I had the privilege to watch Pratibha Parmar’s The Righteous Babes in English class today. It was basically like being thrown back to my high school days, revisiting my early-adolescence heroes: Tori Amos, Skunk Anansie, Ani DiFranco, Chrissie Hynde, Sinead O’Connor. The film heralds the power of female “rockers” and the importance of women owning their lives and expressing them through music — an artform that has the ability to be both direct and urgent.
There was an implication, however, about how important it was/is that these women were/are a part of the mainstream and how their foray into pop culture helped to educate an endless number of girls who were on their way to becoming women. While I agree with the notion of it, I have to disagree with the assumed proliferation of empowered and independent women screaming into mics while moving generations of women toward new revolutions because, well, for me it didn’t happen that way.
When I discovered the poignant genius of Tori Amos, when I first nodded in agreement with every word Ani DiFranco ever wrote, I felt like I was doing it in secret. It wasn’t something I experienced with my girlfriends; it was sought in the early days of the internet and Napster in 1999. I was curious about obscure things I had read by women writers, explored them through illegal file sharing and was thus a changed person. But see, I was lucky. I had a computer, an internet connection and enough savvy to both hear of Napster and know how to use it. How did all of the other girls have their feminist coming of age?
The film also briefly implied that feminist rockers had done their jobs, paved the way, et c’est tout. Female vocalists in the meantime have become a fetish of sorts. Even, sadly, a genre (a designation from the norm of ‘male vocalist’). And yet I can listen to all the Feist and Beth Orton and Cat Power all I want and — not to diminish their individual talents as musicians, songwriters and lyricists — but… nothing since the day I heard DiFranco’s “I’m No Heroine” has any piece of music lifted me, made me so self-aware and curious about all the other ways I was being ripped off over my physiology.
That era of my growth was at once infuriating and inspiring, always powerful. I read Ellen Willis and subscribed to Ms.; I pissed off my Catholic school teachers by taking 40 minutes too long to present my independent study topic on — what else — the importance of women’s access to contraception along with safe and legal abortions.
It’s disappointing that ‘feminist’ is still a four letter word. It’s especially disappointing that so many women are turned off by the term. I chalk it up to a lack of education, but never lack of experience. Our collective conditioning just needs to be pointed out. That’s what DiFranco and Amos did for me ten years ago.
We also need to stop hating each other. Shit.
