Riot Grrrl Quotes

You learn that the only way to get rock-star power as a girl is to be a groupie and bare your breasts and get chosen for the night. We learn that the only way to get anywhere is through men. And it's a lie.

It can be really painful to have to face how fucked up shit is and how scared people are…of being alive. Scared of things that are amazing. Scared of things that aren’t like television or aren’t dead. A lot of people can’t deal with three-dimensional human beings, they only know how to deal with other products — they see themselves as other products. When the world only treats you like a dot on a marketing scheme, you can learn to treat yourself and other people like that.

Treating feminism like it's a personal accessory that just isn't appropriate anymore obscures the places where feminism hasn't made strides for people who still need it.

i want to scream because no matter how much I scream, no one will listen.

Equality makes way for an increased number of free, considered choices, and an increased number of people with access to them. But choice itself isn't the same as equality...

And as the recession continues and our prospects look bleaker and bleaker, I’m excited. I look to the past to see what our future will be like. And in times of economic hardship and harsh governments, of pointless wars and mass unemployment, there was pop art and there was punk, there was hip hop and grafitti, there was acid house and riot grrrl. There was art and music and books that could bring you to your knees with their utter perfection. Because, when everything else is gone, all we’re left with is our imaginations.

You wouldn't believe how many languages I had to learn to get my software engineering degree." Sam's gaze drifted over Daisy's Riot Grrrl T-shirt. "I see English wasn't one of them.

The diversity of voices, issues, approaches, and processes required to make feminism work as an inclusive social movement is precisely the kind of knotty, unruly insurrection that just can't be smoothed into a neat brand.

Advertising and marketing philosophies that thrive on emphasizing 'natural' differences don't stay in the realm of advertising and marketing--they spill into how we justify sexism and racism at every life stage.

The rise of feminist underpants is a weird twist on Karl Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, wherein consumer products once divorced from inherent use value are imbued with all sorts of meaning. To brand something as feminist doesn't involve ideology, or labor, or policy, or specific actions or processes. It's just a matter of saying, 'This is feminist because we say it is.

Do people call you Ollie?” Lola asked. Oliver looked at her, completely dumbfounded by the possibility of this nickname. She may as well have asked him if people call him Garth, or Andrew, or Timothy. “No,” he said flatly, and the only thing charming about him was the way his accent seemed to run through every vowel with one syllable. Lola’s eyebrow twitched in her single tell—mildly annoyed—and she lifted her flashing LED drink cup to her lips. Lola wears mostly black, including her glossy dark hair, and has a tiny diamond pierced into her lip, but, even still, she’s never been able to pull off the full physical manifestation of the angry Riot Grrrl. With her perfect porcelain skin and the longest eyelashes in the world, she’s simply too delicate. But once she decides you’re an asshole, it no longer matters to her what you think. She gives good glare. “The flower suits you,” she said, tilting her head to study him. “And you have pretty hands, kind of soft. Maybe we should call you Olive.” He grunted out a dry laugh. “And a really beautiful mouth,” I added. “Gentle. Like a woman’s.” “Aw fuck off.” He was laughing outright by then.

The girls couldn't block out these things and they didn't want to; they wanted to stay acutely aware of the war against them so they could fight back.

If someone didn’t feel included, if someone felt marginalised, they would form their own band, write their own fanzine, or just call you out on what they deemed racist or classist, sizeist, sexist, body-ableist.

you, not riot grrrl, but rolling all of your R’s. less betty paige, more betty la fea. less zoey deschanel, more chilindrina. not trying to be more white—just more loved. just trying to find a song that is about the girl who is always fixing, snipping away at the bits of herself that are always becoming

American culture, perhaps more than any other, prizes individualism. Our narratives of art, politics, and business idolize the person who triumphs against the odds, with only himself or herself to answer to. The lone wolf. The stranger in town. The maverick. The plucky kid. The Final Girl. You've only got yourself, in the end. It's all up to you.

A big tent is great and all, but there has to be a line in the sand, and I'm pretty sure the desire to legislate other women's bodies is it.

Tobi had summed it up in Jigsaw: “A band is any song you ever played with anybody even if only once.

Empowertising not only builds on the idea that any choice is a feminist choice if a self-labeled feminist deems it so, but takes it a little bit further to suggest that being female is in itself something that deserves celebration.

Empowerment wasn't defined as a static concept or standalone occurrence, but as an evolving way to rethink entire power structures and value systems, draw on shared skills and knowledge, and endow marginalized communities with tools for economic sustainability.

Anybody who listened to her talk or who read the zine she had begun publishing, Fantastic Fanzine, could easily become hypnotized by her words’ raw force: This world teaches women to hate themselves, but I refuse to listen to its message. I’m not going to let boys come between me and my girlfriends. I’m not going to try and be your idea of sexy if sexy means being thin and helpless, tottering around on high heeled shoes. I’m not going to stay home at night hating my sex because if I go out then I’m asking for trouble.

Marketplace feminism is in many ways about just branding feminism as an identify that everyone can and should consume. That's not a bad thing in theory, but in practice it tends to involve highlighting only the most appealing feature of a multifaceted set of movements. It kicks the least sensational and most complex issues under a rug and assures them that we'll get back to them once everybody's on board. And it ends up pandering to the people who might get on board-maybe, possibly, once feminism works its charm-rather than addressing the many unfinished projects still remaining.

...the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that its fair for a woman to be fired from her job if her appearance is distracting enough to threaten the marriage of her superior -- a decision spurred by the case of a dentist who fired his hygienist because even in head-to-foot scrubs, she was simply too irresistible. In the court's finding, this was totally legitimate: employers "can fire employees that they and their spouses see as threats to their marriages." It's not up to employers, you see, to be more professional and appropriate in such cases, it's up to female employees not to unwittingly lead them on by doing nothing other than having the gall to show up for work with their god-given faces and bodies.

