“Our philosophy is girls controlling our destiny,
taking control of our lives.”
“Girl power” tells us that
girls can do anything -- but can this sugary sweet message
actually prevent us from fixing a world that doesn’t let
young women realize their full power?
In the 90s, the “Girl power” movement
embodied by pop icons, The Spice Girls
brought feminist thinking into the mainstream.
It was positioned as a more accessible and fun evolution
of old-school feminist ideals. “It’s like feminism
from the 60s revitalised for the 90s.”
But girl power also was a shallower, commercial version of
feminist ideas that were, previously, a lot more edgy and disruptive.
It took what was a political movement, and depoliticised it.
“Do you think Margaret Thatcher had girl power?”
“Yes, of course!” “Do you think she
effectively utilized girl power by funneling money
to illegal paramilitary death squads in Northern Ireland?”
The philosophy of girl power implied women should empower
themselves as individuals, instead of dismantling the systems
that stood in the way of gender equality.
Perhaps the most revealing issue was that many girl power icons
were effectively designed by men. 90s “girl power” heroines
created by men like Buffy The Vampire Slayer,
The Powerpuff Girls, and Xena: Warrior Princess all looked great
while kicking ass. Meanwhile, popular men’s magazines
like Maxim, Loaded, and FHM were redefining the feminine ideal
as a woman who was loud, brash, and unapologetic
like one of the guys -- but still (of course) centerfold-ready.
Today we can see the dark sides of capitalism-friendly
girl power in its descendent “girlboss feminism”
which is increasingly condemned. And it’s this
commodification of feminism -- turning it into a sanitized,
child-friendly brand -- that is girl power’s
most enduring legacy. Here’s our take on Girl Power,
and what happens when a revolutionary movement
is embraced and absorbed by the structures it tries to fight against.
I’m Susannah McCullough, I’m Debra Minoff,
And we’re really excited to announce that we have
a new episode of The Takeaway
on our Amazon Prime Video YouTube Channel.
It’s on a show we’re really enjoying watching:
The Wild -- so wild. If you haven’t seen it yet,
check it out on Amazon Prime Video.
It’s about a group of girls whose plane crashes
in the middle of nowhere, and they find themselves
on a deserted island, and also find themselves
in a fairly sinister, complicated, social experiment.
There are so many interesting mysteries
going on in this plot that’s what I love
about this show. You’re wondering
what’s really the reason that they’re on
this island. Lord of the Flies
meets Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,
it definitely brings in all of those cool themes.
There’s a lot to unpack in the season 1 finale,
we find some answers but have even more questions.
This is a really important Takeaway episode to watch
if you’re a fan of the show
to try and figure out what we know so far,
what is behind this whole mystery
and where it could be going. Go to the Amazon Prime
Video YouTube channel, watch our latest episode
of The Takeaway, it really supports us.
Thank you so much for subscribing
and please keep watching.
The first thing to understand about girl power is that
its origins were far more radical. Punk band Bikini Kill,
pioneers of the Riot Grrl subculture of the early 90s,
used the term as the title for their second zine in 1991.
Our fanzines were all about feminism and political issues.
“I actually wrote a radical manifesto
in the Bikini Kill fanzine called Girl Power.”
That zine contained the Riot Grrl Manifesto,
which reads as an outwardly political, angry, anti-capitalist statement,
with lines such as: “we hate capitalism
in all its forms and see our main goal
as sharing information and staying alive,
instead of making profits off being cool
according to traditional standards.” “We weren’t making money,
we knew we were never gonna make money,
and it was really important we made our music,
we were on a mission, and we were gonna do what we did
whether we got attention or not.”
Within that manifesto, though, we can see kernels of messaging
that would be taken up by the more commercial advocates
of girl power. Take the lines:
“We are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb,
Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak,” or “us girls crave records
and books and fanzines that speak to US that WE feel
included in and can understand in our own ways.”
This mainstreaming and commercialization of the
Riot Grrl ethos was most clearly seen
in the Spice Girls, the British pop group phenomenon
formed in 1994. The Spice Girls were
explicitly girl power all the time,
bluntly preaching empowerment and strength in sisterhood
in very mainstream spaces. “We went away and wrote
our own stuff, managed ourselves,
created the spicy girl power movement
because we had our own ideas of what we wanted to do.”
