The Quiet Before, page 17
The article was thoughtful and not cheap, a sincere attempt to make sense of what Riot Grrrl’s inchoate energy represented. But it was also quick to draft the girls as the perfect frontline soldiers in the then raging culture wars. Anita Hill had made her accusations against Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court nomination hearings in the fall of 1991, dividing the country over the issue of sexual harassment. In June of the following year the Supreme Court announced its decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, a case that reaffirmed Roe v. Wade all while making it more difficult for a woman to get a legal abortion, in part by upholding the state’s parental consent provisions for minors. Then there were the high-profile rape trials of William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson, in which women’s accounts of rape were framed as dubious. This was also an election year, and by the summer of 1992 its contours were clear: a Republican Party backed by the Christian Right against a Democratic candidate whose wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, provoked contempt by saying her career had saved her from a life in which she would have “stayed home, baked cookies and had teas.”
Second-wave feminism, which had opened up workplaces for women and won battles over reproductive rights, seemed unprepared for the moment, for what Susan Faludi had called a “backlash” (her book of that title spent thirty-five weeks on the bestseller lists in 1992). But maybe there was a younger cohort who was ready to join the fray. The piece declared, “The Riot Girls have the right kind of rhetoric with which to face this dark hour because, like many teenage girls, they phrase every setback, every dream, in the language of crisis.”
This was a lot to put on their shoulders. But the article thoughtfully approached the Riot Grrrls on their own terms and was so sensitively written that it did not make them wary of the media. Further evidence of just how interesting they had become to the grown-up world emerged when the first Riot Grrrl convention took place on the last weekend of July in Washington, D.C. The gathering brought together more than a hundred girls. It was a weekend full of shows and dance parties, workshops and themed discussions, on “everything from self defense, to how to run a soundboard, to how to lay out a zine”—and one meeting simply called “Rape.” It was a meaningful if chaotic gathering, with many large circles in which girls passed around boxes of Kleenex and told their stories. The rough, unfinished, and undefined quality of the activism was evident too. At one session organized by Kathleen, “Un-learning Racism,” cliquish tendencies alluded to in the L A Weekly piece came out into the open. Most of the girls rejected the notion that they might be complicit in a culture of tacit white supremacy. They were supposed to be the victims here. The few participants of color were upset and felt excluded, while the white girls claimed reverse racism was at work. It was all very jumbled (and it was, of course, precisely here, navigating the shoals of class and race, that second-wave feminism had had its own crisis two decades earlier). The confrontation would eventually find its way into zines like Mimi Thi Nguyen’s Race Riot, entirely concerned with the unique problems of girls of color in the movement.
Suddenly they were being watched. One woman who showed up at the convention said she was writing an article for Spin magazine. Another was researching a piece for the Washington City Paper. An amateur filmmaker was trying to interview girls for a documentary. And one woman announced at a workshop, “I’m from USA Today.”
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IT WAS THE ARTICLE from that newspaper, published a week after the convention’s end, that made the Riot Grrrls begin to feel that their movement—was it a movement?—was slipping out of their hands. “Better watch out, boys,” it opened. “From hundreds of once pink, frilly bedrooms, comes the young feminist revolution. And it’s not pretty. But it doesn’t wanna be. So there!” The girls were belittled, all “hairy legs, army boots and tattoos,” and any bigger political ideas were presented as nothing more than irrational aggression. In one scene from the convention, describing a concert by the group Cheesecake, a “scrawny boy” yells something derogatory, only to be “surrounded by an angry mob of girls, hopping and slam-dancing in a frenzy. He bolts to safety, chased by their jeers.” The girls come off as simultaneously naïve and reactionary: “Another woman says that if you ask a man to touch your left breast and he touches your right, ‘that’s rape.’ ” There was no explanation given for why the Riot Grrrls did what they did, besides condescending sketches of their conversations as “strictly, like, girl talk. Insightful, honest, often touching.” They were “teen angsters, searching for their sexual and social identity.”
