The American Girl dolls were marketed as more civilized, educational, and confidence-producing than trashy Barbie, whose dreams were limited to a self-serve ice cream parlor and a convertible. With girlish bodies and identities that weren’t sexualized, they were seen as an improvement upon Barbie, who, by the 90s, was attempting to beat her shallow rap. In 1992, the Year of the Woman, Mattel released Presidential Barbie. “Totally Hair” Barbie—launched the same year with “ten and a half inches for styling!”—swiftly outsold the ambitious politician and would become an all-time bestseller. If you can’t beat them, of course, you can always acquire them. Mattel bought the Pleasant Company in 1998.
Psychologists pegged Barbie and American Girl as promotional devices for self-esteem that didn’t actually deliver it. “Open an American Girl catalogue, or take a walk through Limited Too, and you’ll see stereotypes of girls with very limited choices about who they can be alongside continuous pleas for them to shop, primp, chat, and do things girls are ‘supposed to do,’” warned Lyn Mikel Brown and Sharon Lamb in Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes. “In fact, be aware that every time the phrase ‘girl power’ is used, it means the power to make choices while shopping!”
Dolls were hardly to blame for the 90s girl crisis, but it’s hard not to see how they underscored girls’ belief that self-worth was found in appearance, not achievements. And this lesson was being absorbed by younger and younger girls. Mattel admitted that it marketed its busty dolls—which earned the company $1 billion a year—to girls even younger than seven years old. One report found that three-year-olds “choose Barbie over baby dolls.”
In the 1990s, brands like Mattel and American Girl encouraged girls to purchase self-esteem and chase perfection. Magazines and marketers sold girls goods and beauty ideals to make them feel better about themselves. As objectification theory explained, girls were taught to internalize the outside criticism of their bodies, and to make it the primary view of their worth. The atmosphere was ripe for bitchification to thrive.
ACTING LIKE CHILDREN
By the mid-to-late 90s, the Riot Grrrl revolution had all but fizzled, while the troubles of girlhood, identified by researchers, persisted, if not intensified. Young women still struggled with body image, depression, and the specter of the perfect girl. Many still wanted to fulminate against the societal construction of girlhood, but they saw how women perceived as angry, manly, and difficult were summarily bitchified, so they opted to rebel by embracing girlhood but rejecting feminism. Exercising the right to be girly seemed like a logical path of self-actualization. Choice, after all, was a feminist plank. Moreover, plenty of girls weren’t ready to be the “women” their mothers’ generation told them they had to be once they turned eighteen.
This was the backdrop against which Girl Power, a 90s mantra and marketing tool, rose to prominence. Riot Grrrl was never afraid to show its claws, but Girl Power, its successor movement, lacked teeth; it embraced the “girl” part but did away with everything else. In other words, by the late 90s, the Riot Grrrl rebellion had been diluted and commercialized. Ultimately, it ceased to be a rebellion at all, and instead became a full-on shopping spree. Where Riot Grrrl had used anger and disobedience to fight for social justice, Girl Power revered signifiers of girliness, especially those that could be purchased. Girl Power was such an effective marketing tool that girls growing up in the 90s, myself included, had no inkling of its origin as a protest movement. We thought the Spice Girls had invented it. To us, at the time, Girl Power appeared as an opportunity to delay womanhood and gain imagined parity with boys. It was “becoming a woman on a girl’s own terms,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Geri Halliwell, a.k.a. Ginger Spice, crystallized this strategy when she told a reporter that feminism needed weakening to become more palatable. “It’s about labeling. For me feminism is bra-burning lesbianism. It’s very unglamorous. I’d like to see it rebranded. We need to see a celebration of our femininity and softness,” she said.
Fashion trends like lace, bows, knee socks, pigtails, baby tees, baby-doll dresses, and Hello Kitty accessories emerged to celebrate the sexy little girl. Celebrities like Baby Spice, Gwen Stefani, and Drew Barrymore expertly surfed the Girl Power crest in these fashions and bleached-blonde hair, while reports cheered their helplessness and sweet personas. By presenting not as women but as girls, their success and social capital soared, as George Washington University English professor Gayle Wald wrote in her 1998 paper “Just a Girl? Rock Music, Feminism, and the Cultural Construction of Female Youth.” The “girlishly feminine persona” worn by Stefani and others “potentially furthers the notion that within patriarchal society women acquire attention, approval and authority to the degree that they are willing to act like children,” Wald observed.
