Latest news with #RiotGrrrl
Winnipeg Free Press
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
‘Girl on Girl' explores how Internet pornography's rise helped normalize misogyny
Girl on Girl, the treatise on the seismic shift in pop culture of the late 1990s/early 2000s by Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert, opens with one of the most enduring images of that time: the 1999 Rolling Stone cover featuring Britney Spears. The then-teenage pop star is reclining on magenta satin sheets, clutching a Teletubby doll — the purple one, another lightning rod for controversy — her shirt open, revealing a satin push-up bra in bad-girl black. In many ways, that image was a cultural bellwether of all that was to come: the objectification, infantilization and hyper-sexualization of girls and women by popular culture. With Girl On Girl, Gilbert, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, offers a clear-eyed survey of an era when feminist 'Riot Grrrl' women were replaced by girls — pliable, exploitable, profitable girls. The book is chronological, divided up into sections with 'girl' in the title — Girl Power, Girl Fight, Gossip Girls, Girl Boss — to examine, in dizzying, harrowing detail, all the ways in which the late '90s and the early aughts were no friend to women. From teen sex comedies such as American Pie casting women as the gatekeepers of sex to reality TV's meat-market appraisal of women, Gilbert takes a sharp critic's view of the culture of the era, and how it normalized misogyny. She treats her subject matter seriously because it is serious. Sometimes people dismiss pop culture as frivolous when it actually has the power to shape social mores. We are what we eat, the adage goes; it follows that we are what we consume in other spheres as well. As Gilbert discovered through her research, all roads lead back to the advent of internet pornography. The aesthetics of porn had a far-reaching — and sometimes insidious — influence, including into IRL bedrooms. The chapter Final Girl, which explores the rise of violence in porn and other media, is particularly terrifying in its lurid detail. (If you're looking for a feel-good read, this is not it.) A lot is packed into these chapters — each individual cultural example on its own could likely merit a full-length book treatment — but taken all together, the effect is like looking at a completed jigsaw puzzle; we knew each individual piece was bad, but the whole is devastating. Gilbert mentions that publishers wanted her to insert more of herself into the book; save for a few instances, she mostly does not. Girl On Girl could have benefitted from more of a personal touch; the writing sometimes feels distant and anthropological. If the whole point is to understand how this culture made women feel, and the lasting scars it left, it could have been helpful to have a millennial guide in Gilbert, who was 16 in 1999. Wednesdays Columnist Jen Zoratti looks at what's next in arts, life and pop culture. Lately, culture's been feeling very Y2K. The alarming rise of Skinnytok — the pro-anorexia, 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels' messaging of the early aughts repackaged for the TikTok generation — and Ozempic bringing back impossible Hollywood body standards. Girlbosses, Girl Dinners, Tradwives, Instagram Face and cosmetic surgery, skin-care obsessed Sephora tweens. A reality TV star in the White House. Gilbert draws a straight line between then and now, but manages to end on a hopeful note. We have the language now, she notes. We can name the misogyny, the objectification. We can understand, clearly, the harms of the culture we consumed back then — the culture we might even find ourselves nostalgic for now. To wit: on Instagram there was a trend of millennial women making videos critically addressing and reflecting on the era at the heart of Girl On Girl and how it made them who they are. The soundtrack? Billie Eilish's aching song What Was I Made For?, from Greta Gerwig's Barbie. Jen Zoratti is a Free Press columnist and a millennial who was 14 in 1999. Jen ZorattiColumnist Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen. Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
CBC
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
St. John's punk band Snitfit wants to evolve beyond its Riot Grrrl label
