Girl on Girl

Chapter 1

Girl Power, Boy Rage

Music and Feminism in the 1990s

I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate.
Joni Mitchell (2004)

When will this caveboy shit end?
dream hampton (1991)

In 2003, the music critic Jessica Hopper published an essay in Punk Planet titled "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't," detailing the alienation she felt from one of the most influential artistic genres of the era. "Girls in emo songs today do not have names," she wrote. "Our actions are portrayed solely through the detailing of neurotic self-entanglement of the boy singer-our region of personal power, simply, is our impact on his romantic life. We're vessels redeemed in the light of boy-love. On a pedestal, on our backs."

Many of us could sense this dynamic at the time, even if we couldn't quite rationalize it. What Hopper was articulating about emo was true of much music in the aughts: The most popular anthems of the decade were sticky, leaden strip-club soundtracks, full of rote clichés about male sexual prowess and devious, grasping women. In my late teens and twenties, I danced in clubs to Sisqó's "Thong Song," Christina Aguilera's "Dirrty," and 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P." without realizing that something had shifted. It's impossible to analyze millennial culture without first going back to the 1990s, where flash points in music would uncannily anticipate and inform what was coming. During that decade, music was the site of some of our most crucial battles over sex, power, and feminism. It was where provocateurs and rebels came to play and to protest. Women in music in the 1990s were angry and abrasive and thrillingly powerful. And then, just like that, they were gone-replaced by girls. The backlash that banished them would reverberate across all forms of media, so relentlessly and persuasively that people of my generation would hardly think to notice what we'd lost.

At the tail end of 1990, Madonna released a video to accompany her new single, "Justify My Love," that set the tone for the coming decade: audacious, wildly sexual, a little bit trollish. The song was a hypnotic, trip-hoppy declaration of lust; the video was a conceptual, wildly sexual exploration of fantasy and desire that detonated pre-internet popular discourse. Madonna, shot in black-and-white, is seen walking down a hotel hallway toward an assignation, limping slightly in heels and a black raincoat, clutching her head as if in pain. As she passes different doorways, we see fleeting glimpses of the people occupying various rooms, watching us watch them. The star is joined by her lover (played by her real-life boyfriend at the time, the amiable lunk Tony Ward); a man laces a woman into a rubber corset; a dancer in a unitard contorts into shifting positions; Ward watches Madonna with another partner, his expression a picture. More people arrive; Ward gets trussed up in fetish netting; everyone tests the amorphous boundaries of sexuality, gender, and dominance. Finally, Madonna puts on her coat and leaves, laughing, renewed and jubilant, no longer tired.

The brazen, unnerving sexuality of the video was the whole point. By the end of that year, the AIDS epidemic had claimed more than 120,000 lives in the United States, one-fifth of which were in New York, the epicenter of fashion, art, music, media, and advertising. Cultural anxiety regarding the idea that sex could literally kill you had led to two wildly divergent schools of thought in media. One, nicknamed the New Traditionalism, preached a revival of old-fashioned family values, where women went home and stayed there. (The 1987 movie Fatal Attraction made this fear of a corrupted American culture literal, in the form of Glenn Close's sexually adventurous, bunny-boiling career woman, the fling who won't be flung.) The other, the New Voyeurism, embraced sex, but as a spectator sport. "At a time when doing it has become excessively dangerous, looking at it, reading about it, thinking about it have become a necessity," a Newsweek feature on Madonna declared in 1992. "AIDS has pushed voyeurism from the sexual second tier . . . into the front row."

For the rest of the 1990s, culture would be shaped by the push-pull of these two opposing forces. The New Traditionalism and the New Voyeurism seemed at odds, but both were essentially promising women the same thing: that fulfillment and prosperity lie in catering to men's desires. Music, though, was where women were pushing back. The "Justify My Love" video reads now as a brazen affirmation of sexual freedom in a turbulent era. But there was a twist. The subject of the video was Madonna-the fantasies, the imagery, the pleasure all hers. If it was alienating to men, or to mainstream audiences, she didn't care. The video ended with words on a screen: "Poor is the man / Whose pleasures depend / On the permission of another."

