Girl Power: Patriarchy in Sheep’s Clothing
Welcome to Harvard Law School Graduation: a pert, slender blonde wearing
bright pink lipstick and a mortarboard is giving the graduation address; her classmates
leap up to applaud her as the camera focuses on her darkly handsome boyfriend.
Beautiful! Fabulous! What, you wonder, is this girl’s story?
Her story lies in the plot of the 2001 movie Legally Blonde, a pink and fluffy
spectacular starring Reese Witherspoon. Reese plays Elle Woods, who decides to follow
her ex-boyfriend to Harvard Law after their breakup. A fashion design major, Elle hits
the books pretty hard to get decent scores on her LSATS, even missing parties – and then
hires a professional to film her in a soft-core porn admissions video, focusing on Elle
floating in a cool blue pool wearing a tiny pink bikini. Lo and behold, it wows the white,
middle-aged male admissions board, and Elle goes on to take campus by storm.
And there’s good reason Elle makes such a splash: she turns out to be he only beautiful
girl at Harvard. All the rest of the girls there spend their time studying and doing nothing
else; they are dull, boring, and above all, unpretty. These smart women do anything but
have fun. Most of them blur into one bespectacled, intellectual image, but there’s one
young woman among them who is even worse than dull – our token Feminist. She has
dreadlocks and a defensive attitude, talks about nothing but political rallies and is, of
course, a lesbian. Elle hates her.
Unrealistic? Sure, but what do we expect from the movies? The real problem
begins when the ideas propagated by films that claim to be a “feel good, girl-power
movie,” as People magazine called this particular brain-number, seep into our everyday
existence. With the tagline “believing in yourself never goes out of style,” the kind of
empty platitude that masquerades for self-esteem in America’s touchy-feely pop
psychology landscape, Legally Blonde is just one in a chain of girl power movies, Tshirts, books, and philosophies falsely represented as empowering that have been
stealthily creeping into our culture.
While the producers of this film would have us believe that this movie’s
message is that all blondes aren’t dumb (in an attempt to contradict one of Hollywood’s
earlier stereotypes), and harp on how wonderful it is that a pretty girl could make it in law
school, that’s not what really comes across. Sure, Elle was disappointed when she found
out she got an internship on basis of her looks, but shouldn’t there be more then just
disappointment? In order to avoid this objectification, perhaps girls shouldn’t send
tantalizing, sexual videos to the admissions committee. What Legally Blonde really
teaches its viewers is that most smart girls aren’t pretty; smartness is intolerable in a
woman unless she is pretty; and that any politically aware or feminist women are radical
lesbians on the lower strata of society. These negative images have definitely traveled
farther than the silver screen – in a recent New York Times column, for example, Maureen
Dowd presented a few interviews with female Harvard students who admitted they kept
their college a secret from their male dates. “It’s the kiss of death,” one female student
lamented. Apparently, young men are still threatened by women who are smarter than
they are, or who might make more money. No, Legally Blonde is not an isolated cultural
blunder, and we can buy into similar philosophies in any mall. Take a look at the shelves
of Old Navy or Claire’s. Under the guise of raising girls’ self-esteem, these stores stock
their shelves with shirts that say: Boys are great – every girl should own one; Boys Lie; I
Love Boys; I Love Shopping; Perfect; 90% Angel; Princess; Porn Star; and Playboy.
What do these T-shirts teach our girls? Manufacturers get away with these slogans by
shoving them under the girl power umbrella, telling us they preach empowerment. If you
open Delia’s, a mail order clothing and accessory catalogue sent to countless teen and
preteen girls, models sort similar shirts at the top of a page that reads at the bottom,
“Girls can rule the world,” “be anything you want,” or any number of other tired slogans.
But if we look past the accompanying cheerful catchphrases to what the T-shirts really
mean, we can find another story: they promote sexism (objectification of males),
heterosexism (all hetero-themed opinions), egomania (narcissism instead of betterment),
and the typical role of female as consumer (emphasis on shopping) and sex object
(glorification of sex industry). The Playboy shirts alone show how young women have
bought into the concept that this male-defined concept of beauty is true desirability.
What is empowering about this?
