BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism From the Pages of Bitch Magazine

by Lisa Jervis

  She picked up right where Judy Blume left off.

  Klein took it for granted that we knew how our bodies functioned and focused instead on the complications that emerge once teenage girls do something with their sex information. If Blume’s novels helped girls realize that everything they were feeling and experiencing was normal, Klein took it one step further, emphasizing that not only were the feelings normal, but that girls should never doubt their right and ability to express them.

  However, knowing plenty about the insecurities of adolescence, she also threw down a cold, hard reality—teenage girls aren’t always applauded by their peers for having an independent, matter-of-fact attitude toward sex. This issue is verbalized in It’s OK If You Don’t Love Me when main girl Jody grapples with the contradictions inherent in her sex ed class’s breezy discussions. (“I hate to tell people, even other girls, that I’m on the Pill. I think it’s hard to admit that sex is something you want to do or might do. It’s one thing to say you believe in it in the abstract, but to come right out and say I guess I’ll be sleeping with someone tonight, I might as well be prepared, is hard.”)

  She put the ladies first.

  Not only that, but she posited a world where the gender roles taken for granted by other young-adult novels—even Blume’s—were adjusted with so little fanfare that they seemed to always have been that way. Her heroines never stood by their lockers chewing their hair over whether Joe might ask them out; these girls marched right up to Joe without a twinge of indecision.

  This female-forward approach was even more explicit when it came to sex. Not only did female characters take the lead, they took it in ways that were widely considered “male”—and curiosity, not capitulation, characterized their experimentation.

  She made boys our friends.

  Klein gave girls boundless credit for possessing both brains and agency, but never at the expense of her male characters. Many of her books were written from the perspective of teenage boys, and while her male characters—including No More Saturday Nights’ Tim, a college freshman and single father, and Joel, who flounders his way through a first affair in Beginners’ Love—weren’t what you would call sensitive New Age guys, they were portrayed as thinking, feeling, emotional people. In the YA genre, where boys were regularly depicted as no more than jockish arm trophies who either made girls’ lives worthwhile or ruined their reputations, this was, sad to say, more props than were generally given.

  Her characters spoke up.

  Klein’s female characters had a lot to say, especially on the subjects of gender, sex, and feminism. Whether loudmouthed or demure, these girls were each confrontational in their own way, primed and ready to challenge outdated assumptions of gender difference, social conditioning, and more. In It’s OK If You Don’t Love Me, for instance, Jody is outraged to discover how ill informed her younger brother is about sex (“Girls like to do it too, you know”); in Love Is One of the Choices, Maggie engages in a passionate argument with her father about whether pornography can appeal to women.

  These back-and-forth debates are natural and narrative, rather than pedantic, and they mirror the often frustrating impossibility of schooling one’s parents/siblings/peers in viewpoints that buck the status quo. NK’s girls and women speak up on behalf of themselves and their gender as a whole, but even when their statements don’t illustrate a feminist viewpoint (though they often do), the dialogues that emerge reflect the vital and changing ideas of what girls and women want from society, men, and each other.

  She tried to right the wrongs of the information police.

  Remember in grade school when boys were informed about erections and wet dreams while girls were told about menstruation in what was essentially a shill for Kotex? That was sex education: Boys learned that their bodies were a source of pleasure; girls were warned that the wrong brand of pad would lead to the ruin of their best white jeans.

  Had Norma Klein been in charge, boys and girls would have sat side by side to learn about themselves and about each other, and wouldn’t enter puberty with the assumption that sexual attitudes were gender-coded. Klein’s books made reference not only to the misguided way boys’ and girls’ sex education is disseminated, but also to the way the media telegraphs a wealth of wrongheaded moral dogma.

