Club Friday Q&A: Lisa Whittington-Hill on How Pop Culture is Failing Women
By Stacy lee kong
Image: Courtesy of Lisa Whittington-Hill
Fun fact: Lisa Whittington-Hill was my first journalism boss, and one of the first professional journalists (if not the first) to show me that pop culture was worthy of analysis and attention. As the publisher of This magazine, where I did my first internship, she was a mentor and source of encouragement as I learned how to fact-check, research and write front-of-book stories—and if we also talked a lot about celebrities from our respective desks, that clearly ended up serving both of us well! In fact, Lisa is publishing two books on pop culture this year: an in-depth look at The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat, part of Bloomsbury Publishing’s 33 1/3 series on popular music, and the upcoming Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture Is Failing Women, a collection of essays about how far we haven’t come in terms of women’s representation in popular culture. So, earlier this month, we logged on for a marathon Zoom call about why we stay paying attention to pop culture even though it so often disappoints us, the celebrities we remain obsessed with and the trends we’d like to see die—ahem, female feuds—among many other topics. Read on for a (slightly shorter, don’t worry!) version of our chat.
Where did you get the idea for this book?
It started with the essay in the book about Courtney Love, who is someone who I’ve turned defending into an art form. That is a piece that I had pitched for years to so many different outlets as a feature, as a book… But no one wanted to accept that story, and I believe that was very much because people have a particular idea of Courtney Love—they want the messy Courtney Love, they want the falling down Courtney Love. They don't want to talk about how Courtney Love has been vilified, or to unpack how she's been treated, or talk about a redemption narrative for her. People have a particular idea of her and they don't want that to change.
So, I was at the point where I was pretty discouraged, and then I reached out to Krista Stevens, who was an editor at Longreads, and she got back to me quickly and was like, “I would love to run this. I think it's a really important piece. I also have a complicated relationship with Courtney Love, but I feel she's someone who deserves some analysis, some critical analysis.”
So, that started the ball rolling. I wrote another piece for them, which is also in the book, about gender bias and coverage of celebrity memoirs, and that just started me thinking more and more about pop culture’s problematic treatment of women. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but I started to put it in the context of Me Too and Time's Up. You know, people would say to me, “Well, everything's gotten better for women. Me Too happened and everything's better.” But there’s still gender bias, there’s still this double standard, there’s still this problematic relationship in the way pop culture treats women and men. We've had documentaries and memoirs and podcasts all retelling and re-examining women that pop culture has been really unfair to, and I think that's been really helpful. But that can also lead to us thinking, “Okay, we've solved the problem!” Right? Like, “We had two documentaries about Britney Spears, we can cross Britney Spears off the list. We've fixed our Britney Spears problem.”
Me Too has been invaluable and has resulted in so much change, but I think there is this thinking that all the problems have been fixed and that we can really move on, and I don't think that's the case at all.
No, definitely not. Last year, I wrote about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, and my thesis was that the discourse around that defamation trial really showed the limits of Me Too.
I wrote about the Depp and Heard trial in the book and I just finished watching the Netflix series. I held out as long as I could on watching it because I was like, ‘This is gonna make me so upset.’ People are always like, “I don't understand why women don't come forward.” Well, have you watched the three episodes of the Netflix series? That trial basically wrote a playbook of how to discredit women. If you want to discredit a woman, you watch that Netflix series and and take some notes and you've got it all right there.
And it’s not just this one example. Marilyn Manson is using those tactics. Brad Pitt is using those tactics.
We even see it with Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner! He’s using an offshoot of the ’unlikeable woman’ that I call the ‘bad mom.’ I also talked in the book about Olivia Wilde and all the stuff around Don't Worry Darling, which was shortly after Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. You really can see it is a playbook. And it's certainly not restricted to famous men and famous women; we see it every day.
Why do you think a pop culture is always letting women down? Like, why do we continually see the same kinds of stories come up again and again?
Misogyny. I mean, I think that's the big one. One of the essays is about pop culture in the early 2000s, and how in the tabloid culture of that time, the way Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears were treated made money. How much money did it generate for Us Weekly when the magazine put Britney Spears with her shaved head on the cover with the coverline ‘Help me’? How much money did it generate for Perez Hilton back in the early 2000s? I often feel like I don't have a more a more complex answer than… misogyny.
