Rock & Roll Freakshow

i love you in the strongest way there is

"Being in this urban jungle, I was a different type of girl. I was hearing what they were saying, but I was living in an environment where people were getting stabbed. Riot Grrrl felt like a bubblegum expression. I was bald, and I would get a lot of negative attention that bordered on violence, so I wasn't in the world of [baby voice] 'You just think I can't play because I'm a girl!'

and this one by laronda davis:

"I never looked at a magazine and thought that that was what I was supposed to look like. On one hand, it's actually kind of liberating to not be what this standard of womanhood is. That standard put a lot of women in boxes, and they spend their li[ves] trying to get out of the box. Black women were never allowed in the box. I wasn't looking at TV saying, 'Oh, that represents me.' I wasn't listening to music telling about my experience. I had experiences that told me I wasn't concerned with these things that the happy songs were about."

(article here)

all in all i think what riot grrrl needs to change is its idea of a universal female childhood in their songs that we can all relate to. it kind of sucks to say but really all women do have in common are the stereotypes we're given, and when punk women criticized and defied those stereotypes they really shone; i was reading that people called kathleen hanna writing "slut" on her stomach white feminism and i was like....err. sexualization is something all women are subjected to. i've just been in a bit of a rabbit hole which started when i researched the history of trans people in riot grrrl, then to modern times when i found a claim that kathleen hanna had stopped using the line "all girls to the front" and edited her riot grrrl manifesto, and finally ended here with me thinking "man, riot grrrl's spirit is needed now more than ever, but like we need to make it WAAAAYYY better so it actually works out". the good news is, like i said, it hasn't actually faded out of mainstream consciousness.