  NK worked into her characters’ mouths sly commentary on this passage of information and how it causes teenagers to inadvertently participate in their own manipulation; these revelations are an encouragement to look critically at what girls, especially, are told in books that are ostensibly for them. Beginners’ Love’s Leda, for instance, takes issue with the YA subgenre of the “sexual disaster” novel, in which all teenage nooky invariably leads to misfortune and regret (“God, don’t you hate those books for teenagers where they have to get married and she drops out of school and they live over a garage and he works in some used car lot? And there’s always some scene where a girl who’s had an abortion comes to visit and she’s gone insane and becomes a Bowery bum, just in case you didn’t get the point”); Maggie of Love Is One of the Choices, meanwhile, is relieved that her first sexual experience isn’t the bloody horror it’s made out to be in books for teens.

  She got on the wrong side of book-burning fanatics.

  Klein’s willingness to point out where society’s moral judgments fail teenagers didn’t go unnoticed by the people who make those very judgments. Since we all know how well female sexual agency flies in our society—particularly when it involves teenagers—it’s no surprise that several of Klein’s books have in the past been banned from school libraries, putting them in the company of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, and Brave New World. But we all know that the books people don’t want teenagers to see are the honest ones, and NK’s tales, written in the ’70s and ’80s, remain as relevant and controversial as they were when they were first published.

  She changed some lives.

  I like to think of Norma Klein as one of my first feminist influences. Not that I didn’t log my share of hours mooning over some bowl-cutted junior-high crush when I could have been doing more interesting things. But Klein—along with that proudly erect kid in front of the TV—started me thinking about the inequity that defines the teenage realm: the code of conformity that uses the word “slut” to brand the girl who speaks her mind about sex, the mind-set that not only allows but encourages the devaluation of girls and their sexuality. There was no shortage of girl media to remind us of what we were supposed to want, but Klein proposed an all-important alternative. Her books weren’t only fun, smart, and sexy; it’s clear to me now that they were also a form of activism—the refusal of one writer to pander to the what-girls-want formulas used by other writers and publishers of young-adult books. Klein died in 1989, but she left a legacy of strong, provocative girl literature that continues to burst the wispy bubble of dyed-to-match pumps and homecoming dances—a gift I know I’ll always be grateful for.

  Sister Outsider Headbanger

  On Being a Black Feminist Metalhead

  Keidra Chaney / FALL 2001

  I’M NOT SURE EXACTLY WHEN OR HOW IT HAPPENED, BUT AT some point in my childhood I began to think I was a white guy trapped in the body of a black girl. And not just any white guy, either—a guitar player in a heavy-metal band.

  Okay, stop laughing. It’s no joke. I’m a black female metalhead. Like I said, I can’t really tell you how it happened. Maybe it was growing up in the ’80s, being fed a steady diet of Ratt videos on Chicago’s quasi-MTV UHF station. Or maybe it was coming of age at the same time heavy metal reached public consciousness as the Voice of the Disgruntled Adolescent White Male. Sure, I wasn’t white, male, or even particularly angry as a tenyear-old—but I recognized the force of those electric guitars, relentlessly pounding drums, and growling vocals. Even then, I knew that heavy metal was power, and power was irresistible.

  Over the next few years, I embraced my heavy-metal destiny. I wasn’t ashamed of my love for metal; I just couldn’t exp
lain it to most people. Heavy metal has always been and will always be the redheaded stepchild of rock, much maligned and generally misunderstood. Respectable rock fans and critics dismiss it as simplistic and puerile; religious conservatives condemn it as “the devil’s music.” To a lot of black folks, it’s just a bunch of crazy white guys screaming, which is just as bad. Even my older sister, who is almost ridiculously eclectic in her musical tastes (Barry Manilow!), wasn’t exactly feeling metal.

  Yet in the early ’80s, some of us kids in the ’hood did listen to metal. Radio was somewhat less segregated than it is today, but hip hop didn’t exist to MTV or radio. We did know about Quiet Riot and Poison, those mainstays of pop-metal. Later, when hip hop came of age and my peers grew out of the Crüe and into Boogie Down Productions and N.W.A., cable television got me intrigued by Megadeth, Anthrax, and Queensryche.

