On Waves

Zines are the new blogs? That’s the word, or the twitter, on the street. But when recently asked to contribute some writing on feminism to a zine, I realized my last zine activity was in a very different era, in the prime of Riot Grrrl, so totally back in the day, when I anonymously accused my sexist high school math teacher of subtle piggery. I was crouched in the back of Trig class, staring at my desk with a poker face, when a kid in class asked this teacher if he had noticed his cameo in our (dubiously named) revolutionary propaganda distributed in every other locker early that morning. He puffed up with pride and strutted like a peg-legged peacock to the blackboard; he had seen it indeed.

“Calling people out” was one of the basic tenets of Riot Grrrl. Usually, though, not so anonymously. These accusations of misogyny included finger-pointing in the pit of crowded punk rock shows or posting “wanted poster” flyers on record store message boards (or, more usually, through the more indie-style blacklisting of people who were no longer welcome in the “scene.”) Yet, these actions also unintentionally put the spotlight on the victim; by focusing on these specific incidents instead of addressing the underlying reasons for these institutionalized forms of sexism, the burden to bear was left on the victim’s shoulders. And Riot Grrrl got heavy, that way, for these teenage fighters, these screaming twee Joan of Arcs, and collapsed under some of that weight.

So when encouraged to again call out insidious sexism that I was experiencing, I resisted instinctively. It might feel terrific momentarily, but would it get me where I wanted to be as an adult who wants to be treated as a professional? “Let’s hope that being an adult doesn’t preclude you from being a Riot Grrrl,” was the wise advise I received about this quandary. My response was, Hell no! Once a Riot Grrrl always a Riot…Woman? Riot Womyn? Riot Lady?

After some consideration I realized the answer is, actually, yes, being an adult does preclude one from being a grrrl. Perhaps Riot Grrrl only lasted three years in part because the girls grew up. Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna once declared that Riot Grrrl and its accruements of barrettes and babydoll dresses was all about reclaiming, with aggressive agency, trodden-upon lost little girl parts of ourselves. That was so complicated and necessary, to those involved and, perhaps, also encouraged a more general aesthetic and linguistic appreciation of what we deemed “girl-style.” (“Revolution girl style now” was our mantra.) But what’s next, style-wise and also philosophically and politically, in feminism?

The primary responsibility of feminism is to name, naming experiences that have gone unrecognized and so vaporously existed only in hunches and “feminine intuition.” What did Riot Grrrl name? (Those r’s are important! “Riot Grrl” is something that Spin or a Sunday supplement might write about. Those three r’s are the badge of recognition for anyone who was actually there.) "Riot Grrrl" named not only this loud growl of outing punk rock pigs, but the integrating of femininity, in the form of girl-style, into feminism. The sixties and seventies Second Wave of Feminism was about equivalence and equal opportunity in the world of men. The Riot Grrrl Third Wave aesthetic underpinnings, on the other hand, were about revalidating pure girliness with feminist force, not only about subversive ownership of a bit of Lolita sexiness, but about validating a whole mode of existence and syntax. It was a revolution totally conducted in the language of teenage gossip and fandom. As Marisa Meltzer quoted in her fundamental book published just last year, Girl Power: “Never were Valley Girls so scary.” And scariness, that punk rock rooted destruction, was of course where the “riot” came in. “Frivolity is subjective, so fuck you—this is my life, and on my terms,” said Riot Grrrl.

Again, the primary responsibility of feminism is to name. But once something has been named it’s time to move on and name new experiences. One must always be conscious of this history of naming, though, to remind ourselves that real things in women’s experience did not exist at one time because these experiences weren’t named.

The word “sexual harassment” first appeared legally in 1973. It didn’t exist before then (as Mad Men is currently reminding audiences.) But sexual harassment indicates a specific kind of experience, a boss-secretary dynamic of someone with more power demanding sexual favors from someone with less power. But as the work of the Second Wavers has cleared pathways into new and more equal opportunities in jobs for women, that doesn’t mean that sexism in the workplace has disappeared, but that it’s taken new insidious forms: less pay for the same work, the “martyr” tendency of women to take on extra hours of grunt work and organizing, the “martyr” tendency of women to take on not only this extra work but extra work at home as well. The Village Voice recently had a cover story of a woman who claims she was fired because she refused to dress frumpily; she dressed tastefully but womanly in tight knit skirts, turtlenecks, and heels—out of habit and personal/cultural pride—and the men she worked with claimed they were were distracted. Is their attraction her responsibility? Of course not. These men couldn't compartmentalize their physiological reactions from their professional behavior. Their behavior suggests that womanliness is not allowed in the work world. That sexist situation needs to be named.

Work that is conducted primarily in social settings outside of an office has its own set of problems. This particular scenario was identified in a terrific 2003 Salon article that attempted to answer the mysterious question of why there have been so few women directors. "Let's say you have a short at a film festival and it's doing well. Chances are high you'll be at a party and have an opportunity to pitch your idea over drinks. If your idea is good enough perhaps you'll get it financed," says filmmaker Tara Veneruso. She says that for women, though, chatting up an older man over drinks isn't construed as business -- it's seen as flirting. That, Veneruso says, is why women are "always on the outside of the casual networks where much of the film business gets done."

This sexist situation is not sexual harassment; it needs to be named. As B. Ruby Rich wrote in describing unnamed genres of films by or for women in her article "The Crisis in Naming in Feminist Film Criticism": "Here is the problem: not so much that the names just reviewed are being employed as that other names are not--and therefore the qualities which those names would describe are lost."

When it comes to identifying insidious forms of sexism found in professional settings, we need new names. This is out of the realm of the lexicon of girl’s bedroom and rock club domains of Riot Grrrl. This is also out of the realm of the experience of pre-9 to 5 era of feminist work world activism. The Second Wavers paved the way for more complicated social dynamics in the work world. We owe them so much. We must aknowledge this debt and also move on.

Independent curator and activist Matt Peterson is offering an amazing opportunity to remember those early struggles to identify and fight for the obvious tonight in his screening tonight at BAM of The Woman’s Film, a collection of firsthand accounts of the development of the Second Wave Women’s Movement in America. He rightly identifies this documentary and the shorts playing with it as important documents in the history of political consciousness.

The best way to remind ourselves of the work that still needs to be done in feminism is to revisit the work that has been done, rights won that we take for granted now because of the obviousness of those entitlements, rights so hard to win but that now seem inevitable. It’s important to remember that there was an era before these women when those obvious injustices hadn’t even been named.