Maybe the girl revolution won’t take shape in the public world, the world of men. It certainly won’t happen out on the street, where girls aren’t safe. Maybe it will begin in a private, enclosed space men never enter, a generic space women enter and leave, often together, writing messages for each other on the wall: a restroom. That is where Nikki McClure believes the powerful future of girls lies, and her vision came to her when, as she writes, “in 1990-91 a list of men who date raped was kept on the wall of the 3rd stall, 2nd floor of the Library Building at Evergreen State College.” That year the restroom became a place where young women warned one another and memorized the names of rapists before they were painted over. McClure saw the potential there and started to dream: “Secret notes are passed back and forth through sanitary napkin catdoors. . . . I will recognize you in the crowd and will slip off to the restroom where I will leave you a secret package. If anyone else were to discover it, they would find a pearl necklace, each bead a time bomb added every year. We are going to explode one by one until the bathrooms are full and we have to wait in line to get in.”
The girl revolutionaries have a long way to go before they rule all towns. As they exist now, they are a self-proclaimed movement of very young, very angry women discovering their own power through frenzied productivity: fanzines, music, public-access shows, performance events. They meet in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania–in apartments, rock clubs, cluttered kitchens, pink bedrooms. Riot Girl Olympia meet Sundays in a white apartment-house laundry room, usually in the late afternoon. The world they are trying to change right now is the world of Olympia, an isolated small town with one main street, a few wide, clear alleys perfect for graffiti (“Your desires are reality”), a theater where movies are always a dollar. The bars are full of quiet regulars, who occasionally start short-lived, halfhearted brawls.
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One of the most telling metaphors of the Riot Girls is their dramatic invasion of the mosh pit. In Olympia, bands don’t usually perform on risers, so only the people up front can really see, and, given the violent crush of the pit, those people are almost always boys. Most of the girls didn’t want to dance in the pit–it hurts your boobs. And for many girls getting touched by sweaty male strangers has all-too-familiar, nightmarish implications. Perhaps moshing is just another one of what Barbara Kruger calls those “elaborate rituals” men have invented “in order to touch the skin of another man.” But the girls wanted a space to dance, so they formed tight groups and made their way to the front, protecting each other the whole way. Any boy who shoved them had a whole angry pack to contend with.
Hanna’s energy and drive fueled much of the activity in Olympia, and she has been instrumental in organizing Riot Girls in D.C., where the band eventually moved. She’s a 23-year-old woman who sees everything she does as part of a movement, as a sign, and everything that thwarts her as part of a conspiracy. In Spin magazine, Hanna was deemed the “angriest girl of all.” She’s clearly a leader, and it’s around her that many young, impressionable girls have mobilized.
It was also on that tour that they found a new mecca, better than the safe haven of Olympia: Washington, D.C. Like Olympia, D.C. has a thriving, politically oriented scene. It’s the home of Dischord Records and the hero-priests of punk, Fugazi. There’s a punk activist collective there called Positive Force, which organizes protests and benefit concerts and raises money and food for the homeless. Many of the DC Riot Girls also belong to Positive Force.
“Everyone’s signing to major labels,” says a bewildered MacKaye, “except the people in this room.” “Yeah,” says Hanna, and she’s certain they never will. Maybe this room, with its glaring overhead light, broken clocks, and off-speed tape deck in the background, is the last holdout against the quickly advancing corporate ogre.
Yet female anger only surfaced in isolated, sporadic bursts, the occasional woman’s voice a novelty, not a sign or a threat. Talking in her narrow, half-lit Lower East Side apartment, as the afternoon outside grows hectic and damp, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon says she’s always felt like an outsider: “I always idolized male guitar players. It was exciting to be in the middle of it but also feel like a voyeur. There were isolated female musicians, but there was never any bonding or anything.” Though Gordon has supported bands like Hole and Babes in Toyland, she’s wary of becoming identified with any movement. So are bands like L7, who refuse to do interviews on the subject, or Babes in Toyland, who just want to be seen as musicians on their own terms. Yet the Riot Girls have adopted these bands as their reluctant mentors; they’ve realized that getting lost in a song or a show is fundamentally different when you’re getting lost in the sound of a woman’s voice. And if rock has built itself on the foundation of screaming girl fans, suddenly that fandom isn’t based on pent-up male worship but on recognition.