  I buried my metal affection at first, not wanting to seem like too much of a freak to my friends, sneaking Metallica songs in between Salt-N-Pepa and Digital Underground on mix tapes. Like decaffeinated coffee, a black female metalhead is something that doesn’t make sense to a lot of people; this was especially true at a time when hip hop as a genre was very much linked to the cultural experiences of the black community—“black folks’ CNN,” as Chuck D once put it. What could I possibly find appealing about heavy metal, seeing as how it didn’t reflect my life experience or cultural identity in any tangible way?

  Actually, I think that contradiction was what appealed to me in the first place. Heavy metal was so radically different from the music I grew up with that it allowed me to imagine myself as someone radically different from the geeky, awkward preteen I normally was. Even as my burgeoning feminist self felt empowered by seeing Queen Latifah and Monie Love do “Ladies First” on Yo! MTV Raps in 1989, another part of me—the one that secretly watched Headbangers Ball in my basement every Saturday night—wanted to run away from home and become a roadie for Metallica.

  Maintaining the dual identity of regular high-school student by day, hard-rockin’ metalhead by night made me feel pretty isolated. Finding other heavy metal-loving black kids in a Lutheran high school in the pre-Internet ’90s was no easy task. But by sophomore year, I had encountered some kindred spirits: I met my friend Nicole when she noticed the cover of my Metal Edge magazine peeking from my notebook on the way to English class. “You read Metal Edge?” she asked in shock. I was ready for another fight—I had already endured more than a semester’s worth of ridicule after coming out as a metalhead—but she exclaimed, “So do I!”

  It was cool to find girls who read both Essence and Rip, who could talk about the new Slayer video and the pros and cons of relaxers in the same conversation. I felt validated, even though my mom thought I was suffering the delayed effects of some childhood head injury and classmates accused me of betraying my blackness or flirting with satanism. Instead of trying to change people’s minds, I settled for screwing with them. My friends and I wore our metalhead status like badges of honor: We all felt like outsiders for one reason or another, and it was no coincidence that we were all attracted to music that made difference into a source of pride.

  It’s this sense of self-imposed alienation from “normal” society that’s a big part of metal’s appeal. In her 1991 examination of the genre, Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology, Deena Weinstein aptly calls heavy-metal fans “proud pariahs.” Metal has never been particularly trendy, even in its heyday, but that outsider element adds much to the music’s appeal. “Some people get into music that’s not really popular, like heavy metal, to make themselves distinct from their peers,” Weinstein told me during a phone interview. “It makes sense that you’d be attracted to it. Teenagers use music to distance themselves from their parents, their upbringing.”

  There’s also the sense of camaraderie and acceptance that is unique to metal fans (well, and Deadheads): a loyalty that borders on obsession. Metalheads are not casual fans. We memorize every word to every song of every album by our favorite bands, we wear tour T-shirts until they literally fall apart, we see our heroes in concert dozens of times, we spend hundreds of dollars on bootlegs and import LPs even if we don’t have a turntable to play them on.

  But though I was drawn to the outsider appeal of the music in the first place, it was difficult for me to forget my double outsider status at concerts, where guys would gawk and point at me and my metalhead clique as if we were Martians instead of black girls, and we could count the number of black faces on one hand. But once the lights went down and the band came onstage, we were all headbanging and moshing and howling the words to the songs. The music took over, and we could all share that universal bond of loving it, if only for a few hours.

  Of course, as in all of rock’s subgenres, female metal fans have had to walk that fine line between sighing teen-dream fandom and balls-to-the-wall solidarity. A lot of women embrace and identify with the music and musicians the same way male fans do, while also grafting very girly wants and desires onto metal’s aggressive vibes. We want to be tough and emulate our heroes and start our own bands—but, yeah, we also fantasize about hanging out with the guys, dating them, fucking them.

