"Girls Rule" is more than just a cute T-shirt slogan; it's
an increasing reality on the pop charts, playing fields,
and TV and movie screens. But is Girl Power a
revolutionary salvo for gender equality, or a marketing
opportunity for soft- drink execs? Ann Powers reports.
Last fall, two different camps set out to capture the hormonally charged
hearts of America's teenage girls. Both relied on a multimedia, multiphase
plan to saturate the nation's airwaves and Web sites with messages of
self-love, independence, and robust health. Each raised the same rallying
cry: Girl Power! One was prefab supergroup the Spice Girls, hot off their
first major European hit. The other was the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services.
The parallels were striking. "Say what you have to say," encouraged Ginger
Spice. "Girl Power is about speaking your mind," read the HHS media kit.
"Eat healthy, but don't diet," counseled Sporty Spice. "Exercise your mind
and body," urged the government literature. "Don't do anything to get in a
gang," warned Scary Spice. "You are a unique individual with your own
special talents and skills," advised the Clinton administration. And
though state-sponsored Girl Power was primarily a Just Say No campaign,
HHS Secretary Donna Shalala could have been the sixth spice-Wonky
Spice?-when she proclaimed, "Girl Power is not another way of saying
no-it is a reason to say yes!"
Girl Power may be a manufactured term, designed to sell things-for
instance, abstinence and record albums-to an increasingly assertive female
audience. Yet the phrase, like "juvenile delinquency" in the 1950s or
"sexual revolution" in the '60s, also indicates a serious social shift.
Young women, shunned or patronized by everyone from social policymakers to
feminist intellectuals to entertainment execs, are finally insisting on
the right to star in their own lives. Not since the height of Beatlemania
have adults been so aware of girls' power to shape trends, and never
before have girls been so active in the culture at large. Pop music is
dominated by young women artists: Newcomers such as Fiona Apple, Jewel,
the Spice Girls, Lil' Kim, No Doubt's Gwen Stefani, and Erykah Badu have
all reached platinum status this year, and record labels have responded
with a full-on blitz of female signings, to such an extent that, for the
moment, talented men have less chance of scoring a record deal than do
not-so-talented women. And the male artists who do reach the top, whether
Jakob Dylan, Hanson, or Maxwell, are there in large part due to their
adoring female fan base.
The boys hardly matter, though; what girls want (and are getting) from
culture today is relentlessly focused on their own desires, ambitions, and
identities. No more waiting sweetly in the background for cultural crumbs
or taking refuge in underground enclaves like riot grrrl. Girl Culture
girls are Everything Girls; they want the world and they want it now. And
clearly, they are getting it: jock heroines like Missy Giove and Rebecca
Lobo; Web zines with names like Bust, gURL, and Maxi; big-buck new
periodicals like Jump and Jane; major Hollywood movies like The Craft and
Scream; TV shows like Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer;
and small-screen sneaker commercials, soft-drink spots, and 1-800-collect
ads all pitched in the key of gurl.
What all this girlie action adds up to is more than just a wider selection
of goods; Girl Culture girls have transformed what it means to be female
in the '90s. Unlike conventional feminism, which focused on women's
socially imposed weaknesses, Girl Culture assumes that women are free
agents in the world, that they start out strong, and that the odds are in
their favor. It goes beyond the so-called postfeminist assertions of
politically incorrect debutantes and jesters like Katie Roiphe and Camille
Paglia, who harrumphed that really potent women like themselves stood
alone. Girl Culture insists that being strong doesn't single you out; on
the contrary, it recasts sisterhood in the image of a girl gang expanding
its turf. Touchy-feely consciousness may not be Girl Culture, but the
Girls' Aggressive Skate Team is. Raising your voice with a thousand other
earth mothers to a Holly Near ballad doesn't cut it, but spitting out the
sexy-defiant words to an Ani DiFranco song sure does.
