Even the biographer of the Riot Grrrl movement, Sara Marcus, said acts like the Spice Girls kept Riot Grrrl feminism alive, even if it was a cheapened version. Brickman and Filbin agree. “I think it’s really unfair to point out the Spice Girls as overmarketed or whatever,” said Filbin, a spokesmodel for a shopping app. “That’s antifeminist to me.” “They didn’t take themselves seriously,” said Brickman. “It was like, yeah, they might have been sexualized, but they seemed like they were in control of it and they had humor about it.”
“Back then I don’t think that’s why I loved them,” says Filbin, scrolling through her phone. “That’s why I love them now.”
Bust magazine editor Debbie Stoller wasn’t bothered by corporations adopting Girl Power as a marketing tool. “Even if this stuff gets out in the mainstream in a watered-down form, at least it’s getting out there. The corporations aren’t getting it quite right, but at least they’re not getting it so wrong,” she told the New York Times in 1997.
Meanwhile, Girl Power did wonders for the Spice Girls’ brand and bank accounts. Between tours, albums, and prolific and diverse merch, they earned some $75 million per year at the height of their fame.
CUDDLE CORE
Girl Power wasn’t only about celebrating girlhood. It also aimed to turn adult women into little girls. The wispy-haired, apple-cheeked Baby Spice personified a strand of Girl Power called Cuddle Core, which peddled girly fashions and attitudes to 90s grown-ups. Cuddle Core proclaimed there was power in acquiring the trappings of childhood. Through trending baby tees, mini backpacks, cartoon characters, sweater sets, barrettes, pastel nail polish, knee socks, and Mary Janes, infantilization became de rigueur. Cuddle Core resembled the ravished-doll look popularized by Courtney Love in her Peter Pan collars and torn tights, but cleaned up. The trend subtracted the disheveled parts and the artistic statement, and instead augmented the lace and frills. The New York Times called it “Love’s Baby Soft feminism.” During the 90s, fashion catalogue dELiA*s, jewelry shop Claire’s, and girls’ clothiers like the Limited Too supplied the building blocks of the Cuddle Core uniform.
This aesthetic and attitude signaled a mammoth shift. Many 90s girls had spent their formative years in androgynous flannel, skater jeans, and razored haircuts. Now, the girly girl in frilly tops, pleated skirts, and Crayola-colored eye shadow was claiming the mantle of feminism. “A lot of women can dress like little girls but be very powerful,” enthused sixteen-year-old Erin, the subject of a Los Angeles Times article titled “Cute. Real Cute” that reported on the Cuddle Core trend. In addition to carrying a Hello Kitty character wallet and wearing a pink grosgrain ribbon in her hair, Erin admitted to owning three pairs of Mary Janes.
Retailers, the media, and the entertainment industry created and applauded the Cuddle Core trend. The Barneys New York 1997 spring fashion catalogue titled “Us Girls” featured models swathed in pink and wearing tiaras alongside copy that read, “Girls can be offended when they’re whistled at but upset when they’re not” and “Girls can hail a cab with their legs.” When these messages were deemed sexist, Barneys defended them as celebrations of girls in a postfeminist world. Bust magazine made “the voice of the new girl order” their rallying cry. Butt-kicking schoolgirls like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sabrina the Teenage Witch figured into this trend. The Girl Power bromide appeared on paraphernalia like school supplies, jewelry, and apparel. Mountain Dew soda ran ads featuring girls doing extreme sports set to a version of the song “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” by the band Ruby. Revlon’s nail polish color Girly, a juicy pink, claimed to represent “being modern, ageless and unfettered.” Pink was the new power color—the new black. To embrace Girl Power was to harness the signifiers of girlhood as a better, more palatable feminism that could accord women attention and influence.
Girl Power proved successful in the marketplace, but it also popped up in government and nonprofit initiatives. The Department of Health and Human Services launched its “Girl Power!” campaign in 1996 to promote healthy behaviors for girls ages nine to fourteen, like exercising and staying drug-free. “We must teach girls that the size of their ambition is more important than the size of their clothes,” wrote Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. Still, stores like dELiA*s and 5-7-9 didn’t routinely stock plus sizes. Nonprofits sprang up to do Girl Power work in local communities. The Ms. Foundation’s Take Our Daughters to Work Day redirected its focus on working women to boosting the self-esteem of girls. And while these efforts seemed worthy, they were inadvertently tying girls’ self-worth to the pursuit of perfecting appearance and amassing possessions.
