Fairytales in the Supermarket and Other Stories f rom Modernity
In her essay “The Media and the Movement: A User’s Guide,” Gloria Steinem urges her fellow feminists to “monitor, infiltrate, replace, protest, teach with, create our own” various forms of media, insisting that if they don’t, they “will not only be invisible in the present, but absent from history’s first draft.” Punk aims, and in many ways succeeds, to do precisely this. The commitment to a DIY lifestyle that has come to be a central tenet of the punk subculture is, at its core, a way to offer new, radical alternatives of meaning-making. This means creating and producing content—whether it be music, art, journalism—outside of the mainstream. Communal living, independent record labels, and self-made zines abound in the scene; it’s do-it-yourself because no one else is going to. But there seems to be something more urgent in this dedication to a self-sufficient movement for the women of the scene. Steinem penned her essay for the 2003 anthology Sisterhood is Forever, and it’s followed three chapters later by a contribution from Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna. The Riot Grrrl movement, the most prominent of the female punk subcultures, didn’t technically have a leader; but if it did, it was Hanna. She and the broader movement alike epitomized this desire to create a cohesive alternative to the dominant society. In her foundational Riot Grrrl manifesto, Hanna insists that “we must take over the means of production in order to create our own meanings.” For these women, DIY ethics are not merely a way to resist corporate hegemony, they are indeed the only way to produce “meaning” for communities under- or mis-represented in mainstream media. The short-lived hardcore band G.L.O.S.S. recently came out of Olympia, Washington twenty-four years after Bikini Kill did. And their name, standing for Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit, offers the same radical anti-establishment message that Hanna did in the 1990s. But this rejection of the mainstream way of looking, thinking, acting, and living is not just a quixotic whim but an urgent necessity.
For, as we see, the society of the modern age is not one welcoming to women, and the urban spaces of violence and consumption prove to be dangerous landscapes for the modern woman to navigate. The city as a looming figure in the literary consciousness oscillates between dreams and nightmares. For as much excitement and opportunity it can offer, it is verging always on its own filth and decay. The city is a space of freedom and fantasy and a space of violence, alienation, and sin. But even space itself is a vexed notion in the female experience. For the Victorian woman—confined to attics, domestic spheres, rest cures, her own body, and an entirely “separate sphere”—the city is inaccessible because she is alternately too unfit or too pure for it. The (flawed) logic insists that a woman by nature is angelic in her purity and the city, with its shock and speed, is a sullying force. With the rise of factory labor, then the two World Wars, then the women’s liberation movement and its successive waves of feminism, women began more and more to forge their own paths through the urban spaces. But, though they are allowed out in it just the same as their male counterparts, women still experience the city differently. Its defining modes of violence and materialism are, after all, gendered ones. Punk, as a primarily urban movement, often considers the interactions between cities and their inhabitants. And for the female punk rockers, the city is unwelcoming. Brody Dalle of The Distillers imagines the “City of Angels” only as a “valley of unease,” and as a space of anxiety akin to the Los Angeles of X’s debut album. She envisions the city as one of glamor infused with predation—a neon-tinged nightmare that’s closer to hell than one would hope to be.
