking about this, I was thinking about motherland. I was thinking motherland because she's somebody who's like professionally really competent. Yeah. And all of the tension comes from from parenting. How am I supposed to be a mother when it's so, you know, so thankless. Also, I'm not even sure if I like my children. I'm not sure if I even like my own mother.

And, you know, she resents being a mother. Yeah. You know, so she's not a perfect, I have everything together and I'm good at everything. And in fact, there are like women around her who are like, who seem to be much better at doing everything. And, you know, they become thorns in her side. Yeah. Jab at her. But I thought that that was an interesting reversal of the, you know, because one of the things, one of the things about, you know,

the train wreck woman and, you know, the sort of like broad city woman is that there's a level of like permanent infantilization. Yeah. A little bit. It's like, oh, me, no do taxes. Yeah. Like, there's a bit of that. Whereas Motherland is like fucking parents evening. Well, the real shift, the reason that I think there's been, there's a shift, mainstream shift, is because I saw Bridget Jones fall, they've made her competent. Yeah, they have. She's competent in that because I didn't like, I don't, I've not seen Bridget Jones three. I've seen Bridget Jones one and two and I used to hate them. Yeah. It's absolute despise them. Now I can stomach them and I'm quite fond of them because of repeated viewings and proximity, which is the point

of wrong calls, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, but Bridget Jones four, the whole thing is, first of all, the romantic lead. Yeah. There's a complete change in what he represents. Now he represents, you know, before he was a savior. Now he represents someone who can help her son process his grief. Yeah. That's what's romantic. She needs a partner. she doesn't need this saviour and she's good at her fucking job now yeah she is such an interesting shift but talk about power like she's a good she's a good parent she's not a perfect parent because no one's a perfect parent like but she loves her kids and she's taking care of them well and everything is good in that sense and then she's good at her job she is competent and then

even in terms of the first romantic relationship with leo woodl she's the one with the power because she's older she has the house he's just a kind of like sweet i don't know like piece of eye candy but you're totally right i think that was part of what made that film so much more appealing to me was just the idea that finally she has like come to a point in life where she knows what she's doing and it's in some ways really gratifying to see how fascinating as well that in the first like the very first time of which jones you identify as the epitome of post-feminism yeah and now when you see her it just shows how much what comes back to what we're talking about in rom-coms where what audience is desiring has changed so much because they're longing to see a

fantasy of some of a woman who can meet like a fully realized partner who has emotional intelligence and is also competent, but we're not seeing that on the ground is the sort of lived reality that people think that they can access. Yeah. I wonder if it's interesting, too, that she had to become widowed to become capable in some ways. Like maybe she was relying on her husband to sort of do it. And then once she was on her own, she realized all the things that she was able to do by herself. That's a kind of dark reading bit.

I think it's an accurate. Yeah. Colin Firth must die for Renee's Elwager to live. Sorry if we've spoiled it everyone, by the way. No, I think it's pretty, like, well acknowledged now by the fact that he dies. We need to solve a problem. I was going to say, speaking of train wrecks and messy women, shall we? Yeah.

So this is our regular segment called I'm in big trouble. If you're in big trouble, small trouble, medium trouble, molecular trouble, email us at if I speak at navaramedia.com. that's if I speak at navaramedia.com, Moya. Do you want to take it away? Yeah, right. I've got lots of thoughts about this one. Hi guys, thanks for the podcast. Listening to you both feels like being part of an excellent conversation between friends

and I always gain so much from it. Thanks. I have a dilemma. For context, I'm a 30-year-old woman who's been single a while and would ideally like to be in a relationship. Two months ago, I met a boy at a friend's birthday. A boy, interesting. To be honest, I didn't instantly fancy him, but we had loads in common. The chat was great, and we both got very drunk and went home together. The sex wasn't great initially. The things he did just didn't seem to work for me. But the next morning was better, and overall we had a lovely time. We went on one more date. Once again, the chat was truly accident, the vibes were lovely and romantic, and the sex was a significant improvement. He took on my suggestions pretty well. We're incredibly politically, intellectually aligned. Our values are similar. We have a similar sense of humour and some very good friends in common. He got pretty smitten, pretty

