Are all post-feminists sluts, or are all sluts post-feminist? If you credit girl power with anything other than net curtain politics, you may meet this conundrum as the death throes of the Spice Girls are broadcast to a world long desperate to report their demise. But taking girl power seriously is a big mistake - this was no ideology, this was a call to party.

Girl power was supposed to be uplifting: you didn't get wired, you got underwired; you didn't whinge, you practised affirmations. Feminists were invited to drop the dungarees in favour of the credit card. Everyone could be a Spice Girl - like living Barbies, there was a model for every day of the week.

The band seemed capable of endless reinvention - Geri Halliwell reportedly told one promoter: "I'm as old or as young as you want me to be. I can be a 10-year-old with big tits if you want."

Girl power's solution to most social ills was to lace them with talcum powder and then invite everyone to a pyjama party, but commentators kept expecting more. They claimed a mass following and insisted they were as ordinary as the little girls whose mummies bought their merchandise in droves.

"We didn't want to be put up on a pedestal," Baby Spice/Emma Bunton told one interviewer. "We wanted girls to look up at us and say `I want to join the gang'. "

The girl power gang grew into a collection of grannies and girlies happy to flex their economic muscles by paying for the privilege of exercising girl power. Its cultural apogee was celebrating Nanette Newman for all her work on the Fairy Liquid ads as she sat in an invited audience alongside her daughter and granddaughter, the Spice Girls' mothers, and ab fab celebrities of stage and screen.

Crass, sure, but oddly cute: half the audience had imagined themselves as the little girl in those detergent ads, the rest as the beautiful Mama. Only later did someone remember Newman also starred in The Stepford Wives.

Just as desperate commentators were wondering if the Spice Girls could possibly represent a new epoch for women and equality - brash, confident, sexually in control - they fingered Margaret Thatcher as a role model, declared their support for the Conservative Party in the last British general elections, and damned themselves in the liberal press.

It was, of course, a mistake to believe they were radical: the Spice Girls functioned not as latter-day heroines but as naughty exhibitionists, whose most shocking political statement was pinching the regal buttocks of the Prince of Wales. Yet the backlash insisted on querying their status as role models, accusing them of corrupting young girls by being too sexually explicit, too damn sluttish.

The trap was sprung. From then on, the Spice Girls were doomed to self-immolation. You can still hear the calls of "I told you so."

When nude photos of Geri Halliwell surfaced in the tabloids, and then in the May edition of Playboy, the people they impressed who pretended to be horror-struck were the suits in the record companies who still saw women as sluts, not the blue-rinse grannies wise enough to figure out that the serious threats to their granddaughters lay somewhere else entirely.

More likely, the Spice Girls had about as much influence on children's sexuality as Santa Claus has on Easter. No way was Baby Spice going to turn an eight-yearold into a panting Lolita - small girls loved her for her pigtails, as indeed did somewhat older men.

If you bothered to compose a cultural iconography of the Spice Girls, you could spin it as a tale of how naughty girls must always get their just deserts - every stereotype from Eve in the Garden of Eden to Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Woman comes up for grabs.

But why take it all so seriously? This was a band which became one of the most successful brands in the music business, not a cultural movement with a liturgy all its own. "Freedom, fun and liberty" was how Geri Halliwell rather grandly defined girl power. £313 million pounds better off now, she must have had a real good time.