>> After decades of political and social progress women's rights are now the subject of a new political debate and policy change amid a backlash against the goals of modern feminism.

Allie Rogan spoke with Sophie Gilbert about her new book which argues pop culture of the 1990's and early 2000's set back a generation of women.

Ali rogin: Sophie, obvious.. these days, women's rights are a huge part of the political conversation in the united States.

So with everything that's going on right now, why look back at this period in the r.. history of pop culture?

Sophie Gilbert: I think because to me it felt like it might all be connected particularly after roe V wade was overturned, I just felt like I couldn't understand what had happened certainly to feminism but also to women in culture du.. lifetime.

There were people who were parsing the politics of that moment but it felt like it might make sense to me as a critic to go back and look at the culture of the moment that shaped my generation and also the generation that came a.. Ali rogin: The term feminism, of course, through the decades, has meant different things to different people, but I'd like you to tell us about how the word and the idea of feminism evolved duri.. period.

>> I have always understood it to mean do you believe women are human beings and that they should have equal rights in society.

It seems simple to me.

Understand it is not always so simple.

One of the questio.. understand in my book .. think music is a useful example, how in the music of the 1990s we went from this really kind of ferocious activist moment of the early '90s, the riot girl movement, so many women in rock and roll making re.. impassioned music about womenhood, about subjects like sexual assault, really kind of political music in lots of ways.

How we went from that energy to the pop stars of the 2000s who were sort of very highly sexual..

Didn't really speak up for themselves, we.. in many ways, and who then again where in some ways stalked by media across the course of.. 2000s.

It's sort of wanting to understand.. happened.

It also came to tell me a little bit about what happened in feminism during the 90.. And this shift from third-wave feminism at the beginning of the '90's and things like the year of the woman and Anita hill's senate testimony.

Towards post-feminism, which was less an ideology I would say than a kind of trend in media that told women that they'd achieved everything they ever needed to, that there was no longer any point in protes.. or in activism, they should just go out and celebrate all the freedoms that they've achieved.

Ali rogin: There seems to be a but that shift to postfeminism seemed to really play out in the culture of the 2000's.

Ali rogin: There seems to be a certain patt.. book that you identify where you start in the earlier part of this era with these very powerful expressions of female agency and self-actualization.

You have the riot girl movement who came up with girl power, which then got kind of appropriated by the commercial forces behind the spice girls.

And then in the fashion world, you have these amazonian supermodels wh.. who later got replaced by these very waifish young models.

Is that a pattern?

Sophie Gilbert: It was a hundred percent a pattern, I think, throughout the culture of the nineties, the shift away from women and certainly strong, powerful women who were re.. presence in media at the beginning of the decade towards girls.

.. but in fashion as well, you had this shift a.. supermodels, the sort of real amazonian powerful women, the Cindy crawfords and the Naomi campbells who worked very much as a unit and they fought for each other and they were paid very well.

And .. designers got frustrated and they felt that the models .. overshadowing the clothes and so you can see this sort of very intentional shift in fashion towards the more waifish models that came later in the 90s, the Kate mosses, you know, the rise of heroin chic and thi.. towards younger women who sort of didn't have the same energy and couldn't quite stand up for themselves in the same way.

Ali rogin: Reading this book, you kind of want to come to the end of it and thin.. god that's over but it doesn't really feel like it's over, does it?

Sophie Gilbert: There is so much that, unfortunately, r.. of the 2000s now and obviously, there's a real element of outrageous and cruel and dehumanizing misogyny in a lot of the internet now, i.. and that part, I think, is very gloomy to think about, but at the same time, when I look at the culture th.. now, when I looked at the movies and the television and the books being written and the art and the voices.. there is so much more about women than there was back then.

There is so more curiosity about women's lives.

There is much more sensitivity.

There are so many more women making art, certainly, full stop.

And so, yes, t.. misogyny is still present, but they're not being reiterated by the culture at large and so that's the thing that I think I cling to.

>> The book is girl on girl.

Sophie Gilbert.

Thank you so m.. >> Thank you for hav.. ♪