Mixing the bra-burning outrageousness of early women's liberation with the
bullet bra-wearing, get-ahead attitude of '80s rebel babes like Madonna,
Girl Culture doesn't seek so much to infiltrate various establishments as
to overrun them. The Girl Culture girl either goes where no woman has gone
before-she's a boxer like Christy Martin-or takes on an old power position
in a new way-she's a supermodel with no eyebrows, like Kristen McNemany.
Girl Culture girls choose their own representatives, too: That's why
Alanis Morissette, whose megastardom took everyone by surprise, is a
genuine exemplar, while Meredith Brooks, whose Girl Culture quotient
seemed chemically engineered by her record company, is already not. Girl
Culture belongs to girls who write poetry, girls who do math, girls who
play the drums-as long as they've found something that makes them just a
little bigger than expected. While feminism tried to imagine what women
could become, Girl Culture urges them to enjoy what they have-muscles,
guile, sex appeal-and to go ahead and use it.
"Suck my left one!" screamed Kathleen Hanna, singer for riot grrrl queens
Bikini Kill, as she lifted her top and flashed her breasts at an all-ages
show in 1992. Her lyrics taunted a wannabe molester, turning his menace
against him. In the early '90s, while feminists fretted over whether women
should be soldiers and sex workers, female rockers blasted through such
debate with a few well-placed power chords. Their songs often angrily or
sarcastically exposed the abuse they'd suffered, but the music sounded
like the opposite of laying back and taking it. "Was she asking for it?"
taunted Courtney Love, standing with her legs splayed beneath her torn
chiffon dress like every pedophile's nightmare. Polly Harvey turned on her
torturer: "I'll make you lick my injuries," she growled in "Rid of Me."
Tori Amos's concerts peaked with "Me and a Gun," a fierce a cappella
account of her own rape that turned the testimony into a tool for survival.
"I didn't think that this would happen again," grumbled Liz Phair in her
film-noir secretary voice on Exile in Guyville. "Fuck and run, even when I
was 12."
These diatribes spilled forth on the college-radio airwaves like flash
floods, furious and shocking. The mood was one of vengeance, the same
spirit cultivated by Susan Faludi's best-selling 1992 book Backlash, which
detailed contemporary sexism in terms that called for a war against it.
Young women took that directive to heart, publishing zines with titles
like Chainsaw and forming defiantly dirty bands like 7 Year Bitch. Turning
up the volume, they began to play with sexual personae that neither
feminism nor conventional femininity could accommodate: goddess and whore,
genius and tart, dominatrix and masochist. As Bj?rk caterwauled "You'll
meet an army of me."
While women rockers dug into this dizzying experience, their male
counterparts made music meant to raise the girl inside the man. Eddie
Vedder sang in the voice of a female child-abuse victim; Trent Reznor
called his compulsion toward sexual dominance a disease. "The killer in me
is the killer in you," whimpered Billy Corgan. "What's a boy supposed to
do?" No one asked this question more acutely than Kurt Cobain, who used
his fame to engineer a new record deal for legendary feminist folk-punks
the Raincoats, and, in the public side of his marriage to Courtney Love,
strove to offer a model for true creative partnership between men and
women. Love herself saw very clearly how rubbing feminist protest up
against rock rebellion cleansed the former of its prudishness and the
latter of its misogyny.
"Do you feel like you have power by being a rock star?" old-school groupie
Pamela Des Barres asked her in a 1994 interview.
"Fuck, yeah, man!" responded Love. "I'm a rock-star girl!"
