By Tanya Pearson
In 1991, journalist Barney Hoskyns wrote that angry girls with electric guitars had “highjacked rock and roll” and that these “psycho babes from hell” were symptomatic of a new wave of post-feminist expression. This article appeared in Vogue, just to give you a sense of how widespread and mainstream the alternative genre had become. In his 1979 book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige provides an account of how the mainstream media deal with youth subcultures.
According to this narrative, youth cultures emerge seemingly spontaneously “from the streets,” from outside the capitalist economy. They are then inevitably co-opted by the mainstream, diluted, and commodified. Radical bands are seen to lose their edge as they are signed to major record labels; entrepreneurs soften street fashions as they package them for mainstream high-street consumers; leaders of the style are nominated and often endowed with additional glamour and charisma. Media plays a key role here, albeit veering erratically from fascination with taboo behavior to melodramatic “moral panic.” In the ’90s, the media played an important role in positioning women as arbiters of a new feminism, while also laying the groundwork for the eventual backlash. The ’90s witnessed an explosion of different forms of femininity, a conflation of styles, sounds, genres, and aesthetics that left the media scratching its head. Radio, MTV, and music magazines shaped public opinion but had a difficult time corralling and categorizing these rock women — and the media loves putting women in categorical boxes.
L7 were hard rock, were androgynous, and deliberately chose a gender-neutral band name; Shirley Manson was a little bit goth, a little bit pop, and 100 percent opinionated; Liz Phair wasn’t loud, but she was sexual and explicit; Courtney Love and Kat Bjelland screamed and thrashed their guitars in tattered vintage, lipstick-smeared fury; Kristin Hersh was the nice mom, cerebral, genius, and progenitor of modern indie rock; Alanis Morissette emerged in 1995 with hair in her face and a unique vocal affect unveiled in her single “You Oughta Know,” exemplifying rage and vulnerability. For a glorious moment, she made being pissed off — and going down on your significant other in a movie theater — cool, although still unhygienic.
Mass media, whether it’s aware of it or not, internalizes institutional values while operating under the illusion that it is free, objective, and unbiased. It employs strategies, rooted in the coloniality of gender, women, and women’s work and perpetuates myths that we consider natural or innate — myths like (1) rock is masculine, rebellious, and antiestablishment; (2) women are predisposed to compete; (3) women in rock are a novelty or phenomenon; (4) mass media subscribes to gendered categorizations; and (5) mass media preserves the male gaze.
Using this logic, for example, an unwed, childless, hard-rocking woman becomes a spectacle, while child-rearing rock women become dangerous aberrations to our collective understandings of what a wife and mother should be. Women, by virtue of their biology, do not fit into the rock mold, which is all about cock, sex, and masculine sexual prowess. Some, like Courtney Love and Kristin Hersh, were young wives and mothers who upended that revisionist ideology. Hersh went on to have four children and lost custody of her eldest due in part to how she was portrayed in the media (mentally ill) and for being unsuitably employed.
Kristin Hersh: I’ve been made to look bad for just being a mother in a band so much so that they took my son away. It was easy to make me look bad: a history of mental illness, a rock band, traveling. I’m actually a really good mother. We have a nuclear family, yet they will not forgive me for that one lousy thing, which is that I can’t give up my band. The good rock journalists would note the onstage/offstage schism. Basically, their thrust was, “Look at this sweet girl or nice mom lady, and then watch what happens onstage.” And that’s true, and it’s a better story. The Warner Bros. take on what I was, was that I was too ugly and too smart, so that means you are difficult to work with because you’re not malleable and you’re not marketable. They want someone dumb and hot, and that’s not that different from a lot of popular culture, so I probably should have expected it, but music was my religion, and I couldn’t imagine that someone would crap all over it like that.
The media situated Liz Phair as the counterpoint to the androgynous alt-rock norm: a sexy, young, feminine woman who spoke frankly and explicitly about sex. At one point, a record label executive offered her thousands of dollars a month to be his live-in girlfriend. Less obvious consequences included navigating men’s expectations without pissing them off or hurting their feelings.
Liz Phair: I feel safer in this industry because of current campaigns of awareness for how unsafe it was in the past and how much sexual harassment, women, especially in the music industry, experienced. God. But it is quaint to laugh and be able to laugh about men being like, “I thought that harassing women was part of the job.”
And there is no question that, as a female, I would use men’s anticipation of that in the flirting process. I was aware that there was this sense of being friendly and a really chill kind of girl.
Whenever I would go do anything, any radio stop, any executive stop, there was this way of having to bejewel men’s expectations of some kind of flirty interaction, and then I spent my whole professional life dodging further consequences. It was expected. And to think about that now, it blows in my mind, that you’d have to flirt as a matter of doing business. And then you’d have to figure out how to get out of any expectations that arose from that flirting. We’ve gotten to the elevator. There’d be this feeling of like, “Okay, I have to get out of here.” And it freaked me out that anywhere you went, the guy could be expected to hit on you, and you were supposed to dress in a way that made them think that you were hot. And this was being explicitly said by labels.
Excerpted from Pretend We’re Dead by Tanya Peterson. Copyright © 2025 by Tanya Peterson. Used by arrangement with Da Capo, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing Group. All rights reserved.