Fairytales in the Supermarket & Other Stories from 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.

The urban despair that Dalle identifies is still a generalized feeling, but, through bands like The Raincoats and Bush Tetras we see a more specific and far darker cause of such apprehension. The Raincoat’s 1979 “Off Duty Trip” and Bush Tetras’ 1980 “Too Many Creeps” function as anxiety-fueled cousins, wary of the city spaces populated by violence. The former details a rape that takes place in the public and the subsequent sympathy that inevitably falls to the male perpetrator. Lead singer Ana da Silva describes the passers-by—“those who walk past her screams”—as “only [being] reminded of love’s young dreams.” The offhand nature of this scene description frames the violent rape as a commonplace experience for women out in public, and in this case, walking through a park. “Too Many Creeps” is less graphic in its characterization of urban unease, but it offers a message as clear as its delivery is abrupt: the city, with its streets and shopping centers, us an unsafe space for women subjected to constant harassment. Shopping is a traditionally feminized activity, but, ironically, the only capitalist transaction that takes place in this track’s mall is what frontwoman Cynthia Sley deems “pay[ing] the price of shopping around”—that is, being harassed by the ubiquitous “creeps.” Both tracks, leaning more on funk-influence quasi-dance beats than the aggression typically associated with punk, imply a degree of detachment. With their sparse beats and staccato vocals, da Silva and Sley alike seem almost to be remote viewers of the horrors of the city—as if a standoffish and exhausted demeanor is merely the result of such violent urban pressures.

“Too Many Creeps” bring us to a disconcerting, albeit familiar, intersection of the modern woman—shopping and violence. The relationship between consumerism and the female body is a complicated one, but the bulk of its history resides in the modern era. In her dissertation, “Made-Over: Consumerism, Desire and Feminine Subjectivity,” Kathryn Fraser studies the “makeover” trope in advertisements and film as it relates to broader late-capitalist concerns of desire, identity, and the consumerconsumed relationship. Upon tracing the history of a marketed femininity through print advertisements and magazines like Cosmopolitan, Fraser notes that “in a culture increasingly inclined toward spectatorship and display, cosmetics made possible the assertion of new selves and identities for women now solidly engaged in public activities.” Of particular interest here are the concepts of “spectatorship” and women’s entry into the “public” sphere.

As noted earlier, women were not always welcomed figures in public urban spaces, and their subsequent entry into these environments was one shaped by paradox and unease. (Think Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and the emerging “New Woman” who finds herself simultaneously at the heart of London’s vitality and utterly, desperately alienated from it and those around her.) But when they do become, or are allowed to be, “engaged in public activities,” women find themselves still relegated to the domestic virtues of ornamentation and passivity. With the speed and “progress” of modernism comes only new, faster ways to construct the old models of female identity—namely, those of objectification.

THE MODERN WOMAN, AS FRASER PUTS IT, SEEMS ALWAYS IN PURSUIT OF HER OWN “SEL[F] AND IDENTIT[Y].” AND MATERIALISM IS WHERE SHE IS TOLD SHE CAN FIND IT.

The 1980s are often viewed as the decade of excess, of Gordon Gekko’s greed and Madonna’s materialism, but already in 1978 did X-Ray Spex release Germfree Adolescents and its thoroughly anti-consumerist messages. “Art-I-Ficial,” a response to and rejection of the “consumer society” Styrene inhabits, functions as a more nuanced discussion of the media presence we see on Blondie’s “Rip Her To Shreds.” Styrene acknowledges that she’s “artificial,” but insists that the blame be placed on the “appliances” that “reared” her. She cries, “When I put on my makeup / The pretty little mask not me / That’s the way a girl should be / In a consumer society.” As a “mask[ed]” performer of femininity, Styrene understands the pressures of a capitalist society to be gendered and link links the epithets of being ‘fake’ to the command to conform to material standards of identity. She confronts a similar inundation of consumerist ideologies on “Plastic Bag.” Here, she compares her mind to a plastic bag filled with advertisements and media “rubbish”; her only consolation is to “eat Kleenex for breakfast” and “use soft hygienic Weetabix / to dry [her] tears.” With her brain a jumble of products, Styrene’s only refuge from the deluge of consumerist messages is in more consumption.

For Fraser, the media does answer the age-old question of “what…woman want[s]”: ““to consume, and so be consumed, endlessly.” Locked in this cycle of fetishization—first of commodities, then of self as another commodity—women like Styrene find in modernity a loss of identity where they were promised the discovery of one.