People are like, “Well, you know, it's getting better.” And in some ways, it is getting better. But I was writing the essay about Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, which is about how the early 2000s were so awful to these women, and then I went to get a coffee and I went to the newsstand, and there was US Weekly with coverlines about Britney’s nude selfies and self-destruction. I was like, it's all so depressing. Nothing has changed.
Why do you think this keeps happening?
I mean, I think the same as you. It's because pop culture reflects us, and this is who we are. And to your point, I think a lot of it is capitalism, too. There's always a money-making reason not to go for progress or equality or equity. It’s depressing. But the natural follow-up to that question, then, is why do we keep paying attention? I really love pop culture, I really love thinking about why these things matter and what they say about us, but it's often quite depressing. So why do you do this to yourself?
I don't know. I often find it depressing. I often find myself defending my choices [of what I cover]. I’m sure you find this, too. l’m often saying, “I know people think they've heard enough about the Kardashians, or that they’re just these trashy reality show stars, but here's why they matter.” Which really means, here's how celebrity gossip helps us identify and define ourselves and our relationship to the world. I stayed up all night watching the Depp vs. Heard Netflix series; it's only three episodes, but I was so depressed about it afterwards.
But then I feel like, the more you talk about these kinds of issues, the more you can move towards change, hopefully. Despite my cynicism, I remain hopeful that things can change, and that’s why I think it's really important to expose these things. I often think social media is a huge dumpster fire and really toxic, but I love how it can be used to call these things out. We can be like, “Hey, we're talking about Ashton Kutcher right now. Here's this clip of him introducing Hilary Duff and talking about how ‘we’ can't wait for Hilary Duff to turn 18.” Or, I'm obsessed with TikTok videos about how problematic America's Next Top Model was. It's exhausting sometimes, because it's like, how many times do you have to talk about how bad media was to Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan? But I do think there are reasons to be hopeful.
One of the things that I think about a lot is how personal I get in my own writing. I really strongly believe our experiences of moving through the world can really help readers understand issues in a more rich way. But when it comes time to actually talk about my feelings, I don't always want to do that. But you did that in the book, in a couple ways that I thought were really interesting. So I wanted to start by talking about why you started the book with an essay about age, and how pop culture treats women as we age?
That's actually my editor's choice. It was a fairly recent piece I wrote for Catapult before they sadly shut down. I think his thinking was that it was going to centre me and my perspective, and that starting with a personal piece draws people in. Like, “Hey, come join me on this journey we're gonna go on.” Because I am a woman in my 50s, and pop culture has certain expectations about women my age. There has also been a lot of conversation about women, aging and pop culture recently—when we were talking about the order of the essays, there was a lot of talk about Yellowjackets, which is a series that starts out when the characters are teenagers and then you meet them later in life, played by actors people had grown up with, including Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci. And there was also a lot of talk about Jennifer Aniston’s Allure cover at the time, and how the magazine really focused on her age.
I loved your essay about OCD, too. It felt like a perspective that’s often missing from writing about pop culture. But, in the essay you said you try to be open about having OCD, while also still having these feelings of shame around what it actually means. So how did you navigate telling that story and revealing something so personal?
I think the more you talk about something like OCD, the more people who have OCD feel seen. That piece ran in The Walrus and the response was amazing, from people who had OCD, people who had friends and families with OCD, people who knew nothing about it. But it was hard to know how much of myself to put in. When I started writing it, I knew it was either all in or nothing. Either I shared everything, or I didn’t share anything at all. I remember after writing the first draft, I realized I had to share more. For me, it was something that I have had for so long, and I hid for so long, that finally I was just like, “You know what? I'm gonna just throw it all out there.” Part of it was wanting to share my experience hoping that maybe it would help other people. I'm also always careful to say, this is my experience only and not a universal experience. I didn't want people to feel like I was saying, “This is what OCD is like for everyone.” Because it is very different.
Were there any essays or topics that didn't make it into the book?
