by Andi Zeisler
The blackout was sensible but ultimately limiting. What mainstream media outlets couldn’t confirm by talking to actual participants, they simply made up, painting with cartoonishly broad strokes a picture of lemming-like teens in combat boots, ratty hair, and torn fishnets screaming into microphones and thumbing their noses at boys. There was dismissive coverage like Spin’s, and there was fearmongering coverage like that of Britain’s Mail on Sunday, which spoke ominously of Riot Grrrl lyrics as “a prayer against men. . . . They call themselves feminists but theirs is a feminism of rage and, even, fear.” (As opposed to the happy-go-lucky feminism the writer was used to, I guess.) In Girls to the Front, Marcus wrote: “The system was weighted against the issues that they cared and cried and bled about. It was stacked so that the way their lives really were never had any relevance at all.” A 1995 episode of Roseanne seemed like the revolution-girl-style’s death rattle: In it, Roseanne and her sister, Jackie, pick up a gum-snapping hitchhiker named Garland who foists a Bikini Kill cassette on the duo. Even though Roseanne grudgingly admits “At least they’re saying something,” the caricature of Riot Grrrls as trend-chasing bubble-heads was proof that the movement had been forcibly assimilated.
In the inevitable cycle by which mainstream culture sanitizes, dilutes, and repackages radicalism, by 1997 the phrase “Girl Power” was harvested from Riot Grrrl zines and re-emerged, a marketplace-feminist Frankenstein’s monster, in the juggernaut of the Spice Girls. Created by Simon Fuller (later the impresario behind American Idol), the Spice Girls, like a Teen Beat’s worth of boy bands that came before, were plucked from cattle-call auditions and engineered for maximum demographic and commercial appeal, as prefab as Riot Grrrl was unpolished. With their carefully crafted personas—Sporty, Scary, Baby, Posh, and Ginger—the Spice Girls were pretty and accessible, and the girl power they espoused in profiles and interviews (“It’s woman power, it’s an essence, it’s a tribe”) was a fun, firmly apolitical departure from Riot Grrrl rhetoric. There were no sharp edges here, no anger, and no analysis—why would there be? The Spice Girls could have been any singing group that was signed and sold. Girl Power was packaging, bright bubble letters that suggested power was as simple as putting on a t-shirt proclaiming “Girls Kick Ass” and going dancing with your friends. The Spice Girls as individuals seemed genuinely excited about the young girls who were their instantly devoted listeners, but they (and their management) had no interest in taking any stand more controversial than, “Of course you can wear hot pants and still be a feminist!” In the 1997 movie Spice World, Sporty Spice even lampooned the emptiness of Spice rhetoric, posing as Ginger while bleating, “Blah, blah, blah. And Girl Power, feminism, d’you know what I mean?”
It’s not as though ten-year-old girls would have been cranking up Bratmobile if the Spice Girls didn’t exist, although they might have tuned into the slightly older-skewing angry-girl artists, like Alanis Morrissette, Fiona Apple, and Meredith Brooks, whose rise had also been finessed by Riot Grrrl. But the significant difference was that where Riot Grrrl’s vision of empowerment was inherently self-sufficient—Why not start a band or make a zine with your friends?—girl power was centered on empowerment by way of the market. What girl power meant in a post–Riot Grrrl world was simply whatever elevated girls as consumers.
Within weeks of the Spices’ top-100 ascendancy there was a wealth of Spice Girls product on offer, from t-shirts and lollipops to vinyl change purses and “Girl Power” dolls in each woman’s likeness. The feisty, sisters-before-misters attitude of the Girls was all well and good, even if no one seemed exactly sure how seriously to take the line, “If you want to be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.” But it was the depoliticized, kitchen-sink quality of “Girl Power” that gave the slogan, and the Spice Girls themselves, merchandising heft: their personas suggested that empowerment came in a number of flavors, all of which lined up with existing female-consumer categories and none of which had to compromise accepted notions of femininity or desirability. (The nail-polish colors associated with Baby Spice and Scary Spice, for instance, might be different, but the point—buy this nail polish!—was the same.) Nor did Girl Power acknowledge the structural barriers to actual empowerment for many young women; in the free market of pop music, anyone with $5 for a Spice Girls pencil case could be empowered.
