Riot Grrrl & a Middle-Aged Girls Trip

True crime on vacation

Kathleen Hanna’s memoir dropped last week and she’s been on book tour, which landed her in a theater less than 10 minutes from my apartment. I missed it because I was leaving town for my first “Girls Trip” since 2017 — stay tuned for how this comes full circle.

Not much feels “lucky” about being a part of my (very particular) generation, but to be a disaffected teenager raised by a single dad during the time every Bikini Kill record came out is like winning the formative pop-culture lottery.

Through Kathleen and her band I discovered feminism. Punk rock became accessible to me instead of being an exclusive boys’ club and all the unarticulated rage I had from being a girl in the world now had an eloquent container that I could scream along with on my bedroom stereo.

I joined the Riot Grrrl movement after a girl named Julie gave me a flyer outside my first Babes In Toyland show at The Whisky in West Hollywood in 1992.

Sidenote: Here’s actual footage of Babes’ opening song that night. I was close to the front, but 13-year-old-me getting her mind blown is just out of frame.

It was easy to grab friends and get rides from senior girls to attend Riot Grrrl meetings. I didn’t have to explain what it was exactly (which was great, because I didn’t really know), besides “girls only, in a room, talking” to get others on board immediately.

One meeting was in the back room of the Soap Plant near the Hollywood/Sunset junction, others were in women’s apartments in Echo Park and Silverlake (women with their own apartments was a revelation in and of itself!)

But as weirdo/nerdy teenagers from the valley, we never felt 100% welcome at those meetings. There was a thrill and relief from being in an all-women’s space for the first time, but it was still scene-y Los Angeles. My friend Harmony showed up in Birkenstocks and lots of hippie jewelry that jingled as we walked in a half-hour late (traffic on the 101!) while a woman with Betty Page bangs described her latest experience with street harassment. We received more cold stares than warm welcomes.

After my friend C. — the only person of color in a mostly white room and super-butch/male presenting — was passive-aggressively called out as an interloping man, we stopped going to those meetings.

Lucky for us, a group of high school girls had just formed a San Fernando Valley chapter of Riot Grrrl, and those meetings were usually held at a Denny’s in Woodland Hills, so it was much easier to convince my dad to give me a ride instead of depending on jingle-jangle Harmony.

Me waiting at my dad’s Ford Explorer for a ride to a Riot Grrrl meeting.

What happened at Riot Grrrl meetings? I’m not sure what was supposed to happen. It wasn’t quite activism and we didn’t plan any riots (do riots get planned in meetings?) but it was social and supportive. Girls got together and vented about everything from images in fashion magazines (this was the supermodel & heroin chic era) to being catcalled as we walked to school.

See my baggy clothes in the pic above? I thought I was fat and I was hiding my new boobs because creepy men seemed to be everywhere.

I remember an older woman (older than me at the time, so she was probably 21) at one of my first meetings demonstrated her “tough walk” for when she had to walk home alone after dark.

But we also talked about music, met up for shows, and started zines and bands. So, young women getting together to trauma bond about the scaries of being a girl, taking up six tables at Denny’s to do so, (turns out the type of men who approach teenage girls never approach angry gangs of teenage girls) and breaking off in little groups to make art together was a kind of activism itself.

Once the responsible private school girls who organized and led the meetings went off to college, the valley chapter fizzled out. I knew it was over when I was put in charge of checking the 213 voicemail account we inherited from the already-fizzled L.A. chapter. Tumbleweeds.

Fast-forward literally 31 goddamned years…

I’m boarding a plane with a new hardcover book I’ve been saving for this flight and trip. I bought a copy the day after it came out. (Turned out my husband also pre-ordered a copy at the same bookstore — a surprise gift I didn’t know was sitting behind the counter when I checked out.)

Here’s a passage from the very first page of Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk:

I want to tell you how I write songs and produce music. How singing makes me feel connected to a million miracles at once. How being onstage is the one place I feel the most me. But I can’t untangle all of that from the background that is male violence.

I was staying in a beach house with 8 other women — two friend groups from two different cities, connected by one friend who was celebrating her 40th birthday (just a widdle baby!)

On our first night after leaving a restaurant en masse and piling into two cars, we were followed home by island security, (a guy in a truck). We ran through a billion scenarios as we wound through dark roads:

“Don’t pull up to the house! He’ll know where we’re staying!”

“Wait, he’s a security guard, he’s just trying to protect us!”

“No! Lots of serial killers work as security guards.”

The guy in the truck drove away after we parked and waited to get out of the car. Suddenly our bungalow was the Chi Omega house and Kiawah Island’s very own Ted Bundy was lying in wait. We got to the door and wondered aloud if the house had an alarm. One of the smarter among us yelled out into the dark, “Yes it has an alarm and I brought my gun!”

We checked under beds and in closets, half joking, but also, we accidentally left the doors unlocked while we were gone, so...

And then we were all in the kitchen, joking about how if this was a guys’ trip, no one would be checking all window locks before bed. And funny how we all defaulted to true crime/Dateline scenarios as soon as the sun went down. Then the conversation turned to how fucked up it is that there are entire cable channels and book and movie genres devoted to true stories of male violence.

Someone asked, instead of all the books and movies, “Why haven’t they figured out what to do with all these men?”

I felt a Riot Grrrl meeting coming on!

As Kathleen Hanna tells her life story, the backdrop of male violence is multi-thread: There’s domestic abuse, street harassment (women know this its own thread, from “innocuous” cat calling to men pulling up and demanding you get in their car), male teachers and students telling her she’s too stupid for college or her art sucks, date rape, getting things thrown at her and being threatened at her bands’ shows.

For most women, once you’re a middle-aged mom who’s stuck at home or work most of the time, it feels like the specter of male violence has gone away. At least, it lives in media instead of in your face, IRL each day. (Not sure how many of the 50 women who got punched in the head in NYC this year were over the age of 40.)

But we still can’t go on vacation by ourselves without envisioning our own horrific murders.

There’s no solving this kind of problem (especially when you’re building media empires out of it), so we’ve tried to build little pockets of feminist utopia that live and die as quickly as local punk scenes: Riot Grrrl, Girlbossing at a girlbossy startup, The Wing. We keep “getting it wrong,” or crumble from in-fighting.

But I’d like to take a cue from Kathleen, who was canceled for white/cis/classist feminism before the internet and getting canceled were things: Keep carving out space, telling stories, and help other people feel heard and safe.

After all these years, I still can’t do five minutes of coffee small talk before I talk about patriarchy (I like Big Talk!). So, I’m looking forward to the next feminist movement, whatever it is, (I once tried to make it financial and got ripped off — more on that another time!)

When it comes, I’ll gleefully embrace it like 13-year old getting her first Bikini Kill EP.

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