12:29 pm Sep. 28, 2010
In 1991, the writer Sara Marcus was 14, growing up weird in suburban Maryland. She was a drama kid, too strange "for the smart kids’ clique and too diligent for the purple-haired rebels,” she wrote in the introduction to her book, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, out today on Harper Perennial.
She was confronted with sexual danger—by an attendant at a Ross Dress for Less fitting room and an against-the-lockers threat from a boy at her school—that left her “marinating in shame,” alone in her bedroom, during her early teen years. “I experienced female adolescence as a constant affront with calamity always loitering nearby, licking its lips,” she wrote. “I was sure I was the only one who felt this way.”
But she wasn’t. In Olympia, Wash. and Washington, D.C., a group of teenage girls were feeling the same isolation and frustration and transforming it into a movement that spanned music, writing, politics. They were called Riot Grrrls, young women who had called for a “girl riot” during the summer of 1991, and who took as the main basis for their shared idiom the conventions of what had been a male-dominated form: punk rock. Their lyrics addressed not alienation from parents or school authorities or the police (well, sometimes the police) so much as the gender conventions, girls' self-image, misogyny in popular culture, and the sexual violence and harassment in their own communities. The Riot Grrrls held safe-space meetings, wrote their stories and rally cries in zines that were distributed by mail order and at local record stores (in lucky towns), and organized conventions to form chapters, workshops and rock shows. Their new feminist movement for a generation of girls in the '90s was in full swing, and percolating across the country.
But Marcus would not discover them, the group that she felt would save her, until the fall of 1992. She read an article in Newsweek, “Revolution, Girl Style,” about the “sexy, assertive, loud” girls and “never wanted anything more in my life,” than to be part of their movement. She set out on a search to find them, taking the bus and the Metro to Washington, D.C. with the words “Riot Girl” written in marker across her knuckles. “I waited to stumble into a whole pack of them,” she wrote in Girls to the Front. “I waited for a gang to stop me and say, ‘You’re coming with us.’ My piano teacher told me to go wash my hands.”
Marcus wouldn't meet the Riot Grrrls in person until early 1993, at a meeting at the Washington, D.C. chapter.
“These girls weren’t all punk, they didn’t all have bands, and while they were the coolest girls I’d ever met, they were cool in a way that drew me closer instead of shutting me out,” Marcus wrote. She began to understand that “being a teenager was always going to be a bloodbath to some extent, but it did not have to be this particular bloodbath,” she wrote. “I felt powerless not because I was weak but because I lived in a society that drained girls of power.” But Marcus arrived in Riot Grrrl just a few months before the movement's core members began to retreat.
As Marcus grew up, becoming a critic and journalist in Brooklyn, she heard Riot Grrrl characterized in the past tense. Although groups of Riot Grrrls, or members who were originally inspired by the movement, were still organizing shows, making zines, and organizing feminist meetings and rallies, a media blackout in 1993 sequestered the movement to the underground.
Where were the Riot Grrrls?
AROUND NOON ON SEPT. 27, MARCUS WAS SITTING in the back room of a nearly empty diner in Williamsburg, a few blocks from her apartment, bundled in a roomy gray sweater and a brown scarf laced with shiny silver threads, against the unseasonal cold and rain. Her brown hair, cut into a shag, was damp and she was wearing glasses, an accessory that she normally doesn’t wear, she said, with round, tan-colored frames, which made her brown eyes look big and wet. A busboy turned on a radio that wafted in a song by country-pop singer Taylor Swift. Marcus jumped from her chair, ducked behind the bar, and clicked off the stereo. “I won’t be able to concentrate,” she told Capital, rushing back to the corner table. “Because I really like her.”
“When I started writing the book, I felt that within myself and the people that I knew [that] the idea that we had ever felt so strongly about something that we would boycott somebody over it, even the idea of calling out sexism or harassment, it had come to seem a little gauche,” Marcus said. “It wasn’t really cool to say, ‘Oh my god, did you see how that guy totally like grabbed my ass as I was saying goodbye and I hardly know him? That’s so sleazy.’ It was like, if you were polite and sophisticated, you were over that. And I definitely had a desire to, definitely not bring people back to the absolutism of being adolescent and ostracizing anybody who says the wrong thing to you once. But I wanted to heal all of that, I did have that sense of, can we be integrated? Can we recognize what was incredibly valuable about being that way in the world? Can we accept that we have grown up, and from this safe distance see if there’s anything that we want to bring with us into the present? I think I call it the willingness to name things as political if they’re political and unacceptable if they’re unacceptable. So that’s for the people our age.”
“For the younger people, I was very careful to constantly not over-mystify the period,” she said. "To as much as possible, avoid writing something that would make kids think, ‘If only I had been alive then. There’s nothing now.’ I just constantly tried to hammer on the point that the only thing that was special about that time was that people gave themselves and their friends credit that maybe they could do something amazing. And that can happen any time. So if kids start like forming Riot Grrrl chapters now, I won’t be psyched. I want them to do something else.”
