The Riot Grrrl Movement Introduced Me To Feminism. And I Wasn't The Only One.

None of us come out of the womb feminist. Riot grrrl, for those unfamiliar, is a feminist movement and subculture founded in the early ’90s by young women artists, activists and rockers in bands including Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy and Bratmobile. “I’m really interested in a punk rock movement — an angry girl movement — of sexual abuse survivors,” Bikini Kill singer and riot grrrl co-founder Kathleen Hanna told Sara Marcus, author of “Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution.” “I seriously believe that the majority of people in this country have stories to tell that they aren’t telling for some reason. “Built on the floors of strangers’ living rooms, tops of Xerox machines, snail mail, word of mouth and mixtapes, Riot Grrrl reinvented punk,” Gossip frontwoman Beth Ditto wrote in the foreword to “Riot Grrrl: Revolution Girl Style Now!” Riot grrrl music didn’t really reach me until I was a teenager in the early 2000s, after I’d already thoroughly consumed the Spice Girls’ brand of “girl power” — a term which, by the way, was coined by Bikini Kill in 1991. “Though my feminist heroes are the people who made up the Combahee River Collective, and Shirley Chisholm, and Florynce Kennedy and Patsy Mink, I think there’s still a part of me that really resonates with the punk rock ethos of riot grrrl music,” Bhaman said.