These slogans, inscribed on shirts, stickers, notebooks, and many other
marketable objects, are widespread to say the least. But hasn’t anyone else noticed what
they say? Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of feminist debate about them
these days, most likely because popular culture has widely accepted girl power since the
Spice Girls coined the term. Today’s “third wave” feminists who came of age in the
1980s, women such as Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, would have us believe
the struggle for feminist ideals is no longer needed. In their 2000 book Manifesta: Young
Women, Feminism and the Future, Baumgardner and Richards say, “For our generation,
feminism is like fluoride,” meaning all modern girls are unconscious feminists. Or are
they? I agree that certain concepts have found their way into our water supply, so to
speak, but they are not truly feminist. Indeed, Baumgardner and Richards go on to
disprove their own statements in Manifesta; Reason book reviewer Cathy Young points
out that the authors’ “writing all too often confirms the very stereotypes of young
feminists that they seek to disprove--namely, silliness and self-absorption.” The qualities
Young mentions all appear in girl power clothes, movies, music, and magazines. I
propose that although girl power supporters claim the trend is really about accepting and
celebrating girls and all forms of sexuality, what it’s really doing is making over young
women into exactly what men want. This isn’t new, either – the same thing happened in
the 1960s with the advent of the Pill. The Pill left birth control completely up to women
for a change, so men could have as many one-night stands as they wanted,
no strings attached. So what if a woman could have them, too? What ended up
happening was that women, in the name of equality, adopted the less responsible male
behavior that had long been a societal double standard instead of bettering the behavior of
both genders.
So, we’re left with deciding what qualities are desirable. If we want
equality, we should want equality on the best possible terms instead of
just settling. Should feminists eager for a generation of “empowered”
girls have to settle for girl power?
Let’s say the definition of a third wave feminism is, as Baumgardner and
Richards claim, wanting “[one] to be whoever [one is]--but with a political
consciousness.” This definition implies a desire to step away from requiring an image to
go along with an –ism, as well as for mindfulness in living. Yet, does girl power fulfill
this definition? I don’t believe it does. Rather, girl power creates yet
another narrow image girls and young women are expected to fit into. Not only is girl
power just one more way of telling girls how to be girls, but the image it advocates is
degrading. There is no political consciousness in a 12-year-old girl, or a 25-year-old, for
that matter, who wears a shirt emblazoned with the Playboy bunny – the message she
sends is that she is ready and willing to be used. Why should an independent young
woman proclaim her value as an object?
Feminism, a theory that backs choice balanced with political consciousness, should warn
against this unconscious propagation of oppression. Feminism says you can; girl power
says you have to. It even manages to be both homophobic and anti-male simultaneously.
The same version of a young female model wearing a “Boys Lie” T-shirt would
definitely turn up her nose at the mention of lesbianism except in the bi-curious,
threesome male fantasy variety. Even the blatantly anti-male “boys lie” is juxtaposed
with the fatuous “I Love Boys”. Boys may lie, but what the heck. It’s still ok to be their
Porn Star.
Feminists’ struggles against objectification are all invalidated with each mother
who believes she is teaching her daughter the value of self-worth by renting Legally
Blonde or buying her a “Princess” T-shirt. But what can we expect from our society? Is
girl power the best we can get? Will it actually bring about a revolution of enlightened
women on an equal level with men, as some desperate feminists hope? I doubt it. As
Cathy Young reminds us, for an empowering dialogue about men and women in society
to succeed, it must include both men and women. I would add that it also needs to harbor
active consciousness – one needn’t speak only of politics, or attend all of the nation’s
rallies, but should be aware of what his or her behavior and choices says. Dancing drunk
in a dark club wearing revealing clothing does not say “I respect my body,” no matter
what girl power advocates might want us to think. And, as we can see from the
contradictory, anti-male and Hefner-supporting, overtly sexual philosophy behind girl
power, neither of these stipulations is met. Men are both shut out of the dialogue and
expected, even preferred, to be objectifiers.
Feminism is about equality, human rights, and choices. It does not expect all
feminists to eat whole grains and organic vegetables, or cut off their hair, but it does
expect some kind of consciousness, some awareness of politics, gender, and a sense of
self. On the contrary, girl power is about image, prettiness, and heterosexist sexual
attractiveness. I think we shouldn’t have to settle for accepting girl power as the best
version of feminism for this generation, but I’ll take a conscious and feminist stance – I’ll
skip the aisle with Reese Witherspoon and Perfect shirts, but I’ll keep talking about them.
To modify Legally Blonde’s catchphrase, we’ve got to be worth believing in before we
can believe in ourselves.