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Riot Grrrl Essay

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Take a moment and envision yourself accompanying your significant other at a highly anticipated punk rock concert. Upon arrival, he immediately insists that you play the role of a “good girlfriend” by holding his jacket while he and the rest of the male audience move up towards the mosh pit. You soon find yourself pushed and shoved to the back of the room, the farthest distance away from the stage as possible, along with hundreds of other “good girlfriends” as personified coat hangers. This was an issue faced by many women in the early 90’s who were interested in the punk rock scene, yet were unable to have their voices be heard, until now. Riot grrrl, a radical feminist movement that thrived in the underground punk scene has challenged …show more content…

What the media fails to accurately portray is that feminists strive to promote equality for both women and men. Utilizing feminism as their secret weapon to add diversity to the overly male punk scene, the riot grrrls managed to successfully promote women’s rights with politically charged tunes that empowered women to make a change.

However, despite of its fabricated intentions, the media proposed a valid argument against the movement: why the movement did not last over the years. One often overlooked aspect of Riot grrrl was that although it claimed to revive the feminist appeal by standing up for ALL women, the majority of its efforts seemed to appeal more in favor of middle-class Caucasian women. Members with a variety of ethnic backgrounds who identified themselves as riot grrrls felt that that their adversities and struggles as both minorities and women were not equally put into perspective as much as those of their counterparts. This flaw within the movement has negatively affected its social longevity and overall appeal to a wider range of women, yet the dedication to spread awareness on intimate struggles and successful establishment of a community within the movement have proven to still be both effective as well as inspiring in today’s modern society. Without a doubt, the riot grrrl movement took the world by storm on a social and political level, but not entirely on the still prominently masculine world of

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