The good side of girl power

At first I thought this was a joke, not least because the first time I spotted it was in a spoof news item: “Victoria Beckham has BLASTED Geri Halliwell for suggesting they swap their famous slogan GIRL POWER for a more gender-neutral option INNER POWER”’:

Oh fuck off Woke Spice, where does she come up with this shit? Next she’ll be saying we should be called The Spice People […] This is why we used to turn her mic off.

Haha. Just imagine that happening! Only it’s not actually that funny, more the kind of joke that takes me back to the days when everyone’s dad used to refer to Harriet Harman as “Harriet Harperson”. The kind of joke that says “look, that’s the logical conclusion of your crazy insistence that everyone pretend that we’re all the same!” The kind of joke people make when they wish to portray feminism, even in its weakest guises, as narcissism, language policing and sex difference denialism. 

It isn’t a joke, though. 

The artist formerly known as Ginger Spice, Geri Horner (née Halliwell) has genuinely proposed that Girl Power be replaced by Inner Power. “Girl Power,” she opined at the launch of her latest children’s book, “was a sweet word for feminism”:

But if you look in the dictionary and see what feminism means, it means the ‘equalisation between the sexes’. Therefore, to me it’s irrelevant what your gender is, I want everyone to feel their power, so let’s evolve that word from Girl Power to Inner Power.

Obviously I don’t know what dictionary Horner is looking at. Having reached for the one nearest to me (an old Chambers Concise), I get “advocacy of women’s rights, of the movement for the advancement and emancipation of women”. Of course there are variations on this and I’m no etymologist, but I’ve always felt the “fem” part is a bit of a giveaway. In addition, if we’re really committed to “equalisation between the sexes”, one place to start might be by allowing women one political movement — just the one! — of their own. 

Not that the Girl Power of the nineties ever felt like much of a feminist force to be reckoned with. On the contrary, as several older feminists pointed out at the time, it in many ways epitomised third-wave feminism’s dropping of the ball. Rather than continue the rebellion, it opted for adaptation — at best, a watering down of key feminist principles (sisterhood, sexual autonomy, female self-assertion), at worst, a reframing of the anti-feminist backlash of Loaded and ladettism as a newer, better, more “palatable” form of feminism. You get something sweeter, as Horner herself suggests, when you replace the word “woman” with “girl” (especially if the “girls” are women in their twenties, their own names replaced by cutesy epithets such as Baby, Ginger, Sporty, Posh and Scary).

Does it matter, then, if the term “Girl Power” dies a death? If the reason for this were because, as feminism goes, it was a pretty rubbish, often counter-productive form, I’d say it didn’t. If the reckoning we were having today involved saying that actually — as predicted at the time in books such as Overloaded and Female Chauvinist Pigs — this kind of “feminism” was paving the way for the ultra-misogyny of the porn age, that would be one thing. If what was under attack were the worst aspects of nineties “feminism” — the infantilisation of women, the trivialising of sexual objectification, the reduction of female experience to short skirts and pillow fights — I would be happy to see it go. 

Yet this is not what Horner objects to when she proposes replacing “Girl Power” with “Inner Power”. What she objects to are the best parts of the former — the crumbs from the patriarchal table, the good stuff that some of us (myself included) were able to glean from it, the idea that actually, female relationships and experiences are important and valuable in their own right — even more important than male attention (see, for instance, “Wannabe” and “Mama”). If “Girl Power” was crap feminism, there was still some feminism in it, at least in principle, if not in execution. “Girl Power” wasn’t for everyone — it was for women and girls. This meant something at a time when any mainstream recognition of real feminist activism was thin on the ground. 

And that is the part that’s now causing such consternation. If “Girl Power” ultimately undermined women by rehabilitating patriarchal ideas about femininity and objectification, “Inner Power” takes it one step further by seeking to rehabilitate deeply misogynistic beliefs about femaleness — the idea that to be female is to never have anything of your own, that any exclusion of males is suspect, that female relationality is a poor substitute for male individualism. It is of a piece with the current trend for recasting any attempt to set things aside for women alone as regressive. If anything, it is a reminder that if too many people now understand feminism as “taking misogynistic ideas and finding twisty, convoluted ways of making them sound feminist, without actually changing anything”, this has been going on for decades. 

At least girls of my generation were told that, in theory, you can have things which are just for you

Following the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of women, we are starting to see organisations respond by deciding it is better to have nothing at all for women, if “women” doesn’t mean everyone. Now it seems we’re not even allowed feminism in its crappest form. At least girls of my generation were told that, in theory, you can have things which are just for you, your female friends, maybe even your mum, too. What do today’s girls have? The sense that perhaps even being a girl is problematic (how dare you be you without giving someone else a go?). 

Imaginary Victoria Beckham is right. If you want to be a feminist — or at least not an active misogynist — you’ve got to get with the idea that girls matter enough to have something of their own.