We’re Not Here to Be Patriarchal?

Beyond the Dude-centric Approach to Punk

You can learn a lot about punk from Kevin Mattson’s We’re Not Here to Entertain—a lot about men in punk. Like many men I’ve met over the years, Mattson unfortunately takes the position that punk died or “broke” right around the time they stopped being punk, right around the time they “grew up” and went to college or had to get a “real” job. In his preface, Mattson writes, “I no longer inhabit whatever is left of the ‘punk rock world'” (xiv), his use of the word “left” reducing those who marched on after him to part of some waning, gasping, air-quotes space. Yet just as, in his words, “punk died or became a high-priced commodity” (9) in the early 1980s, my best friend Nicole Lopez and I were growing up in a town of 700 people, most of whom voted for Ronald Reagan, the other subject of Mattson’s book; we had just started listening to punk and were making plans to start our own band: a very angry, all-girl punk band called Bitch Fight. The end of this aging man’s punk story marked the beginning of our own. Moreover, Mattson’s book overlooks the issue of feminism and the backlash against it as key to formations of punk in the 1980s beyond the dude-centric portrayal he offers.

In fact, around 1984, un monton de other women in punk in the US began starting their own bands too. Inspired by first wave English punk singer Poly Styrene’s powerful voice and performance in X-Ray Spex and women-fronted bands in the US such as la mera mera, The Bags, and The Avengers (and the women hidden among men in bands, such as Kiera Rosseler of Black Flag, Jane Weems of The Maggots and Polkacide, and Debra La Rue Cooper of Voicefarm) women (and queer folks too) did not give up on punk. They didn’t fixate on its worrisome commodification. They did not declare it dead. Nor did we subscribe to the fallacious, black-and-white notion that some people making money off punk meant it was over. Or that making a living from music meant we could not still be political or take it even more underground. In fact, while conservative America ramped up its backlash against the feminist movement, those of us who understood that punk was not just an object or an aesthetic but rather an attitude—a liberating ethos that permeates all aspects of our lives—began to pick up guitars, drumsticks, and microphones, cut our hair short, quit shaving our underarms, reject the expected Beauty standards of the male gaze, and play music that, at the time, no one anywhere would dare consider marketable.

It was during the well-documented backlash against the women’s movement in the 1980s, the historical backdrop of Mattson’s book, that increasing numbers of women in punk began taking more active roles in their respective scenes: booking punk tours, writing zines, and starting their own bands—stepping out from the shadows of men. This was an era when President Reagan opposed the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. As Susan Faludi reported in her book Backlash, Reagan contended that women had come so far that he did not need to do things such as appoint them to higher office.[1] He also purported to believe that forcing women back into traditional roles as housewives doing unwaged labor would improve official unemployment numbers.[2] Overall, as Françoise Coste argues, “Reagan’s popularity with women, which was already low to start with, plummeted (he was on average between 15% to 23% less popular among women than among men). This disaffection was interestingly due less to Reagan’s old opposition to the ERA than to his stances on concrete everyday life issues.”[3] For me personally, and for by Bitch Fight bandmate Nicole Lopez, these everyday issues were things such as calling our moms “welfare queens,” reducing aid to dependent families, and driving many single-parent families even further below the poverty line. Nicole’s mom stretched her income by living rent free with her widowed mother, and my mom supplemented hers by peddling recreational substances to her friends. Reagan’s backlash against women shamed them for working outside the home and yet also cut the welfare benefits to single mothers who needed aid to stay home with their children.

As Faludi noted, mainstream media of the 1980s declared feminism dead, but this was possibly more wishful thinking than an accurate portrayal. As she wrote, “Just when record numbers of younger women were supporting feminist goals in the mid-80s (more of them, in fact, than old women) and a majority of all women were calling themselves feminists, the media declared the advent of a younger ‘postfeminist generation’ that supposedly reviled the women’s movement.”[4] Meanwhile, women in punk, such as the members of the band Frightwig, critiqued Reagan-era patriarchy from a feminist angle. Their song “Crazy World” on the 1986 album Faster Fright Wig, Kill, Kill, Kill invokes ideas from feminist anti-nuke crusader Dr. Helen Caldicott’s’s book Missile Envy (Caldicott, as Mattson notes in We’re Not Here to Entertain, sobered President Regan to the implications of nuclear escalation with the Soviet Union in a face-to-face meeting at the White House in 1984). The lyrics to “Crazy World” are:

How come a missile looks like a cock?