There's a couple of things. I wanted to write a longer piece—and I'm hoping to still do it—about Me Too in pop culture. There was this particular time where we were seeing movies like She Said and Promising Young Woman, and it felt like pop culture was embracing Me Too. But I’m feeling like there’s a bit of a backlash happening. We’re seeing that Fatal Attraction got rebooted and I’m like, who decided we needed to reboot Fatal Attraction?!
So, I wanted to write a piece about pop culture talking about Me Too, and depictions of Me Too in pop culture, because I feel like there’s a lot of interesting things to say, especially as we're coming up on, the anniversary of the hashtag going viral in October. (Even though Me Too existed long before that, and I always like to remind people that, because it was not started by Alyssa Milano.) But I also feel like there was endless material; every day I see something and be like, “I want to write about that.” Eventually my editor, said, “You can't keep adding new essays! At a certain point, we have to cap it.” But every day brings new examples. I could have just written this book every month.
Like all the recent discourse about Olivia Rodrigo! What I would actually really love to have a conversation about is how she masterfully she uses not just the aesthetic of the 90s, but also the sonic traditions of the 90s, to create music that feels relatable to Gen Z and millennials and Gen X, but in way that brings those aesthetics into 2023. But instead, we just keep talking about Olivia Rodrigo vs. Taylor Swift.
Yes! And why is it either or, and we have to have them feuding? One of the essays in the book is about female feuds, because I think that there are really gendered ways of talking about friendship, and our culture loves to see ladies fight. I saw this video from the New York Times interviewing Olivia, and one of the questions was, have you seen the Eras Tour? It was almost setting this up as “Oh, you haven’t seen the Eras Tour? You must have a problem with Taylor Swift.”
Of course, talking about female feuds, Taylor Swift loves to play the victim. She talks about sisterhood and solidarity and her squad, but I think of her as someone who wants to keep these feuds going and is perfectly content to write songs about bad blood and calling other women out for being unkind. So I'm Team Olivia, not that we should all picking teams; we should be supporting both.
But I found it really interesting that this ‘feud’ was in a New York Times profile, and it was given considerable space. There are so many interesting things to say about Olivia, but a large portion of that story was like, “Is this song about Taylor Swift?” I think that's the only way we can understand art made by women, in context of them competing for the top position.
Do you have a favourite essay? Or, is there one that most encapsulates what you want to achieve with this book?
I think I would probably say the one about unlikeable women. I actually had considered writing a whole book about the history of unlikeable women in pop culture. It's certainly not a new trope, but this is a playbook that pop culture seems to just keep wanting to going back to. I talk specifically about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, and Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, and Olivia Wilde and the salad dressing and everything about Don’t Worry Darling. And as we were saying earlier, Joe Jonas and Sophie Turner’s divorce is another version of the unlikeable woman story, this time with children. It’s something I just keep seeing.
When I write about pop culture, depressing as it is to keep seeing those kind of patterns repeat themselves, my hope is the more we talk about and engage with this idea of the unlikeable woman, the more we can acknowledge that media did this and pop culture did this. Because I am seeing still seeing likeable women everywhere.
Whereas, men are not ‘unlikeable.’ They're just complicated or complex or bad boys.
Or reformed bad boys. There's an essay on forgiveness and redemption in the book, which is about seeing how easily and quickly male celebrities get redemption. It takes often just a trip to rehab or a Vanity Fair cover or a New York Times interview where they talk about their issues, and usually, we forgive them and we move on. We forget. And we certainly do not grant women that luxury.
Lisa’s book, Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture Is Failing Women, comes out on Oct. 26 and is available for pre-order now.
Thank you for reading this week’s Club Friday Q&A! Still looking for intersectional pop culture analysis? Here are a few ways to get more Friday:
💫 Subscribe to the (free) weekly newsletter, or join Club Friday, our paid membership program. Members get early access to Q&As with pop culture experts and Friday merch, as well as other fun perks.
💫 If you’d like to make a one-time donation toward the cost of creating Friday Things, you can donate through Ko-Fi.
💫 Follow Friday on social media. We’re on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and (occasionally) TikTok.