The availability of these messages on the radio,
TV and at the record store served as a kind of
entry-level feminism for young girls who might not have
otherwise been exposed. And they basically boiled
girl power down to three values:
confidence, independence, and female friendship.
“Spice Girls is fundamentally about friendship.
That’s what this group runs on”
Female empowerment done within a commercial space
isn’t inherently bad “It was like a diluted feminism,
but there’s nothing wrong with that, that might lead you
to the stronger stuff.” And girl power impressively
did usher feminist ideas into the mainstream
to a powerful degree. This manifested in
network television shows featuring badass, assertive,
and audaciously “unladylike” female characters like
Xena: Warrior Princess, who captured a big following
through a take-no-prisoners mentality that felt indebted
to the Riot Grrl ethos, “Open the gates.”
“No.” “I’m in command here, I said open the gates!”
Perhaps the greatest legacy of girl power à la the Spice Girls
is that it made feminism feel fun and open to everyone.
As activist Nimco Ali told Stylist, feminism is often heavy with academia,
or too technical. What the Spice Girls did
wasn’t life-saving, but it was dynamic.”
And by modeling that girls could be sporty or outspoken
as well as girly and fashionable, it pushed against
gender polarization, or the idea that
men and women are polar opposites who must live and behave
in different ways appropriate to their gender
“You can wear your wonderbra, as much makeup as you like,
but still have some intelligence. Have some balls!”
At the same time, because of the Spice Girls’
and girl power’s rapid rise to immense popularity,
The market transformed the idea of girl power
into extremely profitable merchandise and barbie dolls,
playing into the kind of “clothes and dolls” female stereotypes
both Riot Grrl and girl power claimed to fight against.
“Girl power is moving merchandise by the tonne-load.
7-14 year olds are clamouring to buy the stuff
stacked up on the shelves around me here.”
Even the one-word monikers each Spice Girl was known by
(Sporty, Ginger, Baby, Posh and Scary)
encouraged young fans to compare themselves to
a narrow archetype of womanhood that’s mostly about appearance
(and in Mel B’s case, many now question if labeling
the one black woman in the group as “Scary” had racist undertones)
Whenever a political movement that seeks to empower
the disempowered gets co-opted by
mainstream capitalist forces, it’s likely that those original ideas
will get twisted to instead reinforce the existing structures of power.
And the girl power of the 1990s did get used to essentially
put forward pretty young females as symbols of
masculine ideas of strength and intense individualism.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer turned a regular teen girl
into an action heroine and subverted tropes of
valley girl blondes; yet as professor and
avid Buffy-studier Lorna Jowett wrote,
“Buffy may be a Barbie with a kung-fu grip,
but she’s still a barbie.” “I germinated this idea
how much I’d like to see a blonde girl
go into a dark alley, get attacked by a big monster,
and then kill it.” “That was sort of the genesis
for the idea of the movie Buffy The Vampire Slayer.”
(Moreover, the show’s feminist themes have been somewhat tainted
by reports that its creator, Joss Whedon,
allegedly abused his power, and has been verbally abusive
and cruel to female actors. Meanwhile, girl power
actively disavowed an old-fashioned, political idea of feminism.
As Geri Halliwell put it in 2017: “Twenty years ago,
if you said the word feminism, you thought of those bra-burning,
marching protestors. It was quite tough and harsh.
For me, Girl Power was a much more punchy way of saying it.”
The Powerpuff Girls villainized a more explicit invocation of feminism
“That’s right, you sad excuse of a man.
You’ve been rendered completely helpless by a woman”].
Girl Power’s message also coincided with the rise
of a specific type of woman in pop culture.
Enter: the ladette. This “guy’s girl”
could binge-drink, be sexually promiscuous,
get into brawls, and show a blatant disregard
“I’m a party woman. I only deal with one aspect
of the whole gift department, the essential Christmas present:
the corkscrew.” Carolyn Jackson and Penny Tinkler
write that ladettes “presented as occupying space
outside the traditional feminine domestic sphere,
and crucially, as taking space once regarded
as the principal or sole preserve of men.”
In the UK this manifested in the hard-partying,
ultra cool aesthetic of supermodel Kate Moss,
and in television hosts like Zoe Ball, Denise Van Outen, and Sara Cox.
“Hopefully after the show I’ll be making love.”
