title: Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boys’ Subculture
author: Lauraine Leblanc
other shit: 1999, Rutgers University Press. 231 pages + appendices (including a hilarious punk glossary!), notes, index.
rating: 3/5 safety pins

According to my records, I have apparently been working on this post since the beginning of April. I kept starting it, and then I’d realize that I’d written a few thousand words about combat boots. About the first pair I ever got, at 13, about the years of fighting I had to do to get them, because “you can have combat boots when you go into combat.” I think that’s a thing people say as a brush-off, but I come from a military family; my father meant it. Which is to say that wearing combat boots was never about wearing combat boots.

At any rate, I sometimes wish I’d hung onto that first pair. I can still picture them by the door in the last apartment they were ever in, patched with duct tape. I can feel them on my feet, lopsided but comfortable, the outside of their soles worn noticeably lower than the inside. I remember when I finally replaced them, putting the old pair next to the new, realizing that the new pair was a full inch taller than the old. I believe this is my fourth pair.

I ended up on that tangent — and believe me, those two paragraphs are very much condensed from the original — because Pretty in Punk is essentially a textbook. What am I supposed to say about it? I’m not in a position to critique the scholarship, really. It’s a straight-up ethnography about punk girls, focused on the way they (we) negotiate and rebel against the mainstream idea[l] of femininity by diving into this subculture… and that’s when things get hard, because of the constraints that a male-dominated subculture like punk places on the women who want to be involved. Leblanc looks at the difficulties in that, and the strategies the punk girls come up with for coping with both mainstream society and with their chosen subculture. It’s part women’s studies, part sociology, and there are a lot of sentences like this one:

Whereas subculture theorists conceptualize resistance as stylistic, and feminist theorists consider discursive accounts, recent critics of resistance theorizing have begun to examine the behavioral forms of resistance constructed by oppressed individuals in their everyday lives.

Yeah, see? My feminist theory is reasonably solid, but let me tell you about my resistance theory. It goes like this: “Fuck you.” I probably would have gotten a lot more out of this book if I’d spent a month at the library doing the background reading, but while I consider myself to be someone with a healthy amount of intellectual curiosity, that’s a bit much. I soldiered on.

I think I did that because, early in the introduction, she asks, “How do punk girls, with their shaved heads and their combat boots—”

And that was it. I didn’t much care what came next, frankly. It sounds specious and shallow to say, well, there I am in this book, a girl with a shaved head and combat boots, but let me tell you how often I see myself in mainstream literature. Not often. When I do, I’m usually a criminal. This is hardly mainstream literature, but it was still nice, a book with some glimpses of me in it, with some echoes of things I might once have said, with an approximation of how I might once have felt.

There wasn’t a lot of me, of course. The book came out in 1999, and a lot has changed since then — in feminist theory, in punk rock, in society as a whole. (Depressingly, a lot hasn’t.) It focuses on people who are very deeply into the scene, on gutterpunks and crustpunks and kids who live in punk rock squats. None of those descriptors apply to yours truly. But there were enough glimpses to keep me moving through the academic jargon.

There was almost nothing about music; instead, Leblanc focused on what brought the girls into punk, the kinds of challenges they faced in their previous lives and the ones they face as punks, the way they negotiate those challenges and deal with their fellow punks, and any lessons non-punks can learn. I think my favorite bit of the latter was in the chapter on dealing with street-level sexual harassment, something that every woman deals with at some point. And while it’s been suggested that one of the more effective responses is actually to confront the harassers, I don’t know a lot of women willing to do it.

(Am I? Probably, but keep in mind that I haven’t been catcalled since I shaved my head. I have many stories about shit that happend to me before I shaved my head, though. That isn’t why I did it — it never crossed my mind — but I’m not complaining, and there are sometimes people who start talking in my presence about how they don’t understand why women would deliberately make themselves “ugly.” (What’s “ugly”?) Well. I do.)

