Sophie Gilbert’s essay collection asks how pop culture has trained women to police each other — through reality TV, rom-coms, celebrity media, and the girlboss myth — rather than the systems that produce those cultures. We discussed whether progress in representation is cosmetic, and what “internalized misogyny” actually means as a concept beyond individual bad behaviour.
The session raised the waves of feminism as a framework: what the third wave got right, what postfeminism did with it, and how “girl power” became a product. We also talked about what a feminist media diet looks like, and whether consuming critically is enough.