This is a quiz. What is the meaning of the following cultural smoke signals?
A new line of women’s mountain-biking clothing is called Girls Love Dirt. One of Revlon’s latest nail colors, a watermelon pink, is named Girly. And a catalog from Barneys New York, called “Us Girls,” shows spring fashions with tag lines like “Girls can be offended when they’re whistled at but upset when they’re not” and “Girls can hail a cab with their legs.”
Traditional feminists may blanch, but the use of “girl” to describe a woman made stronger when she embraces her lacy, sex-kittenish side has made its way from the underground to mainstream commercial products.
This is Love’s Baby Soft feminism, one just right for a year in which Hunter Tylo emerged as a civil-rights icon. Tylo is the actress who struck a blow for vixens everywhere by winning a $5 million judgment after being fired as a “Melrose Place” seductress because she was pregnant.
The 48-page Barneys catalog, which was photographed by Sophia Coppola, is filled with models wearing tiaras, evoking everything from princesses to virgins to prom queens. “I’m sure Freud would have a field day,” said Simon Doonan, executive vice president for creative services at Barneys. But he defended the catalog, which will be sent to customers in mid-February, against anyone who might call it a step backward.
“As a post-feminist idea, it’s now appropriate to embrace one’s girldom and not feel it’s a diminishing of one’s power but a whole source of power,” Doonan said. “Girls get to move the goal posts.”
“If only they got to play too,” many women would reply. Feminists in the 1970s fought not to be called girls, which is what waitresses and secretaries, not to mention congresswomen and female judges, were called as a way of putting them in their place.
But in the ’90s, a younger generation of women who also call themselves feminists began recycling “girl,” starting with the editors of underground zines like Bust, which bills itself “the voice of the new girl order,” and punk rockers belonging to the movement known as riot grrrls.
In their wake have followed Xena, the Warrior Princess; Hard Candy nail polish; Drew Barrymore; Courtney Love; Spin magazine’s recent Girl Issue with Fiona Apple on the cover, and the Spice Girls, with their mantra “Girl Power,” a slogan for supposedly brash femininity.
Debbie Stoller, a co-editor of Bust, says the modern embrace of “girl” is not reactionary.
“I think it’s a reclaiming,” she said. “I think it is kind of subversive. How come drag queens get to have all the fun?”
Stoller cited Mary Pipher’s book “Reviving Ophelia” (Putnam, 1994), about the trials of teenage girls and research highlighting the falloff in their self-confidence. “Little girls are full of chutzpah,” she said, but during puberty, “they go through a crisis they never recover from.” In this sense, the grownup readers of Bust are trying to get in touch with their inner 9-year-old.
Stoller doesn’t mind that big corporations are latching onto “girl.”
“The corporations are just jumping on the bandwagon, but I don’t care,” she said. “Even if this stuff gets out in the mainstream in a watered-down form, at least it’s getting out there. The corporations aren’t getting it quite right, but at least they aren’t getting it so wrong.”
Marcelle Karp, her co-editor, mentioned a recent television commercial for Mountain Dew with Lesley Rankine (of the band Ruby) singing “Thank heaven for little girls” over footage, in Karp’s words, of “girls doing superjock activities.”
She added: “It comes straight from zine culture. People selling products realize people have become so specific in their tastes. They thought: `Why don’t we reclaim girls as a big part of our consumer market? Let’s capitalize on it.’ They’ve been very successful.”
Stoller feels the same way about the corporate embrace of girliness as she does about the Spice Girls, whose feminist stance is paper-thin, she contends. Corporate girliness “functions as a Trojan horse,” she said, adding: “It breaks through the lines of the feminist backlash. Then we can jump out and do some real damage. At least, I hope so.”
