I remember my father’s confusion when, in the mid-Nineties, the incoming tide of Britpop resurrected all the things from his teenage years. After decades of punk, synthesizers and acid house, suddenly his teenage daughter and her mates were all into the Beatles and the Beach Boys, Mod parkas, Minis, and minis, and The Italian Job.
“Why are you digging up all of our old stuff?” he would half-complain, half-jeer, as Carnaby Street started to “swing” again, and men I knew scoured vintage shops to, very possibly, buy the old trousers he’d given away in 1969. “The point was that, when we were doing it, it was new: we were rebelling against our parents. You guys can’t rebel by doing something old. You can’t have nostalgia and pretend it’s new.”
But of course, it felt new to us – we hadn’t worn these clothes, or had these haircuts, or written songs on these guitars before.
And, more than that, it was useful to us: digging up all those mid-Sixties tropes of optimism, and Britain being cool, was a shortcut to fighting back against grunge’s American gloom. It jump-started the charts being flooded by these confident, young, working-class Brits – Blur, Pulp, Oasis.
If their starting point was indeed the Kinks and Revolver and – in Pulp’s case – black-and-white kitchen sink dramas, well, by the end, they’d made something completely unique and of the times. If you’re creative, there’s no such thing as “stealing” from another era – you’re just picking up a ball thrown in the air by a previous generation, and playing a new game with it. You’re looking for a bit of unfinished business that abuts with what you want to do now. You’re planting some unused seeds.
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And so to the present day – where, with absolute predictability, I found myself silently complaining/jeering that my teenage daughters were getting into my teenage stuff. Last year, the music I heard booming from their room suddenly shifted. Previously, they’d been into grime and R&B, which I liked. It made me feel like I was keeping up with the times, as I harrowingly began conversations along the lines of, “Ooooh, I like this Dave/Skepta/Little Simz/Stormzy! They’ve got great flow. They are spitting bars!”
Now, suddenly, all they were playing were my feminist punk groups of the early Nineties. Hole, Babes in Toyland, L7, Bikini Kill.
“I’ve got my AAA pass from when I went on tour with Hole in 1993,” I said, crudely trying to make myself look cool by inserting myself into their new fandom. “Look – here’s a picture of me and Courtney Love! But – why are you into all this old stuff?”
By this point, my youngest was using up all the colour ink in my printer, printing out page after page of pictures of Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna – “GIRL POWER” scrawled over her soft belly, in Sharpie – to put on the wall next to the lyrics of her Double Dare Ya: “Hey girlfriend/ I got a proposition goes something like this:/ Dare ya to do what you want!/ Dare ya to be who you will!/ Dare ya to cry right out loud!”
“I just like them,” she said, watching the Kathleen Hanna documentary The Punk Singer for the seventh time. “She is my hero.”
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It’s only in the past few months that I’ve realised why my girls were getting into the whole, “old” Riot Grrrl movement: as always, it’s because it is useful to them.
By now, everyone will have seen the reports about sexual harassment and abuse in schools: what started as a pupil-led whistle-blowing at the country’s top private schools – Latymer, Eton, Westminster, St Paul’s, Highgate – is now sweeping through every education sector, public or private. All the schools named have launched an investigation into the allegations. Former pupil Soma Sara, 22, opened a website called Everyone’s Invited, where former and current pupils could tell their stories of misogyny, harassment and assault at school, and has already gathered more than 10,000 individual cases, with the numbers rising, in the hundreds, every day.
Simon Bailey, head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, has warned that this is just “the tip of the iceberg”, and that he expects this wave of revelations will “dwarf” the Jimmy Savile scandal, or the number of victims in the Football Association abuse probe.
“I think it is the next big child sexual abuse scandal to hit the country,” he said. “It will go right across the whole of the education sector – private schools, state schools and universities.”
I have two young girls – one still at school; one now finished with education. Did they experience an atmosphere of misogyny, intimidation, cat-calling, harassment, abuse and assault? Oh yes. All of these. All of these.
