Mel C and the perils of being a girl.

Before we talk about the Spice Girls, I should tell you that because of consistent sexual assaults perpetrated by a lone male, women in my hometown of Hamilton have been asked to run in pairs or avoid our many hiking and running trails entirely.

This makes sense: the most efficient system of subjugation has always been to make the prisoners the guards.

On the day after the day after National Daughters Day, I consider the devil’s conundrum: how to negotiate the maddening unfairness that makes parents complicit in limiting our girls’ movements…for their own safety.

You can choose not to run, of course, but you have to go to school. That’s where one girl in two will report bullying that can amount to life-altering psychological torture.

The means used to control them are targeted at girls’ abundant, gentle hearts: shame, ostracism, mockery. Your breasts are too small, you should be more fashionable, fierce, childlike, not such a slut.

This brings us, using the long way around, to The Spice Girls, created in 1994 by a father and son marketing team as an answer to the haul being raked in by boy bands. 

The genius of The Spice Girls was extraordinary pop channelled through performers depicting pillars of male sexual fantasy, all wrapped in a veil that purported female advancement: Girl Power.

There was Gerri Halliwell, Ginger Spice, cast as the cheeky whore, Melanie Brown, Mel B, the sexual tigress, Victoria Beckham, Posh Spice, the bitchy fashion plate and, most distressingly, Emma Bunton, the baby doll/pedophile fantasy.

Our family avatar was Sporty Spice, Mel Chisholm. She was unashamedly athletic, direct, average-looking and free of any second hand fetish.

Mel C was the girl you pulled for, the only one who made any sense (she is easily the best singer).

These days you find Melanie Chisholm on the English chat show circuit talking up her book Who I Am. Show business was often a lark but many of her stories are hard. She has been plagued by eating disorders. It was years before she could watch the romp that is Spice World because she hated the sight of herself.

Just days before the film’s release she was sexually assaulted by a male masseur. She told no one, lived in fear of being turfed from the band and said that while on tour she was often summoned to Mel Brown’s suite for a dressing down.

 “I would reluctantly drag myself out of bed and up the corridor of whatever hotel we were in, dreading what was in store. Normally these summits would serve to tell someone what they’d done ‘wrong’,” Chisholm writes. She began to retreat into herself, to speak less in interviews.

Bullied by a peer? Check. Silenced. Eating disorder. Sexually assaulted. Check. Check. Check, goddamit.

Lots of therapy helped Mel C. Mel B herself became a target of domestic abuse and now campaigns as an advocate for victims. Who I Am was vetted by the other four bandmates members and everyone is getting along great.

Melanie Chisholm, meanwhile, lives in London as a 48-year-old single parent to 12-year-old Scarlet. Naturally then, she wonders about the impact of the current brand of female musical empowerment but her position is a delicate one. The Spice Girls made her rich and they made her miserable, they freed her from the constraints of female existence and in the end, did no such thing.

The interviewer from The Telegraph asked Chisholm what she thought of Little Mix, a girl band that has moved the sexuality up a whole lot of notches.

For purposes of comparison, this is one of the Girls' spicier lyrics.

“Too much of something is bad enough

But something's coming over to make me wonder

Too much of nothing is just as tough

I need to know the way to feel to keep me satisfied”

Now Little Mix:

“I’m a machine when I do it.

I’ll be catching fire, gasoline, when I do it.

Just cause you’re packin’ packin’ whoop down south, that don’t mean I’m ever going to take it laying down.”

There seems to be no real distinction between the characters in Little Mix but they too have cultivated credibility through feminist anthems, fervent support for LBGTQ+ and calling out sexism in what remains a male-dominated music industry.

“I love Little Mix – they’re such a talented group of girls – and I look at their costumes, and that’s what young girls want to do,” said Mel C. “

Let's talk about your book.

“It’s taking female sexuality and owning it. That’s what they want to do, not what they’re being told to do.”

So who is exploiting who and, by extension, what role does that dynamic play in a world where my daughters are wary of running through nature in broad daylight here on the day after the day after National Daughters Day.

There are no easy answers, even from a woman who has seen all sides of the question: standard bearer and victim, role model and enabler, guard and prisoner.

“It’s girls going, ‘We’re doing it for ourselves,’ but on the other hand it plays very well into the hands of men,” Mel C said.

“It’s very convenient.”