It had been only a year since the zine network had started to branch out. But the sudden onslaught of cartoonish coverage short-circuited everything, and just at the moment, following their first convention, when they were beginning to think about where to go next.
It felt relentless. Someone from Newsweek called Allison’s house three times in a week. Requests came in from the major daytime talk shows, from Sally Jessy Raphael and Maury Povich. The girls felt misunderstood and mischaracterized, frustrated that their bedroom-grown subculture was being stripped of deeper meaning and reduced to just another passing trend. The USA Today article was accompanied by a sidebar breaking down the “in-your-face fashion” of the Riot Grrrl look: “fishnet stockings and garter belts under baggy army shorts.” Even seemingly positive forms of attention felt oppressive. Sassy magazine, a publication for young women that did a better job of presenting the lived reality of teenage girls than any other glossy, embraced the zine phenomena and in early 1992 began featuring a “zine of the month.” This went out to their readership of hundreds of thousands. When Molly and Allison’s Girl Germs was highlighted and their address given out, they got an overwhelming amount of mail, and demand for their zine exceeded their ability to deliver.
Feeling pinned down and exploited, turned into a product, Kathleen vented her annoyance in the D.C.-based feminist publication Off Our Backs: “Interview magazine called us yesterday. Maria Shriver wants us on her show. That’s scary as shit. I know that we are tokens. I have no fucking illusions that these people give a shit what I have to say for real. I do think that people want to stare at my tits, want to see me put my foot in my mouth, to see us fuck up. They can control what we’re doing by labeling it and ghettoizing it and putting it in some weird box. I won’t let that happen.”
If the zines documented the unfiltered collective conscience of this group of young women, then they revealed that by the fall of 1992 the skewed public attention had become a crisis, making them want to push back even harder against the image projected onto them. “I feel like I have so little control of my life as it is without some reporter saying who I am,” Erika Reinstein wrote in her zine. “I feel marginalized enough as it is without the corporate media making matters worse.” Erika’s annoyance was also at the reporters’ unwillingness to grasp “the idea of a movement of individuals working together without some kind of map or chart or set of rules.” The prefabricated narratives imposed on Riot Grrrl missed what was so special about all that was unfolding through the zines—the tension the medium permitted. Everyone’s zine was their own, but they were also intertwined. A set of common concerns was emerging over time and possibly even an agenda, but no one was going to tell anyone what they could or couldn’t write about, or what it all meant or could add up to.
Ananda La Vita, who was living in the Positive Force group house in Arlington and fielding many of the media requests, captured what was so frustrating and destructive about the coverage. “One thing I am particularly upset about is how they take something that has no actual definition, and they attempt to define it,” she wrote in a typewritten screed for other Riot Grrrls. “Riot Grrrl is about destroying boundaries, not creating them. But these mags make us look like we’re one ‘thing,’ that you have to look a certain way or be into a certain type of music or believe certain things in order to be a Riot Grrrl, when there are no such requirements….Seeing ourselves described by these mainstream writers puts boundaries in our minds. I think this is really dangerous. We can counteract it by keeping alive the ‘underground’ aspect of Riot Grrrl—keeping alive our communication with each other. We can’t let these papers dominate our image of each other.”
The article appearing in Spin that November, “Teenage Riot,” represented a low. It was illustrated by a thin, sulking fashion model posing with the words “Riot Grrrls” painted on her flawless skin. A group of actual Riot Grrrls in D.C. had a solution: they would put in place a “media blackout,” simply refuse to cooperate with any journalist or publication. They would ignore calls, not allow their photos to be taken or words quoted without permission. Their zines had given them a sense of power and self-worth. To hold on to that, they had to refuse to be consumed.
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ALLISON AND MOLLY toured with Bratmobile during the summer of 1992, and it wasn’t good. Their close friendship felt the strain of their nights playing shows throughout the Midwest, from Chicago to Madison to Bloomington and Dayton. Partly this was the pressure of being a band, of young egos colliding, not knowing how to compromise. But they also carried the burden of representing Riot Grrrl at a moment when the movement was getting more attention than anyone knew how to handle. By the fall, there was little left of Bratmobile.