quickly. And while I was quite excited about why I could lead, I still wasn't sure if the physical or sexual attraction was there for me. Then I went to Glastombe and a crazy whirlwind romance where the sexual attraction and physical attraction, sexual attraction and was through the roof. We spent the whole festival together, and when it was over, I was faced with a very difficult choice. I chose Glastow Boy. We didn't seem to be especially politically intellectually aligned, but of the two options, I felt the intense physical attraction we had was more likely starting point from which something serious might grow. I still think this is the right call. Silence. However, in the real world, it quickly became clear

that our incompatibility is too great and we ended things. I'd left things on a very good, mutually respectful note with Boy One, with lots of appreciation of how much we liked each other had in common, though he was pretty devastated he had suggested I could come back to it if things didn't work out with Glastow Boy. Now I'm on the fence. Given how much he liked me the first time round and how disappointed he was when I ended it, I don't think it's something I can go back too lightly. I'd been very excited to see what. I'd been very excited to see way it goes from our first one or two dates, but I'm aware that maybe I was banking on the physical and sexual attraction growing on my part. Maybe this is wishful thinking. I think I'm

quite a sexual person. This has always been a key part of the relation to me. Can this side of things grow? As I said, I do want to be in a relationship, so I think my desire to go back to him is at least part driven by the idea of a relationship with him, given how perfect he is for me on paper, rather than maybe the reality of the connection we have. But we had only met twice. Selfishly, I'd love to go back and give it a chance and see if my physical and sexual attraction to him could develop, but I worry this is wishful thinking, and I don't want to hurt him all over again. What do you think? So many thoughts I want you guys to go first. Sophie. Well, first of all, I've been married for 16 years, and I think the thing that comes to be really,

really important over time is just whether you can talk to someone and whether they make you laugh. And so in terms of, like, the idea of checking off boxes of, like, compatibility and politics and things like that, yeah, it is important. But what's much more important is mutual curiosity, respect, like conversation. Did he ask you questions, for example? A lot of people don't really know how to do that on dates anymore. So I appreciate that the writer is taking his feeling seriously and not wanting to kind of spin him around a second time.

But I also think in terms of long-time relationships, the initial, like, crazy, wild attraction is much less crucial. over time than the connection at a more human level, if that makes sense. So what do I think, special one, what I think is that going back to somebody after it's flopped with the person you initially chose isn't a good basis for a relationship. I completely agree with everything you said, Sophie, about physical connection. I think that might be where you start but I think that often what physical connection is

at the start is I really want to get closer to this person and sex is the means by which we do that because I also think that what sex and a physical connection is like after you've been with someone for 16 years or like if you've been with someone for seven years like I have it's different it's different it's not like oh I have this insatiable curiosity that like you know or like oh here's my

here's the gold coin that I'm offering because they want to pull you closer to me. It's something else. It's much more about nourishing a bond that already exists rather than this sort of like demonic hunger. Totally. It changes. And that's not that's not a bad thing. I think it's a, it's a reflection of the fact that sex at the start is a way of establishing a bond and then sex after a long time is about nourishing a bond. And really what's going to determine whether or not your relationship can go the distances, whether, because familiarity breeds contempt you're just going to learn more and more annoying things about your partner. And if you can have a core of

admiration for them, as you learn more and more of these annoying things, that's what makes the difference. But I think it's not actually relevant in this case. I think that you feel a bit annoyed or bummed out because what's basically a holiday romance didn't seem so sparkly in the light of day and in the light of the real world and seem a bit like, oh, I'm kicking myself for having, you know, gotten carried away and over-excited about something and you're creeping back with your tail between your legs.