In 1961, working-class Viv Nicholson’s husband won an unexpected £152,000—translating to somewhere around $4,500,000 today–off betting in the football pools. Between her rampant spending and chaotic personal life, Nicholson transformed into a symbolic public figure of excess and consumerism. One obituary from The Daily Telegraph characterizes her life of newfound wealth as one not of “content” like her husband’s, but of alienation; it claims that “Viv often moped alone at home with little to do but watch television.” It is no wonder that Nicholson captured the imagination of global media and musical artists alike. The Smiths borrowed her likeness for album art and tour promotions, and The Slits’ titled a song with Nicholson’s (in) famous response to reporters’ questions of what she would do with her husband’s winnings: “spend spend spend.” The 1979 track articulates the same concerns as Styrene, describing the “want to buy” in an effort to “satisfy this empty feeling.” Once again, we see the “addict[ion]” to and implication in the capitalist notions of self-worth take hold of the female identity. Nicholson reifies the anxiety surrounding materialism as she is both a public representation of consumerism’s tragedy and a case study in the impossibility of female satisfaction in a capitalist system.

Two decades later, with the energy of the Riot Grrrl movement behind them, Sleater-Kinney released “#1 Must Have.” While the band was a seminal figure in the movement—a “bearer of the flag from the beginning”—the track assumes a more dismal, self-described “cynic[al]” stance. Released in 2000, the song looks back on the accusations of selling-out levied against the band and the movement as a whole.

Frontwoman Corin Tucker reflects, “they took our ideas to their marketing stars / And now I’m spending all my days at girlpower.com / Trying to buy back a little piece of me.” For a movement founded on a vision of an alternative to society, this sentiment reflects the ultimate encroachment of mainstream corporate ideals on a subculture that meant to reject them. On the chorus, Tucker confesses that “my inspiration rests / In-between my beauty magazines and my credit card bills.” With a sense of doom and yet another image of confinement, the song illustrates woman’s inevitable subjugation to consumer trends. The search for identity, for “a little piece” of one’s self, in the marketplace proves as, if not more, futile in the 21st century than it was in the 20th.

The condition of the modern woman seems to occupy a space somewhere between discontent and violence.

Sleater-Kinney’s 2005 “Modern Girl” offers an updated, and still unnerving, glimpse into the anxieties that plague woman’s navigation of modernity. On the surface, the titular “modern girl” lives a life “like a picture of a sunny day,” but lurking beneath is a deep-rooted ennui. The verses’ simplistic logic satirizes the capitalist insistence that identity can be constructed by what you own—that commodities can fill the “hole the size of this entire world” that sits within the modern woman. “Mujer Moderna,” released a decade later by the San Antoniobased Fea, is a counterpart both comforting and frustrating. While its fierce rejection of regressive and two-dimensional understandings of female identity and sexuality is a reminder of punk’s relentless energy, the very fact that society still requires such a message is upsetting. Lead-singer Letty Martinez insists that “I’m not guilty or a whore / I’m not a bitch or a slut / I’m not alone, I’m not a bitch, I’m just a modern woman.” We return here to the familiar stage and rhetoric of the contemporary female identity—violence and degradation respectively—but the track offers a means of resistance. With its unabashed aggression and embrace of cultural intersectionality—as an ode to Riot Grrrl now informed by the band’s experiences as women of color—Martinez’s assertion of womanhood is itself a middle finger to the systems of violence and marginalization.

It would seem that modernity offers nothing but despair to its women. But these artists, though they suffer under the boot of the establishment, never cease to rebel against it. On “#1 Must Have,” we find a bleak vision of society, but we also find an alternative to it. Its outro addresses “all the ladies out there” to encourage them that “culture is what we make it …. / Now is the time to invent.” If culture is constructed, then women can shape it for the better—to be safe, to be inclusive, to be different. If it’s anything, punk is a fundamentally modern phenomenon. It always pushes toward futurity, boundaries and traditions be damned; in fact, perhaps it’s so difficult to define precisely because it’s always ahead of its time. To call punk dead is to minimize the efforts, labor, and most importantly, the rage, of the modern punk rockers. To call punk dead is to relegate it to a thing of the past and to not allow the modern woman to progress beyond these worn notions of identity. What Sleater-Kinney tells us to do, and what all these women have done, is to “invent.” Because there are still those “living outside of society’s shit” with stories to tell. And because as long as there is a war to wage, punk will never be dead.