Lipstick liberation

Part 5

by Yvonne Abraham

What's left is Spice Girls feminism. As "Scary Spice" Mel B put it in a recent Entertainment Weekly interview: "You can wear your Wonderbra, you can wear your mascara, but you've got a bit of intelligence. . . . Don't rely on your sexuality, but don't be afraid of it."

"Just because you've got a short skirt on and a pair of tits, you can still say what you want to say. We're still very strong," Baby Spice Emma chimed in. Heavy.

The Spice Girls have been anointed a feminist pop outfit by more than a few writers. The Spicies themselves prefer the term Girl Power: personal, and especially sexual, empowerment is central to their act. And sexy feminism certainly works as a marketing approach (the fact that the quintet churning out the prefab Brit-pop also have good abs and producers helps, too). They take feminism's shell, and fill it up with lip gloss, ribbed condoms, and girls-on-top innuendo. Nobody tells the Spice Girls what to do. They're young and stylish and sexy as they wannabe. And they chew men up and spit 'em out:

I won't be hasty, I'll give you a try

If you really bug me then I'll say goodbye.

It's balder and tackier, but it's very much like what many third-wave writers are saying: if every woman felt that free, we'd all be fine.

Feminism should now concern itself with "personal work," Karen Lehrman says. "Under real feminism," she writes, "women have ultimate responsibility for their problems, happiness and lives.

"The personal, in other words, is no longer political." Instead of agitating on Capitol Hill, feminists would do better to revive consciousness-raising groups for poor women, says Lehrman: it's all about self-esteem now. Which is distressingly close to the touchy-feeliness she pillories in much of her work.

None of the other third-wave writers goes quite as far as Lehrman, but hers is the logical conclusion of feminism's retreat into the personal. Girl Power has its limits. Take away the sexual freedom and the guiltless push-up bras and you're not left with much.

"For so many of these women," says Faludi, "what they want to break off and call feminism is their own personal advancement, their own personal freedoms, their own personal choices, so feminism must be about what I want to wear, about fashion and beauty and flirting at the office. Here's our new brand of feminism. Tastes good, less filling."

Problem is, a lot of women need something more substantial. But enough about them. Let's talk about me.

Me, me, me.

Childhood extraordinarily ordinary . . . n

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.