So I've been talking about how Anita Sarkeesian has said that Charmed, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and The Spice Girls were positive female representations from the late 90s, while using it to help tent up her argument about the representation of women in videogames.
I've gotten the witch situation out of the way, now it's time to begrudgingly pull myself through Spice World.
Plot: Umm.. Girl Powa? Or in the case of their movie: Let's make a mockumentary of ourselves (think Spinal Tap, but without the actual band being a joke too).
Crimes against Humanity: A music group with a message, that sort of ruins their own message with just about every breath they take.
The Spice Girls. Boy I was glad that Anita took so long to make another video, because I was hoping she was done so the thoughts I had on the back burner would stop being relevant, so I didn't have to write about this. Guess you don't always get what you want..
So, The Spice Girls were girl pop group that ran from 1994 to 2000, then from 2007-2008, and then appeared again in 2012. They were only in the spotlight for a short time, but they did make quite a mark on things.
The biggest thing about The Spice Girls was their message: Girl Power.. Problem with this however is, like I mention above, they undercut their own message simply by being The Spice Girls.
See, like Charmed, each one of these girls is something of a trope, and they aren't really always that positive:
Scary Spice: The scary one? I've never really gotten what they were getting at with her name. But I'm guessing they were going for "It's okay to be scary." I don't know, but what it comes off as is being scary sexy (like witches?).. Or even something a little more racist, an unnecessary to note here, with the "scary" one being of African decent.
Posh Spice: The fashionable one. If any one is going to care about make-up, looks or cloths, it's going to be her. But thats not really the best thing in the world if you go by most feminist sentiment these days. Posh embodies pretty much all the reasons that fashion magazines catch so hate from these groups.
Baby Spice: A sexy baby? I mean, really? Cause that's her part in this group. She also seems to be portrayed often as the naive (stupid) one, more often then not.
Ginger Spice: The Redhead. I'm sorry, but I can't find anything to say other then she's the sexy redhead. This was very much the sentiment during that time and she was often the only Spice Girl any one cared about because of it (which made things even better for some people when they dug deep enough to find videos of her topless). I can't help but think that this was a plus for the group, simply because she got men to pay even more attention to them then their relieving clothing did.
Sporty Spice: The one that can do sports things... The "most fit" in the group, but often seen as the most unattractive. Which, even though focusing on looks is superficial, sort of alludes to the idea that you can't be attractive and be sporty at the same time -which is how a lot of folks seemed to take it.
Not one of them conveys a positive trope, even though I'd say Sporty comes the closest, but she also seemed to have gotten the least exposure of all of them. So when they start jumping around in their skimpy outfits (which is a whole other negative against their positive role model-ness), yelling their war cry, "Girl Power!," about how girls should be strong, it's really hard not to see them for their appealing coat of paint and cringe.
They sort of drown out their message.
Speaking of drowning out their message. The Spice Girls first major hit in the US was "Wanna be," which states: "If you wanna be my lover, you have to get with my friends".. Which brings up kind of a dual context to the song.
Surely they mean to say: If you want to be my boyfriend, you have to approve of my friends, and my friends of you. However what it came off as for a lot of folks at the time is a little more racy; it sounded more like: If you want to have sex with me, then you also have to sex up my friends.. Which.. If we're supposed to believe that promiscuity is a hot ticket issues in feminist circles, sort of doesn't support it very well.
If you go the racy route, your entering a quagmire of back and forth between the sides fighting over the issue. To many they're basically saying that a girl wants her man to be promiscuous, and be with her friends, which is how things tend to fall as the "usual" and thus "negative" because the guy always gets to be promiscuous in a much more positive light then a female does. If the female does it, she gets treated like the scum of the earth.
But you can also take this to mean that the female herself is promiscuous, and doesn't mind if her man "gets with her friends" because of it. This opens the door for the same negativity above, but also means that they sound as if they're saying "Hey, if they can do it, we can be like that too, and promiscuity is positive -so you should support it"
My personal take on it? Both sides shouldn't be promiscuous. No matter how you cut it, its kind of a bad thing that just cases issues for both men and women, equally. But that's just me.
