I think Riot Grrrl is one of those terms that conjures up a slightly different image for everybody.

Okay, and my image is directly informed by being at the movement's ground zero.

It's weird to me to try and explain Riot Grrls, because I didn't get the media filtered view, I got the "damn it, Sam, ask before you take my crap to your meeting!" view of living with multiple Grrls. Which means my image is also directly informed by my lingering desire to pop 'em in the jaws.

but not Buffy - Buffy wanted to conform or be popular, even though she knew it would never happen.

Yes. As much as in RL I am the anti-Buffy, this is what I loved about her. Not riot grrrly at all. She wasn't a rebel. She just kicked ass. And did her hair.

And neither was Faith. Faith wasn't cool enough to be riot grrly - she listened to metal and wore black jeans. She was just straight up trashy.

Y'know, the reality of the Grrls was actually pretty close to the Blessed Wanna Be girls of S4.

David, I regret to inform you that neither Neal Stephenson nor Wm. Gibson is a grrl,

Yeah, but they wanted to be.

much less a riotous one. Do you mean by "riot grrl" the Buffy/Xena type, or do you mean like Lori Petty in Tank Girl (which is my meaning, and the only one I can think of), or both?

I meant punk-rock girl/ bike messenger culture / sorta dykey / tomboys.

I don't know if the Oughties are cohering, but I'm definitely seeing a shift to the Joan of Arc-etype.

That's pretty much why, although I found the simultaneous poking fun at and glorification of spastic social-grace-lacking hackers mostly just irritating and stupid.

Throw in the just-us-folks snarking at 'intellectuals' in Cryptonomicon for me.

It is interesting because so much of it matters where you come from. My image of "riot grrrls" is colored by growing up in Japan in the 80s - just because Japanese teenage girls IN Japan look as if they are coming out of a sci-fi movie. Their look is amazing. Their style is so creative. And it was all about the future and it was all about a true birth of their take on feminism at the time.

These images have nothing to do with the reality of the term, though, or what it meant in the 90s or ANYTHING. But I can't help it - it's always what I think of.

I meant punk-rock girl/ bike messenger culture / sorta dykey / tomboys.

Yeah, see, where I went to college, the dykey/tomboyish thing was not of a cultural moment, and it didn't tend to lean in the punk-rock direction. And I still can't think of, say, a popular movie, or a TV show, that professed or exploited this archetype in such a way that it would be considered zeitgeist.

Antigovernment paranoia, I remember that as a fun mid-90s phenomenon. The (Creeped But) Capable Woman phenom rests basically on the shoulders of Jodie Foster and Gillian Anderson, AFAIK. Most of the rest of the 90s stuff professed above I buy into. But yeah, still scratching my head on the "riot grrl" thing.

Because Y.T. in Snow Crash enjoyed her own rape.

Hmm... Yeah, I can see that. I'd forgotten about that scene.

I tend to think Lori Petty, Courtney Love, the morphing of skater girlfriend culture into girl skater culture, and (my apologies to Plei) Olympia.

And I still can't think of, say, a popular movie, or a TV show, that professed or exploited this archetype in such a way that it would be considered zeitgeist.

Oh, I was specifically referring to the girl bike messenger protagonists in Snow Crash and Virtual Light.

But yeah, still scratching my head on the "riot grrl" thing.

It was one of the many off-shoots of punk/indie culture. Spread through zines (back when they were prolific and mailed instead of websites). It was a specific philosophy that wed feminism and punk's Do-It-Yourself ethos. When it started to burble up into the mainstream, they took the interesting step of having a media-moratorium. They didn't want to be co-opted into the mainstream. So what did roll forward into the popular media were more general notions of female empowerment such as Buffy or the Spice Girls sloganeering.

Tank Girl would be another reflection of that character type.

As Ple notes, the reality was that it wound up also being a kind of self-righteous, patriarchal-culture-is-evil, vegan, PETA, recovered-memories-of-abuse, girl-victimhood-support-group, Ani Defranco is GOD, thang.

Jim (Eaton-Terry) was actually pretty close to the center of the movement in London.

Highpoint: Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl" single as produced by Joan Jett. Low points: see above re: Vegan/Peta/Ani.