Anyway, Leblanc mentions the confrontation strategy, saying that although it goes against feminine socialization (true) and risks escalating the encounter and alienating passers-by (also true), it’s by far the most common strategy employed by punks. Comments are mirrored (“I bet a punk rock girl could give you a rough ride.” “I bet a steel-capped boot could shut you up.”), assholes are confronted (“What’d you just say, motherfucker?”), punches are thrown. The author’s dry summation, though, is what cracked me up: “Clearly, not all of these strategies appeal to all women; engaging in street brawls or dressing in punk style will be unacceptable to many.”

You don’t say.

What I did think was interesting was her comment that most women respond to sexual harassment by ignoring it, but punks don’t. However, despite their reputation as violent and confrontational, most punks DO ignore general harassment, which is more common and ranges in severity “from obtrusive gazing to physical assault, including instances of visual harassment, verbal harassment, and physical harassment.” The chapter intro talks about Leblanc’s own experiences with this, including stories of having her picture taken without her consent, being surrounded and threatened, being physically attacked with no provocation, being followed by store detectives, being shouted at from the windows of passing vehicles. I mentioned that I no longer get catcalled, but in 2011, I certainly get stared at and yelled at and followed around by “subtle” store employees. Like the punks in the book, I ignore it.

The section on general harassment, though, let’s pause and talk about that for a second, because it’s responsible for my biggest problem with the book. I’ve seen the assertion made in a lot of places, that punks are discriminated against because we look funny. We have blue hair, we have no hair, we dress weird, we have visible piercings and tattoos, whatever. We look different, and so people fuck with us. We are totally discriminated against. Just like black people!

…

No. Stop it, white punks. Stop it right now. Yes, I get it, and yes, I have been beaten up for looking like a freak. Obviously that sucked. But you know what? I cut my own fucking hair.

Leblanc’s response is:

Does the fact that punks create their self-presentation, and even the interpretation of this presentation as deviant, excuse harassment? Should punks cease “whining” and adopt a more mainstream style if they dislike the harassment they experience? If so, does this not mean that blacks should attempt to be more “white,” or that gays and lesbians should always pass as straight when in public? Not so, as punks would argue; it should be everyone’s right, whether “different” by choice or by birth, to enjoy their full civil rights in a public environment that is free of discrimination and harassment.

For fuck’s sake. Of course everyone should always be in a tolerant environment that celebrates and encourages diversity and is free of discrimination and harassment. But the fact that I shouldn’t have to change my appearance doesn’t mean I can’t. I’m not going to, but I can, and there is a huge and very fundamental difference between having hateful shit directed at me for who I am on a biological level and having it directed at me because of how I choose to look. I can sympathize and I can empathize and I can do whatever I am capable of doing to fight against the former, but it is not the same, and saying it’s the same is disingenuous, appropriative bullshit. (It also really pisses off punks of colour, by the way, and drives many of them from the scene. That links to an MRR article from ~2000, but someone made this blue-hair-discrimination argument to me only a few weeks ago.)

Anyway. I have just realized that one of the lovely things about “reviewing” a textbook is that it’s written in that classic format where she tells us what she’s going to tell us, tells us, and then tells us what she just told us. It is therefore really easy to summarize her salient points. For example, the chapter on constructing femininity, which I liked, ends this way:

True, housewives may not soon sport combat boots and liberty spikes and refuse to serve dinners, and punk girls in mohawks and crinolines and mainstream girls sporting combat boots with their prom dresses may not topple the government, but they certainly do expand the parameters of what is permissible. They are changing the faces of femininity.

There were also interesting bits on adolescent girls’ self-esteem, a surprisingly decent historical overview of punk rock, and a lolarious punk glossary (apparently we’re all anarchists). Should you read the book? I don’t know. I assume that you’ll know by now if this is the sort of book you’re interested in reading, and if you’re only interested in the scholarship, I have to assume that there are more recent studies available that would be more worthwhile. I liked the book for what amount to personal reasons, but I don’t expect everyone to react the same way. That aside, apart from the glimpses of myself, what I liked most were the glimpses of the author.

