Back in the '90s, The Spice Girls were the brazen vixens of the music industry, encouraging us to spice up our lives whilst hyping up “Girl Power!” with big hair, bright lipstick, and some impossibly tall platform shoes. Mel C, aka Sporty Spice (aka Melanie Chisholm) recently spoke about how their bold, unabashed attitudes and their strength in numbers were some of the reasons why sexual harassment was never something they grappled with.“It's funny, because I get asked about the Me Too movement a lot and that within the music industry and if I've ever experienced anything,” she told Jessie Ware on the
Table Manners podcast. “And I was like, ‘are you kidding me?’ No one would come near the Spice Girls because they were petrified by us.”“I think often with these situations there can be vulnerable people that are targeted, aren't there?” she continued. “Which, of course, there are some vulnerable people in Spice Girls, but because you knew if you mess with one of them, you would have to deal with the other four, so we always had backup.”[video_embed id='6016199762001']RELATED: Victoria Beckham has no regrets from her Spice Girls days[/video_embed]It’s hard to argue with that after some behind-the-scenes footage from the early days of the Spice Girls
emerged a few years ago. In 1997, Sporty, Scary, Baby, Ginger and Posh were filming a Polaroid commercial when two ad execs in the background heckled that there should be “more cleavage.” You better believe Scary, aka Mel B, confronted them without missing a beat, followed by Ginger (Geri Halliwell) and Posh (Victoria Beckham), giving them a piece of their minds. After Mel B tells the brosephs to “f**k off” and Geri calls them “chauvinistic pigs,” Victoria grabs the sunglasses right off the head of the lead Yoko Brono and tries to sell the cheap shades for a fiver. Dang, if you weren’t scared of “Girl Power” before, you should be now.“We started talking about girl power because we experienced sexism in the industry," Mel C continued on the podcast. “Because we were just five girls, we wanted to be famous, we wanted to be pop stars, and quite quickly we were being told, ‘Yeah, girl bands don't sell records, you can't be on the cover of magazines because — girls buy records by boys.’ And we were like, ‘Seriously?’ Don't say that to the Spice Girls, that's like red rag to a bull.”“We had a really important point to prove, which was great because it put a fire in our belly,” Sporty added. “It became more than ‘girl power.’ It became ‘people power’; it became about equality.”If you missed out on the most recent reunion tour with Mel C, Geri, Mel B, and Emma Bunton, don’t worry because
The Hollywood Reporter reported last year that an animated film with all the girls, including the elusive Victoria Beckham, is in the works.[video_embed id='-1']Before you go: Lainey’s favourite first interview will spice up your life[/video_embed]
