The recent news of a Spice Girls reunion will, I suspect, be greeted by some former fans with nostalgic longing and others with an embarrassed cringe. But whether you’re a fan or foe, I think it’s worth remembering that golden decade of Girl Power — the 1990s — when it was bliss to be young and female.
With our present preoccupation with the abuses of male power, we’ve forgotten about Girl Power. It was a fun-fuelled feminism for the mainstream; a materialistic and hedonistic celebration of female assertiveness, ambition and self-reliance. Girl Power was Thatcherism in sexy underwear.
OK, so maybe Girl Power didn’t produce much in the way of great pop music or feminist polemics. But it gave young women the confidence to raise two fingers to female passivity and having to suffer the whims and wrongs of men. Girl Power said, ‘Go ahead, demand what you want’ (‘what you really, really want’, as the Spice Girls put it) and don’t let any man get in your way.
Just compare the bold assertiveness of the Girl Power generation with the poor-me passivity of a group of contemporary women I call Generation Geisha. They are women who claim that their emotional, social, sexual and professional lives have been devoted to the service of men.
The Germaine Greer of Generation Geisha is the bestselling Italian novelist Elena Ferrante. Writing in the Guardian, Ferrante claims that all aspects of a woman’s life have been ‘codified in terms of male needs… We have to be women according to roles and modalities that make men happy’. Consequently, ‘for the sake of peace and quiet, we suffocate ourselves’.
This servitude to men’s sensitivity means that geisha women will endure a date with a man who bores them because they don’t want to hurt his feelings and they will sleep with a man because he might be sensitive to sexual rejection.
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