Sophie Gilbert is a journalist at The Atlantic, a cultural critic and author of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves.
In Girl on Girl, you argue that porn became an increasingly prominent cultural force from the 1990s onwards. How did that happen?
In some ways it was just because there was this really unprecedented increase in the number of people watching it. Before VHS people had to go to a movie theatre to watch porn and that was a huge deterrent. Then suddenly you had this technology that allowed them to watch it in their homes. Between the mid-80s and the mid-90s, there was something like a tenfold increase in the number of people renting porn on VHS in the US. And then obviously the internet increased access further.
Because porn is seen as shameful, no one is really talking about it, but it does have a massive influence on popular culture. You see it first in art in the 70s and 80s, then in fashion, then it creeps into music and TV and movies. If you look at the porn movies of the 70s now, people really thought they were making art. The reason why people like [American writer and journalist] Joan Didion were going to watch porn movies in the 70s was because there was this interest in whether or not sex could become an art form.
But as porn became more ubiquitous online, and at the same time mainstream culture became more sexualised, porn had to do something to stand out. It had to persuade people to keep paying for it, which is hard to do when you’ve got sex on TV and in movies, so it became more extreme, more violent – and more degrading, especially to women.
And that had a knock-on effect on broader culture?
You can definitely see culture mimicking porn’s extremity in the 2000s. But porn has also influenced the ways in which people have sex. There are studies that show an increase in the number of women who’ve been choked during sex without consent, and who’ve encountered violent sexual acts like spitting, gagging, hitting. [The depiction of choking in porn is due to be banned in the UK.]
Under the Online Safety Act, platforms hosting pornographic content must now verify that users are over the age of 18. Is this a positive step?
There are people who are a lot more versed on the internet than I am who argue that it will not have any impact. That said, I’m just amazed that it’s taken so long for people to try to have any kind of filtering at all. We have had extreme porn on the internet now for almost 30 years. We have a generation – [the singer] Billie Eilish has talked a lot about this – who grew up seeing extreme pornographic content before they’re of an age where they can make sense of it. There’s no perfect way to manage exposure to porn, but I’m still staggered that people think there’s no point in trying when we can see quite clearly the negative impact that porn is having on sex and sexuality.
To some people, including to some feminists, this is a kind of moral panic – just another step in the long history of attempting to censor sexual content.
I’m not opposed to porn and I say that in Girl on Girl. I’ve been criticised from the left for being “scoldy” about porn and I’ve been criticised from the right for not being scoldy enough. And I think that’s because I’m sort of pragmatic. People have always sought out imagery of sex using new technologies. The minute the printing press was introduced people were using it to make sexual imagery; there are cave paintings of sexual imagery. People love watching sex and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
The problem is that the imagery that has been fed to us for at least the last three decades – and honestly much longer than that – has really catered to a male gaze. It depicts sex as something that is all about pleasing men and that women just have to submit to. There’s a reason why we’ve seen this massive surge of interest in romantic fiction among women. It’s because women are drawn to sexual content too, but they want the kind of content that centres their pleasure, their desire and agency, and sees them as fully human rather than passive sex objects that just have things done to them.
The subscription service OnlyFans hosts pornographic content by full-time sex workers, but also by pop stars, actors and others, who use it as gig work or to subsidise their artistic careers. Is that the end point of the “pornification” of pop culture you’re describing?
I don’t know if it’s an end point; it’s just another form of technology. I do think OnlyFans is really interesting because it’s not driven by mass clicks. There’s an intimacy to the relationship between creators and their fans that in some ways makes space for a much wider sense of what’s desirable. A lot of the OnlyFans celebrities are women over 50, such as actresses Denise Richards and Carmen Electra. There are creators who don’t have the same kind of bodies that traditional porn stars have had. There’s a lot more space for the complexity of what we as human beings are attracted to.
At the same time, there’s a generation of men who are being taught to think of women as people who are sycophantic to them. You can’t see the person as your equal, because they’re catering to you for money.
You’re interested in how these dynamics filter into the wider world. What’s your take on the cover of Sabrina Carpenter’s latest album Man’s Best Friend? It sparked controversy by showing the singer-songwriter kneeling down at the feet of a man who is pulling her by the hair.
What’s interesting to me is that if that album had come out in the 2000s, we wouldn’t have been having the same conversations that are being had now. I saw women debating that on Instagram with enormous wisdom and insight and complexity, and a real openness to sexuality from women in a way that was not shaming, but was also aware that stars don’t exist in a vacuum, that the ways in which they want to portray themselves always have an impact on the rest of us. I think women and girls today are so much better educated about these issues. They have better language to talk about them and a much better understanding of the dynamics of sex and power.
You describe a kind of cultural correction that started in the 2010s, with more complex representations of women on screen. Are you positive about the future?
Yeah, it’s been really incredible to see. In the Golden Globes in 2025 there were so many more women behind the camera, women directors, there were actresses in their 50, 60s, 70s doing some of the most interesting work of their lives, in stories about the transition into motherhood or beauty culture in Hollywood. None of this was happening in the 2000s. So there’s a willingness in mainstream culture now to reckon with women and their interiority and their lives and their stories that is incredibly heartening to me.
At the same time, most people now go to see one movie a year. For most people now, culture is the content on their phones. And so in some ways, I think that’s the next frontier. There is just a wild west of different platforms and technologies that people my age [Gilbert is 42] have not got any clue what to do with. The mainstream culture, the culture that I still write about – the books and the television and the art – has changed for the better in so many ways and there’s such incredible storytelling out there. But I do think we’re also facing a new world of social media and phone use and we have to confront the question of what to do about it.
This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.
