The Maris Review, vol 54

Maris Kreizman

13 May 2025 — 5 min read

What I read this week

Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert

The big project of my adult life, and my upcoming book, as a matter of fact, has been unlearning. I go back and think through the things that I thought were normal as a kid and young woman and realize how entirely deranged they were. Free Britney, Terry Richardson, The Swan, etc.

In her absolutely absorbing new book Sophie Gilbert recontextualizes the pop culture of the 90s and aughts starting with an Adrienne Rich quote that I also use in my own book: "Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves." There have been so many documentaries and podcasts and essays about what feminism looked like in the 90s and early aughts, but Gilbert's has the most cohesive argument in looking back: that so many of the things we were told were "empowering" to women were always or became ways to simply objectify and capitalize on them.

If "girl power" was a highly politicized term that came out of the Riot Grrrl movement, then by the time the Spice Girls had co-opted it in order to sell things it was all but meaningless. And fuck, I love Bratmobile but I also love the Spice Girls! That's what we've gotta grapple with. Girl on Girl calls out lots of the popular culture that I still love, but it's not asking us to denounce them. It's just asking us to look back and think about how our cultural ideas have reflected or informed the ways our society treats women.

I kept waiting to get to a part in Sophie's book where I could say "she's such a scold" or "she's gone too far" but I never found it. She's not anti- sex or anti- sex work, or even anti- porn. Her book mostly argues that the pornification of just about everything in our culture flattens so much sex positivity into something that is a consumable commodity. It's not that I wasn't aware at the time. I was the editorial assistant on Ariel Levy's 2006 book about the rise of raunch culture called Female Chauvinist Pigs, which Sophie mentions here a few times. I loved that book, but I remember reading a few reviews at the time that were like, "lighten up, you prude." And I, like one of those Cool Girls in Gillian Flynn's 2012 megahit Gone Girl, wanted to signal to the world that I was fun, that I could hang. I distanced myself from it.

I had been thinking about Female Chauvinist Pigs a lot recently because my friend Scaachi made a documentary about Girls Gone Wild in which she confronts Joe Francis about so many different allegations: that he took advantage of young women under the age of 18 both sexually and monetarily, making millions off of one drunken moment that still has repercussions in their lives today. The reality of what happened with Girls Gone Wild and the many assault allegations that came out of it was so much worse than I ever could have imagined when I was working on Female Chauvinist Pigs. I don't want to make that mistake again.

At a time when virgins (incels) and nerds (tech bros) have become the evil villains and women's rights have been scaled back in appalling ways we'd never imagined it's worth taking a look at where we've been. As Sophie says many time over, there is not one movie or one form of art that turns a kid into an incel who believes that women's only purpose is to have sex with him. But we can't look at the boom in early aughts sex comedies and the way they objectified women (I also love Scary Movie!) and not consider some fallout. As Sophie so aptly says, "If the hero's curse, as seen in American Pie, is unwanted virginity, then who is the villain who cursed him? Inevitably: a teenage girl."

Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian

I feel like every day I'm confronted with a new personal essay about the decision to not have children (there is one in my upcoming book, in fact), but I haven't read a lot of fiction about it. Until now. And I love that Sanjena Sathian is the author on the case; her previous novel Gold Diggers was so damn delightful. Her protagonist in Goddess Complex is named Sanjana Satyananda, one letter off from the author's own first name. And so we're in the territory where autofiction meets the literature of the double (Sanjena the author quotes from Dostoevsky's The Double in the novel), which makes a lot of sense for a novel about whether to procreate, a decision that can sometimes feel like we're being split in two.

Sanjana is an academic in her early 30s who has left her husband in Goa after he'd pressured her to have a baby and she'd chosen to come back to the States to have an abortion instead. She lives the aimless life of a grad student in anthropology with almost no job prospects, watching others lead more adult-ish lives in homes they own while she jerks off to Zillow listings. If the first half of the novel is concerned with the arrested development of a disaffected millennial, then the second half swings in a wildly new, surreal direction involving Sanjana's introduction to her doppelganger, a character named, yes, you guessed it: Sanjena. The girlies on Goodreads don't seem to love the tonal shift, but I live for this shit.

A note about doubling up

I realized earlier that both of the books I've chosen to read and write about this week are from the Penguin Press imprint of PRH. I try not to double up, but this week it escaped my attention and I guess Penguin Press just happens to publish great books! They've got the new Ocean Vuong novel, too. So I feel less guilty to say that their publication of Gavin Newsom's memoir in October is one that I'll meet with way more scrutiny. I've written about how I wish politicians would simply do their damn jobs rather than working on their brands, and Newsom's brand becomes more monsterish with each passing day.

Hey, Brooklyn:

As my publication date for I Want to Burn This Place Down approaches I'd love to invite you to my launch! So very excited to do the event with Emma – she's been there from the beginning, and now she's a very important Brooklyn entrepreneur!