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By Anna Rahmanan
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I always knew I wasn't Posh Spice or Baby Spice.
I spent a lot of my childhood trying to figure out which Spice Girl I was, usually landing somewhere between Scary's self-assurance, Sporty's athleticism and Ginger's femininity; this was less immediately pronounced than Victoria Beckham's or Emma Bunton's, yet unmistakably there.
I still think about it because growing up doesn't mean you stop thinking about the things that formed you. I still settle for a hybrid, as if the five Spice Girls represented the entire spectrum of female possibility and my job was to locate myself somewhere along it.
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I suspect this entire exercise would sound mildly deranged to a 10-year-old today, and likely offensive to certain guardians of contemporary identity politics. Why should anyone have to choose a single identity? Why should a personality fit into one of five predetermined categories? And why, exactly, was the only Black woman called Scary?
These are questions I find myself asking as the Spice Girls prepare to release a 30th-anniversary collection. I will, naturally, be buying it. I have also been personally petitioning the Spice Girls through endless Instagram messages and comments, presumably disappearing into the great digital void, for a reunion at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Ladies, the world will travel. Spice Girls gods, please hear this desperate fan.
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But the anniversary raises a more interesting question than whether five middle-aged women can still perform the choreography to "Stop."
Could the Spice Girls even exist today?
The group that sold more than 100 million records worldwide built an empire on a formula that now looks out of date: five women, five exaggerated stereotypes, all somehow coalescing into one glorious, uncomplicated proposition about female empowerment.
Their genius was making identity something you could play with. Our generation, rather unfortunately I should add, has made identity something you must defend.
Consider the glorious absurdity of the women themselves. Geri Halliwell could arrive at the 1997 Brit Awards wearing a Union Jack tea towel masquerading as a minidress while Beckham stood beside her looking as if she'd wandered into the wrong party and was too impeccably dressed to leave. Melanie Chisholm wore tracksuits and sneakers on the same stage as Bunton, almost always in pigtails and sometimes talking like a toddler. Melanie Brown wore leopard print and manifested the uninhibited confidence that made the others seem almost restrained at times.
Five personalities were so exaggerated, they bordered on cartoon characters, and, somehow, millions of girls saw themselves in them.
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The names alone would probably require a contemporary record label to retain an entire department of sensitivity consultants: Posh! Baby! Ginger! Sporty! Scary! Imagine explaining that the group's only Black member would be marketed as Scary, while the elegant white brunette got Posh and the blonde got Baby.
Sure, some of these questions related to the racial implications of that arrangement are worthy of exploration, but let’s not forget that Mel B was also the group's most exuberantly fearless presence: Scary could mean formidable, irrepressible, gloriously unwilling to behave. The nickname contained both a stereotype and an escape from it.
Perhaps what strikes me most is how little we cared about resolving such contradictions. We were allowed to adore people who embodied things we weren't, to borrow their personalities for an afternoon, to announce ourselves as Ginger one day and Sporty the next without the world turning on us.
And then there’s the girl power of it all.
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To understand how radical the Spice Girls felt in 1996, you have to remember what they actually meant by those two words. Girl power was, in their telling, wonderfully uncomplicated: believe in yourself, stand up for yourself, stick by your girlfriends, don't let men dictate your life, and, for heaven's sake, have some fun while you're at it.
Here, the whole thing becomes absurd. Isn't that exact type of girl power what today's feminists are still telling us? That women should be free to define themselves, reject prescribed roles, wear what they please and live without seeking male approval? On paper, the Spice Girls could have written the manifesto.
So why do I suspect they would struggle to survive the very cultural climate that claims to champion their ideals?
Because the trouble would begin the moment they actually behaved like the Spice Girls.
Imagine five women arriving on the scene today, each assigned a reductive personality. Imagine the discussions about why one woman's defining characteristic was her body type and another's was her class-coded elegance. Imagine the arguments over whether their skimpy outfits represented sexual liberation or the commercialization of female bodies. And imagine Halliwell, wearing her Union Jack minidress, cheerfully refusing to provide a coherent political explanation for any of it.
The Spice Girls were walking contradictions: they celebrated individuality while dressing themselves in stereotypes. They preached independence while selling dolls, candy and Pepsi. They told girls to resist being defined by men while performing in outfits designed to attract plenty of attention. And they seemed unconcerned with making any of it intellectually consistent. And yet…it worked. And it was fun to watch. Oh-so-fun to watch.
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There was something wonderfully democratic about their philosophy. Their first single, "Wannabe," made female friendship a condition of romance. Their entire public existence suggested that women could take up as much space as they wanted, preferably while wearing platform boots and behaving in ways that would horrify a finishing-school instructor.
In 1997, they even brought that glorious disregard for decorum to an encounter with the then-Prince Charles, kissing the future king on the cheek and turning a royal engagement into an unruly backstage party. Geri was famously reported to have pinched his bottom, a detail that became pop-cultural folklore, whether or not it happened quite as the tabloids claimed. Imagine the headlines! The statements! The frantic non-apologies today! The Spice Girls, I suspect, would have been far too busy laughing.
And therein lies the difference between the girl power they embodied and the version we so often debate today: the principles sound similar, but the permission to be gloriously inconsistent is harder to come by.
The Spice Girls could be feminist and frivolous, empowering and commercially shameless, ridiculous and revolutionary. That was their feminism. Today, I suspect, those contradictions would become the story, dissected until the women themselves disappeared beneath arguments about what they represented. Of course, some scrutiny is deserved. But what an extraordinary loss if the price of taking women seriously is that we can no longer allow them to be unserious.
And God, how I miss what they gave us; the sheer pleasure of being a girl. We have gained a more sophisticated language for identity, and rightly so, but somewhere along the way we seem to have misplaced the innocence of simply enjoying it. The Spice Girls made five absurdly narrow categories feel like an invitation to become absolutely anything.
Perhaps the solution is for the Spice Girls themselves to remind us how it's done. Who better to reclaim girl power from the exhausting business of defining it than the five women who made an entire generation believe in it?
Which brings me, inevitably, back to the Sphere. Victoria, Emma, Mel B, Mel C, Geri: I'm begging you. Give us the platform boots, the Union Jack, the leopard print, the ridiculousness, the friendship, the glorious refusal to take yourselves too seriously. Give us one more night when nobody has to choose between being complicated and being free.
I'll be there, obviously, still trying to work out which Spice Girl I am.
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