Instead of forcing change, Girl Power infantilized and sexually objectified its crusaders. But, as Wald foretold, the rewards for choosing the Girl Power path were great. And so, like a brigade of female Benjamin Buttons, grown women pursued the reversal of womanhood to girlhood through behavior and consumer choices.
CUTE GIRL WITH A MICROPHONE
Recording artist Lisa Loeb understands that part of her job at 90s Fest is to remind the audience who she was in the 90s. On stage, she takes requests and attempts gems so old that she can’t remember the chords or key and has to reboot a couple of times. Her voice is still the girlish combination of tinkling and breathy that captivated so many in her breakup hit, “Stay (I Missed You).” It’s also perfect for the children’s music that has extended her career and won her a Grammy Award in 2018. She has swapped old themes of love and breakups for new ones like parents flipping pancakes.
In August 1994, twenty-seven-year-old Loeb, a Texas native, became the first artist to secure a Billboard number one song without a record deal. Her buddy, the actor Ethan Hawke, had finagled “Stay (I Missed You)” onto the soundtrack of the Gen X cult film Reality Bites. Hawke directed Loeb’s video, which cemented her mainstream persona. In it, she wears a puffed-sleeve Betsey Johnson dress that Johnson herself shortened for the shoot.
“You said that I was naive / And I thought that I was strong / I thought, ‘Hey I can leave, I can leave’ / But now I know that I was wrong, ’cause I missed you,” she croons to the camera. Her movements are charming and awkward. She shakes her wrists, loses her balance, then clutches her heart. The style of the video “created a weird intimacy” between the performer and the audience, Loeb later said. It endeared her to fans who felt they knew her, thanks in part to a heavy rotation on MTV that summer.
“Everybody loved to buy into the true story that happened to this girl, and how stars align, and sometimes it all works out,” former MTV vice president of music and talent Amy Finnerty told me of Loeb’s discovery. A girly image and backstory made Loeb famous, but it also contributed to a media narrative that pinned her as helpless and lucky. “I remember reading press and people would call me a waif, and I felt like I wasn’t being taken seriously as a musician. That felt so strange to me, because that’s what I had done my whole life: Play guitar, write music, play music. I wasn’t this pop singer that appeared out of nowhere, I had been working at this forever,” Loeb told Entertainment Weekly. Hawke won credit for extracting her from obscurity. While she was grateful for the break, it stung to hear that she hadn’t worked for it. “It’s frustrating to read about how much I was struggling until all of a sudden Ethan got me on the soundtrack,” Loeb told Seventeen magazine in 1995.
What distinguished Loeb from other female pop stars at the time, and helped create her girlish image, were her 60s-style cat-eye glasses accenting her otherwise bare-looking face. Her lenses, with their upswept feline corners, became a fixation. She was the toast of the near- and farsighted, and the object of countless sexy-librarian fantasies. Loeb “makes it OK to wear your nerd glasses with a sexy dress and high heels,” the Los Angeles Times explained, permitting pretty girls to fly their inner dork flags.
Wearing g
lasses signaled she was educated, more so than her degree from Brown University or stint at the prestigious Berklee College of Music. Reviewers described her as “brainy,” “quirky,” and “intellectual.” “Tortoise-shell cat-eyes frame her youthful face, giving her a piquant, slyly studious look: the rock guitarist as bohemian-intellectual songwriter,” wrote the Dallas Morning News. The frames differentiated her from other chart-topping stars of the day who had better eyesight—or at least contact lenses. Critics found “something endearing about her out-of-place-ness” and determined that the “bespectacled Loeb offered a new range of female possibility.” To many, her glasses telegraphed that she was a role model for women still attached to their girlhood and girls themselves, a smart artist for smart fans, and an antidote to the 90s girl crisis.
At the same time, Loeb’s glasses also nudged her toward the schoolgirl caricature of male sexual fantasy and cliché. She “projected the demeanor of a smart college student,” the New York Times asserted. Compared to the women who were called angry rockers, like Courtney Love, Fiona Apple, and Paula Cole, Loeb was positively virginal. New York magazine christened her “The Last Good Girl.” “It was so much chatter about her glasses,” recalled Finnerty. “I’m sure she was annoyed at some point. I mean, she never said that to me, but I’m sure she was like, ‘Is anybody really listening to the song?’”