Madonna must have anticipated mass outrage, and she got it. But she also helped ignite a sex-positive wave of music that put women's desires front and center. In 1993, Janet Jackson released Janet, a silky, carnal record all about lust. The video for her track "Any Time, Any Place" teases the same voyeuristic impulses at play in "Justify My Love"; people spy on each other through peepholes and letterboxes and an elderly neighbor looks on, disapprovingly, as Jackson pushes her lover's head down while he's on top of her-a revolutionary assertion of sexual power and equality that would later be echoed in videos and lyrics by TLC, Mary J. Blige, and Lil' Kim.

At the time, music videos were still a novel art form. The 1990s predilection for voyeurism wasn't just a response to AIDS: Images became more ubiquitous and more freighted because consumers now had the ability to watch music as well as listen to it. When MTV launched in 1981, it turned the nature of pop and rock stardom inside out. What you looked like as an artist became, overnight, as crucial as the sound you made. Artists such as Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, and Tina Turner, whose unique aesthetics made them immediately recognizable on-screen, flourished in the new medium. But Madonna and Jackson both also seemed to recognize all the ways in which video made women targets. Twelve days after the launch of MTV, Duran Duran began production on the video for "Girls on Film," a six-minute short in which topless models had pillow fights, mud wrestled, kissed, poured champagne over each other's breasts, and straddled an oversized pole covered in shaving cream-adapting hokey sexist imagery for a new technological era.

Madonna's and Jackson's videos openly challenged the idea of women's performing for men's pleasure. In the 1986 video for "Open Your Heart," which incorporates a vast nude painting by the Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka, Madonna played a peep-show dancer in front of an audience of leering, dead-eyed onlookers. The following year, a study found that while rock videos were "cable's first real contribution to entertainment programming on television," the majority of videos shown on MTV depicted women as sex objects or two-dimensional stereotypes. Madonna was more pro-sex than possibly anyone else alive, but for her, sexuality was synonymous with power. Her 1992 coffee-table erotica book Sex was another manifestation of her fantasies: surreal in parts, kinky in others, sometimes outright comical. The author Mary Gabriel argues that it "may have been the first major book of female sexual imagery ever published that was not created to titillate a heterosexual man." And yet the message the entertainment industry would end up taking away from the book was that it was sexual-and that it sold, and sold, and sold.


In some ways, the story of what happened to the feminist movement during the 1990s can be told by tracing the evolution of a single slogan. In 1991, Kathleen Hanna was in Olympia, Washington, in her final semester of college, preoccupied with the fanzine she was making for her punk band, Bikini Kill. Hanna had been reading some of the feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan’s work on adolescent girlhood, confidence, and resistance and was brainstorming titles for her next zine with Bikini Kill’s drummer, Tobi Vail. “Let’s put a word with ‘girl’ that doesn’t usually go with ‘girl,’” Hanna recalls suggesting in her 2024 autobiography, Rebel Girl.

"Power," Vail replied. "Girl Power."

By the end of the 1990s, Girl Power would be a universally familiar slogan, and yet the more it was recited, the less it seemed to stand for. Girl Power as an early-1990s ideology was intensely, intentionally political. It filtered punk's rage through lived experience, demanding more space and respect for women at live shows and throughout the industry as well as creating radical texts that often resembled-with their use of collage, drawings, and block letters-a girl's diary. One flier Hanna wrote for a Bikini Kill show featured a list of imperatives titled "The Revolution Starts Here + Now Within Each One of Us" and included exhortations such as "Resist the internalization of capitalism, the reducing of people + oneself to commodities meant to be consumed." Other contemporary zines associated with the nascent movement that would be named "riot grrrl" explored subjects such as postmodernism, bisexuality, inclusivity in feminism, and the work of the surrealist French playwright Antonin Artaud.

There was no political Teen Vogue during the 1990s. The magazine I read as a tween in the United Kingdom was Just Seventeen, a heavily consumerist, boy-obsessed glossy named after the Beatles' lyric about dating a teenager. It offered leg workouts, twenty reasons to call your crush, even explicit sex tips, but nothing about Artaud or self-commodification. The writer Olivia Laing, also growing up in Britain that decade, was luckier: They discovered riot grrrl via a blistering performance by the punk band Huggy Bear on Channel 4's The Word and immediately sent off a stamped-addressed envelope to claim their own zine. "It's easy to be dismissive about teenage girls-frivolous, vapid, superficial-but looking again at these secret texts, what I'm struck by is their intensity of thought," they wrote in The Guardian in 2018. "Early zines discuss ways to empower girls, to stay safe, to reclaim streets and mosh pits. . . . But the potential self-righteousness is undercut by an avant-garde irreverence of style. Mainstream culture is literally chopped up and rearranged, embroidered for good measure with a doodling of guns and stars."

