Girl Power
If you want my future, forget my past. If you wanna get with me, better make it fast... I won't be hasty, I'll give you a try, If you really bug me then I'll say goodbye... --From Wannabe by the Spice Girls
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So you're hoping the Spice Girls are history. Well, alas, they are. The bustier-busting sloganeering they purveyed is the touchstone for much of what passes for commercial feminism nowadays, especially the kind marketed to the demographic group the Spices are proudly empowering: preteen and teenage girls. Or "grrrls," as that tiresome battle growl goes. Is this the future of feminism?
The culture is right-in-your-face. If it isn't the cartoonish Spices rapping, "Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want," it's that other teen idol, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, declaring her love to a bewitched bloodsucker before driving a dagger through his heart. Meanwhile, in the recently released The Opposite of Sex, Christina Ricci plays a take-no-prisoners 16-year-old, one who steals and dumps a series of boyfriends, including her half brother's. On the music front, singer-actress Brandy and fellow teen phenom Monica duke it out for love in their No. 1 duet, The Boy Is Mine--and in the video version, join in alliance to show up a two-timing boyfriend. But the words of singer Fiona Apple best capture the grrrl spirit, "It's a sad sad world/ when a girl will break a boy/ Just because she can."
What a world: lions and tigers and girls, oh, my! Buffy undoes the undead; Xena destroys barbarians; Michelle Williams breaks hearts on Dawson's Creek. The girlish offensive doesn't show any signs of flagging. By some estimates, more than 60 teen-oriented movies are in production or active development, many of them with seriously empowered heroines. Ten Things I Hate About You might be considered the cinematic Cliffs Notes to The Taming of the Shrew; and Gellar has signed up for Cruel Inventions, an adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons. The WB network's fall schedule will include Felicity, a series about a California girl who rebels against Daddy's wishes that she become a doctor and attend his alma mater. "She arrives in Manhattan on her own dime with everything at stake," explains its creator, J.J. Abrams. "Her bravery and optimism are designed to inspire girls." No one calculates what giving up a career and money may mean for Felicity. That would be too crass.
Disney's animated epic Mulan, which opened last week, has its Chinese heroine donning male military drag, ostensibly to save her disabled father from being conscripted for certain death in a war against invaders. But the movie's point is to show that Mulan is as valuable as any boy. Or as the film goes on to demonstrate, that she can do something her father cannot: bury a horde of enemy Huns under tons of snow. You go, girl! It's the perfect way for Disney to do Joan of Arc without having the heroine burned at the stake.