“Girl Power” was anodyne enough to encompass almost any and every worldview, a point that was driven home when Geri Halliwell, aka Ginger Spice, called notoriously unprogressive former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher “the first Spice Girl.” Halliwell’s enthusiasm for a woman whose political glory came at the expense of Britain’s poor and working classes wasn’t necessarily shared by her co-Spices—but as ludicrous as the comparison was, it wasn’t totally inaccurate. Along with Ronald Reagan, Thatcher was one of global neoliberalism’s head cheerleaders, and in arguing for the primacy of economic markets she ignored the social barriers to participating in them. The Spice Girls’ agenda obviously had none of the heartlessness of Thatcher’s. But they were a handy tool of neoliberalism: Girl Power was used less in the service of reaching girls as people than in reaching them as a market on behalf of Pepsi, Polaroid, and the other corporations that helped brand the Spices and their audience as a new kind of confident, spunky female consumer.
The Girl Power marketing frenzy seemed, in theory, like a good corrective to the girl crisis identified by the likes of Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown in the late 1980s. It allowed retailers, advertisers, and even the U.S. government to feel like they were doing something to alleviate the problem of plummeting self-confidence. (The government’s Girl Power initiative, launched by the department of Health and Human Services, was formed with the somewhat fuzzy mission of helping “encourage and motivate nine- to thirteen-year-old girls to make the most of their lives.”) Commercial girl power was wholly decontextualized from the social dynamics that Riot Grrrl addressed. Instead, it spotlighted a kind of elementary-school sass that fueled the mass production of t-shirts reading “Girls Rule, Boys Drool” and “Boys Are Stupid, Throw Rocks at Them.”
Feminists who were preteen girls during peak Spice, who thrilled to “Wannabe” on the radio and played Spice Girls with their friends, were very much like my friends and me a generation before, playing with Wonder Woman and Bionic Woman dolls and playacting as Charlie’s Angels or Christie Love: hungry for pop cultural role models, we glommed on to the few that existed. They weren’t perfect, but they were there. There are thus a lot of blog posts about the Spice Girls written in the past decade with titles like “In Defense of the Spice Girls” (at Rookie) and “What the Spice Girls Taught Me About Feminism” (at Autostraddle), which posit that, as gateway feminism, you could do worse than a gaggle of British babes advocating friendship, trust, and safe sex. That’s probably true. But the cultural legacy of the Spice Girls is as much about empowering marketplace feminism as about empowering girls. As their hits faded from the radio and MTV, their girl power became just one more element in what Peggy Orenstein calls the “gender apartheid” of retail sales, where “boy” is denoted with sports logos and robots while “girl” is encompassed in phrases like “princess” and “spoiled brat.” Instead of teaching girls actual self-advocacy and confidence, a shift toward increasingly gendered capitalism turned Girl Power into little more than a cute, chauvinist retail fad.
“Choice” of a New Generation
With the Spice Girls as its most visible ambassadors, Girl Power marketing moved squarely into mass culture by the early 2000s, increasingly positioned by TV networks, movie studios, record labels, and advertising executives to sell women and girls on their own retail influence and consumer identity. Consumer empowerment dovetailed nicely with third-wave feminism, whose ideology was in part about rejecting what many young feminists perceived as inflexible dogma and embracing varied, intersecting identities instead. And this empowerment was certainly of a piece with the neoliberal ideal in which individuals operate independent of cult
ural and economic influence, proving that all you need to succeed—or, in liberatory terms, to achieve equality—is the desire and will to do so. It seems significant that when asked to define the word “feminism,” women today are as likely to say that “It’s about choice” as “It’s about equality.” I have occasionally had to bite my tongue around students and others who burst out with, “Feminism is all about having choices!” It’s not that simple, and that’s not the whole story; but I also don’t want to be the judgmental scold who scares them away from feminism.
