The 1990s and the following decade were, it is widely agreed, a bad time to be a girl. Which is strange, because a girl seemed like the best thing you could be then. Certainly better than being a woman. Not as good as being a boy or a man, of course, but since those were out of the question (gender fluidity was still a nascent proposition), you might as well lean into girlhood.

For millennial girls like me and Sophie Gilbert (a Pulitzer-nominated staff writer on the Atlantic), this was a confusing period. On the one hand, girls were everywhere. We became teenagers to chants of ‘girl power!’, and later we got our vision of young adulthood from the Lena Dunham series Girls. ‘Girl’ was an identity with potential. On the other hand, it’s hard to avoid just how porny a lot of the uses of ‘girl’ were. The Girls Gone Wild softcore DVD series turned young women’s drunken lapses into permanent, purchasable shame. The phrase ‘girl on girl’ comes from pornography, where it denoted lesbian scenes. Gilbert uses it here to refer to the self-loathing and anti-sisterhood this period inculcated.

‘Empowerment’ was the watchword of the millennial girl, but what exactly was she........

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