JUST A GIRL
Gwen Stefani’s song “Just a Girl” tapped into the ethos of Girl Power as a bridge to self-esteem. When rock critic Kim France profiled Stefani for the January 1997 issue of Us magazine, she went to see Stefani’s band, No Doubt, perform in Los Angeles. “I remember sitting in the stadium and she’s chanting to the girls in the audience. And there are schoolgirls there. Young girls. And she’s going, ‘Fuck you, I’m a girl!’ And they’re going, ‘Fuck you, I’m a girl!’ I thought, this is going to be a formidable generation growing up with that message. It was so different than the message I grew up with,” she told me.
The hit that made Stefani, “Just a Girl,” challenged and mocked the adages that girls should be polite and demure. “’Cause I’m just a girl, a little ol’ me / Well don’t let me out of your sight,” she croons. “Oh I’m just a girl, all pretty and petite / So don’t let me have any rights / Oh . . . I’ve had it up to here!” The teen girls France described who idolized Stefani helped launch her to a superstardom that continues more than two decades later. Girls latched on to how Stefani indicted the helpless, delicate girl stereotype while embodying it in the same breath. Spin magazine described her fans—the Gwennabees—as “smatterings of breathlessly excited, blonde-streaked, sparkle-lashed 14-year-olds” who “litter the backstage area.”
Performing “Just a Girl” in the 90s, Stefani was sarcastic and implacable. She seemed to cover the entire stage at once, scaling speakers, cartwheeling, kicking and throwing her arms like snakes sprung from cans, adorned in track pants, a crop top, and a bindi. She was not afraid to sweat, and even fractured a foot during one concert. One reporter claimed that she offered him her bra and shirt to smell after a particularly aerobic performance to prove that she was such a girl that excessive sweating didn’t make her smell bad.
Stefani’s ode to girldom marked an end to the “petulant whining” of plain-faced rocker women who “openly spew their feelings,” according to a 1996 Entertainment Weekly review. There was palpable excitement in the ouster of unshaved Paula Cole, damaged Fiona Apple, and trashy Courtney Love. In place of such artists was Stefani, a “camera-ready” blonde goddess who looked like “a cross between Jessica Lange and a naughty cheerleader,” observed the Los Angeles Times. She was compared to “larger-than-life celluloid sex symbols” like Pamela Anderson, Jenny McCarthy, and Anna Nicole Smith. Stefani’s “pouty” voice was a “girlish hiccup”; her lyrics were “mewling” and “worthy of the rescue-me blankness of Mariah Carey’s entire repertoire,” EW continued. The glad-to-be-ogled girly girl was back. Reviewers cast Stefani as a sex kitten, “the paragon of baremidriffed yumminess.” She had the blonde, thin body men idealized while still looking like she belonged in high school. Fittingly, reports in news and music publications focused on Stefani’s passion for makeup, boys, and other elemental accoutrements of girlhood. “If it’s pretty, she wears it; if it smells good, she sprays it, and if it’s feminine, she flaunts it,” explained the Chicago Sun-Times. “I love makeup. I love getting my hair done. I love pedicures. I’m the furthest thing from a rock chick,” Stefani told Spin.
Critics infantilized Stefani, making her seem less like a rising rock star than an average teen girl in Peoria, even though she was in her midtwenties. Their proof was all the ways she deferred to her mom and dad. Before Stefani got famous, her parents f
orbade her from playing late gigs far from home on school nights. Her mother stopped speaking to her for a week after Stefani led a stadium in a “Fuck you, I’m a girl” chant during a show. Stefani still lived at home when No Doubt was launched out of neo-ska obscurity and into mainstream pop fame with their 1995 album Tragic Kingdom. She approached her father with a hand outstretched for money before rehearsals. “I don’t pay bills. I don’t pay rent. The only thing I pay is my phone bill and my car insurance,” Stefani told a reporter. “Just a Girl” was inspired by Stefani’s dad yelling at her for staying out too late at her boyfriend’s house. Even after moving out of her parents’ home, Stefani often returned there to sleep in her childhood bed. This veil of dependence on her parents secured her helpless “girl-next-door” status.