Cramped into guitarist Ruairi Hogan's parent's 90s-style basement, the band plays a new, unreleased tune — as hard and as fast as anything they've done so far. Punk songs are well-known for their brevity, but this one sneaks up on you with a breakdown that comes back around to a blistering verse. Drummer Dom Lamouche bashes away mercilessly on his kit, Hogan happily drives the song with their signature intensity, as singer Etta Cessac-Sinclair screams her lungs out into a megaphone while wearing a star-patterned aqua-coloured dress. They're still looking for a bass player, but this is Snitfit, a band that identifies as anti-capitalist and anti-fascist, and at times comes off aggressive politically. The teen punk group based in St. John's adopted the Riot Grrrl movement attributed to many female-led feminist acts over the years. But they're working hard to evolve beyond the movement's shortcomings. "In [ Bikini Kill and Le Tigre's ] Kathleen Hannah's autobiography, she talks about wanting to lean away from the title Riot Grrrl because, historically, it marginalized a bunch of people," said Cessac-Sinclair. "So we always call ourselves post-Riot Grrrl. I think that's what we are." That sentiment will be on full display on Saturday, when the band takes the stage during the annual Lawnya Vawnya festival in St. John's. Although the band is confident about the motivation, the group admits to sometimes feeling constrained by labels. They're mixing it up a bit on their upcoming efforts. It's obvious beneath the screaming, the ear-melting instrumentation, and the band's political views, there's a lot of love behind it all. "I feel you should go about educating people with love and not hatred," said Hogan, referring to his right-wing friends and the polarization of society. "It's very important to have compassion, but also a loud and clear voice." "I wrote a really long song [when] this article came out [some time ago]," Cessac-Sinclair says, describing the inspiration of one of Snitfit's upcoming tracks. "There were terrible photos showing how the planet is dying … a whole village is burning, a family is hiding under a bridge, and a baby's dying. So I read this article, cried, wrote down the description of each image, and that's one of the songs." The members have raised thousands for Palestine relief with their performances. "It doesn't feel nice to just talk about it and not do anything", Cessac-Sinclair said.
Yahoo
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
St. John's punk band Snitfit wants to evolve beyond its Riot Grrrl label
Cramped into guitarist Ruairi Hogan's parent's 90s-style basement, the band plays a new, unreleased tune — as hard and as fast as anything they've done so far. Punk songs are well-known for their brevity, but this one sneaks up on you with a breakdown that comes back around to a blistering verse. Drummer Dom Lamouche bashes away mercilessly on his kit, Hogan happily drives the song with their signature intensity, as singer Etta Cessac-Sinclair screams her lungs out into a megaphone while wearing a star-patterned aqua-coloured dress. They're still looking for a bass player, but this is Snitfit, a band that identifies as anti-capitalist and anti-fascist, and at times comes off aggressive politically. The teen punk group based in St. John's adopted the Riot Grrrl movement attributed to many female-led feminist acts over the years. But they're working hard to evolve beyond the movement's shortcomings. "In [Bikini Kill and Le Tigre's] Kathleen Hannah's autobiography, she talks about wanting to lean away from the title Riot Grrrl because, historically, it marginalized a bunch of people," said Cessac-Sinclair. "So we always call ourselves post-Riot Grrrl. I think that's what we are." That sentiment will be on full display on Saturday, when the band takes the stage during the annual Lawnya Vawnya festival in St. John's. Although the band is confident about the motivation, the group admits to sometimes feeling constrained by labels. They're mixing it up a bit on their upcoming efforts. It's obvious beneath the screaming, the ear-melting instrumentation, and the band's political views, there's a lot of love behind it all. "I feel you should go about educating people with love and not hatred," said Hogan, referring to his right-wing friends and the polarization of society. "It's very important to have compassion, but also a loud and clear voice." "I wrote a really long song [when] this article came out [some time ago]," Cessac-Sinclair says, describing the inspiration of one of Snitfit's upcoming tracks. "There were terrible photos showing how the planet is dying … a whole village is burning, a family is hiding under a bridge, and a baby's dying. So I read this article, cried, wrote down the description of each image, and that's one of the songs." The members have raised thousands for Palestine relief with their performances. "It doesn't feel nice to just talk about it and not do anything", Cessac-Sinclair said. Download our to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Sign up for our . Click .
