Oh bondage up yours! The early punk movement--and the women who made it rock

Off Our Backs, Nov/Dec 2002 by Lee, Michelle

review

In the late 1970s, a musical insurrection exploded. In both New York and London, teenagers reacted to economic oppression and the musical and cultural excesses of the '70s and did what teenagers for generations had done: rebelled.

They picked up instruments they barely knew how to play and taught themselves quickly. They tossed together a few chords, harsh vocals and a quick tempo to form bands that rapidly garnered fans. They, with the advent of stores like "Sex" in London donned clothing specifically designed to piss off the overadorned mainstream. They were sarcastic and mocked conventions of mainstream society that people rarely before questioned. They spoke of anarchy, riots, sexism and war as well as romance and friends. They had the audacity to curse on TV. They brought the safety-pin piercing, the dog-chain jewelry and the spray-painted circle-A (for anarchy) into the vernacular. In effect, they created a revolution that still has a lasting impact on music and culture today.

But to whom are these feats attributed in collective memory? Look up late '70s/early '80s punk on a search engine, or excavate the reaches of your memory, and chances are, it's a spiky-haired boy sneering back at you. In popular culture, "punk" photos are the requisite pictures of Sex Pistols Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious; and Clash frontman Joe Strummer get his fair share of photos; and so on with images of men sporting tousled hair and ripped t-shirts.

And you ask-where were the women? Weren't they involved in punk, too?

Answer: They were as much a part of the punk movement as the men, but as so often happens with history, they are remembered much less than their male counterparts.

Even in this supposedly-liberated movement, it wasn't easy to be a woman in the early punk scene of the late '70s and early '80s. Although many punks had progressive politics, internalized gender bias was harder to eradicate. In a scene that is best remembered for tough-guy attitude and a heroin addict (Vicious) who purportedly killed his girlfriend, women had the tough task of both proving themselves and representing the musicianhood of womankind.

When men wore the ripped, tight, dominatrix-inspired outfits characteristic of early punk, they were simply subverting the system-but when women donned similar attire, along with heavy black eyeliner, it became an excuse for sexual harassment.

Female punks were often talked of as sex symbols, "journalistic" criticism speaking of their physique as well as their music. At shows, women musicians were ridiculed, targeted for thrown projectiles, and encouraged to strut their sex appeal by the men in the crowd.

Despite the adversity, though, women triumphed, carving out spaces for feminist politics and creating some of the best music of the late '70s/early '80s punk movement.

Their anger, in itself, was an expression of feminism, as this aggression ran counter to how girls were taught to act. Female musicians showing their rage or biting sarcasm publicly helped to subvert gender roles in both the punk scene and the mainstream. It was certainly feminist when women punk musicians got up in front of hostile crowds to both prove they could play well and, for bands like Crass, X-Ray Spex, and the Raincoats, to offer salient feminist politics in lyric form. After all, lyrics like "Some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard... But I say oh bondage, up yours!" got their point across loud and clear.

Playing music was not the only means of expression for women in punk; they opened doors into other crucial parts of the scene as well. Many women, such as Caroline Coon and Julie Burchill, wrote articles and books about punk, documenting the movement in both photos and words. Coon also managed one of the bestknown punk bands of all time, the Clash. Another woman, Vivienne Westwood, was one of the masterminds of punk fashion.

In many ways, this expression of feminism strikes me as the first stirrings of third wave feminism, a feminism of the '80s and beyond more steeped in music and pop culture than that of previous generations. It was certainly a foreshadowing of one of the best examples of 3rd wave feminism: the riot grrrl movement a decade later, when women once again took a stand against a male-dominated music movement to carve out their own spaces.

This notion of punk lifestyle as feminist is further explained in Coon's commentary on the all-female band the Slits in her book 1988. Even though the Slits explicitly refused to comment about feminism, they still posed a definite threat to defined gender roles.

"What they represent is a revolutionary and basic shift of female ego from one which is biologically defined to one which is made strong by an assertive, mainstream role in society. Thus they are far more threatening than the male musicians they are touring with," Coon wrote.

Following are four of my favorite recordings from

the late '70s|early '80s punk era, essentials for any feminist's punk collection. This is by no means a comprehensive list, though - just a sampling of the dozens of great bands out there.