The media blitz had taken a toll. Now they were spending more time responding to false depictions of themselves than expanding the network they had formed. And that wasn’t the only problem. The groups in Olympia and D.C. who had conceived of Riot Grrrl in their bedrooms not even two years earlier didn’t recognize it anymore. Even Tobi, whose Jigsaw had kicked things off, sat down in early 1993 to write a new zine, lamenting “how something that was once mine and genuinely meaningful to me has been taken from me and has been made into something quite else than was initially intended.”
The coverage had brought an entirely new generation of girls to the movement, a lot of them, and all at once. The new arrivals had learned about Riot Grrrl in the pages of Sassy or Newsweek or through Bikini Kill’s growing fame, rather than through zines or by meeting other girls at shows. It was not always clear what was drawing them to meetings or making them want to get out their scissors and glue sticks—was it part of that original desire to create a new culture, or because the superficial elements of it were now trendy? Tobi was exasperated by these “posers or maybe just well intentioned and hopelessly enthusiastic extremely isolated young girls living in small town america who read dumb articles in dumb magazines written by dumb people.” The D.C. group, still working out of the Positive Force house, was inundated with mail—lots of flowery stationery—with girls begging to start their own local groups, asking for permission, as if Riot Grrrl was like the Girl Scouts. In response, some of the girls put together a zine they mailed back, containing the only instructions for starting a chapter: “If you want to start one, you’ve already begun, all that’s left to be done, is to do it.”
The movement was being diluted, and so a decision was made to write a zine together answering the question, for themselves more than anyone else, “What is Riot Grrrl, anyway?” Instead of offering one collective answer to their central question, each of them, twenty Riot Grrrls in all who took on the new zine, would contribute a mini essay defining the movement for herself. The overlapping and contradictory voices would provide the answer. It wasn’t one thing. It was a conversation. Angelique, who dotted the i in her name with a heart, wrote, “We are coming together in full force because we know the world treats us like littlegirlsdumbslutsstupidwhoresuglybitchesoldmaidshelplesscreaturesPROPERTY. and we know what we really are. (sometimes).”
The limited ways they saw their lives reflected back to them from these hip magazines reminded the girls exactly why they had found zines so attractive to begin with. They had felt ignored by the wider culture. Zines had given them the chance to build up the confidence to say something back. But now they were little more than the cut-and-paste look of their zines or their Doc Martens; the most superficial elements had been scraped and repurposed. And it made them feel even further silenced. “The media has made us into a fad so that we can easily be put in the back of people’s closets with the macrame and parachute pants when we aren’t ‘the next big thing’ anymore,” wrote another contributor. After making the zine, the D.C. chapter took one further step: they formed a media working group, to try to shape their own image, though many of the girls dissented. Some felt it would undermine exactly what had made Riot Grrrl so special to start now passing down diktats.
The outside attention persisted all through the end of 1992 and into 1993. “Mean, Mad, and Definitely Underground” was the headline in the Los Angeles Times, “Feminist Fury” in The Seattle Times. Even Cosmo, defender of the very femininity that felt most oppressive to the girls, ran an article that spring: “The New Activists: Fearless, Funny, Fighting Mad.” These pieces portrayed the Riot Grrrls as aggressive, almost domineering, in their anger. No longer passively surrounding the mosh pit as coat hangers, now they were scaring the boys away. In one article in Seventeen magazine, “It’s a Grrrl Thing,” the “crowd of girls with chopped-off hair in plaid vintage dresses” were menacing and confused, “condemning the Y chromosome as the root of all evil,” alienating everyone with their “militant slant.” The internal debate over media coverage was presented as just a frivolous catfight: “Will Riot Grrrl refocus feminism or fry in its own fury?” The article, of course, completely ignored the hard issues that the Riot Grrrls actually used their zines to discuss. Ironically, elsewhere in the same issue of Seventeen were the results of a national survey about sexual harassment that found that 40 percent of the readers endured catcalls and handsy men every day.
