CONTROVERSIAL OPINIONS ABOUT RIOT GRRRL PUNK

RIOT GRRRL PUNK

Riot girl

[noun]

a member of a movement of young feminists associated with aggressive punk-style rock music.

It has come to my attention that the views about the riot grrrl movement are pretty contradictory in the punk community. Most of the disagreements start with people simply not acknowledging the fact that riot grrrl "counts" or "is a valid part of" the punk music scene.

I find this quite peculiar. It's as if people don't know the history of either the riot grrrl punk movement, or the feminist movement, or both.

In my opinion, there's a possibility of this bias against feminism-based punk be rooted in sexism. They don't acknowledge women's rights as enough of an issue to require or "deserve" a place in the community the same way anti-governmental, anarchist movements do. To put it plainly, this sucks ass. I wouldn't be saying anything new or revolutionary if I stated that inner divisions and disagreements do nothing but harm ANY community, not just punk. Anti-feminism ideologies have basically the exact same results as homophobia, racism, etc - it causes segregation within groups and overall makes everything unenjoyable for everyone.

As in most cases, the root of this issue is misinformation, or lack of information entirely. If nobody knows the fundamentals of the riot grrrl punk, they obviously won't respect it. And even if they know the fundamentals of riot grrrrl, they won't realize the significance of it unless they're familiar with the concept of feminism, especially not if they have the primitive viewpoint of "feminism = bad".

Usually, when you read "articles" like this, the writer has a goal - a plan of action. To be quite frank with the readers of this blog, I don't know what I'm trying to achieve by writing this. In the long run, my words hold no significance.

I think all we can do, for now, is to just educate more people about the issue. I guess that's all I'm aiming for on this post. These harmful mindsets really hurt the integrity of the scene, I've even heard riot grrrl be referred to as corporate or an industry plant, for fuck's sake! Anyways, if you haven't tried listening to riot grrrl punk yet, you're missing out ;)

Thank you for reading!

- xoxovampira