WE’LL NAME HER MINNIE PEARL, JUST YOU AND ME…: I finally sat down last night and pulled together some random thoughts about the DC punk scene when I was in it–about 1993-1996. This particular part of the scene was bounded on one side by Positive Force/Fugazi (whose music I never liked), on the other by Riot Grrrl/Bikini Kill/Bratmobile/etc. I haven’t tried to organize these thoughts because, well, I didn’t have time; but I thought someone out there might want to know what it was like. So here’s what I noticed. I still like this a lot.

The good stuff about that slice of the DC punk scene: DIY. There is no better preparation for life than the knowledge that you can Do It Yourself. Zines, records, t-shirts, clothes, music, instruments (anybody got a length of plastic tubing?), news, food, charities (not that that word was ever used), festivals, posters–you could make ‘most anything. The DIY attitude fosters a sense of responsibility–instead of carping about the people who make things in the world, you become the people who make things. You have to take the criticism for what you make; you do the work; your reward is that there’s something out there that looks the way you made it look. Robert Bork’s phrase (which you’d never hear in this scene!) for this was, “Wreak yourself upon the world.”

Riot Grrrl did an incredible service by helping young women talk about and heal after sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. I learned a lot about the horrible things people do to one another. RG helped a lot of people take back their lives. “Break the silence” is not a cliche–it’s what happened. On a related note, I met some incredibly strong people through the punk scene–people who had come through terrible experiences with toughness and grace. (I later met some similar people in the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy… things change.)

There was a lot of openness to non-punk kids, music, etc. There wasn’t (much of) the cliqueishness and self-righteous superior attitude a lot of people associate with punk. Not that it was never there, just that it was really not a big part of my experience.

Now, the other stuff…: Asceticism. The whole “straight edge” thing (no sex no drugs no alcohol; usually no meat) gave me an allergy to the word “purity” that it took me a while to shake. sXe (=straight edge) was good insofar as it helped kids (mostly but by no means exclusively boys) reject the sex-and-consumption mentality fed to them by TV and mainstream society–especially the hothouse society of high school. The downsides included: an inaccurate understanding of why sexual purity was despised and selfishness exalted in our society–everything was blamed on Capitalism, the personification of evil; and a lack of any sense of moderation–you were impure if you drank a beer for crying out loud. Pleasures weren’t really given up for anything; sXe was primarily against things rather than in favor of things. (You could see this super-clearly in the anarchowhateverist politics of sXe.)

Riot Grrrl: sex-abuse survivors + sexual tension + sexual “liberation” = sometimes a really bad scene.

“Look at me, don’t look at me–look at me, how dare you look at me?!–look at me…” Punks would dress in really out-there ways (and chicks, especially outside the sXe scene, would dress in really provocative ways–I had this tiger-print skirt that was more safety-pins and hope than fabric…) but would get indignant if anyone reacted to their clothes. I mean, what? If you wear a cheerleading skirt and a baby-doll tee, I don’t care what it says on it–“MAN-HATER” or “STOP LOOKING AT MY CHEST” are exactly as provocative as “BABY” or “PRINCESS.” There was a lot of naivete, especially among the women, about how people would react to us. Women played up our vulnerability in order to make a feminist point; we assumed other people correctly interpreted our deliberately ambiguous gestures–and then flipped out if people misread our signals. This happened in more areas than just clothing.

An attempt to acknowledge the harm done to people because of their race, ethnicity, class, etc. became an exercise in learned weakness. Instead of taking the attitude that, look, there’s racism/sexism/whatever out there and it sucks, so you’d better be ready to deal with it, punk-types instead obsessively cultivated their oppressions. Every insensitive remark was an indication of the huge crushing heteropatriarchy, and so, I think, small annoyances became much more hurtful than they needed to be. Cultivating one’s sensitivity to being dissed (as opposed to cultivating a sensitivity about when you might be dissing others) makes it almost impossible to function in the workaday world. You can’t get much done if you thin your own skin.

Oh, and the political and religious views were the essence of conformity.

So you can see how all this was great preparation for college–much better than my guidance counselor….