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Here are all the useless, pointless things you can say when your daughter comes home, weeping, telling you about the sexually criminal acts committed by fellow pupils – the seemingly nice young men you’ve had in your house, and served pasta to, and chatted about Marvel movies with.
“Let’s contact the school now, and the police: this is a crime and it must be reported.”
“No, no! They’ll know it’s me, and it will just make things worse.”
“That boy will be expelled. He won’t be there to make things worse.”
“It’s not just one boy, though – you’d have to expel ten boys. And then you’d still be left with the boys who didn’t do anything and can’t be expelled – but who laughed at the jokes, or shoved you in the corridor, or pretended you didn’t exist, or who spread rumours about you. There are too many to do anything about it. It’s OK. I’ll just carry on.”
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“Let me come into school, then – let me have a private word with these boys. Let me scare them.”
“No! No! That would be the worst thing – having to get your mum to sort out your problems! That makes me look like a baby!”
“Let me contact their mothers, then. Their mothers would be horrified.”
“No – that will make the boys angry.”
I am stumped, for a minute.
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“Well, you need to fight back, darling. Get together with the other girls. Organise. Change things. Smash the patriarchy. Start a feminist revolution.”
She looks at me – as if I have said the wildest, stupidest thing ever.
“But what does that mean?” she says, eventually. “That’s just something you say on Instagram. I have to catch the train in 20 minutes. How do I actually start a feminist revolution?”
And she stands there – 17, so clever, so bright, already someone who has fought so many battles; and now another one, even while she still has a teddy bear in her bed.
Last week, we watched the new Amy Poehler movie, Moxie, on Netflix. It’s about a 16-year-old girl at a school awash with misogyny, harassment and abuse, whose mother tells her, “Fight back!”
And she, too, does not know how – until she finds a suitcase in the basement, containing her mother’s teenage years: her Bikini Kill records, her Huggy Bear posters and her feminist, Riot Grrrl fanzines.
She listens to the records – it’s the first time she’s heard loud, sweaty female fury, of which there is not much in 2021’s world of lavish, sexy pop, or else sad, whispering singer-songwriters. It gives her energy. It allows her to feel her anger.
She reads the fanzines – which tell you how to start a feminist revolution at school. And so, secretly, anonymously, she starts her own fanzine, Moxie!, leaving it in the ladies’ toilets, where it gets passed around like contraband.
“Draw hearts and stars on your hands with Sharpies, to show you’re with us and want change,” Moxie! says. And so all the other angry, silenced girls start to secretly identify each other and realise – they are the majority.
Girls with big breasts are told by teachers that they must “cover up” their vest tops, even though it’s summer – or else be expelled. Moxie! says, “Girls, this Wednesday, we all wear vest tops. They can’t expel us all!” They all turn up in vest tops. The school changes the dress code.
Moxie! steps it up: “Girls, post your stories of harassment, or abuse, anonymously. And then, on Thursday, we all walk out, until they are investigated.”
The stories flood in – there is a mass walkout. Finally, the police become involved. The happy ending is a big, messy feminist party, where children play Bikini Kill’s Rebel Girl and everyone dances. The school has been mended. The girls are now free.
The timing is exquisite – I cannot be the only Nineties feminist mother who has been telling her girls, uselessly, to “fight back”; Moxie is a step-by-step manual for how you actually do that. It’s a feminist recipe book for how to organise collective protest; a new Girl Bible. It’s also an absolute feel-good, hilarious blast – this is no heavy, fibrous lecture. It’s a perfect piece of pop culture – able to wear its lessons lightly because it picks up where Riot Grrrl left off. It’s a piece of unfinished business that abuts, perfectly, with what young women need now.
The week before we watched this movie, my daughter had decided that she could not go to school any more – “I’m tired of fighting this, every day. I feel so alone.”
The day after we watched it, I found her in her room, getting dressed for school, in a vest top and Doc Martens. She had hearts and flowers drawn on her hand.
“I’m meeting all the other girls after school,” she said. Shouted – as she was listening to Bikini Kill so loudly. “We’re writing a list – of everything that’s happened. We’re starting a feminist revolution.”