White beauty norms became aligned with Kate Moss and other pale, bony models – some embodying profoundly emaciated, heroin chic – and the acceleration of unhealthy body images. On the other, it was the ultimate pornification of the female body in black hip-hop culture, in which I was – by the middle of the decade – heavily immersed. It was Missy Elliott bossing hip-hop, TLC, Destiny’s Child and the Spice Girls, by whose time I was too cool to idolise women with silly names, but who delivered glossy girl power to my eight-year-old sister. It was “position of the fortnight” in More magazine – offering teenage girls line drawings that explained sexual positions in technical detail. It was, on the one hand, all about girl power and sex positivity. The 90s, and the third-wave feminism the decade has come to be remembered for, was a contradictory experience at the time. What it was, though, was an early indication that attitudes towards gender and sexuality were changing. If a No 1 song by a boyband from Oklahoma, inappropriately riling prepubescent girls, doesn’t sound like an obvious feminist anthem, that’s because it wasn’t. Wearing leggings and an oversized, DayGlo T-shirt, I was singing Colour Me Badd. I began the 1990s doing something very specific at a disco on a highly anticipated end of primary school camp in Cornwall.
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