No dejo de pensar en el Manifiesto Riot Grrrl que estaba en el fanzine de mamá. Decía que las mujeres constituyen una fuerza revolucionaria que puede cambiar en verdad el mundo. Mi pecho siente la presión de algo que da miedo y satisfacción al mismo tiempo.

Oh God," Nick said, clutching his chest. "I love it. You're the Riot Grrrl version of the Little Mermaid. You're the Third Wave feminist Little Mermaid who told the prince to go fuck himself, and then went on to turn the underwater community into conservation activists, aren't you?

As usual, I'm supposed to be one of the most powerful men in the city, and my future is totally dependent on someone in a worn-out "Riot Grrrl" tee-shirt and fuzzy slippers.

Maybe being a teenager was always going to be a bloodbath to some extent, but it did not have to be this particular bloodbath. Its severity and the specific tone of its miseries were political, which meant they were mutable. I felt powerless not because I was weak but because I lived in a society that drained girls of power. Boys harassed me not because I invited it but because they were taught it was acceptable and saw that no one intervened. These things weren’t my fault, and we could fight them all together. For the first time in years, I knew that I was going to be okay.

The pair’s status as paradigmatic riot grrrls was only increasing, especially as their extremist rhetoric polarized longtime allies and drove many away. Politics was personal; their revolution had become about a purification of one’s individual life, habits, language, relationships. This is the revolutionary program of a moment that has lost the ability to envision large-scale change, or that sees institutions as so flawed at their core that they can never be vehicles of transformation.

In a time of feminism taken into account, there's a sense that if one's choices--even in something as minor as a favorite chill-out show--can't be rationalized, they should probably be kept quiet. As with most-feminist movies and most-feminist underpants, this suggests that feminism is a unvarying foundation of a larger system. It suggests feminism is something that either is or is not okay to consume, rather than a sense through which creators and audiences see stories, characters, and communication.

A great thing about Olympia is that everybody will clap for anything,” songwriter Lois Maffeo, who had a long-running all-girl radio show on the community radio station KAOS, said later. “You could get up and sing some godawful song and everybody would be like, ‘Yeah! Good for you, that’s so excellent!

Another artist, Nikki McClure, used to take long walks in the woods around sunset, making up songs and singing them to herself at the top of her voice; when she hit on something that sounded good to her, she’d run back to whatever house was hosting a show and sing into the mic, knowing the audience would be receptive.

The librarian, a tiny blonde twenty-something in a Riot grrrl T-shirt, looked up from her desk and smiled. Don’t let anyone tell you that the gold standard of feeling old is when the police and doctors seem younger than you. It’s the librarians that will get you every time.

I felt powerless not because I was weak but because I lived in a society that drained girls of power. Boys harassed me not because I invited it but because they were taught it was acceptable and saw that no one intervened. These things weren’t my fault, and we could fight them all together.

the consciousness that many of our emotional challenges (self-doubt, confusion, sadness) resulted not from personal failings but from political and social forces, and that we could do battle with them as such; the belief that we could and would, as one of the movement’s manifestos had put it, change the world for real.

I’ve always been interested in playing music with other women,” Tobi wrote in her article. “And it seems like I’ve always been misunderstood and gotten called sexist for it. I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy, but to me it seems natural to notice the difference between men and women and I don’t understand WHY I’m constantly told to ignore that in the context of rock and roll.

Safety had been a key concept in feminist circles since the ‘70s. All-female events or groups were commonly described as “safe spaces”—insulated from any hint of male violence. Safe could be a slippery word, though, sometimes used to mean less “free of danger” than “comfortable” or “unchallenged”—with the added intimation that anyone who dared to disagree was not just a dissenter but an attacker. Anything that wasn’t to one’s liking, if it could be framed as a political issue, could be described as a threat to one’s safety, and Mary was learning how useful this could be. “I saw how power was gained by talking about being a victim,” she said.

MAYBE I WOULDN’T HAVE TO BE A FEMINIST IF YOU WEREN’T SUCH AN ASSHOLE.

I felt powerless not because I was weak but because I lived in a society that drained girls of power.

...while riot grrrl is part of the punk rock/alternative rock feminism of the 1990s, it's by no means the majority of it. Despite the slogan, not every girl was a riot grrrl, and there's a huge swath of awesome women in '90s music who aren't riot grrrls. In no particular order: L7, Hole, PJ Harvey, Belly, Throwing Muses, Seven Year Bitch, Babes in Toyland, Liz Phair, Bjork, Juliana Hatfield, Gwen Stefani/No Doubt, Shirley Manson/Garbage, the Breeders, Luscious Jackson, Elastica, Sleater-Kinney, and may more women were part of either the alternative or indie rock music scene. Beyond that, the decade was pretty amazing for singer-songwriters like Tori Amos, Sarah McLachlan, Jewel, Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette, Tracy Chapman, and Melissa Etheridge; for the R&B and hip-hop artists like Salt-n-Peppa, Queen Latifah, TLC, En Vogue, and Missy Elliott; and, at the tail end of the decade, all the pop you could ever want with the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Destiny's Child. So, if you read this book, then run to Spotify to listen to riot grrrl bands, and find they're not for you, remember: there's more than one way to be a girl, and there's more than one kind of music to power you to your goals. What you listen to will never be as important as what you do.

Some girls started zines; some formed bands; some just dug in their closets and pulled out the little-girl barrettes they'd heard riot grrrls wore, and admired themselves in the mirror with a bright plastic butterflies poised on their temples,