Sophie Gilbert is a British-born writer and journalist who works at The Atlantic in Washington, D.C., United States.
Sophie Gilbert moved to the United States in 2007 from London, where she was born. She earned her Master's degree in magazine journalism at the New York University while interning for Vogue and Slate . [1]
Gilbert's articles appeared on The Washington Post , The New Republic , and Slate and she was hired as the Washingtonian monthly's arts editor.[ citation needed ]
Gilbert began working for The Atlantic as a staff writer. In 2014, she was promoted to senior editor, in charge of special reports and projects, as well as writing on entertainment and culture.[ citation needed ]
In 2023, Gilbert published a collection of essays titled On Womanhood: Bodies, Literature, Choice. [2]
In 2025, she published Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, characterized by the New Yorker reviewer as "the most ambitious of the feminist reappraisals of the two-thousands." [3] In an Atlantic article [4] adapted from Girl on Girl, Gilbert reveals she did not begin to question how coming of age in this "hypersexualized, internet-enabled environment" had affected her until a few months into the coronavirus pandemic, when she gave birth to twins. [3] The book was generally praised by reviewers. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
In the otherwise welcoming review of The New Yorker , there are objections to the adoption of the anti-porn position of seeing causation where correlation is most likely. "There is plenty of evidence," the review reads, "that sadistic men watch sadistic porn, less evidence that sadistic porn creates sadistic men." Gilbert is said to be dwelling on porn's most violent offerings as if porn's extremes express the truth of that medium. The reviewer concludes that, without the ambition of Dworkin-MacKinnon or the materialist analysis of their socialist and Third Worldist contemporaries, who have ostensibly traced the source of women's oppression to colonialism, racism, and economic inequality, the author's argument finds itself at a dead end. [3]
In 2022, Gilbert was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, [11]
In 2024, she received the year's National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. [12]