The number of zines was meanwhile exploding, from a few dozen to thousands by 1993. With more families buying personal computers and new easy-to-use desktop publishing software, the bar to taking part was now much lower. Alienated teenage girls everywhere joined in the homespun, confessional writing. In one of the last organized moves of the original group of Riot Grrrls, meant to reassert the centrality of zines to their way of communicating and coming together, a couple of girls launched Riot Grrrl Press in 1993. Kathleen and Allison first had the idea: to create a distribution service and a catalog that one could order from by sending in fifty cents for a requested zine. But it was Erika Reinstein, the D.C.-based Riot Grrrl, who took on the task with May Summer Farnsworth, the two of them turning their apartment into a blizzard of paper. Girls would send in their own zines, and sometimes even their thick original copies still curling at the edges and smelling of rubber cement (May, who worked at a copy shop, would secretly use the photocopy machine to create flat masters when her supervisor wasn’t looking). Then the orders for zines poured in, dozens of letters piling up every day.
It was a lot of work. In the initial call for zines, Erika and May listed six reasons why the press was “important RIGHT NOW.” The first was “self-representation, we need to make ourselves visible without using mainstream media as a tool.” The other reasons were “networking” and “taking the burden off (usually) young women who can’t afford to distribute their zines, or whose zines aren’t well known.” This would “create another vehicle of communication for women.” They would be a “central place.” As if their point weren’t clear enough, when their first catalog came out in July, it included a P.S.: “We still say if you are a reporter FUCK OFF RIGHT NOW.” Among the nearly ninety titles listed were zines about body image (Girl Trouble, Cherub), about queer identity (Luna, Party Mix), and about sexual health (Clitoris). Kathleen, who had turned much of her attention to Bikini Kill—then about to release their first album, Pussy Whipped—was excited to see the press come to life, a wresting back of control. Girls sent her lots of mail. Now she could send back a catalog, jotting on each one, “Here is a list of girl powered zines that you might be interested in getting.” The implication was always this: now go out and make your own.
The catalog was a clever way to reel Riot Grrrl back in, to make it once again an incubator of a new type of feminism, one that was being described even in Ms. magazine, the foundational publication of the second wave, as an emerging third wave. In early January 1992, Rebecca Walker, daughter of the novelist Alice Walker, wrote a short essay in the magazine’s pages that read like something out of a zine. It started with her own anger while watching the Clarence Thomas hearings, then described an experience she had on a train with an aggressive group of men, and finally burst into a need to act, “to push beyond my rage and articulate an agenda.” But, like much of what appeared in the zines, the tight focus on women’s lived experience—what nearly two decades later would blow up under the hashtag #MeToo—had yet to cohere into a political program.
There was work to do to translate the rage, and the zines were where it was most likely to happen. But for the Riot Grrrls, it was already too late. On the surface the movement had heft: at an April 1993 gay rights march in Washington, the Riot Grrrl contingent was three times bigger than their showing at a similar protest the year before. But their message, their plan, was still diffuse. And when they found a microphone shoved in their faces, as it had been almost since their start, they offered a yell and spoke generally about “girl power.”
No greater omen foretold the demise of Riot Grrrl than the rise of the Spice Girls, a girl group from England that started climbing to the top of the music charts in the mid-1990s. Looking like a variety pack of Barbie dolls, all in crop tops and tight skirts—an image the original Riot Grrrls would have mocked and abhorred—the Spice Girls claimed “girl power” as their own motto. The liner notes to their first album declared, “The Future Is Female,” and called their legion of teenage girl fans “Freedom Fighters.” “We’re freshening up feminism for the nineties,” they told The Guardian. “Feminism has become a dirty word. Girl Power is just a nineties way of saying it.” Within a few short years Revolution Girl Style Now and its messy DIY creativity, its attempt to turn trauma into change, its uncompromising attention to individual experience, had transmogrified into a capitalist dream, an easily digestible, catchy pop anthem about consumption masquerading as empowerment, played again and again on the radio: “I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want….”
