Quiet riot: how UK Riot Grrrls missed the point

Refusing to talk to journalists is always a risky strategy, as any Old Labour heavyweight will confirm.

Withholding the official line as “punishment” to newspapers for inconvenient stories may be tempting, but it’s always best to get your point across. The alternative - assuming that “no comment” will mean no story - is laughable. Like it or not, if the subject is newsworthy enough, journalists will write about it, with or without you. You lose.

The long-forgotten Riot Grrrl movement of the early 1990s made this mistake, at least in the UK. It was hopeful and admirable, albeit shambolic. It was useful if only as a means of enabling women to go to gigs without getting squashed. It wasn’t afraid to label itself as feminist. The D-I-Y music was of questionable quality, but was spiky and good-natured enough to be passable, which was OK because the message, rather than the music, was the point.

But the bands took themselves too seriously. Grrrls’ favourite Huggy Bear refused to talk to the music press and even took the totalitarian step of trying to ban journalists from gigs. For all their sloganeering and posturing, the band’s silence made them (and in turn, the entire Riot Grrrl movement) appear paranoid, humourless and inarticulate.

Women of a more outward bent, though initially receptive to Riot Grrrl, soon lost patience. The Grrrls suffered the indignity of Courtney Love dismissing them as them as “a little pack of oestrogen lemmings”.

Niki from Huggy Bear eventually offered this explanation for the band’s self-imposed silence, in a 1994 interview to journalist Amy Raphael: “We recognised early on that the journalist/popstar dialogue is a complex system of mythologies and identifications to do with fake hierarchies which connect preferences of desirability via the kinds of photos which are used to represent you or how much space is given to each member of a band in an interview”.

Well that explains it, then. Or at least, it demonstrates why non-journalists need journalists. It also explains why the Spice Girls didn’t bother getting to grips with Riot Grrrls’ weighty philosophy before getting started on their big adventure.

Towards the end of 2007, Black Dog published what it hoped would be the definitive history of Riot Grrrl. In journalistic terms, the movement is ripe for re-examination, not least because its original members are coming up to comfortable middle age. The book’s arrival should have seen a flurry of features about Riot Grrrl in the broadsheets and the music press – a mini retrospective – but it was met with a deafening silence.

Riot Grrrl was feminism’s greatest missed opportunity. Thanks, Grrrls, for nothing.

Beyond irony

Why do women’s magazines make their readers miserable? Last week, Women in Journalism highlighted how the websites of magazines aimed at girls as young as 10 were using “lads’ mags tactics” by encouraging readers to upload photos of themselves in order to rate their own and others bodies.

The campaign group pointed to Bliss magazine, whose website ran a feature encouraging teenagers to rate their own thighs, legs and breasts with the options “happy”, “hate ‘em” and “ewwww”.

The tactic is nothing new. It’s been 17 years since Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth convinced us that the cosmetics industry’s relationship with women’s magazines was symbiotic. The magazines hack away at their readers’ self-confidence in order to create a market for the “solutions” – the products their advertisers sell. Most women's magazine readers know this and accept it for the ludicrous exchange that it is, but such sophistication is a lot to ask of 10 year-olds.

What is new is the casual acceptance of body rating, among both readers and editorial staff. A whole generation of young journalists working on Bliss and its clones presumably regard such features as acceptable. And why wouldn’t they, given that they have grown up with lads’ mag “irony” and a belief that feminism is not of use to them.