In particular: “Trying to emulate my female rock heroines, I just accidentally became a punk, and serendipitously ended up becoming myself.” More than almost anything else in the whole world, I love stories about How Punk Rock Saved My Soul, and there was enough of that in here for me to keep on keeping on.

Over on the Diversity in Python list (on which I am largely lurking, for reasons both various AND sundry), the question was raised: What brought you to Python? When you got to the fork in the road, what made the The Python Way more attractive than all those other ways? The people? The projects? The Django pony at the end of the rainbow? The assumption was that there was, somewhere, at some point, a decision that had to be made, and we pythonistas at least have that decision in common. After all, here we are.

Me, though, I never really made that decision. I went to journalism school (for what I believe is one of the only reasons people go to journalism school, which is to save the world). Yeah, while I was there, I built some websites and enjoyed it, but it was always a means to an end, always just another thing I could put on my resume for when I had to go out and get a real job. One of the almost-real jobs I had was at Playboy. I fell in with the programmer types on the pay site, and we stayed in touch, and when that internship was over, I went off to save the world.

Except that I didn’t have the stomach for world-saving. Working as a reporter in a courthouse on Chicago’s south side was grindingly, soul-crushingly depressing, and sometimes I still marvel that I came out of that alive. Illinois has the death penalty, and so I sat through murder trials that I still can’t talk about, and then sat through them all over again as people took the stand to explain why more death would make everything better. I realized that I could do it, if I wanted to; I could shut down the part of myself that threw up in the courthouse bathroom before calling the newsroom with my story. But I didn’t really like the person I would have had to become to do that, and so I walked away from hard-news journalism.

So then I thought, okay! Maybe science! Science can totally save the world! And anyway, mainstream reporting of the sciences often isn’t very good. So I did that for a while, working as a writer and editor for various scientific institutions and publications. It was fun and it was interesting and I loved going to work every day and learning new things and talking to amazing people and looking at experiments.

But in the end, I realized that I can’t write for a living. I can’t do it. It makes me insane, hollows out all the parts of myself I need to get through my day, leaves me empty and aching and scraped raw. Other people can do it — thank god — but I can’t. I can’t do deadlines, and I can’t do regular contributions to anything, and if I am to write, I have to do it on my own time and my own terms. I do, however, have to do it.

So, there I was, 20-something and lost, and those guys I’d fallen in with at Playboy (remember them?) had gone to a different company, and there was a part-time job opening for a contractor to come in and do straight black-box manual testing of websites. Okay, sure. I can totally click links, and I can blow my paycheck on ice cream and comic books, and everything will be super. Two things became clear quite quickly: One, they needed someone full-time, and two, clicking links is stupid. There must be a way to automate this. And there is! It’s called twill, and it’s written in python; what else do I need to know? Quick! Someone get me a command line.

And that gets me back to the beginning of this post: There wasn’t really a decision. I got a job, and I needed this tool to do my job, and here I am. It’s pretty nice here. I have the good fortune to work with many great pythonistas at my job, people to keep me interested and motivated and tell me when my ideas or code (or both) are full of shit. Many of them are active and involved with The Python Community.

When I put my roll-call for women in python, I really wasn’t sure what to expect. But the comments on that post, and conversations I’ve had about it have led me to believe that there are a lot more women using python than people think. But are we in python? Are we active and involved members of the community? Known and respected and liked (or, I suppose, loathed)? A few, yes, but not many. Why is that?

Me, I’m on the fringes. I could certainly become more involved if I were so inclined (and sometimes I am). But there are a few things keeping me where I am.

Communities are hard work. Participating is emotionally exhausting, and dev communities are largely based in mediums I don’t really enjoy all that much. I hate mailing lists. I swore off IRC sometime in the 90s. It drives me crazy to have to follow 270 different blogs and subscribe to RSS feeds for comments so I can follow conversations, or constantly refresh pages having discussions that I care about. Being in The Python Community (or, I assume, any dev community) is incredibly time-consuming, and I don’t have a lot of time. The Second Shift phenomenon is well-known, but for me, it’s more like my Fifth Shift.