Either way, this racy message, misconstrued or not, doesn't exactly help the group feel very positive. Not when young girls were taking this in on the back of the whole, positive, "Girl power!" vibe and parents had to assess (as I'm sure most did) whether they were taking the context to mean: Promiscuity is okay.
Oh, and there's also how they sing part of the song, which I had forgotten about.. It sort of sounds like they're having an orgasm. It's kind of hard to ignore now that I've been reminded of it.
They had other hits, but none of them seem to have the same lasting power as their first hit had. I hate to admit however, that I'm not entirely willing to go out of my way to check in and see if those hits were positive or negative to Anita's claims of the group. Their outer appearance alone hurts her claim, enough.
And then there's Spice World, which was the movie they made for.. Reasons I can't even imagine.
Spice World is.. Well.. Let me see if I can sum it up:
Spice World starts with the group singing on a British pop show that isn't around any more, but the girls aren't really feeling what they're doing any more. Oh, and there's this newspaper owner (a man, mind you) that's out to get them, because, you know, newspapers mattered back then still -and he has some guy go take pictures of them. Oh, but some director (also a man) wants to make a movie about them, and sort of stalks them till they say yes.
But the girls quit because they can't spend time with a pregnant friend, on top of all the other stress of touring. But this gives the girls time to reflect, which leads them to giving up their stance, and reconcile, and decide to take their to-pregnant-to-dance friend, out dancing. Where she promptly starts giving birth. At the hospital, they decide to stay for the birth, rather then go perform.
Sometime during this they have a Scooby-Doo chase with the guy taking pictures of them, who was posing as a doctor to take the shot (an obvious way that all paparazzi get their pictures...) who they stop and make see the error of his ways. He goes after his employer, who get's fired for some scandal or another.
Noticing they're late for their show, and their driver is missing, Posh drives like a maniac (another wonderful trope against women: That they can't drive) to get them there, even jumping a gap in Tower Bridge.
Oh, and for some reason there's a bomb on the bus, which they find right before they get to the show.
But the girls get stopped by a cop and charged with a long list of ridiculous charges, but Baby Spice pushes forward, bats her eyes, and he lets them go.... Yeah...
They perform, and the credits roll, with the group talking about their movie, over them... Then the bomb on their bus explodes.
The thing about this movie is that the whole movie seems to serve to point out 2 things:
1) The girls are a mockery of themselves. Even if it's meant to be in a fun way. Take everything I said about them above, and ramp it up, not to 11, but 100. And that's the girls in this movie. Even their tour bus, and living areas, are all weird representations of their role in the group, and not the real women who toil away in the roles.
2) Men are creepy and evil, for really no good reason other then to get at women.
Even the example of them Anita uses of them in video 3 in her series, has the girls marching in line like an army, being ironic in loose army clothing, singing a song about wonder bras. Didn't feminists of the past burn bras as a statement? Isn't the song countering that then? Was that really okay then, and is it now? I really want to know.
After all this your probably worried that, because I'm talking very much like Anita does while bringing the ax down on videogames, and there's really no excuse for it, because I guess I am. But I assure you that this is just an (over) analyzing of same things she, and many other so called "hardcore" feminists (because, I hope we know, not *all* feminists are like Anita Sarkeesian's representing them all to be) would say if they actually sat down and took the time to think about these media tidbits that she's deemed to be positive, exemplary, representations of women. And I have to say it was *very* easy to slip right into the robe of belittling these works. It was almost scary.
Overall, like I said in prior installments, this is all just entertainment, entertainment we're all talking just a little too seriously sometimes.
Next Time: We'll talk about what would happen if Anita made a game.. Fun!
Extra Fun fact (that means nothing) Ginger Spice's real name is Geri Halliwell.. Everything seems to loop right back to Charmed.. Or witches.. Your choice, I guess.
(P.S. Again, really didn't need to go out of my way for these pictures...)
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