The Girl Culture that grew out of this moment, the one that dominates
today in the super-girl persons of Fiona Apple (20), Alanis Morissette(23),
and Gwen Stefani (28), assumes that all girls are potentially rock-star
girls: that any woman can be larger than life without sacrificing her
femininity, however she defines it. Girl Culture makes its crucial
statement by insisting that women can and do find authority in roles
feminism previously assumed were demeaning. Using the dismissive,
diminuitive "girl" turns an indignity into a fighting word, in the same
manner homosexuals did with "queer" ten years ago: "Being a girl" means
taking pride in the very qualities denigrated by both sexists and
doctrinaire feminists. For young women, these include prettiness,
brattiness, and sexual flamboyance. Being a girl also means trusting
youth's impulsive drive-not agonizing over the nature of the power you can
grab, or how girl power might be different than boy power, or what girls
might do once they get it. Girl Culture girls leave the soul-searching for
somebody else.
The clothes reflect this cultivated cluelessness. Midriff tops and
baby-tees and coyly clingy retro-dresses tone down the confrontational
sexuality of punk by several notches, instead pretending that sex appeal
is something almost accidental. Yet the core attraction of these cute
little outfits-and of young girls' bodies in them-is that they hide sex in
plain sight. Jailbait is a spicy taboo: When Girl Culture girls present
themselves as nymphets, without some kind of disruption, without scrawling
slut across that bare belly, as some riot grrrls did, they use their sexual
power without having to consider the responsibilities and risks it entails.
Girl Culture presents beauty as one of many tools young women can use to
get ahead (this was always the case, but now nobody's pretending), and
it's expected that girls want to go as far as possible. In this world, the
spotlight is the ultimate source of energy. Lilith Fair organizer Sarah
McLachlan, who hearkens back to a very 1973 sense of feminine boosterism,
gets Girl Culture points nonetheless because she made no bones about how
her tour would promote her career and that of the other women on the bill.
"We decided we want to be a 'household name,' " Posh Spice told one
reporter. "Like Ajax." Such an odd, dehumanizing sentiment makes sense in
the Girl Culture universe, where the constellations that burn brightest
are the ones that are Totally Huge. "I do not feel oppressed by the call
to greatness," wrote Avia Midons in the zine h2so4. "It may be the only
thing that keeps me going."
Girl Culture demands this kind of hugeness because its basic strategy isn't
rational or realistic-it's mythic. Feminism gave women critical tools, but
it never offered enough fantasy, and the images it did
produce-earth-hugging virgin goddesses like the Venus of Willendorf, or
sensibly dressed Susan B. Anthony types-don't cut it in this high-speed,
cold-blooded age. What girls want now is what boys have always found in
ancient tales of sword and sorcery, in the cowboy's laconic visage, in
Schwarzenneger's muscle-and in rock'n'roll's swaggering satyrs, Elvis,
Jagger, Prince. They want ruthless, righteous heroes. Girl Power turns out
to be nothing more-and nothing less-than the vision of women out to win.
"I'm here to remind you of the mess you left when you went away!" shouted
Alanis Morissette in "You Oughta Know," the 1995 hit that began Girl
Culture's hero phase. Her yell was so melodramatic that fans of cred girls
like Love and Phair were ready to send her back to drama club. But even if
she was beyond fake, her hocus-pocus did the trick. Raising her voice
changed Morissette from a permed Canadian child star with a fading
dance-pop career to a vengeful goddess ready to answer the petitions of
millions of fans. Morissette turned out to be more New Age peacenik than
spirtual terrorist, but she never lost the momentum of that first coldcock
to the universal older man.
It's not entirely coincidental that the cataclysm Morissette spearheaded
took place when it did. Teenage girls now preoccupy the public
consciousness the way teenage boys did in the 1950s. Back then, endless
commentary addressed the drifting juvies who seemed to be squandering the
promise of the post-war boom. In our own era, similar condescenscion has
been leveled toward girls. Best-sellers like Reviving Ophelia and
Schoolgirls stimulated mass panic over their failing confidence levels.