And so, if I’m going to get involved, there need to be rewards. And there totally are. Support and encouragement for my projects. Answers to my questions. New friends. New ideas. New, better technologies. Cool software. Exciting travel opportunities and informative conferences. Possible job opportunities. The sheer joy of the thing itself, of a single, elegant line of code, of starting from nothing and building something cool, building something that works and that people can use and love and share.

I don’t know what other people get out of it. I assume others have similar reasons. (My straw poll on twitter largely confirmed this for me.)

But because I’m a woman, I get other stuff, too: Constant questions about where the other women are, sexist comments on this blog any time I post, demands on my patience and my time to answer questions about what I’m doing, how and why I’m doing it, what is this whole “feminism” thing all about anyway, what about the mens, and on and on and on. For me, wading into the python community ends up being only a little about python, and a lot about women — whether I want it that way or not.

Usually, I don’t. I announced at the last pycon that the first dude who asked me where were all the women was going to get punched in the face. I managed to largely avoid the conversation, but it was hard work, and it kept me pretty cut off. I stuck with the guys I already knew, and I didn’t go to any parties or meet many new people or do much of the social stuff that makes pycon so awesome. I still had a good time, but it was a very controlled good time.

To be an active part of any community, python included, you have to want it. You have to love it and sometimes you have to hate it, but mostly, you have to want whatever it is you get out of it. And if you’re part of an under-represented group and you want to play, you’d better also want to save the world, because that’s the assumption everyone is going to make. You’re going to be the token, the anomaly, the exception to the rule, and people are going to ask you about it, and heaven help you if you don’t want to discuss it. They’ll call you names under their breath (affectionately) and roll their eyes (fondly) and pat you on the head (sweetly) and ask why you’re so emotional (seriously).

It’s hard, is what I’m saying.

Is it worth it? I don’t know. I cannot and will not speak for other women. For me, sometimes, yes, it’s worth it. I’m not opposed to work, and I neither expect nor want everything to be easy. But sometimes it’s not worth it. Sometimes I tell all my mailing lists to stop sending me mail and I quit out of my RSS reader and I pause twitter until I can breathe again. Maybe I knit a hat or read a book or study French or write a story or go to a play or hang out with my friends. Sometimes I pull back for a day, sometimes for a month. There’s no shortage of activity or community in my life, just a shortage of sleep.

I keep losing track of the point of this post. What am I even trying to say? I’m not sure I know. Communities are difficult. Being actively involved with python is a lot of work, all those lists and feeds and conferences and blog posts to write and conversations to have. It’s not remotely surprising to me that there are so many women using python without engaging with the community, awesome as it is. Maybe they use it at work, like I do, and they can get support and encouragement and help from coworkers. They can read everyone else’s blog posts for fresh ideas and new technologies. They use python like they use Firefox, as just another tool to get the job done, whatever the job may be. Maybe they have all the friends they need. Maybe they’d rather spend their time writing software than answering questions about feminism (or any other *ism). Maybe they don’t want it badly enough. I can’t hold that against anyone; I’m often in that boat. I’m sure everyone is, about something.

So if my point is (and I am pretty sure this is my point!) that dev communities are difficult and time-consuming, and moreso for under-represented groups, what can we do about it? [Please note that I am completely uninterested in explaining why we should care, and I'm not going to engage with anyone who thinks under-represented groups should just stay under-represented.] And that’s where, I’m afraid, I’m out of words. The diversity list is kicking around some pretty good ideas about this, like Python Open Mike for people who don’t want to (or can’t) maintain their own blogs. So that’s awesome. Is the wiki useful enough? Should there be better newbie guides? Is there some kind of This Week In Python thing that people can subscribe to for an idea of what’s going on in the community without drowning in Planet Python? Would that even be useful? Are there community-building and maintaining technologies out there that are better than mailing lists and irc channels and far-flung blogs? What else can we do to make engaging less of a pain in the ass?