In his 2005 encyclical God is Love, Pope Benedict defended the Christian view of sexual love. Despite those who claimed that Christians were killjoys when it comes to sex, Benedict offered a correction. Christianity “in no way rejected eros as such; rather, it declared war on a warped and destructive form of it, because this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it.”

As Benedict explained, “The prostitutes in the [Greek] temple, who had to bestow this divine intoxication, were not treated as human beings and persons, but simply used as a means of arousing ‘divine madness’: far from being goddesses, they were human persons being exploited.”

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Reclaiming genuine eros is at the heart of a brilliant new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert. Gilbert is not a religious scholar but a liberal journalist. Even so, it is a profound work, beautifully written and deeply researched.

Girl on Girl traces how, in the last 30 years, pornography has ravaged our culture. In the 1980s, there were powerful and sexual female performers, such as the Go-Go’s, Janet Jackson, and Salt ’n’ Pepa —complex, tough, funny, and introspective females who represented not only female sexuality but female intelligence, humor, and business smarts. In the early 1990s, there was the Riot Grrrl movement in punk rock, which emphasized self-assertion and talking back to boys who behaved badly.

Then something changed. In Girl on Girl, Gilbert argues that it was the fashion industry in the late 1990s that shifted the emphasis in pop culture from young women to girls — and pornography. “I’ve come to think that what Ariel Levy called ‘raunch culture’ in her 2005 book Female Chauvinist Pigs—a dominant cultural mode celebrating porn, sex, self‑commodification, ironic sexism, and uninhibited self‑exposure—started in fashion,” Gilbert writes. “It’s an industry where the female body has long been sold, abused, and starved into submission, where men with power bully and manipulate and profit from the labor of girls with none.” 

The fashion industry wasn’t alone. There was gangsta rap, which was violent and misogynistic and, as Gilbert notes, defended as “satire” by liberal elites like Henry Louis Gates. There was the AIDS epidemic and the Bill Clinton sexual scandal with Monica Lewinsky, both of which forced sexual terms into the public discourse. Changing technology made it easier to record and share graphic images. Pop music went from celebrating adult female powerhouses such as Queen Latifah and Chrissy Hynde to a teenage Britney Spears on the cover of Rolling Stone lying in bed holding a Teletubbie. Gilbert wrote, “It doesn’t seem accidental that the early‑1990s era of the supermodel—strong, athletic, glamorous, unimaginably well‑paid women—was followed so closely by the rise of the waif in the second half of the decade: frail, pallid, underage girls who didn’t yet know how to negotiate or exert their power or assert their own boundaries.”

As the fashion industry used pornography “as both a look book and an instruction manual,” at the same time, “porn was adapting to a world in which it was no longer on the margins.” To keep loyal to its transgressive nature, pornography had to go extreme. The chapter in Girl on Girl about “extreme porn” or “torture porn” is beyond disturbing. It is demonic.

By the 2000s, as Gilbert notes, “sex was culture. There was no need to pretend anyone was interested in anything else.” In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama was photographed by Terry Richardson, a notorious “artist” and pornographer. Since 2001, Richardson had been accused of sexually exploiting models during photo shoots. When a pornographic movie was made mocking Sarah Palin in 2018, liberals at places like Salon just commented on the film’s cheap quality — not that the depiction was immoral. At an award show, rapper Snoop Dogg arrived with three women on leashes. 

Yet despite the mainstreaming, pornography was the same old scam that it had been going back to the 1970s. “The same people who’d always had power and authority over how images of women were commodified and sold were simply repackaging an old product,” writes Gilbert.

Unsurprisingly, such abuse led to the #MeToo movement. When the graphic “Blurred Lines” song was released in 2013, along with a video in which Robin Thicke, T.I., and Pharrell Williams were surrounded by three virtually naked models, women objected — “the tenor of the response,” writes Gilbert, “signaled an undeniable shift in how women were willing to be treated.”

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In the end, Gilbert expresses hope that art, which degraded itself and eros in recent decades, can bring back some sanity. As Gilbert observes near the end of Girl on Girl, “The Romantic movement of the nineteenth century, which celebrated chivalry, beauty, love, and emotion, arguably set a path for twentieth‑century feminism by encouraging the perception of women as full human beings, not just commodities.”