It was around this time that “the performance of girlhood,” at which Loeb seemed to excel, became “a new cultural dominant within the musical practice of women in rock,” according to Wald. “Acting like a girl” was advantageous for women rockers in the 90s because it offered “new ways of promoting the cultural visibility of women within rock music.” The girl act owed a debt to Madonna and the Riot Grrrl movement, and allowed women to become as famous as male rockers, not by copying them but by flaunting their girliness. It also attracted a new strain of fan to market to: the teenage girl. Loeb’s schoolgirl nerd chic was the perfect product.
While Loeb’s girly guise launched her brand, it limited her art. As Loeb produced more music, performed widely, and gave interviews, she seemed to suggest—sometimes hinting, other times flaunting—that she was more than just a pretty, nerdy, good girl. But when Loeb pushed back against the girl trope, the media bristled. Seventeen wanted to know if being called a nerd offended her. “It’s probably because I have glasses and I went to college and maybe because I have a lot of words in my songs. Maybe that’s why they call me a nerd,” Loeb said, reminding the magazine’s teen audience that she was not only bespectacled but educated. Much like pioneering television shows Sex and the City and Ally McBeal, Loeb’s songs exposed women’s thoughts and interior lives, giving them a platform and treating them as if they mattered. But detractors called her impressionistic lyrics “cryptic,” “confusing,” and “cliché.” Instead, they seemed to want a sad girl singing a breakup song.
Once “Stay” reached earworm status, onlookers questioned Loeb’s credibility and authenticity. Did she deserve to be the ringleader of girly nerd chic? Many asked whether or not her glasses were real. Did she need them to see, or were they a prop? A character on the sitcom NewsRadio called Loeb’s glasses “fake.” Soon, she was defending her frames to the press. “I’m very nearsighted,” Loeb told her hometown paper, the Dallas Morning News. “Without my glasses, I can’t see anything.” She even demonstrated her spectacles’ medical necessity by removing them for reporters. A talk show host invited Loeb to appear as a guest, then asked to try on her frames. Loeb’s defenders emphasized that she suffered from a contact lens allergy, and that her glasses were legit because she had worn them since seventh grade.
I remember debating the realness of Lisa Loeb’s glasses with my friends. A lot was at stake. If they were real, then she had a legitimate claim to unicorn status: a woman who was talented, hot, and as smart—or smarter—than men. If her glasses were fake, it meant that being sexy was the only real power, and that looks could get you further in life than being intelligent. Also, if her glasses and brainy persona were chicanery, maybe her talent was, too. Maybe she wasn’t such a great songstress after all. “My glasses are a normal and real part of me. They aren’t an act. I’d be selling out if I didn’t wear them,” Loeb said.
In addition to assailing her eyewear and intelligence, critics derided Loeb as something possibly worse—a mere cute girl with a microphone. Since she didn’t play her guitar in her hit video, many thought she didn’t play an instrument at all. Loeb didn’t realize that she would need to “prove to everybody that I had a rock band and I had been doing this forever” to gain musical credibility, she told Entertainment Weekly. Now, she sees the effects of that choice on her career; it allowed people to mistake her for a lightweight. The Boston Globe called her a “wimpy one-shot wonder.” “We remain unconvinced there’s much there,” the paper wrote. She was “not a great singer,” after all, with a voice “alternately bratty and tender,” wrote a New York Times music critic. Her “girlish wail and tricky lyrics suggest a precociously wise child shouting out the answers to knotty psychological questions,” the assessment continued. “The glasses mean she’s smart; the clothes that reveal her body mean she’s hot; the hurt tone and supplicating gestures mean she’s a victim,” translated New York magazine. “We’re supposed to perceive her persona as a cute little accident, but it’s actually shrewdly conceived.”
How did she handle being stereotyped? “I don’t know. I think I’m just very persistent,” Loeb told me at 90s Fest. “I was raised that way.” While her subsequent albums were said to “fail to gain much traction with the pop market,” Loeb has continued to make music, star in reality television shows, and perform for kids—all while wearing glasses.