Teen pregnancy became the touchstone of contemporary moral decay. The
nightly news was filled with images of girls swept under by the tide of
men's desire or their own confusion: the "modern-day Lolita" who ran off
with her high school gym teacher; Megan Kanka, whose apple-cheeked face
became a symbol of the peril facing every child; the 17-year-old retarded
girl in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, tricked into letting half a dozen boys
sodomize her with a broomstick. The brutal cycle hit bottom with the media
coverage of the JonBenet Ramsey case, when the six-year-old beauty queen's
murder gave rise to a national scandal regarding the sexualization of
children-as if girls hadn't been dealing with this from Day One.
The adult talk about the dismal fate of today's Little Women made girls
eager for a chance to talk back, or at least to hear Hero Girls speak
their side. Web sites teem with first-person reports from the jungle of
sexual pursuit, with the emphasis on survivors, not casualties. Fans look
for similar frankness from their pop stars. The Spice Girls get away with
their advice-column side because it's offset by an equal amount of cheek.
They make potty jokes, fret about their lipstick, and gloat about their
crushes. They may be pop bimbos to you, but to girl fans they're
sisters-in-sparkly-nail-polish. Likewise, when Gwen Stefani growls, "I'm
just a girl!" her sentiment disturbs a lot of older feminists, but teen
fans hear the sarcasm. In concert, she turns that phrase from excuse to
threat when she leads the crowd in a chant of "I'm a fucking girl! I'm a
fucking girl!" Fiona Apple provokes a similar mix of anger and pride; her
waifish looks only reinforce the shock of her untamed animal voice. "I
tell you how I feel but you don't care!" the first words on her
platinum-selling album, are programmed into teen-girl hardwiring.
Different as they are, Apple and Stefani are both wild things, sexual and
stubborn, the kind of girls adults say can't handle themselves. Their
audacity lies in insisting that they can.
Such bravado often only works as a show; in real life, Stefani still lives
with her parents and Apple seeks refuge in the self-help poetry of Maya
Angelou. Onstage, they undergo a metamorphosis, a change many young girls
can identify with. Like this moment's other pivotal figures-athletes like
Mia Hamm and Gabrielle Reese, and action babes like Buffy the Vampire
Slayer and Xena-the most popular girl rockers tap into a power that seems
a little beyond their own control. Although Apple pounds away at the piano,
most of these women aren't serious instrumentalists; Girl Culture isn't
interested in such technical mastery. It revels in the excitement of power
that hasn't yet been refined.
Power and athleticism are important to all aspects of Girl Culture: its
films (Scream and the sequel, Scream 2, The Craft) and television programs
(Buffy, Xena, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch) feature airborne action-figure
heroines, its fashion has launched staples like GIRLS KICK ASS T-shirts
and Adidas sweats, and its jocks-from basketball to snowboarding, from
soccer to mountain biking-have captured the imagination of girls
nationwide. Since the 1996 Olympics, where American women swiped the glory
from the men, female athletes are becoming demigoddesses in young women's
eyes, in much the same way their male counterparts have always earned the
envy and devotion of boys. Buy a ticket to just one Swoosh-sponsored WNBA
game, packed with thousands of girls, black and white, who want to Be Like
Rebecca, or Like Sheryl, or Like Spoon, and you'll see a generation of
dreams expanding beyond the runway or the movie screen.
Today's girl does not want to abandon the pretty decorations of the vanity
table, does not want to become a boy; yet so much of traditional
femininity is now viewed as passive, useless. The musicians and athletes
girls admire most are Pretty Women who've chosen to be more, and Girl
Culture films and TV shows smartly flatter this new will to power. In the
year's biggest cult film, Scream, the bunny-cute heroine (Sydney, played
by Neve Campbell) battled not some semi-anonymous monster but her own
insensitive boyfriend. And she broke the genre's most sexist rule, because
she defeated him after losing her virginity. When bad beau Billy returns
to life to correct this transgression, she mutters, "Not in my movie," and
smacks him dead once again.