“if he’s up for it.” In British sitcom Game On,
“one of the lads” Mandy swigs beer, dresses casually,
and has sex instead of relationships. In the US,
the face of MTV’s reality dating show
Singled Out and later the star of her own sketch show,
Jenny McCarthy subverted people’s idea of a submissive former playboy bunny
with a loud, unapologetic, and confident brand
of “bro-y” femininity. “Ooo is the engine hot
or is it just me?” “Listen buddy,
why don’t you save your breath for your inflatable girlfriend, k?
Pamela Anderson rose to prominence in the same era
with a persona that was, while sweeter and soft-spoken,
always cool, laid-back and ready to go along
with whatever the guys wanted to talk about
“I bet you don’t go to the bathroom
for weeks at a time” “that’s not true”
“farts are never not funny” No doubt many women
liked watching or identifying with plenty of free-wheeling ladettes,
who weren’t repressed or “proper,” and got to enjoy being sexy
while having a lot of fun. But in the ladette,
we also see the genesis of what would become known
as the “cool girl” trope expertly dissected in Gone Girl
“Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game.
Cool girl is fun. Cool girl never gets angry at her man.”
Raha Murtuza writes “The main problem with the cool girl
is that she’s meant to put down other women…
The idea is that other girls are obsessed with
makeup and clothes, while the cool girl
likes football and buffalo wings instead.”
And you can see how this partly emerged from
these proto-cool-girls of the 90s and 00s
who combined feminine beauty with boorish male fraternity culture,
yielding an easily sellable product for male-oriented entertainment.
Meanwhile, even though they were supposedly
empowered women carving out space in male arenas,
these pre-cool girls could end up receiving
a fair amount of toxic backlash and moral panic
“They’re truly frightening. Violent, selfish,
with no sense of shame. But not only are they hurting
those around them, far more worrying is the damage
they’re doing to themselves.” Simran Hans explicitly links
the shaming, misogynist tabloid culture of the 00s
to the supposed gains made in the 90s, saying:
“We’d had the rise of ladettes and this reclaiming
of being a ‘boy’s girl’. The 2000s felt like a punishment
for women trying to get in on the act.”
The phrase girl power may not be used with the impunity
it was in the 90s, but we can still see its legacy
in the blueprint of popular, commercial feminism today --
especially in the modern archetype of the “girlboss.”
“I’m the one who created this company from nothing.
I’m the vision. I’m Nasty Gal”
In the mid-2010s, peaking with the “Me too”
and “Times up” moments of 2017, girlboss characters
and real-life female CEOs were framed as empowering disruptors.
But after a number of Girlbosses (including the creator of the name,
NastyGal founder Sophia Amoruso) fell from grace,
many questioned whether “becoming financially successful
while being a woman” was really enough
to be championed as a feminist icon. The girlboss became known for
fostering toxic work environments, leaning into her privilege,
or just not being any better than the guy CEO --
but it’s her hypocrisy of claiming that her success
leads to all women’s success that makes her so hated.
“Tickets to these events start at $300.”
“Part of WAHAM’s mission is to uplift every women,
but can you really do that if the price point is so inaccessible?”
The “girl boss” can be seen as the worst incarnation
of girl power -- a woman of privilege
who performatively espouses feminist ideals
while leaving other women out of the capitalist,
patriarchy ruling class she’s infiltrated
for her own personal profit. But this gets at
the underlying problem: any capitalist-driven
version of feminism -- or of any movement
that’s supposed to be about disrupting the status quo --
will inevitably become about making more money for people
already in power. And it’s not hard to see
that big commercial narratives today -- from superheroines to heist films
to Disney princesses -- often espouse a popular feminism
that’s really a descendent of feel-good, reductive girl power.
As feminism has become more indisputably mainstream,
it’s been increasingly commodified and watered down,
to the point where one can brand themselves as a feminist
without really thinking about what that means,
or meaning anything by it. There’s a Girl Power-esque
marketing-driven idea that, if we teach young people
not to buy into gender inequality, it won’t exist.
“What does it mean to you when I say run like a girl?”
“It means run as fast as you can.”
Contemporary children’s books transform the stories
of empowered women into bedtime stories
“Extraordinary women, past and present,
from Cleopatra to Serena Williams, so the idea was to create
this collection of bedtime stories.” And in spirit of 90s girl power,
this surface-level feminism seems to assume that
any woman who obtains power or prominence
is automatically a feminist icon. Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls
includes Margaret Thatcher, who (though historically notable
for being the first UK woman prime minister)
has been described as an anti-feminist
and even called feminism “poison” policies.
