And Pippi Longstocking picks up the two policemen by the scruff of their blue-clad necks...
Ranting about girls, grrrls, and the seminary in Derry, Maine
The cover of Bikini Kill: A Color and Activity Book shows a cartoon sorceress—I’m pretty sure it’s Cat-Ra, from the 1980s She-Ra—conjuring up the band/zine name in her crystal ball. The band’s song “Demirep” starts with that familiar playground chant about Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black. There’s a 1996 Riot Grrrl music compilation called “Move Into the Villa Villakula,” after Pippi Longstocking’s house; my favorite song on it starts, “It was the first time I ever said a swear word.”
All of these memories are aswirl in my cartoon crystal ball because of a fun-size essay in The Cut, which I found via BD McClay and which pits feminism against “girlhood” on a, like, conceptual level:
The thing about girlhood is that it’s a before time: before puberty, before life, and, importantly, before feminism. Although in reality, girlhood can be (often disturbingly) pierced by the politics of the adult world, it’s a period that precedes those choices that feminism has always concerned itself with — choices about marriage, child raising, career building, homemaking, sex, sexuality, and caretaking. It’s also a time that’s free from the consequences of those choices. In girlhood, we’re not yet even ourselves.
This essay is extremely not the point; as Barbara notes, it’s super short and imho uninterested in sustained thinking, it’s just vibes and you’ll either vibe with it or you won’t. I didn’t, but again, not the point. I’m more interested in the thing it made me think about: the role of girlhood in the feminism I encountered first, the first and probably only feminist movement I’ve ever participated in, that Ramona the Pest of politics, Riot Grrrl.
Most of Riot Grrrl’s aesthetics were girly. Girly voices, cartoon imagery, loopy handwriting with stars or hearts over the i’s. Some of that was because of the power of contrast: a high, nasal girly voice singing about childhood sexual abuse, loopy hearts-and-flowers handwriting for a public diary entry about disordered eating. All the powerlessness that goes by the name of innocence. And, relatedly, some of that imagery was about repair. We would not have said, “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood,” because we were not trying to be constructive and were deeply uninterested in happiness (neither the eudaimonia kind nor the fun kind). But sometimes the childhood imagery was used to depict true friendship, the kind of friendship that inspires later dreams of solidarity; the kind of friendship, where you could roam the streets with criminal girls who would get revenge on those who hurt you and stick by you no matter what, that probably very few of us ever experienced in real girlhood. What if you could live in a sleepover—together, secret, safe?
And sometimes the girl imagery was about anarchy, man. “Daisies”! Childhood is the place of secrets, hideouts, back alleys, loose boards—I said this in that America essay about urban planning for friendship and I still think this way. Childhood has its own hidden culture (Bloody Mary, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board”). It’s the site of experiments in lawlessness. Children are constantly getting told what they have to do, and so childhood experience can become a kind of synecdoche of all our evasions of the rules and regulations. No more teacher’s dirty looks!
The feminism I encounter a lot now is responsible. It’s interested in law, not lawlessness. Usually it’s Catholic feminism and it’s very focused on children as the objects of care, children from the mother’s perspective. Fine as far as it goes, I love my mom, anyone who has watched a mother love her child through the hard times knows that a mother’s love can teach us about God’s love. But even (especially?) from a Christian perspective, there is something missing in this feminism of responsible adulthood.
I recently wrote my very first piece of fanfiction. It’s for IT. I noticed that there is a seminary in Derry, Maine—a town that’s been corrupted for centuries by the presence of an evil uhhhh space clown. I wanted to write about that seminary, and it ended up being about, if you know the book, Richie Tozier’s dad. I haven’t posted it yet and maybe I won’t, partly because I noticed how I was being dragged, as if by a supernatural force!!!!!, toward a symbolic opposition of celibacy and parenthood in which biological fatherhood was the way to defeat IT.
IT is about, in part, the difference between childhood and adulthood, and the transition between the two. One of its central, recurring images is the glass corridor that connects the adult and children’s wings of the public library. And for Stephen King, one of the all-time great Baby Boomer artists, the transition to adulthood is mostly defined by sex. Not entirely—I talked here about some of the novel’s other hints of what adulthood could mean. But there’s a fairly clear idea within the book that childhood is the site of friendship, whereas adulthood is the site of sex and eventually, once childhood’s demons have been vanquished, parenthood. An adult who doesn’t have sex, who in fact is reserved from sex in some way, seems hors de combat, in a kind of artificially-extended childhood.
The sexual renunciates of the early Church often seemed, to their families, like irresponsible children. They risked the end of the family line; the end of memory (another IT theme… I’m truly just riffing now), the end of the world. Here’s Peter Brown on St Basil the Great and his ilk:
To join the hermits in the forest-clad mountains of the Black Sea, or to vanish among the caves in the tufa-rock gulleys that lay at a temptingly short distance from Cappadocia, was worse than shocking; it caused the cold shadow of death to fall across the future of whole families. For young males, the potential fathers of noble families, to meditate sexual renunciation was to meditate social extinction.
There is a household Christianity, which tends to reinforce hierarchies; it ameliorates and compromises, and it’s how the world keeps turning. And there is also a monastery Christianity, or a martyrs’ Christianity, which overturns the world. And, idk… maybe the critiques of the household world that were offered by Riot Grrrl and St Francis have more in common than it might appear.
Flyer for a Riot Grrrl convention, but not the one I went to, photographed by “RockCreek,” found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license… nothing is more punk than citing your right to use an image I guess.
Thanks so much for this—I appreciate, very much, the valuable insights of the "feminism of care," but there's something about it that's always seemed incomplete to me. I loved that it centered children, but I wasn't sure how to locate my own childlikeness (and childlessness!) within a framework that focused so much on the very grown-up experience of parenthood and caregiving even as it valued the reality of dependency. You articulate beautifully here what I could never quite find the words for, that (blessed) tension between "household Christianity" and "monastery Christianity."
I've read this three times now and I've loved it more each time. "But even (especially?) from a Christian perspective, there is something missing in this feminism of responsible adulthood." YES! And yes to Riot Grrls and St. Francis having more in common - throw away the trappings (traps?) of success and respectability. Get it girl!