Judging by the array of pornography magazines on display and packaged in shrink-wrap behind the checkout counter at my neighborhood’s 7-Eleven there is now a skin magazine called, “Girls Over 40.”
Excuse me? Is “Girls Over 40” an oxymoron or what? Or did somebody just raise the legal age of adulthood for women while my back was turned?
Not that I expect to find deep thinking in a skin mag. I only took mental note of this particular magazine title because it offers an example of a trend these days, the revived acceptance of “girl.”
The liberation movements of the 1960s exposed terms like “boy” and “girl” as a put-down of women and minorities, particularly those who held menial jobs.
But, things change back. Ever since at least the early 1980s, when Cindy Lauper hit the airwaves with her hit song, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” I have seen girl ease itself into linguistic rehab.
By the ’90s, pop culture had produced a new term, “grrrl,” as in the “riot grrrls” punk rock movement. The extra Rs sent a new, robust message that said a gal could be fierce and feminine.
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More recently, the publicity accompanying “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the latest in more than 30 years of James Bond movies, proudly praises its female leads, Michelle Yeoh and Teri Hatcher, as “the new Bond girls” with no hint of embarrassment.
Then there are, yes, the Spice Girls, a manufactured British pop vocal group of five women who are virtually unknown, I have found, to those who are more than, say, 35 or 40 years of age, but selling mega-hits to the younger set. Their slogan, “Girl Power,” excites precisely by turning the weak, passive and victim-focused stereotypes of girlhood on their head.
Is it again hip, then, for a woman to be a girl? Several companies are gambling that it is. Revlon offers a new pink “Girly” nail color. A new catalog scheduled for distribution in February from Barneys New York is called “Us Girls.”
A recent New York Times story on the trend quotes editors and marketers who call the girl revival “a post-feminist idea,” an embracing of one’s “girldom” and a whole new “source of power,” instead of a diminishing of power.
And what, pray tell, might the power of girldom be? Times writer Maria Ricapito cites Mary Pipher’s best selling 1994 book, “Reviving Ophelia,” which described a significant falloff in self-confidence by many previously feisty girls just as they hit those turbulent years of 10 to 14. Ricapito suggests that a lot of adult women are “trying to get in touch with their Inner 9-year-old.”
If so, we can add the girl revival to other recent attempts by beleaguered groups to reclaim ownership of previously objectionable words.
Rap music performers have aroused vigorous controversy by using the word “nigger” as a synonym for “friend” in their work, a reflection of the way the word is used between some black folks on the street.
Similarly, organizations like Queer Nation and gay and lesbian activists who are mostly young and radical, have tried to reclaim such epithets as “queer” and “dyke” to find another source of power.
In that case, the current battle of words has an interesting twist. Instead of censoring objectionable words, the intended targets are saying, no, we shall embrace them. We shall give them the meaning we want.
That’s easier to do with some words than with others. The problem is context. It is not just the words you use, but how you use them that counts. When Revlon names a nail color “Girly,” it is sending a message quite different from those emitted by the porn publisher that calls a magazine “Girls Over 40.”
Female persons do have choices. As long as women are free to choose whether they want to call themselves girls–or grrrls–or whether they want to show their stuff by posing nude in a magazine that calls women over 40 girls, there’s a limit to how much mere words can oppress them.
But our words reveal deeper problems with our social standards when they penalize women for something that is encouraged in men, the act of growing up.