"When You See Yourself, Does It Make You Scream?": On the Female Myth

Blondie is now often associated with new-wave synthesizers, disco dance beats, or the Mean Girls soundtrack, but frontwoman Debbie Harry helped forge a punk persona amidst a desperately misogynist music industry. At the center of the mid-70s underground music scene—and what she herself terms the “beginning of female intervention”—Harry represented in many ways a paradox of female identity. She’s at once the coy “Sunday Girl” and the unhinged stalker on “One Way or Another”; the sheltered girlfriend of “Out In the Streets” and the sapphic lover at the “Rifle Range”; an undeniably beautiful former Playmate and the nightmarish punk rocker gracing the cover of Slash. Cutting straight though the binary logic of the Madonnawhore paradigm, Harry is as much a threat to the male imagination as she is a vision of female allure. This impulse to destabilize a conventional femininity informs the women-led punk that followed for decades. On “Rip Her to Shreds,” Harry presents a “composite” image of women in the underground music scene, alternating between a satiric take on gossip column scrutiny in the verses and a rejection of such sexist chatter in the chorus. Harry describes a woman who “thinks she’s Brenda Starr” but has a noticeable “nose job,” who is “Miss Groupie Supreme” but acts “like a soap opera queen.” She insists to her listener that “you know her”—this familiar two-dimensional female figure who is a mere amalgamation of stereotypes and gendered limitations. But in the chorus Harry calls us to “rip her to shreds.” Here we have a rejection of any prescribed notion of femininity. For Harry and the artists that followed her lead, this girl that “you [all] know” not only is nonexistent—a mere construct of cultural imagination—but is a harmfully unattainable ideal to impose upon women. Though her music may be bereft of the speed and aggression we have come to know as punk rock, the message Harry articulates in 1976 continues to resonate through the genre.

Her interest in “rip[ping] to shreds” the conventional image of womanhood is one that shapes the feminist expressions of countless artists to follow. While Harry explores the media myths that shape female identity, bands like the Bags challenge even broader historical forces that enforce narrow definitions of femininity. Frontwoman of one of the earliest LA punk bands and featured prominently in Penelope Spheeris’ Decline of Western Civilization, Alice Bag serves as an indefatigable voice of Chicana revolution. On one track, with reference to the whore of Babylon envisioned in the Bible’s apocalyptic Book of Revelation and to the female gorgons of Greek mythology, Bag deems herself a “Babylonian Gorgon.” As she confronts the sweeping traditions of both Christianity and the Greco-West, Bag engages with millennia of female stereotyping. Whether as debauchery incarnate—the Babylonian “mother of harlots” who drinks from the “filthiness of her fornications”— or as a figure both monstrous and beautiful, the historical woman often finds herself a mere projection of the male imagination. Bag dons this identity with a tongue-incheek pride, insisting that she’s just “gonna babble babble on.” And it is perhaps here that we most clearly see the punk affirmation of identity and voice; where the male mainstream hears only “babbl[ing],” Bag attributes this to the blindness of conventional masculinity and, unfazed, continues to advance her message of rebellion.

In 1978, the same year that the Bags unleash “Babylonian Gorgon” onto the LA scene, the English band X-Ray Spex peers inward in a shift toward a now more familiar interest in identity politics. Though lead singer Poly Styrene, teeth still lined with braces, had only just emerged from her teens, she articulates anticonsumerist and intersectional sentiments as powerful as they are precocious. The debut single “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” opens with the wry “some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard.” And thus begins an album- and decadeslong case for girls to be heard.

The track “Identity” stands at both the literal center of Germfree Adolescents and at the figurative heart of Styrene’s thematic concerns. She proclaims that “identity is the crisis” and ask her listener, “When you look in the mirror / Do you see yourself?/ On the TV screen? / Do you see yourself in the magazine?” These questions, the negative answers to which Styrene presumes to already know, confront a lack of diversity in representations on “TV screen[s]” and “magazines”; more interesting, however, is how Styrene explores the consequence of such media practice. Unlike the various stereotypes catalogued by Harry, Styrene’s listeners cannot even see themselves in the mirror. What Styrene presents here is an individual who encounters their own erasure outside a mainstream that entirely ignores their existence. Daughter to an Irish-Scottish mother and a Somali father, Styrene serves as a critical voice, presence, and representation in a space so heavily dominated by white male artists.

In both Bag and Styrene we see the fledgling of promisingly inclusive scene, but again, the dominant narrative tends toward whiteness. Styrene is perhaps more prescient than one would hope in recognizing identity—as the sum result of gender, race, class, and ability—as the “crisis” that defines a woman’s socio-cultural maneuvers within and without the punk movement. The goal of a female punk culture, however, remains clear in the work of these early pioneers: to represent a female rage, power, and nuance for which the mainstream leaves no space.