Barbara Roessner (yep, her again) examines the changes typified by Mel, Mel, Em, Vic and Quitter on her world.

I didn't have to see the movie "Spice World." I inhabit it. I don't own much makeup, but what little I've got has disappeared into a giant tool box now filled with all kinds of electric-blue glop (worn simultaneously on hair, eyelids and lips), gold mascara, pink body glitter, neon-purple lipstick and more nail polish hues than a mega-box of Crayolas. My very own Spice Girl, aged 10, keeps it under her bed, alongside her platform sneakers. It emerges for Friday night "makeovers" (complete with mud masks and hair crimpers) or whenever the CD player explodes with "If you wanna be my lover ..." So it's more than a passing blip on my pop culture radar screen that Geri "Ginger Spice" Halliwell has abruptly departed the British singing quintet that brought sass, sex and self-assertiveness to the Barbie set and made "Girl Power!" a pubescent rallying cry around the globe. Other parents of Spice Girl wannabes may be rejoicing at the diminution -- and perhaps pending demise -- of the biggest threat to femi-Puritanism since Madonna first blasphemed with her disco-punk Catholic-sluts-rule shtick. Not me. The spice rack is cracking? I'm bummed. Girl Power forever! (With Ginger or without her.) "When this UK quintet of harlots took America by storm, I knew our culture and our way of life would go to hell in a handbasket in the span of zero to 60," one outraged anti-Spice recently declared on the Web. A newspaper letter-writer blamed the "half-dressed" Spice Girls for encouraging teenage pregnancy and general moral turpitude among the nation's female youth. More rational uneasiness has focused on the Spice Girls as symptomatic of a backlash against feminists' concern with sexual harassment and pornography. The Girls are Barbie incarnate, this line of thinking goes -- roles models of the sexual objectification we feminists so abhor, and from which we so desperately wish to free our daughters. To me, the empowering of pink -- the melding of the bare navel and the clenched female fist -- is a most welcome return to the real roots of modern feminism, which, after all, had sexual liberation, not repression, as its engine. To me, the Spice Girls' celebration of traditional female preoccupation with clothes, hair and makeup just puts one more option on what ought to be an infinite list of female choices. What's the message of Girl Power? You can paint your nails and be the smartest kid in the class. You can strap on your 2-inch platform sneaks and play ice hockey. You can decorate your face and maintain your self-esteem. The last thing I want to teach my daughter is that any of the above are mutually exclusive. The most interesting thing about life in "Spice World" is that nobody, nobody -- not your boyfriend or your manager or your culture or even your girlfriends -- is allowed to tell you who or what you can be. Girl Power means very simply that you call the shots, even if your hair's in curlers half the time. I asked my daughter the other morning how she felt about Ginger's passing. She paused momentarily as she adjusted her butterfly earrings with matching hair clips, and shrugged her indifference. The rebel in her, you see, has apparently rebelled against the Spice Girls themselves. "The Spice Girls are stupid," she announced defiantly. Which is precisely the point.