Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.

This is “Her Jazz” by Huggy Bear:

This week I taught a seminar about Riot Grrrl, and Sara Marcus’s book Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. You can see a little more of what I think about that book if you read this post about Bikini Kill from a little while back. The seminar has coincided with the more or less spontaneous #uglygirlsclub campaign, which started at the university where I teach, and about which you can read here.

One thing that this coincidence (and the general issue of “lad culture”/sexism that has belatedly sprung up on UK campuses this autumn) points out is that in twenty years, very little has changed as far as some basic issues of how women, and especially young women, are treated and viewed, generally speaking, especially by men their age, but by men older than their age as well.

Huggy Bear self-consciously latched onto the Riot Grrrl movement, the latest (at that time) of a series of punk rock back-n-forths that litter the history of the genre/form/whatever.  The “boy-girl revolution” refrain points towards a necessary component of the feminist project: dudes, when you talk about the ugly girls club, you’ve got to remember that ugly is in the eye of the beholder, and you’re saying a lot more about yourself and ugly than you are about the girl, or the club. Riot Grrrl tried to pose a threat to social, political, and punk rock patriarchies, but the point wasn’t only the threat: it was (and is) about redressing an imbalance where a young man feels entitled to dismiss his peers as a club of ugly girls, in an environment in which women face a real menace of sexual harassment and assault. The boy-girl revolution, and a more sophisticated enunciation and acting out of that revolution, requires men (young, old, medium) to look at themselves, and then around them, and recognize their own stake in the parity of the sexes. Allowing women the space to be safe and confident doesn’t really diminish you, man, in any way that matters whatsoever. It makes you better.

So, anyway, excellent work, Royal Holloway Feminist Society, for putting a lens over a casual comment that’s built on much less casual foundations.  The work to change those foundations puts demands on the guy who said it in the first place, and the rest of us, too.