Equality makes way for an increased number of free, considered choices, and an increased number of people with access to them. But choice itself isn’t the same as equality, even if the conflation of the two goes back at least as far as John Stuart Mill’s 1869 essay, The Subjection of Women. In his argument for women’s equality and enfranchisement, Mill evoked choice as a necessary element in both:
I consider it presumption in anyone to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be, by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised; and no one can safely pronounce that if women’s nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men’s, and if no artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at all, in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves.
Yet Mill presumed that even with such choices, most women would likely go with the societal flow and take up the roles of wife and mother, rather than vie for a spot in a male-dominated workplace. For Mill, it wasn’t what women did with their choice that was important, but simply the fact that they had it.
“Choice” came to its modern prominence as a feminist signifier by way of one of feminism’s landmark victories: the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade. Though safe and legal abortion as a platform of second-wave feminism regularly used the word “rights” to refer to this act of self-determination, Roe’s ruling changed the frame: it decided that abortion, rather than being protected as a right of bodily autonomy, was instead a feature of the privacy guaranteed by an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The language used in the Court’s majority ruling was deliberate and specific in not referring to safe and legal abortion as a right but rather as an option. In reading the opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun used “this choice” repeatedly to refer to abortion, a tactful construction that was crucial to gaining mainstream support for something that, regardless of legal status, would remain highly controversial. “Choice” worked because it was simultaneously active and passive; as historian Rickie Solinger noted, the term “evoked women shoppers selecting among options in the marketplace.”4 Similarly, second-wave feminist groups had been unambiguous in differentiating “abortion on demand” from therapeutic or medically necessary abortion—it was part of asserting that women, not doctors, were the drivers of the act. But as the issue was increasingly put before nonfeminist Americans for judgment, “demand” became too pushy, too sure of itself—too, well, demanding. As though to distract from the power and freedom that legal abortion represented, the language used to talk about it became increasingly polite.
That “choice” and “rights” are not the same thing had already been made abundantly clear by pre-Roe termination procedures. Women who could afford to access illegal abortions—which necessitated scaring up hundreds of dollars, not including travel to cities with underground providers—had already been doing so for decades. Women who couldn’t access abortions had the “choice” to give their babies up for adoption to more ostensibly deserving women—again, hardly a free choice given that so many birth mothers were young women shamed and pressured by family and clergy to surrender children that in many cases they actually wanted. Both abortion and childbirth were already marketplaces that only some women could afford to enter; in the case of legal abortion, Roe simply transferred control of that marketplace to the government. And 1976’s Hyde Amendment, which prevented federal money from being used to fund abortion (via Medicaid, for instance), effectively shut a huge percentage of low-income women out of that marketplace, making a post-Roe world for all practical purposes not much different than the one that had come before.
Once Roe shifted the language of bodily rights from demands to choices, the advent of neoliberalism did the rest, normalizing the self-focus and singularity made ever more possible by a booming free market. The parlance of the marketplace became the default way to talk about almost all choices made by women.5
Naomi Wolf’s 1993 polemic Fire with Fire pitted two opposing camps against one another: “Victim feminists,” she charged, were stuck in a hopelessly collectivist mindset that looked down on individualism and was mired in outdated patriarchy-bashing. “Power feminists,” on the other hand, engaged with an existing status quo by grabbing it by the balls, politics be damned. The only limits, Wolf declared, were in women’s own minds: “Our movement forward as individual women, as women together . . . depend[s] on what we decide to see when we look in the mirror.” Women, in other words, could choose to be victims or not, regardless of any economic or social forces—poverty, abuse, political disenfranchisement—that might affect their daily lives. (Wolf’s evocation of the mirror seemed notable given that her previous book, The Beauty Myth, so cogently indicted the image industry’s complicity in the gendered wage gap, the prevalence of eating disorders, and more.)
