| To what extent have The Spice Girls
distorted feminist ideology for young women? In-depth independent study by Tanya Blackwell |
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So what's so contentious about the Spice Girls?
Since the summer of 1996, The Spice Girls have broken records and taboos with characteristic verve. They are the first group to achieve four number ones with their first four singles and the first group to hold the coveted Christmas number one two years in a row. Both their debut single and album hit number one in America’s billboard charts. They are also the first girl group to admit kissing each other, repeatedly show their knickers, and most definitely the first to flirt with Tony Blair, Nelson Mandela and HRH Prince Charles.
The modern mass media has been blamed for an increase in many of society’s ills in recent years; violence, rape, crime and drugs, and The Spice Girls have come under repeated fire for their flagrant flaunting of feminine sexuality and also for enforcing a dangerous kind of feminism on their young fans.
Vivenne Westwood, a figure well known for her outrageous, flamboyant fashion designs, attacked The Spice Girls on BBC television, calling them ‘animals with no style’. Westwood claimed "those Spice Girls have never had any education ... they have just been allowed to grow up like animals. Their dreadful clothes, their dreadful look and no style ... they are just cultivating this attitude that you should push your way to the top. I’m morally outraged by it. I call it child molestation. It’s corruption." Westwood made her name in the sixties designing punk fashion, and claims not to have worn knickers when she collected her OBE from the Queen.
Rushkoff argues that it is simply the way we have learned to look at society, in much the same way that we have not yet learned how to read the MTV language, and that to understand today’s media we must look at it with ‘the open-mindedness of youth’. Something that Westwood seems to have conveniently forgotten:
"Those of us intent on securing an adaptive strategy for the coming millennium need look no further than our own children for reassuring answers to the myriad of uncertainties associated with the collapse of the culture we have grown to know and love. Our kids may be younger than us, but they are also newer. They are the latest model of human being, and are equipped with a whole lot of new features. Looking at the world of children is not looking backwards at our own pasts- it’s looking ahead. They are our evolutionary future."