We Need Girl Power!

Heroines like Buffy needed!

Nov. 19, 2004

Oh, for the ’90’s when girl power was in full bloom. Lillithfair held its own against Ozziefest and the other male extravaganzas of rock. "Thelma and Louise" kicked male chauvinist ass while trouncing the competition at the box office. The much maligned Spice Girls preached the gospel of girl power to prepubescent girls. Even in the vast wasteland of television there was an oasis or two of female testosterone. Xena was no pixie princess afraid to scuff up her fingernail polish — she was a fearless statuesque Queen unafraid to get down and dirty as she battled evildoers with Gabby her faithful sidekick/friend and sometime lover by her side. Buffy the Vampire Slayer destroyed vampires and demolished the stereotype of women as helpless victims.

In the decade of the 00’s Xena is dead and females are zeros in American pop culture. The airwaves are ruled by the likes of Britney Spears whose mind is filled with fluff and whose breasts are bursting with silicon. Ms. Spears is a blow up doll for pedophiles and a Barbie doll figure for impressionable young girls. The Spice Girls had more moxie than Christina Aguilera, Ashlee Simpson, Mandy Moore and the rest of today’s anorexic teen queens can ever dream of possessing. In the movies top starlets like Hally Barre are quick to expose their boobs — not as an expression of sexual liberation but as exhibition of pandering to the dictates of the box office.

America needs strong female role models that will saturate pop culture with a renewed burst of girl power. The Powerpuff Girls failed to kickbox girl power into high gear, the movie based on their exploits bombed at the box office. The film the "Catwoman" lost its nine lives in less than a week.

Testosterone fuels American pop culture; we are overwhelmed with masculine Shock and Awe. I can only pray that another "Thelma and Louise" is germinating in the mind of a young girl disgusted with our patriarchal society.