How come the world is so messed up?

Why can’t love turn out to be true?

Show me a man that’s not just a Stooge

It’s a crazy, crazy world we live in.

In the song, Frightwig are making the personal political and the political personal by associating the threat of nuclear war by power hungry men with the fact that they are also toxic and disappointing at home too. One could argue that Frightwig are making a link (never made by Mattson) between Reagan-era foreign policy and Reagan-era anti-feminist agendas.

Similarly, my own band, Bitch Fight, released a song written around 1988 and released on a cassette compilation in 1994. With its satirical lyrics and snotty vocal performance, “Dumb Bitch In Love” rejects the paradigm that causes women to believe that they must be dependent on men to survive. It is a critique both of men who want us to feel this way and the women who internalize this sense of dependency:

Oh, baby, now you’re gone

And you know now I just can’t go on

You said our love would never die

Now I just sit at home and cry

boo hoo

I can’t sleep. I can’t eat

I can’t put socks on my own two feet

I always thought you’d be here, now I just drink another beer

Ooh, baby, now you’re gone….

The three founding members of Bitch Fight—Sue Carny, Nicole Lopez, and I—were all daughters of Reagan’s so-called “welfare queens.” We left Tuolumne in 1987 and played one of our first shows in the Bay Area with Frightwig, whose members were older, witchier, and even less apologetic about being women in punk than we were. With their sky-high ratted hair and screeching sonics, they taunted all those who dared to police the ways women were supposed to act or sound.

Ronald Reagan’s voice is even sampled for the opening of this collection of songs by bands from the suburbs and small towns of California. A slightly younger sounding, but still grandfatherly voice of Reagan can be heard saying, “What they will say a hundred years from now depends on how we keep our rendezvous with destiny. Will we do the things that we know must be done and know that one day down in history a hundred years, or perhaps before, someone will say thank god for those people in the 1980s.”[5] By including the Reagan clip, compilation producer Aaron Cometbus directed the anger and different socio-political concerns of the bands toward the paternalistic patriarchy of the Reagan administration. While himself a man and only 19 years old at the time, Cometbus was able to make a connection to the feminist themes of the Bitch Fight song (written by girls raised by women scorned by men), which railed against all patriarchies, large and small.

Mattson’s history of punk in the United States during the early 1980s rightfully attempts to shift our focus us away from mainstream stereotypes about punk at the time to politics, however it continues to perpetuate the idea that punk was primarily made for and by men and boys. In so doing, the book only glances over the central stories of women in punk and it practically ignores feminism all together. Out of its 291 pages, the book’s index only points to feminism being mentioned eight times and not one of the mentions of feminism leads to a developed discussion by the author of how feminism inspired increased active participation by women in the punk scene. In one instance, Mattson likens feminism to “personal politics” (207) without ever making an explicit connection between the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s and the personal politics of 1980s punk scenes or the women who pushed them forward. The lack of a clear focus on women in punk and/or feminism in a book about punk during the Reagan era is a curious omission by a historian, but it is part and parcel of the patriarchy of punk, the seductive allure of equating the public sphere of punk, performative anger, violence, and politics solely with men and with socially constructed perceptions of masculinity.

And while I hate to say this, I sort of get it. Because my Bitch Fight bandmate Nicole and I lived and breathed the patriarchy of America during the 1980s, the real and manufactured maleness of punk seemed normal to us too. Male punk rock participants were the standard by which all was measured even though this construction of masculinity clashed almost completely with the matriarchal reality of our households, where we were raised by women with strong opinions and sturdy do-it-yourself constitutions. And like so many other women and queer folks who are not at all difficult to document (think of L7, Fire Party, Yeastie Girlz, Seven Year Bitch, Tribe 8), we did start our own band in 1985 after punk reportedly died according to Mattson. Given the patriarchal norms that dominated not just Reagan’s America, but punk too, it’s not hard to see why we didn’t want any dudes in our group. Mattson misses this in his book. It’s all been documented here and there, hiding in plain sight, yet a historical study that makes visible all the ways punk was inspired by feminist politics and shaped by women and queer folks remains to be written.