When she wasn’t applying makeup or deferring to her dad, Stefani was mooning over her ex-boyfriend, No Doubt’s bassist, Tony Kanal. Critics harped on their breakup, which was a subject of Tragic Kingdom. Stefani was couched as a combustible, heartbroken little girl to Kanal’s dispassionate heartbreaker. The press quoted him on the band’s Jamaican pop influences and quoted her about their split. “I forced Tony to go out with me,” Stefani said. “He wasn’t even interested. When we made out that first night I think he thought it was more of a one-night kiss. But then we started going out and after the first year, I was going, ‘When are we getting married?’”
To be sure, Stefani and Kanal amped up the drama at shows. “Don’t Speak” was another runaway hit in part because it detailed their breakup. She would sulk during an instrumental interlude in “Just a Girl,” and Kanal would hand her a bouquet of flowers that she’d accept, then tear apart, sending the crowd into a fit. Even if it was a performance, critics and fans cheered girlhood’s return. They had missed it.
Tragic Kingdom’s success—more than ten million copies sold by the decade’s end—reaffirmed that “sex still sells, even when it comes to women musicians,” wrote Entertainment Weekly. “Maybe we don’t live in such progressive times after all.” Reviewers both celebrated the reemergence of the girly girl and skewered her for being retrograde. This is the trajectory of a 1996 Spin cover story about No Doubt and their hit album, which mostly relished what a girl the singer who critiqued girlhood turned out to be. She may have “embraced the girly shit,” as France says, from a broken heart to makeup brands, but her punishment, like Lisa Loeb’s, was that the girly girl was all she could be.
BUBBLEGUM UNICORNS
Girl Power was leveraged to sell more than just record albums. Major marketers like Coke, Toyota, Frito-Lay, and Sears “recognized the muscle of girl power,” and flocked to hook teen girls early. Market research in the 90s showed that younger demographics held tremendous purchasing power. Children ages four to twelve commanded nearly $15 billion in annual sales and influenced some $160 billion in household purchases, according to a 1994 study by Texas A&M University. Leading retailers began to market to a group too young to even secure a credit card. Some 40 percent of national marketers boasted kid-specific marketing strategies. Companies started conducting research to learn just what youngsters—and girls in particular—were spending their money on. It turned out, in 1997, teen girls spent $50 billion on things like clothes, jewelry, beauty products, entertainment, and food alone. As a CNN reporter put it: “You are looking at the future of retail, and it can barely see over the counter.”
Lisa Frank was known for school supplies and paper goods featuring kittens, bubbles, and unicorns in the colors of an exploded gumball machine. Lisa Frank understood Girl Power’s marketplace potential and devoted ample resources to capturing it. “It’s almost as if they had radar and were able to go into the minds of these young girls,” said one marketing expert on CNN in 1998. What began as paper goods carried in mall favorite Spencer Gifts grew into more costly items—sneakers, outerwear, CD-ROMs, and much more. “If a little girl uses it, chances are Lisa Frank makes it,” enthused the segment’s host.
The company might have been prescient, but it also did its homework. Lisa Frank planted product testers in elementary schools. They recruited classrooms to focus-group experimental characters and fabrics, and created an online fan club and website. By 1998, Lisa Frank was banking $250 million a year by “catering exclusively to the whims of four- to twelve-year-old girls,” according to one report. Company president James Green, who was also married to the founder and namesake, attributed the brand’s success to his wife being “the world’s greatest shopper” and “a little girl at heart.” But their methods weren’t always aboveboard. In 2001, the company agreed to pay a $30,000 fine for collecting personal information from children—such as their names, addresses, phone numbers, and favorite colors and seasons—without parental consent.
In 1994, Lisa Frank commissioned a study of eight- to twelve-year-old girls’ purchasing preferences. Nearly half said the clothing section was their first stop in their favorite stores. Girls spent 41 percent of their money on clothes and shoes, 20 percent on magazines and books, 14 percent on makeup, 12 percent on jewelry, and 11 percent on school supplies. Green said the study was intended to help the company develop “product lines kids want, not just need.” By 1997, teen spending reached $122 billion. Girls shelled out the most for objects promising to enhance their appearance and their self-image.