I've always wondered why people diminish girlhood as somehow cosseted or twee, when the reality of coming-of-age as a young woman is so raw, filled with emotional violence and literal blood. Do girls not suffer enough to be taken seriously? In Rebel Girl, Hanna recounts the experiences that led her to punk activism: her abusive father, whom she and her sister once had to talk out of shooting both them and himself; an unplanned pregnancy and abortion that, because she was underage, she had to write an essay to be granted; the time her ex-boyfriend papered her college library with pictures of her naked; her experience volunteering at a women's shelter after her roommate was violently assaulted by a stranger; her time as a dancer at a gentleman's club; and her rape at the hands of an intimate friend whom she trusted. She remembers thinking that the kind of feminism she was looking for might not exist. The name "Bikini Kill" was a reference to Bikini Atoll, the coral reef in the Marshall Islands where the US government tested nuclear weapons after forcibly repatriating inhabitants. The military, Hanna writes, "taped a picture of Rita Hayworth to the side of one of the bombs, an act against Hayworth's will that left her known as a 'bombshell.'"

What charged the riot-grrrl movement from the beginning was anger at this kind of diminishment and abuse. In the late 1980s, punk music was thriving in Washington, DC, and in the Pacific Northwest, but it made little space for women and girls who felt marginalized within the music scene and unsafe in their day-to-day lives. By the early 1990s, bands such as Babes in Toyland, Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy, Excuse 17, 7 Year Bitch, and Bratmobile were coalescing as a ferocious but nebulous movement. In 1991, Hanna and Vail published the "Riot Grrrl Manifesto," arguing that visibility, encouragement, and safety were necessary for women artists to thrive, and that an "angry grrrl rock revolution" was coming that would seek "to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere." As bands toured, they disseminated this message all over the country, leading to riot-grrrl chapters nationwide.

In 1992, the Chicago Reader examined the riot-grrrl scene, noting that one of its earliest political acts wasn't a song but a list of men who date-raped women, scrawled on the wall of a restroom at Evergreen State College. The idea of secrecy-that the movement was empowered both by public expression and private discourse among its followers-was pivotal to riot grrrl's early popularity, while also contributing to its downfall. Without a formalized structure, the coalition was splintered and vulnerable to charges that it was juvenile, precious, and not sufficiently inclusive. Many punk fans felt left out: The musician Ramdasha Bikceem founded her own zine, GUNK, at the age of fifteen, where she wrote about feeling doubly excluded from both the music she loved and the riot-grrrl scene that she characterized as "white middle class punk grrrls."

By 1993, frustrated with the condescension with which riot grrrl had been portrayed in the media, Bikini Kill had stopped doing interviews, which limited riot grrrl's influence. But Hanna's "Girls to the Front" ethos also forcibly carved out space for both female punk fans and baby feminists outside the music scene, and the spirit of creativity and confession contained in zine culture would be reborn online in the years to come. By 1996, independent riot-grrrl conventions had taken place in a dozen cities across the United States, as well as in Europe and Asia, when the movement's "Girl Power" slogan was appropriated by an all-new girl band several thousand miles away.

The riot-grrrl movement and the Spice Girls were sharply at odds. Riot grrrl evolved organically out of art women were making on their own to signal their presence as an engaged, political fandom. The Spice Girls were created by a father-and-son producer team who put an ad in a trade paper announcing auditions. Riot grrrl was a creative manifestation of third-wave feminism. The Spice Girls pioneered and embodied postfeminism and its messaging: Feminism was over, having achieved all it needed to; women were free to dress and adorn themselves however they wanted; any individual choice could be empowering if someone declared it to be so; consumerism was the path to self-fulfillment. If the emerging model for pop stars was "sexy teenager," the Spice Girls were sexy women who behaved like toddlers at a wedding: grabbing things at random, spinning round and round and round, throwing food on the floor. They embodied "freedom" if you understood that concept as "total absence of impulse control." They made you want to immediately go shopping. And they talked, often, about Girl Power.