Fire with Fire was one of the first popular texts in which neoliberalism’s influence on feminism was made explicit. It skipped over the real-world systems of planned inequality that make grabbing status-quo balls almost impossible for anyone other than the people who are already in closest proximity to them. Power, in her construction, operated in a vacuum untouched by race, class, education, and access to health and child care: if you couldn’t cut it, it was because you simply weren’t trying hard enough.
Wolf tried her hardest to make the phrase “power feminism” happen, but it never quite happened. (Perhaps if she’d called it “empowerment feminism,” it would have caught on.) But her conception of a feminism that is individualist, determined, and has no time for boring talk about structural inequality has blossomed since then. Its appeal is undeniable—you can simply claim an identity, and feminism becomes a sort of muffin basket or fruit bowl to be picked from rather than a set of living ethics and rights that must be fought for.
Writer and philosopher Linda Hirshman somewhat peevishly coined the term “choice feminism” when writing her 2005 American Prospect article “Homeward Bound,” an analysis of the “opt-out revolution” that was trumpeted in mainstream media as a reaction against liberal, career-focused feminism. “Homeward Bound” considered how the predominance of “choice” in feminist rhetoric disguises the unchanged expectation that women are responsible for the bulk of domestic labor. “Women with enough money to quit work say they are ‘choosing’ to opt out,” wrote Hirshman, nodding toward stories like the one on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, whose headline—“Q: Why Don’t More Women Get to the Top? A: They Choose Not To”—was a gleeful jab at feminism. But the deliberate nods to choice reified inequality by assuming that women, whatever else they’re doing, are still holding down the fort at home.6 If the sexes had truly achieved the level of equality presumed by the glut of opt-out narratives, then there surely wouldn’t only be women who were in the position of weighing domestic responsibility against paid work and choosing only one. And they certainly wouldn’t have to bear the brunt of society’s judgment when they chose the latter.
Trend stories like the New York Times Magazine’s—and they popped up like perky toadstools as “the opt-out revolution” became the media’s newest backlash narrative—were based on the idea that the choices of the influential demographic written about (college-educated, heterosexually partnered, fi
nancially stable) are value-neutral, with no relationship to a larger, indelibly gendered culture. This was both a neoliberal fallacy and a big, honking mistake: yes, such women were free to make the choice to leave the workplace, but they were not free to believe that such choices have no impact on the way women are treated in society at large. (Why offer college scholarships or medical fellowships to women, after all, if there’s only a 50 percent chance of a return on the investment?)
When I visit Hirshman at her New York City apartment in 2014 to revisit the arguments of “Homeward Bound” and the book she expanded it into, 2005’s Get to Work, it’s not long before we get on the subject of Sex and the City—and I’m a little relieved that the imposing Hirshman says she regards the show as “an enormously influential text” before I have to. The episode we discuss is the one in which Charlotte, the foursome’s most conservative member, chants “I choose my choice! I choose my choice!” like a mantra when her friend Miranda questions why she would quit the art-gallery job she loves simply because she’s now a wife. It was an absurd, out-of-left-field moment: Charlotte, after all, was the least ideologically radical of the SATC women, prone to wearing (and clutching) pearls and believing in the fairy tale of marriage and motherhood even as real life continually disappointed her. It was Charlotte who uttered the unutterable in the show’s season 3 premiere, suggesting to the horror of her friends that “women just want to be rescued” by a good man. Putting the language of feminism, however watered-down, into Charlotte’s perfectly glossed mouth was like putting slam poetry there—its comic impact came from its improbability. The show’s sly critique of the marketplace-feminist notion that every choice can be a feminist one so long as a feminist (even a momentary one) is doing the choosing has become a meme; nearly every woman I spoke to for this book cried, “I choose my choice!” in mock outrage when the subject of choice feminism came up. What remains important about the episode is that it was likely the first pop culture moment to expose choice feminism’s live wires, asking why, if no one choice can be judged as more meaningful than any other, we need to spend time defending them at all.