One of the most obvious developments in recent pop culture has been the emergence of the icons and rhetoric of 'girl power', a phrase slapped into mainstream culture by the Spice Girls and subsequently incorporated into the language of government bodies as well as journalists, educationalists, culture critics, and pop fans themselves. Magazines for young women are emphatic in their determination that women must do their own thing, be themselves, and/or be as outrageously sassy and sexy as possible (see chapter nine). Several recent movies have featured self-confident, tough, intelligent female lead characters (chapter four). Female pop stars sing about financial and emotional independence, inner strength, and how they don't need a man; and the popular mantra of self-help books is that women can become just as powerful as these icons, if they cultivate their confidence and self-belief, and draw up a plan of self-development (chapter ten). This set of reasonably coherent messages from a range of sources - their clarity only disturbed by the idea that women can be extremely tough and independent whilst also maintaining perfect make-up and wearing impossible shoes - seems to have had some impact on the identities of young women (as the Britney Spears and Destiny's Child fans quoted in chapter ten would attest), as well as being very successful within pop culture as an image/lifestyle idea.
Popular feminism, women and men
The discourses of 'girl power' are today's most prominent expressions of what Angela McRobbie calls 'popular feminism' - the mainstream interpretation of feminism which is a strong element of modern pop culture even though it might not actually answer to the 'feminist' label. Popular feminism is like a radio-friendly remix of a multi-layered song, with the most exciting bits sampled, and some of the denser stuff left out. As McRobbie notes
To [many] young women official feminism is something that belongs to their mothers' generation. They have to develop their own language for dealing with sexual inequality, and if they do this through a raunchy language of 'shagging, snogging and having a good time', then perhaps the role this plays is not unlike the sexually explicit manifestoes found in the early writing of figures like [feminist pioneers] Germaine Greer and Sheila Rowbotham. The key difference is that this language is now found in the mainstream of commercial culture - not out there in the margins of the 'political underground'. (1999: 126).
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