  And so female fans found ways to connect with each other: as pen pals, chatting in the women’s restrooms during concerts, at record stores, wherever we could. We even had our own magazine, the aforementioned Metal Edge, the late-’80s and early-’90s incarnation of which was a strange amalgam of Kerrang! and Tiger Beat. Glossy pinups and wall-size foldouts sat next to ads for instructional videos like How to Play Guitar like Yngwie Malmsteen and classifieds from aspiring musicians trying to start bands. Metal Edge never explicitly billed itself as a metal magazine for teen girls, but Gerri Miller, the magazine’s longtime editor in chief, had an uncanny knack for appealing to the desires of female metalheads. One of my favorite sections was “When They Were Young,” a three-page spread of B-level pop-metal bands’ goofy baby photos and high-school yearbook pictures. (“That’s how you knew that Metal Edge was really for girls,” recalls my friend Christina. “No boy cares about what the guys from Slaughter looked like as babies.”)

  Was Metal Edge exploiting our conflicting desires? Maybe. But the magazine was one of the few forums where we female fans could simultaneously indulge our lustful groupie desires and our dreams of being in the band without losing our hard-core credibility.

  By the time I entered college, I’d started to reconcile my identity and beliefs with my love for metal, but it was hard to leave my ambivalence behind. If saying that I’m a metalhead and a feminist sounds like a contradiction, then saying that I’m a feminist because of heavy metal probably sounds even more so. But metal did empower me. Because the music was so far away from my experience, it didn’t place definitions on who I was or could be as a black female. When I listened to Metallica or Corrosion of Conformity, I wasn’t a “bitch,” a “ho,” or some anonymous jiggling booty in a rap video; I wasn’t a woman who needed rescuing by some dream-date pop star. I was someone who felt weird in high school, who wanted a place to belong.

  Bands like Living Colour and Sepultura took things a step further by bringing a strong antiracist and political tone to their headbanging. Such bands helped me adapt my fandom to my personal ideals, and in turn I examined songs with a critical ear; refused to support bands with racist, sexist, or homophobic lyrics; and wrote angry letters to metal fanzines when they made racist comments. Most important, having the music as an emotional outlet made me feel safe to eventually explore my identity as a black woman and as a feminist, and to find strength in that as well.

  Heavy-metal fandom doesn’t hold the same place in my life that it did when I was thirteen; I try to keep up with the music, but I’m not deeply immersed in the fan culture. Maybe it’s because now that I’m older, I have a greater understanding of my own identity and I don’t need the music to help express my feelings or provide a sense of community.

  In some ways, music fandom seems a lot more diverse than it was when
I was a teen. Thanks at least in part to MTV, kids of different races and ethnicities have more music in common than even a decade ago. It’s not uncommon to see a black or brown kid giddily requesting Papa Roach on Total Request Live, and hip hop has replaced rock as the soundtrack of adolescent rebellion for kids of every color. Black rockers like Living Colour and Fishbone and newer bands with multiracial lineups like Sevendust and the now-defunct Rage Against the Machine have made strides in crossing rock’s color line.

  But MTV and radio (including black stations) still don’t know what to do with artists who don’t fit any preexisting molds, like Me‘Shell NdegéOcello or the black-female-fronted rock band Skunk Anansie. So instead of taking on the challenge of exploring black rock, mainstream media largely ignores it. Even now, we sistas who rock don’t have a high-profile role model to identify with or emulate. The act of participation in rock music as musicians and as fans is still pretty subversive for black women—for black folks in general, really. I hope at some point the music industry will have the guts and good sense to support black rock, and young black women who want a harder sound than Tracy Chapman will be able to find the emotional connection I did, plus something more—a sense of being represented musically, culturally, and politically. But right now I’ll settle for those rare but cherished moments when I spot a girl walking down the street sporting a ’fro and a Korn T-shirt. I’m reminded that we’re still out there, challenging the racism and sexism in the industry and in fandom through writing fanzines, making websites, supporting black rock bands—and, if nothing else, messing with images of who the “average” metal fan is supposed to be.