Sydney's evolution from damsel in distress to steely hero girl required
that she learn, like Demi Moore in G.I. Jane, to master the power she
naturally owned. You see similar lessons repeated in the growing number of
TV shows that cater to the witch-in-the-making. The best is Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, in which former soap star and tae kwon do brown belt Sarah
Michelle Gellar plays a sweet blond thing who reluctantly learns to kick
butt. Buffy and its sitcom counterparts, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and
The Secret World of Alex Mack, all center on a girl's crisis when she
starts to know her own strength. "There are a lot scarier things than you,"
says Buffy before dispatching a particularly nasty monster. "And I'm one
of them."
All of these figures are rock-star girls, aware of and tempted by their
own bad sides. Insurgent lesbian icon Xena, the breastplate-clad
faux-legendary princess in the hit series, strains to resist misusing her
talent for destruction. She's not alone. "I've been a bad, bad girl,"
moans Fiona Apple in "Criminal," her voice torn between true regret and
irrepressible cockiness. "I've been careless with a delicate man."
These struggles bring us back to Girl Culture's most loaded question: How
does a powerful girl wield the double-edged sword of her sexuality?
Hip-hop artists such as Foxy Brown and Lil' Kim have simply accepted that
sex is their handiest weapon; their predator act may serve as an antidote
to the bubble-bath vapidity of most R&B, but doesn't offer much hope for
women after their fineness fades. Still, out-there sexiness is far more
palatable than the dewy-eyed denial of Jewel, the current embodiment of
the cheerleader who's always complaining she's fat. The advice she offers
her female fans-"you can be sexy and spiritual...seductive and innocent...
wise and yet incredibly naive"-seeks to preserve the kind of
simple-hearted maidenhood that most kids put away with their fairy tales.
Jewel is hardly alone in her confused attempt to integrate old-fashioned
feminine allure into the New Girl world. Paula Cole's "Where Have All The
Cowboys Gone?" was, at least, an idealistic misfire: The adventurous
singer thought she could pull off irony on a mass scale with her
nuevo-country song about a disappointed wife; problem was, people heard it
as a call for the return of macho. Meredith Brooks, all wrong in that slip
dress, is just as fuzzy. "Bitch" is an anthem dedicated to nothing, a
laundry list of feminine archetypes designed to serve all comers. "You
wouldn't have it any other way," she sings to the guy for whom she's
bitch, mother, angel undercover, and the kitchen sink. With such a Variety
Pak for a girlfriend, how could he?
The pursuit of sexiness has produced a storehouse of girlie wisdom, from
Cleopatra's kohl eye pencil to Madonna's tips on doing bondage right, and
Girl Culture rightfully honors that legacy. No one wants to throw the
Babysoft out with the bathwater. Yet at this intersection between the
conventional feminine and the evolving Girl, what's springing up is not a
revolution but a mall. Girl Culture's impulse to make no distinctions
produces a sense that any choice is a good one, a creed of unbridled
consumerism. Thus, a genuine movement devolves into a giant shopping
spree, where girls are encouraged to purchase whatever identity fits them
best off the rack. What may feel like a life-changing experience winds up,
two weeks later, as no more than a mysterious charge on your credit card.
But girls are more than just shoppers, and the effects of the culture we
embrace go deeper than the pocketbook. This isn't the first time that what
seemed like a consumer trend turned into something more substantial. A
hundred years ago, the Gibson Girl, a bicycle-riding independent thinker
who dared to show her ankles in public, begat the Suffragette and won
women the vote. In the 1920s, the flapper, a risky creature who played
tennis, drank gin and enjoyed a discreet but daring sex life, gave birth a
couple of decades on to Rosie the Riveter, who redefined the role of women
in the workplace. In the late '60s, the hippie chick who kept her radical
man warm with veggie stew and good lovin' transformed into the woman's
libber, storming the streets in what turned out to be a real, if
incomplete, revolution. Girl Culture is on the same irreversible
trajectory. And eventually, this pantheon of heroes and babes will address
not just what girls really, really want but what they really, really need.
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