‘Wake Up and Smell the Lipgloss’

Abstract

In her discussion of ‘girl power’ in The Whole Woman (1999), Germaine Greer laments the ‘catastrophic career of “girls”, “girls behaving badly”, “girls on top”’ (399). Beginning with the Buffalo Girl, Vivienne Westwood, Greer maps out a lineage of career girls, through Madonna, Courtney Love and Bjork, who have acted as figureheads for ‘succeeding generations of aggressively randy, hard-drinking young females, who have got younger with every passing year, until they are now emerging in their pre-teens’ (400). Having denounced the ‘relentless enculturation’ (92) and stereotypes of female passivity and modesty to which girls were subjected three decades earlier in The Female Eunuch (1970), here she identifies an equally, if not more, insidious form of indoctrination in the construction and marketing of ‘girl power’ — that is, of the paraphernalia of sexualised femininity — to girls and young women by the media. ‘The propaganda machine that is now aimed at our daughters is more powerful than any form of indoctrination that has ever existed before … To deny a woman’s sexuality is certainly to oppress her but to portray her as nothing but a sexual being is equally to oppress her’ (410–11). The trajectory of Greer’s analysis thus highlights a discursive shift from the decorous ‘good girl’ to the sexually aggressive ‘bad girl’ in popular constructions of girlhood and its representations — a Madonna/whore dichotomy that is all too familiar.