You can't go anywhere these days without being accosted by girl power. TV is zinging with feisty chicks yelling what they want, what they really really want.
Down the pub, ladettes demonstrate how they can swear like troopers, tell blue jokes, follow football and knock back 10 pints and a vindaloo. In the music business, predatory women prowl like never before, such as black soul singer Adina Howard, whose current offering, Do You Want To Ride, features a close-up of Adina's fishnet-clad behind on the cover. Throughout the album, she and a male foil grunt their way through tracks with titles like You Got Me Humpin and Horny For Your Love. "I'm speakin' for all the aggressive sistas," Adina says of her music.
In November's Minx magazine ("For Girls with a Lust for Life!") you can learn How To Have Any Man for Breakfast or read about Lusty Women who are Over-sexed and Still Gagging For It. In Com- pany you can see Good Sports Remove Their Shorts. Cosmo now carries a regular sealed supplement of minor male celebrities getting naked. Even our own U Magazine has gone "man mad" this month with "ten pages of beautiful babes" inside - male babes, that is.
More! marks its 250th issue with a celebration of girl power. "In the beginning," says editor Tammy Butt, "there was the lad and he drank and he swore a lot and spent half his life shagging birds, or at least he wanted to. It was inevitable there'd be a backlash." More! lashes back by featuring five "feisty femmes. . . the biggest and brightest of whom we've stuck on our 250th cover as our tribute to the new Girl Power."
Power girls are not feminists; most would run screaming from the label. But not as fast as they would flee the tag of "lady". They might dismiss feminism as past-it and irrelevant but they are positively scathing of traditional female virtues such as modesty, chastity or submissiveness. Many feminist commentators have therefore welcomed the phenomenon. Dr Barbara Bradby, a senior lecturer in sociology at Trinity College, Dublin who teaches a course on gender and popular culture, believes there's nothing new about the concept which she sees as part of a tradition stretching back to the girl bands of the 1960s.
"Remember songs like You Don't Own Me, recently popularised again by the movie The First Wives Club?" she says. "These were the precursors of later performers like Madonna and the Spice Girls." Dr Bradby appreciates the positive messages promoted by such performers and cites an example of an incident observed in Dublin city centre recently. "Four drunken youths started making loud and aggressive advances to a group of mini-skirted girls nearby," she says. "The girls were well able to cope with the situation, which ended in them shouting `Girl Power' at the lads who backed down completely. Girl power says girls can dress as they like but men cannot assume that they are sexually available."
But why does girl power need to be dressed in the trappings of sexual availability in the first place? Annette O'Meara, editor of U Magazine and agony aunt, sees the concept as a commodity, something to be sold, rather than genuinely empowering.
"Girl power seems to suggest that one day young women woke up and switched into sassy, feisty mode," she says. "The reality is that many young women are confused and vulnerable about their sexuality and that messages from TV, fashion and music can be experienced as pressures. If young women were brought up with a sense of individuality, with genuine self-esteem and good assertiveness skills, then we wouldn't need a concept of girl power."
More! magazine's tribute is interesting because it (unintentionally) demonstrates the limits of the girl power concept as currently constructed. The five "girls on top" which they have chosen are: Big Breakfast presenter Denise Van Outen, "more cheek than a roomful of mooners"; Saffron, lead singer with rock group Republica, "the Debbie Harry of the 1990s"; Top Of The Pops presenter Jayne Middlemiss, "flirtiest female on the box"; actress Luisa Bradshaw-White who plays Kira in This Life, "gob as wide as a shovel", and Melinda Messinger, described not as the topless model she is but as "Britain's top homegrown personality" who proves that "smart girls are doing it for themselves".
Doing what, exactly? Taking off their own clothes? Melinda Messinger is a classic page-three girl, who like Sam Fox before her, succeeded in breaking into other areas of showbiz. Jayne Middlemiss too has done what she calls "the topless thing". If these are the role models for the new girl power, it begins to look neither new nor particularly powerful.
Female celebrities selling "slag" as a commodity get away with it. But for the average Josephine to admit to being sexually voracious is to invite opprobrium, as was seen earlier this year, when Channel 4 screened a fly-on-the-wall documentary entitled One Night Stand. This programme featured four people who enjoy casual sex: two straight men, one gay man and one straight woman. It invoked widespread comment in the British press and the focus of fury was Bonnie, the female subject of the documentary, who was given front page treatment (My 25 NoString Flings!!!!) and subjected to feature-length analysis which lambasted her as selfish and emotionally stunted.
Bonnie who was "brought up to believe that sex is just sex - it's fun, it's nice but it's no big deal", was upbraided most noisily by the Sun, who insisted that her habits were at once "a form of depression" and gross self-indulgence. (The Sun, of course, is the newspaper which launched power girl Melinda Messinger's career as "a Page Three Girl for the Thrillennium".) None of the other subjects of the documentary was treated to its moral outrage, illustrating that the double-standards which power girls claim to have demolished are still alive and kicking women.
So much for girls on top. But what of the ladette? She too has a long pedigree, for there were always girls who wanted to be one of the boys and they always were - could only be - second-best. Today's ladette might be able to keep up when it comes to booze and even boorishness, but what about that vital component of the lad's lexicon, the birds? "Saucefor-the-goose" attempts to sexually objectify men usually fail - male strip shows, for example, tend to engender laughter rather than lust. And so long as the threat of sexual danger lurks behind a casual encounter, a onenight stand can never be as straightforward a transaction for women as it is for men.
Which seems to have brought us back to sex again. But then sex has always been central to debates about women's power. In 1971, Germaine Greer wrote in The Female Eunuch that "the chief instrument in the deflection and perversion of female energy is the denial of female sexuality for the substitution of femininity". Then, femininity was still defined around the role of wifeand-mother; today its central characteristics are sexual attractiveness and availability.
The feisty chick may think herself a radical when she shouts how she's up for it. In fact, she is embracing her culture's definition of femininity as wholeheartedly as her forebear whose focus was a sparkler for the fourth finger and wall-to-wall carpeting. The good girl has metamorphosed into the good-time girl.
As currently constructed, girl power is no threat to the established order of things. In order for it to have real muscle, these girls who just wanna have fun need to grow up a little and grapple with the ongoing power struggles around jobs, money, family and who ends up cleaning the loo. Anyone for woman power?
