The Spice Girls: a Mythology

In the mid 90’s the media went wild programming for the adolescent and teenage girl by placing strong female leads in a variety of genres that had never made room for this niche before. In television, strong yet sexy Buffy the Vampire Slayer chased boys by day and fought off evil by night, proving that a girl could be independent and strong yet still fit within the social boundaries of society. For example, in one episode Buffy would fight against three vampires while simultaneously be worrying about who she is going to attend a dance with or if she will make the cheerleading squad. In film, characters such as Kat Stratford in Ten Things I Hate About You reiterated similar ideals: that as a teenage girl you could be tough, strong-willed and in the end fit into the social normative by having a man by your side. Even Disney hopped on board with the trend in their 1998 feature Mulan. In Mulan, the main character, a Chinese, teenage girl, hides her true identity in order to take on male roles, save China, and, in the end, marry the sexy warrior. During this growth of the strong female persona in the media and the targeting of the teenage consumer came girl group sensation, The Spice Girls.

Similar to the trends of television and film in the mid 90’s, The Spice Girls belong to a moment in music where “Teen-Pop” conquered the charts. Within this movement, many of its key players were members of “Boy Bands”, the two most popular being the Backstreet Boys and *Nsync. Like a formula, these Boy Bands had five members with two main singers, performing their songs with choreographed dance moves. They always appeared to be a mother’s dream: clean cut, caring, and tattoo-free. These bands were a global phenomenon; their music videos streaming on MTV daily on Carson Daily’s countdown show TRL. Boy Bands gained such popularity that at one point, there was even a popular tape called “Darrin’s Dance Grooves”, where an individual could learn the choreography featured in the music videos of *Nsync, Britney Spears, and other Teen-Pop sensations. Within this excitement, British Girl Group The Spice Girls emerged, bringing with them groundbreaking record sales.

The group consisted of five different women who each took on a different character, costume, and persona that coincided with the name given to them. Scary Spice, the only black member of this group, clothed herself in a variety of bright, colorful animal prints, never forgetting to make her hair as large and afro-like as possible. On occasion, Scary Spice would also add fake horns onto the front of her head, wrapping them tightly with large strands of hair.

Baby Spice, a blonde girl who always tied her hair into high pigtails, wore baby-doll dresses of solid, feminine tones, and sported a necklace that read ‘baby’. Posh Spice, with her brown hair cut in a short, sexy bob, wore short, tight dresses that left very little to the imagination. She accompanied these dresses with high heals, most times with the straps moving up her legs. Sporty Spice sported complete exercise attire: colorful Adidas workout pants, a sports bra, and a high ponytail.Also, unlike the rest of The Spice Girls who dressed their feet in high heals and platform shoes, Sporty Spice always wore sneakers.

Lastly, Ginger spice, named so because of her bright, red hair, was the flashiest dresser of The Spice Girls. Most known for her various Union Jack onesies and mini dresses, Ginger Spice wore platform shoes and never wore an outfit that wasn’t red, white, blue, or a combination of the colors of the Union Jack. With the costumes and specific names, each of The Spice Girls (minus Ginger Spice) performs an exaggerated female stereotype for their audience, marketing themselves under roles that have been pushed on women for generations.

Within these performances, two of the Spice Girls use props that signify their stereotypes as a whole: bubble gum and horns. For example, Baby Spice represents the infantilized woman, someone who is shy, innocent, and powerless over men. In her photo shoots, her hair in pigtails, Baby Spice is usually paired with a stuffed animal or playing with gum, the strand starting in her mouth, stretched and wrapped around her index finger. Around the same time, Britney Spears used the gum to infantilize herself in the music video “Baby, One More Time”. Dressed as a school girl, a piece of gum is being pulled in a strand from her mouth, the teeth holding onto the end as she wraps gum around her finger, waiting for the bell to release her from the classroom. Bubble gum is seen as an object of youth, for it is a candy that is marketing towards children and appeals to them more because of its sweet taste. It is an object used to infantilize women consistently, and next to cartoons a sexy woman blowing a bubble is the second most common image that appears in advertisements for bubble gum.

Scary Spice is the exotic for a variety of reasons. First off, the fact that she is black qualifies her to take this role for they are marketing towards a mostly white audience, many of whom naturally view black people as “the other”. Her hair, which is not naturally an Afro, is always blown out of tangled in order to appear this way, making her difference even more physically visible. She exaggerates this even further with her animal prints, making herself animalistic, distancing herself from the normal and placing herself among the foreign.
Her most interesting choice in costume, however, are the horns she places on the top of her head. Horns traditionally represent Cain/Satan in a variety of different folktales and biblical interpretations. As Ruth Mellinkoff explains:

[Horns] became increasingly associated with the animal like natures of devils and monster-beast    stereotypes…Its protective connotations disappeared; they were replaced by those implying a degrading and deforming punishment. The horn sprouting from Cain’s head became a concrete manifestation of his bestial nature (62).

Therefore, to dress herself in this way connotes the devil, pure evil, and animalistic behavior. This only emphasizes her ties to the exotic and in a sense makes herself a taboo. The horns help solidify that she is not just an “other” but that she is “an evil other”. The connotations of the horns transform Scary Spice into the category of monster, thereby allowing herself to fit inside the concept of “fear as desire”. These props and the personas that they reinforced allowed the Spice Girls to be easily marketed to the masses, allowing teenage girls to pick which Spice Girl they felt they most resembled.

Aside from their individual characters, what made The Spice Girls largely marketable to young girls was a term the group would coin: girl power. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a:

Self-reliant attitude among girls and young women manifested in ambition, assertiveness, and individualism. Although also used more widely (esp. as a slogan), the term has been particularly and repeatedly associated with popular music … with the British all-female group The Spice Girls.

The Spice Girls would shout “Girl Power” while simultaneously making peace-signs on various occasions, and eventually it became a staple of the group. Girl Power is expressed in the majority of their songs, including their most popular song to date, Wannabe. In Wannabe, The Spice Girls explain:

If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends,
Make it last forever friendship never ends,
If you wanna be my lover, you have got to give,
Taking is too easy, but that's the way it is.

As demonstrated in these lyrics, friendship is essential while relationships with men are of less significance. To sing about this supports one of the factors of girl power: that men aren’t necessary and women can be independent as long as they have other women to help sustain themselves.

In this way, The Spice Girls are a cliché, exaggerated representation of one of the key facets of third wave feminism: that women could battle gender inequalities without fighting against the patriarchy and sticking to traditional female roles and identities. The Spice Girls did just that. They were the embodiment of female roles and identities. The Spice Girls not only fought for feminist ideals such power of womanhood and being independent and strong, but they did it while fitting inside of negative representations of women that have existed for hundreds of years. The Spice Girls used the ideas of the third wave feminist movement to market themselves to the millions, claiming that an individual can be a complete model of what the male desires as long as she is fighting for women’s rights. Within this exaggerated model, The Spice Girls prove that the ideals of third wave feminism were far too general and ignore why women feel the need to fit within those roles in the first place.