I really think it's important for relationships to start on the basis of equals, as much as you can on the basis of equals, where it's not that one person has all the power or all the say over the shape of what the relationship is going to be. And I think that if you come, you know, crawling back with the tail between your legs and this guy said, hey, come back to me any time. You're not, you're not seeing each other right at eye. It's not at that level of equals. So I think you've just got to chalk this one up to the game. You know, it happens. We all make choices that maybe we regret in some way and we think, oh, you know, could this be the one that got away? That's life. That's life. You just got to eat it, I think. Moia, what do you think? I don't think you're as ready for a relationship as you think you are.

That's what I think. I think that you are choosing dopamine over oxytocin. I think I think, and I've been in your fucking shoes, okay? I also have a theory that every time you meet someone where you could have an actual real relationship, there will be another temptation that comes along.

And you're allowed to, you know, on the Love Island parlance, you can test it, you can see if you have a better connection, but you shouldn't sack off the first connection for the second one. You should just test it a little bit, see what happens, and then be like, no, actually the first one's better. With this, the thing about not instantly fancying him, I would love to know more.

Does that mean that you didn't instantly want to rip his clothes off or were you just, where you like, I don't know if I've got the biggest passion in the world for this person, but I'm intrigued, I want to know more. You went home with him. You said the sex wasn't initially great. You were drunk as hell. You were drunk as hell having sex with a stranger.

How is the sex supposed to be amazing? Like, yeah, sometimes we get bang in sex the first time if you're going home with someone you just met. But the conditions weren't great. It's not just the sex. You say the next morning it was better and you had a lovely time. You went on one more date.

The first time wasn't even a date. You met at a party. That's not a date. That's a hookup. Then you went on a date. The chat was amazing. The vibes are lovely and romantic. The sex was a significant improvement.

You were aligned in so many ways. Your values are the same. Your sense of humor is the same. You have similar friends. These are the foundations of what makes a relationship. That is the foundation of someone that you can build something with. Then you go to Glastonbury, you have, as Ash says, a holiday romance. I've had some of the best sex of my life at Glastonbury.

And you know what? When you try and transpose it into another world, you should not do that. They're a Glastonbury Bay for a reason. Glastow Bays, stay at Glastonbury. Don't, like, I'm sure we get people writing and be like, I met my partner of 20 years at Glastonbury. We got married by the fucking. in, you know, south-east corner, great, good for you. You are the exception, not the rule.

I think what happens is you are seeking an Insta connection. And I hate to say it, the older you get, there should be a spark of like, you know, interest and excitement when you meet someone, but you shouldn't be feeling like instantly, head over heels, this is it, we're going to be together forever. That is dopamine. That is not oxytocin. Oxytocin builds. That is the love hormone. It builds, it like comes out the more you know someone. Whereas the dopamine, you're going to be able. whereas the dopamine you get a big rush and then it bottoms out and that I think is exactly what happens here

I don't know I think that you can feel something instantly like I remember you know after the first time me and my my now husband hooked up I remember saying to my friends the next day who I was going on a night out with oh it's awful I think I really like this guy

blank check to treat me like a mug I remember just being like oh no but that's not what I'm talking that's not what I'm talking about like what you're feeling is that's what I'm saying you should feel when you meet someone but it's not I'm not saying you go on but it but it but it was but it was it was it was a it was a strong connection is what I'm saying yes but the differences the different but if if if some other schmuck had come along you know and say on the next night out I'd met

someone who's like very good looking or something like that um I think I would have been like oh sorry but I actually I think there's someone there's someone who I feel serious about again that's you know what I mean yeah I know that's not what I'm talking about that's that's part of like the strong connection I'm saying you should feel interested in someone you should want to see where it goes that might make you say I'm not interested in this person

or it might be you know I've been dating people and I really like them and then I'll like flirt with someone else and I'll be like how do that feel? I'd actually really like the other person

way more you know it depends on the thing you should have a connection with the first person but the second Glaston pro person that she met she's having this like intense falling off cliff

love my life you know this is this is it kind of vibes and that's not it agree I completely agree glass though in the bin But I guess the thing I'm saying is that the thing that you can feel at the start, it sometimes can be really powerful.

