Girls to the Front by Sara Marcus

Author:Sara Marcus
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-fiction, Music, Feminism, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780062013903
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2010-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Spin‘s target audience, the generation that was just beginning to be tentatively labeled “Xers,” constituted a powerful demographic in 1992. Many analysts believed that young voters held a critical key to the presidential election. The number of young people who bothered to vote had been dropping since 1984, and those who did cast ballots had been trending rightward. Figuring out how to reach the youthful abstainers and reverse their conservative drift might be a recipe for a Democratic victory in the fall.

The music industry was getting in on the action: Its new Rock the Vote initiative had signed up ten thousand young voters in time for the New Hampshire primary, and MTV had launched its own million-dollar Choose or Lose campaign, through which the channel broadcast a ninety-minute forum with Bill Clinton. (Political involvement did not necessarily equal progressive values or even intelligence: In one Choose or Lose spot, Aerosmith’s lead guitarist licked whipped cream off a woman’s chest while talking about the freedom “to wear whipped cream as clothing.” The spot also included a cameo from a giant condom.)

Choose or lose, indeed: To be young in 1992 was to feel that the world’s fate could be determined in the next seventy-two hours, and that the outcome might not be too favorable to human survival. With the December 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, the threat of nuclear annihilation had finally faded, but other terrifying forces, seemingly more cosmic and geologic than strictly political, had come to light. AIDS was painting everybody’s sexual awakening with somber mortality; global warming and skin cancer meant the sun was suddenly deadly as well. Magazines and newspapers printed ominous maps of North America striped with creeping red fever-rashes. Temperatures and sea levels were rising; incomes and standards of living were plummeting. For the first time in the nation’s history, young people told pollsters they expected to do worse than their parents had done.

Despite Spin‘s attention to such issues, the magazine remained largely a boy’s club, with men outnumbering women on the masthead three to one, and the resurgence of feminist activism had gotten scant respect in its pages. When Kathleen chose not to be interviewed for a Bikini Kill article in early 1992, the magazine ran an unflattering photograph of her grabbing her breast, mentioned romantic connections between the band members and the boys of Nation of Ulysses, and lashed out at her:

Hanna, however, doesn’t exactly have mass-media savvy—she declined to speak to SPIN and, with that, gave up the opportunity to reach thousands with her motivating voice. At a recent CBGB Bikini Kill show, many guys panted at the prospect of seeing Hanna topless (she had doffed her shirt at a previous gig), turning a potential act of defiance into an oglefest. Some of the older females present saw the show as just a Poly Styrene/X-Ray Spex retread.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.