Today, if you ask her about them, or about being a nerd girl before it was cool, Loeb turns spokesmodel and pounces on the opportunity to discuss her eyewear line. The alluring, girlish glasses are still her calling card, and now she sells them. “I used to prefer to talk about my music than my glasses, but now I have the Lisa Loeb Eyewear line that’s available at opticians’ and ophthalmologists’ offices as well as at Costco,” she told me. They retail for around $150. “I’m really happy to help women who wear glasses feel comfortable wearing glasses if they have to, and look pretty and maybe a little nerdy but hopefully more like a sexy librarian.”
WANNABE
Comedians Lauren Brickman and Carly Ann Filbin wish the Spice Girls were performing at 90s Fest in Brooklyn. They’re not, but a group of look-alikes have attracted the cameras. “I totally fell hook, line, and sinker for the Girl Power thing,” Brickman says. “I loved girls cheerleading for other girls.” I felt the same way in 1996, which is why I, too, loved the Spice Girls. Despite their sexualized marketing to young girls and pandering to the male gaze, I associated the Spice Girls with independence and opportunity. While most sugar pop sold a packaged, bikinied beauty ideal and the promise of male-controlled romantic love, the Spice Girls proved that girl gangs were powerful. That was what their hit “Wannabe” was all about. Here were five women who seemed to espouse female strength and sisterhood values. They made girlhood look strong and fun. Their 1996 debut, Spice, sold nineteen million copies in a little over a year, and is one of the bestselling records in history. Something was hitting home.
Like many girl and boy bands, the Spice Girls were Frankensteined together by a music management juggernaut. Simon Fuller, the recording executive and creator of the pop star competition show American Idol, launched them to stardom. The Spice Girls became one of the most lucrative acts ever and the bestselling girl group of all time. And while “Girl Power” was the group’s maxim, they were obviously cut from a pattern to attract men. Each sexy Spice Girl dressed in midriffs, animal prints, and thigh-high boots, and each fulfilled a different fetish. Sporty was the tomboy, Posh the icy model, Baby the little girl, Ginger the bombshell, and Scary the bad girl, who also happened to be the only black woman in the group. Practically every song they recorded deals with sex—the kind
that men wanted and women obliged. The Spice Girls’ brand extended far beyond the songs to movies, dolls, outerwear, cell phones, school supplies, and more. The Spice Girls were even superimposed on a branded mirror with which owners could attend to their mugs. The package it came in had “Girl Power” plastered all over it, implying that girls could find strength by maintaining their looks.
The softening of Riot Grrrl into Girl Power is thanks, in no small part, to the British pop band, which firmly rooted the Girl Power idea in the public consciousness. To the Spice Girls, Girl Power meant that you could wear thongs and teetering heels with your arm slung around your best girlfriend—who you cared about more than a boy, as the girls suggest in their video for “Wannabe.” The Spice Girls’ calling card was seductive dance moves, clothes, and lipstick. They gyrated in Lycra as if it were the ticket to kicking ass. But they also rejected the notion that they were empty fuck toys. When a radio host asked whether the women believed in sex on the first date, Melanie Brown (Scary Spice) answered, “What are we talking about sex for when we’ve got Girl Power to talk about?” This directness drew fans and followers who identified with wanting more than to be badgered about their sex lives. The Spice Girls fulfilled the role of hypersexualized female pop star while flirtatiously questioning that trope. It was a dizzying, highly successful contradiction.
Some believe that the brand of Girl Power delivered by the Spice Girls and similar vectors was good for women and girls. Former Seventeen magazine entertainment director Claire Connors said the Spice Girls’ message was exactly what teen girls in the 90s needed. “I just thought they were the coolest band ever. I loved the Girl Power part. That was what we had been waiting for in terms of pop. It was a girl boy-band. They talked about what it meant to be a powerful girl,” Connors told me. She recalled doing the first-ever Spice Girls magazine cover when she worked at React, which appeared as a newspaper supplement and in schools in the 90s. She’s a firm believer that Girl Power via the Spice Girls did young women tremendous good. “Anything pro-girl or that makes girls happy and feel good about themselves, that’s a plus. No matter what,” she said.
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