Like it can be, sometimes it can be, oh, I'm interested and let's build this up and let's see where it goes. I think sometimes it can feel a lot more powerful for whatever reason, right? It might be that also you feel powerfully for when something happens because you've built up a friendship first. You know, I've had that where, you know, one of my previous relationships where we ended up being together for about two and a half years. that we were best friends first, and I just fell in love with him and we were watching the wire together. And so then when something happens, I'm like, yeah, oh shit, here we go again. Like, you know you're in it. The thing I'm saying is that it's, you're right about the dopamine versus oxytocin thing, right? This sort of like quick hit and like a whirlwind,

but I think that it can be more than interest. I think you can know you're serious about someone from really early on. Yeah, no, that's, I do agree with that. Sorry, I should have expressed that that that's what I'm trying to say, that you know that you actually interest in, but she says she was very excited. I think that interest was there. I think she just banked so much more on that insta, like overwhelming, full body, legs are falling out underneath me rather than that feeling that you get in your stomach,

which is like this warm. You know when you're sitting across from someone that you've met a couple of times and you're looking at them and you're just like, oh, no, I can feel it in my stomach. Like, I really, there's real potential here that I will like you a lot. Like, that's what I'm talking about,

which I suspect she could have had with this guy. However, I agree with you. I don't think she can go back. For listeners of the pod, you won't know that Moyer just sort of like, put her chin in her hand and like gazed into the camera. And both me and Sophie were like, ready to risk it all. Yeah. Send in the divorce papers. I totally agree with what you're saying about.

You can feel when there's that real potential there. And I do think this is the one bit where I'm like, I don't know because she's like I didn't instantly fancy him. But do you mean you didn't fancy him? the way he didn't fancy glasda guy or do you mean that there wasn't that feeling of oh there is real potential here but she says she was really excited i think this i think we need a little bit more detail but i don't think you should go back i agree with what you're saying because you've now demoted this person to being less than you're equal and therefore you can't go back sorry any last final thoughts from you sophie well i just have been thinking a lot about holiday romances while

you guys were being incredibly wise by the way and i could have used you probably 20 years ago but never mind um and just the idea that i think what makes a holiday romance so thrilling is that because because we know it's short term we know it's transient we open our minds to the kinds of people who wouldn't otherwise have on our list necessarily as romantic partners or people to date like we broaden our horizons or we allow ourselves to be attracted to people who are not our type and so possibly like i'm coming back to the idea of what you said more about being ready for a relationship possibly what makes like those short-term holiday romances so thrilling is that we know they'll end and we know that there's no fear of like commitment or intimacy even it's just going to be

this kind of short-term thrill and and that's perfectly fine there's nothing wrong with that but if you actually are looking for sort of a long-term relationship that's different if that makes sense yeah correct well I think this holiday romance of a podcast might also I was like which bit will ash take? Will she do the Glaston rebit? Will she do the holiday romance bit? There's going to be a sign-off in her somewhere. I did the holiday romance bit.

Sophie Gilbert, it was incredible to talk to you. This book, Girl on Girl, it is banging. And I really recommend it to people who, you know, like us, survived the 2000s. And maybe our sense of self, our sense of body image. it was really impacted by some of the things that we grew up with. So being able to put it in a, you know, in a political context, in a historical context, in an economic context. It does feel a bit liberating.

Like, oh, like, I feel like this is less of a weight on my chest. This is a serious history book. That's said. It's a serious history book. It's a history of ours. That was exactly what I wanted. Like, not to give people a list of things they need to do when they finish reading it, but to give them the framework and the context.

contextualization of what they live through to be able to, you know, see themselves differently, see their own history differently. And I think when you understand yourself fully and you understand the circumstances in which you were raised, you can sort of imagine your future a little bit differently. So it means so much to hear you say that. Thank you. Thank you for being on the show with us. This has been, if I speak, we'll be back next week. Bye. Thank you. Thank you.