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The first time I heard the album Live Through This by Hole, as a junior in college, it pushed through my numbness and woke me up from the inside out. I’d long accepted the patriarchy and rape culture as the status quo, telling myself it was my fault that men had been shouting unkind things at me from moving cars since I was 10; my fault that the only sexual experiences I’d had at college had been shadowy and blurred by long nights of binge drinking; my fault that so many of my friends were hurting from various violations and injustices perpetrated against them (mostly by men).
Courtney Love knew how all that felt—I could hear it in her voice. When I heard her scream-sing “I fake it so real, I am beyond fake,” I thought about all the pleasure I’d feigned in the company of sexual partners. When I heard her shout “People say I’m plump / but I throw up all the time,” I saw myself binge-eating in the low light of the refrigerator, a futile attempt to shove down my anger at living in a world that seemed to be organized around the whims of rich, white, cishet men.
The same was true of Kathleen Hanna, and Tobi Vail, and Donita Sparks, and all the other riot grrrls I learned about by trawling YouTube for vintage music videos and reading Sara Marcus’s phenomenal book Girls to the Front when I should have been studying. I learned about girls like me and my friends; girls who scrawled on themselves with Sharpies and made zines and warned each other about shitty boys and men; girls who took a look around at 1990s American society and said, quite simply, “Fuck this.”
I was 19 then, and even when I felt I would drown in my anger—at the frat guys on my campus who threw sprawling parties that first-year girls staggered in and out of wasted; the random guys on the streets of St. Petersburg, Russia, who would grab my ass as I walked down the street on my way to class when I was studying abroad; the guys in government who didn’t think my ability to secure Plan B or get an abortion was important—I didn’t think I was entitled to it. People had real problems, I told myself; who was I, an English major with no student loans and no capital-T trauma to speak of, to let myself wallow? I was alternately furious and guilty, too full of self-recrimination to commit full-time to my anger. I was an anger freelancer, letting rage at sexism subsume me sometimes—and at other times, which quickly became most times, learning to turn it off at will.
Now, in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s unimaginable yet wholly predictable overturning, I’m thinking about my college self and her born-too-late riot grrrl aspirations again. I know now that the riot grrrl movement was nowhere near as inclusive as it could or should have been; as Mimi Thi Nguyen wrote for the feminist theory journal Women & Performance in 2012, “Women of color wondered out loud for whom writing ‘SLUT’ across their stomachs operated as reclamations of sexual agency against feminine passivity, where racisms had already inscribed such terms onto some bodies.” The privilege of feminist rebellion is too often reserved for white, upper-middle-class women, and for years, valid critiques like Nguyen’s—and the simple passage of time—pushed me away from embracing the full-on riot grrrl aesthetic. (Also, practically speaking, it was hard to move through the working world in the Docs, baby-doll dresses, and smeared eyeliner I favored in 2013.) Still, to this day, I think of riot grrrl as the first flame to light the candle of my then-precious and unyielding rage—and now that the Supreme Court has ruled against my reproductive autonomy, I can feel the flame’s warmth moving me toward that rage again.
I press play on Live Through This over and over again, take a sonic tour through the discographies of Bratmobile and L7 and Le Tigre, and I can’t believe that one of the central tenets the riot grrrls fought for—the right to safe, legal, on-demand abortion—is no longer the law of the land. But also, I can believe it. I have to. The stage has been set for this for months, for years; the Republican war on trans bodies and lives led us to this, and it won’t stop here. If I want to help, to fight, to donate and support and make my advocacy as intersectional as possible, I need to stay angry; but how long can you boil without spilling over?
If I had to channel the sum total of what I’m feeling post-Roe down to one hope, it would be this: Please let my someday, longed-for daughters evolve past the punk-feminist reference points of my youth. Let them find my old copy of Girls to the Front, highlighted and underlined and filled with postcards and old receipts and photos of me and my friends at our first pro-choice demonstrations, and wonder what it is we were fighting for. Please, God, let them not have to fight these same old battles, over and over again. I hope the incandescent rage of the riot grrrls makes no sense to them, but unless we act—soon, and together, and primarily on behalf of the many marginalized people to whom losing fundamental rights is nothing new—I fear it will.
