Spice World: An introduction to feminism

MANILA, Philippines - You don’t mess with the biggest girl group of all time, and you don’t mess with their fans. In 1997, the Spice Girls spiced up the life of nearly every boy and every girl and turned it into a pretty big Spice World. And for a while, fan or not, Generation Next or not, it really was. The group was the accidental rebel princess of feminist movements that preceded it, but for all the young girls out there, it was the best introduction. Everyone wanted to be a Spice Girl in a Spice Bus with the batteries of feminism included — whatever that strain of “Spice Girl” or “feminism” might have been. And most of them didn’t know it.

In the music video for Wannabe, they crashed an aristocratic party with their story from A to Z. In Stop, they shook up a conservative British town looking for a human touch. Played on repeat, they told us how men should act until it was fact (“But any fool can see they’re falling, I gotta make you understand.”)  If we analogize how important it was then, feminism to the Spice Girls is like being gay to Lady Gaga or being heartbroken to Adele. It was hands held together in the air, swaying back and forth to a pop ballad anthem — from Too Much to Mama to Stop.

The Pepsi-sponsored kind of Girl Power drowned the screaming Kathleen Hanna and the photocopied zines that enveloped the Riot Grrl movement. But the Spice Girls’ Girl Power was the kind of power that, chances are, you would have discovered first.

My older girl cousins played me their debut album “Spice,” and Track 1 said “Yo, I’ll tell you what I want what I really really want.” I remember them asking me if I found it “catchy.” A stupid question, I thought, because it was life-changing. And I was seven. But was I only pretending to have understood it because my girl cousins seemed to? Am I still pretending it really mattered now?

Today I still find the definition of feminism elusive, but I still find it comforting how the Spice Girls seemed so sure.

When “Yo, I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want” hit my cousins’ speakers, it should have come with a choir of angels. It made complete sense: they took girl power into clubs, the padded enclave of “see no evil, speak no evil, and hear no evil,” and they definitely sold lollipops with the idea.

The Spice Girls provoked, they called the shots, each a deliberately manufactured marketing caricature (in the most respectful sense), each a one-in-five chance you’d want to aspire to. But who were the Spice Girls, really?

Like any lasting legacy, the Spice Girls broke up a week ago and canceled their world tour. The London Olympics and a West End musical couldn’t have stopped the passing of time. If as a child I had no idea what “zig a zag, ah” meant, or that 2 Become 1 had to do with contraception — could I really pretend to have understood feminism from them? Whatever elegiac beginnings I had for has become a matter of whether I believe in fairytales and whether I really knew the Spice Girls. Is it now clearer from this distance that Girl Power was really just a marketing tool as blatant as the Union Jack they waved? Did we consume all the girl power they could offer back in the days that Mel C’s high kick was felt all over the world? Were the Spice Girls really just good pop we read too much into?

I don’t know, but regardless: viva forever.