Girl Power had morphed from rebellion into a miasma of consumer ideals. It became so embedded in American consumer culture that even antifeminist offenders began to claim it to move their products. One example is a Candie’s perfume ad featuring Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath. He is staring lecherously at the camera while She’s All That star Jodi Lyn O’Keefe sits atop his computer monitor, which shows a rocket going off between her legs. Advertising Women of New York selected it as the most degrading, insulting, and reductive advertisement of the year. But Candie’s chairman Neil Cole claimed that the ad was all about Girl Power. A luxury watch brand used the idea to introduce young women to expensive timepieces. USA Today reported that a spate of new electronic toys created for girls empowered them. But instead of challenging girls, the toys and games allowed them to check horoscopes, “swap gossip,” and “pass notes” to one another.
That Girl Power was co-opted to sell products didn’t surprise parents. The vast majority—92 percent—said they were worried that kid-centered television advertising was making their children “too materialistic” and “turning them into chronic consumers,” according to one report. Some skeptics did push back on commodified Girl Power. “An ideology based on consumerism can never be a revolutionary social movement,” said North Carolina State University professor Amy McClure in a paper about Girl Power that she presented at the American Sociological Association. “The fact that it appears to be a revolutionary movement is a dangerous lie that not only marketers sell to us but that we often happily sell to ourselves.”
A VIRGIN TO BE DEFLOWERED
Kim Gordon, bassist and guitarist for Sonic Youth, thought Girl Power’s most prominent and powerful emissaries, the Spice Girls, were doing more harm than good, and said so in the press. “I think they’re totally ridiculous. Something out of Disneyland . . . They’re masquerading as little girls. It’s repulsive,” she said. Out swept the tide of alternative women rockers who wrote their own songs and told their stories, who were called bitches for being angry and broken and strong. In washed a cadre of “Svengali-produced” blondes, as Paula Cole put it, manipulated and packaged for the new teen market. The sounds of Fiona, Paula, and Courtney—and the empowerment of feel-good, woman-charged Lilith Fair—were trampled by society’s ideal of what women pop stars should be: young, blonde, and, if not singing about sex, selling it. The Spice Girls pioneered this convention; Britney Spears perfected it.
The Spice Girls and Gwen Stefani seemed to casually pretend that Girl Power wasn’t sexual, but Britney Spears did nothing of the sort. Her provocative 1999 Rolling Stone magazine cover at seventeen years old promised to take readers into her bedroom. Spears reclines in a bl
ack bra on a satin coverlet. She holds a phone with a curled cord, and hugs a purple stuffed Teletubby doll. “Inside the Heart, Mind & Bedroom of a Teen Dream,” offers the cover line. This was worlds away from Alanis Morissette’s 1995 cover, emblazoned with the words “Angry White Female.” In her imaginary childhood bedroom, replete with florals and china dolls, Spears conjures the hypersexual, bionic future of girlhood. Brandishing her teenage sexuality was indeed powerful—abstinence be damned—except that she wasn’t in the driver’s seat. The monolithic music industry replaced authentic women rockers with willing teen pop princesses and told us we could expect the same powerful feminist idols.
The video for Spears’s first hit, with its boundary-pushing ellipsis, “. . . Baby One More Time,” panders to its prepubescent audience and is set in territory familiar to teens—the locker-lined hallways and gymnasiums of high school. Spears dons an eroticized Catholic schoolgirl uniform. A white shirt is knotted above her navel and a plaid skirt reveals her upper thighs. There are pom-poms in her pigtails. She squats low and grinds her hips, less like the Mouseketeer she once was and more like a participant in the step (or strip) club.
This presentation was thrilling for men and girls alike. Spears talked to teen girls on their terms. She projected empowerment and freedom with every neck whip, thigh dip, and seductive gaze at the camera. Because she exuded such confidence, critics accused her of manipulating fans with sex. Take the opening of the Rolling Stone profile. Spears “extends a honeyed thigh across the sofa.” She wears a logo T-shirt “distended by her ample chest” and silky white shorts that “cling snugly to her hips” as she “cocks her head and smiles receptively.” But then, the writer shames the reader for falling into Spears’s “trap,” which is “carefully baited by a debut video that shows the seventeen-year-old singer cavorting around like the naughtiest of school girls.” Spears is to blame for tempting men and presenting a sexually aggressive role model to girls.
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