Revealingly, Thatcher was also heralded
by Geri Halliwell as the “first lady of Girl Power,”
“She was a woman that moved mountains and was so powerful.”
Today, another largely superficial incarnation of girl power feminism
is the Disney princess girl boss. Emerging in the late 2000s,
these bolder, independent female characters
have mind-blowing powers, embrace self defense
and sometimes openly mock the idea of fairy tale love.
“You can’t marry a man you just met.”
They were a response to public backlash against
the traditional Disney princesses, who came to be perceived
as too submissive, passive or defined by
their relationship to a prince. But Enchanted’s Giselle,
Tangled’s Rapunzel, and Frozen’s Anna still fit within a
proven, commercially viable Disney movie formula --
girl power is again leveraged as a marketing tool.
Promisingly, though, even today’s commercial,
popular feminist tales are getting more political
and starting to acknowledge that systemic problems
need systemic (and not just symbolic,
individualist) solutions.
The adaptation of and revitalized interest in
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale --
whose red robes attained cultural icon status
while representing real threats to women’s reproductive freedom
in our time. “We are seeing the outfits
a lot as a protest symbol” -- embodies how “girl power” messaging
in today’s film and TV can, and should,
be confrontationally political. Girl power and the Spice Girls
deserve credit for changing the global conversation
at a time when huge all-girl bands weren’t really a thing
(let alone bands made up of young, working class women).
Riot Grrl may have called for a revolution,
but what we got was more of an evolution --
a change by degrees, that has been meaningful
over the years, even though we still
get steps backward.
“More than 12 million women lost their jobs
during the pandemic, and over 4.5 million
have not returned to the workforce.”
But feminism today is taking on a more collective,
intersectional mantra that’s more in line with the true,
countercultural origins of Girl Power. The ideals of 90s
fun-loving girl power have become fused with political feminist action
by a generation of women who grew up with figures
like the Spice Girls as role models. “Many of our social justice problems
like racism and sexism are often overlapping,
creating multiple levels of social injustice.”
And mainstream voices across industries
are getting the message through that “women-power” can’t be achieved
through empowerment of the individual, but through concrete
shockwaves to the system. “For equality in offices,
in kitchens, in factories, in prisons all over the world.”
Check out The Takeaway, our latest episode
on The Wild’s season finale.
There’s a mystery, it is a wild show
and it really has so much to talk about.
And we think you guys are going to be
really interested in this video
because it really digs into, what does it look like
if you throw a bunch of young girls together
and you put them on an island and you said
“figure it out.” If you just had a society
that was all women, what would happen?
We see them going wild, they’re accessing
their primal selves, they’re being really powerful.
It’s definitely not conflict-free,
but there’s sisterhood too and there’s an unlocking
of their true selves. So I think
there’s a really interesting carrying out
of that thought experiment. What has girl power
been represented as? What have we been told it is?
Is it the Spice Girls version of it?
Is it the Legally Blonde version? Or is it the badass Black Widow?
It’s one of those contradictions that girls are powerful
and we are powerful when we come together.
And it’s true, you want to make sure
that you’re living that rather than just letting somebody
get rich off of turning it into a shallow message.
And that’s actually the whole conflict
that’s at the heart of The Wild.
It’s not just about the relationships with others
but it’s about the relationship with yourself
and it really digs into that. Which characters do you think
you most relate to or think you’d be
from The Wild. I have some Leah in me
but I also have some Nora, which is funny because
they’re always positioned as these opposites --
Leah is very obsessed and emotional
and Nora is very detached and analytical --
but I somehow think I’m a blend of those too,
very emotionally analytical. Interestingly,
I have a bit of Fatin in me, who I think is a bit more
of the Id in the emotional.
She’s not scared of pleasure and she’s not scared of enjoying.
And I think that’s a really important piece of me.
I think there’s a little bit of Dot in me
I think I would try to pull whatever tools I could
in terms of surviving and helping out those around me.
I certainly see, you know, some of Leah’s non-conformity
and sometimes how the desire to get to the truth
or figure something out to the point of obsession.
At what point do you trust yourself?
How does someone say “let it go” to you,
and you say, “No, I don’t want
to let it go.” Go to the Amazon Prime
Video YouTube channel, watch our latest episode
of The Takeaway, it really supports us.