Bring back Girl Power

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.