Girl Power

By NADYA LABI

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

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.

But there is a lyric in the film that gives the lie to the bravado of the entire girl-power movement. "Look at me," Mulan sings, "I will never pass for/ a perfect bride/ or a perfect daughter/ Can it be/ I'm not meant to play this part?" In the end, however, she substitutes one part for another. And that's one of the limitations of girl power. Its lure is the image of girls kicking ass, being boylike. But how well does it prepare them to be adults in a complex world? "We're struggling to find alternative models for heroism," says Kathleen Karlyn, an assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon, who is co-writing a book about girl culture. "In order to even imagine female heroism, we're placing it in the realm of fantasy."

Mulan's producer, Pam Coats, hoped to create a character that transcends the conventions of gender. "You see Mulan get physically stronger, but she also uses her brain," says Coats. "We tried really hard to balance her feminine and masculine side." Mulan is more complex than your average action figure. For example, she isn't afraid to hug the Emperor in a burst of emotion. Still, it's noteworthy that one of Disney's most vigorous heroines literally has to disguise herself as a boy. Says Karlyn: "We're beginning to think about heroism in a female way. But we don't have narratives or genres in which we can comfortably fit strong female protagonists."

Girls have nevertheless proved to be a powerful market force by helping generate an estimated 30% to 40% of the movie Titanic's $580 million U.S. gross. All told, young women ages 12 to 19 spent $60 billion last year, according to Teen Research Unlimited. But many of them believe that when it comes to cultural content, they are being sold a bill of used and impractical goods. A 1997 study commissioned by the advocacy organization Children Now and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 71% of girls ages 16 and 17 said the female characters on TV were unrealistically thin; in fact, the girls chose males predominantly as the TV characters they most admired. Recognizing gender stereotyping is one thing, but successfully resisting it is quite another. "All the attractive women on TV and in the movies are skinny," says Rona Luo, a 14-year-old student at New York City's Stuyvesant High School. "It's not so easy to hold out and think, 'I'm going to be who I am.'" She's not alone. A New York Times poll of 1,048 teenagers ages 13 through 17 found that when asked what they would most like to change, 36% of the girls responded "my looks" or "my body," a percentage that was higher than in the 1994 survey. In an age in which image is often mistaken for both message and directive, can girls truly tell if they're making up their own minds, even as they sing about telling people what they want?

After a generation of books and cautionary tales about self-esteem, girls still diet more than they should. A 1995 survey of 1,955 students in Grades 9 to 12 conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 60% of the girls were trying to lose weight, compared with 24% of the boys. More cases of anorexia and bulimia are reported every year, and between 5% and 10% of females 14 and older suffer from such disorders, according to the nonprofit group Eating Disorders Awareness and Prevention. "I don't think in local communities and in schools we're seeing any real flowering of girl power," says Joan Brumberg, author of The Body Project, which draws on diary entries from Victorian times to the present to argue that girls have increasingly defined themselves in terms of their looks. Although she believes that girls need their own cultural icons, Brumberg is worried that celebrities inevitably reinforce the notion that appearance is the only source of female power.

Nowhere is the battle to balance celebrity and right thinking more obvious than in the magazine industry. Among girls ages 12 to 19, Teen Research Unlimited found that 84% read magazines in 1997, so it's no wonder that the business of informing their lives, chronicling their troubles and defining their desires has become fiercely competitive. American Girl, Teen Beat and Tiger Beat have the younger age bracket sewn up. The median age of a Tiger Beat reader is 13, but girls as young as eight are snatching up the magazine. "Our readership is getting younger," says Louise Barile, editor of Tiger Beat. "It just goes back to girls' growing up faster. When they begin to get interested in boys, they graduate to other magazines."

Graduation holds an abundance of possibilities. Three new publications (TEEN PEOPLE, Jump and Twist) are challenging the established triumvirate (Seventeen, YM and Teen). Already, TEEN PEOPLE has 500,000 subscribers; each of Twist's five issues has sold 20% more copies than the previous one; and Jump boasts a circulation of 350,000. "We use girls with all body types and races to make the point of not shooting unrealistic images of beauty and thinness," says Christina Ferrari, managing editor of TEEN PEOPLE (a Time Inc. publication). The June/July issue features the 21 hottest people under 21 as well as an article about a 21-year-old stunt woman and a guide to the favored products of such stars as Drew Barrymore. For its part, Jump has focused on athletics and life-style. Says editor in chief Lori Berger: "We wanted to do a more sophisticated magazine for girls and not treat them like boy-crazy, fashion-crazed teens." One of the magazine's blurbs touts: THE FATS OF LIFE: ARE THOSE 10 LB IN YOUR HEAD OR ON YOUR HIPS?

Athletics is a positive development in a commercial atmosphere full of repackaged notions. Today a record 2.5 million girls compete on high school teams, compared with 300,000 in the early 1970s. "Sports has helped to hold me back from dieting," says Marielle Courtines, 17, who was on her school's varsity swim and softball teams. "Girls who don't eat literally almost faint, and you need energy for swimming." Companies like Nike are promoting a sports-activist attitude. Proudly emblazoned on its website is the slogan PLAY LIKE A GIRL. Buffy embodies that ethic on television: she often forgoes stake and garlic for the more modern method of kickboxing her pointy-toothed enemies. "The characters girls love seem to be in control of their own destinies," says Tara McPherson, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television. Akeisha Byer, 15, puts it more bluntly, "Buffy is, like, a girl kicking butt, and you don't usually see that."

Buffy, of course, rarely breaks a sweat. Reality is more like the WNBA, whose second season started on June 11. A ritual begins every game: the ball exchange. Each player hits the court with a basketball that she hands off to a girl from the stands, and it's hard to tell who is more thrilled--the fan, who gets to shake hands with her sports hero, or the player, who still can't quite believe that she is a sports hero. It's an inspiring tableau, one that apparently moved Mattel as well. The company plans to have its new WNBA Barbie doll in stores by the holidays.

--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Alice Park/New York

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Alice Park/New York