A decade after Wannabe, the bestselling single by a female group in the history of recorded sound, the Spice Girls have brought out a new single. It serves as a prelude to the world tour the group are set to embark upon next month. The whole thing is tragic: the song, the tour, what life has done to the girls in the past 10 years – not to mention what’s happened to the society they helped to create.

I wish they weren’t doing any of it. I wish they would stay at home, grow old gracefully and look back in wonder at how once they walked hand in hand with the zeitgeist. Because I do not think that this time the zeitgeist is with them, nor they with it.

In their new song, Headlines, they sing: “I wanna tell the world I’m giving it up for you.” Oh, really? The video is soft porn without the sex – all tricky lighting, ditzy angles, phoney enthusiasm and calculated lies. Victoria is in bondage gear. Those bubbly, boisterous, noisy, tuneful, natural girls have turned themselves into airbrushed, skinny, desperate housewives, overanxious to entice, ribs showing, faces blank from Botox. And now they’re all mothers, except Sporty, the one with the voice, who still looks halfway human and who not even airbrushing can help.

I hope I’m wrong. Perhaps everyone will love the single – even buy it. But that’s a rare thing these days, the slump in record sales being what it is, the reason why so many groups are having to get themselves back together again and go on tour.

The original impudent, slightly anarchic Spice Girls caught the spirit of the 1990s with songs of girl power and disdain for men: “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends”; “Come a little bit closer baby, get it on, get it on, ‘cause tonight is the night when two become one”; “I wanna make you holler, and hear you scream my name”. I do not think the zeitgeist will attend skeletal girls singing, in effect, “Love me, love me, love me, please, I’m so worried in case you don’t”. Though you never know.

I have defended these girls for a long time, since first I heard Wannabe back in the John Major era and watched the five Spices come leaping and prancing, practically bare bummed, into a room full of men in suits, defying and taunting. The tunes were catchy, energetic, the lyrics brashly brilliant, coherent, convincing. If they were pernicious as well, I overlooked it. Spice Girls songs swept through the school playgrounds like a plague of nits. Boys? Take ’em or leave ’em, preferably ditch ’em. We’re in control now! And if little girls took to sexy dressing and provocation, and their mothers egged them on – well, the Spice Girls were surely a symptom, not the disease itself.

And if that energising, “down with men” girl power devolved down to estate level to create a new female climate of disrespect, with a lot of swearing at mums and thumping of teachers, a careless sexuality, fancying and pulling, not loving – creating as a complement an equivalent male breed of skulking, vandalising hoodies – you could hardly blame the Spice Girls. Could you? They were just a pop group, artificially created by cunning managers who saw a future in girl groups after a 10-year rule by boybands.

If boys became the new girls, nervous of sex for fear of failure, old-fashioned and blundering, their macho malehood discredited – “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends” – it was just another song: don’t blame the Spice Girls. A new breed of anorexic,bulimic, drunken girlhood on our street corners, indifferent to icy winds, bringing up their bile over the white-trainered feet of noble paramedics? Surely not because of lyrics sung by a generation of impressionable little girls – “Well it was Saturday night, I know the feeling was right”? It couldn’t be as simple as that.

And then the zeitgeist drifted off and the group disbanded. Geri somehow went on to be a UN ambassador, Nelson Mandela somehow came into the picture, and thus world peace was promoted. Victoria married Becks, and a great deal of celebrity, money and spending was involved. Scandal hovered near Becks for a while, but he was truly beautiful asleep and scored goals for England, so everything was forgiven. Victoria managed to have three children in spite of being so thin, and was evidently a good mother. I saw her on an LA chat show recently and liked what I saw: she seemed perfectly intelligent and rather charming. Everyone else seemed to dislike her and find her false, but I put that down to envy. The others in the group seemed to have faded out of sight. Their time was surely past.

But, suddenly, the Spice Girls regroup as Spice “women”. I watch the video of Headlines and am appalled. The world has moved on. They should rename themselves the Dorian Grays – they are moving paintings, not real people at all – they have other, sinister versions of their true selves elsewhere. Maybe Victoria was always wearing bondage gear at heart, for all she sang about girl power and punched the air and urged us all to “Get it on!”

Those songs, I now see, were indeed insidious, fed as they were into a vulnerable society; Mr Blair was moving into No 10 with his guitar, and cool new Britannia was upon us. If Wag culture was to take over; if too many newly empowered girls were to end up with monstrous credit-card debts from buying too much bling; if little girls in the playground would move up to anorexia, bulimia, failing livers and chlamydia from too many alley encounters after pub and club, blame it on the Spice Girls. They took the inheritance of the serious, middle-class feminists of 30 years back and squandered it. This was not the girl power we had in mind. We didn’t believe the law of unintended consequences applied to us. Whoever does?

Fay Weldon’s new novel, The Spa Decameron, is published by Quercus (£14.99)

Times recommends

• What took place in 2010...
• Can you really cure a hangover?
• Video: How to do glamorous smoky eyes