Friday, July 25, 2008

Girl Power

I noticed the other day that my friend has a bumper sticker on her bike that says, “Girls Kick Butt.” (The word isn’t actually “butt” but a more colorful term that rhymes with “grass.” If you know that, you’ll understand better the force of the slogan.) The phrase “Girls Kick [You-Know]” is unexpected, because girls, conventionally speaking, aren’t supposed to want violence. Of course, the phrase also simply means, “girls are great, girls are cool.” But it’s impossible not to hear also the assertion that girls are powerful, they enjoy their power, they take charge, they win. Win what? Against whom? Or does it matter?

The slogan may be hard to hear despite its emphatic form. In fact, its forcefulness indicates a suspicion that no one is listening. And so I’d like, just for a moment, to create a space in which such an utterance might be heard, or overheard: because it is a message addressed not to me, not to men, but to other women and especially to girls, in the way a bumper sticker nudges and whispers secrets even as it seems to shout.

It may be instructive to compare it to another kind of slogan altogether, one that would announce that “boys rule” or that “guys are cool.” The problem is that such a message is superfluous. Who needs to hear it? Boys already know, as girls do also (too well!), that boys are cool, boys kick butt. Everything about our culture tells us so. And just to be certain, people like popular radio host Michael Savage will climb on a soapbox to tell us that any good father teaches his son what his father taught him: “Don’t behave like a fool. Don’t be anybody’s dummy. Don’t sound like an idiot. Don’t act like a girl. Don’t cry.” Savage says, “That’s what you should raise your children with. Stop with the sensitivity training. You’re turning your son into a girl, and you’re turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men.”

The message that boys rule, that boys win, is already the message of politics, patriotism, business, and sports. As a slogan it sounds like boasting or even bullying. Not so, “Girls Kick Butt,” a phrase that pushes its way into the conversation against the will of the powerful. It is itself already a kicking of a large and obstructive butt. It says, “Yes, you are the ass, Michael Savage!” But it also says, more powerfully, in an affirmative voice, from the female teacher to the female student, “I’m here; we are together,” and from the mother to the daughter, “I hear you; I feel the same way.”

In politics, there are two kinds of violence, and one is better than the other. One is a friend of justice even though it stands outside the law; the other speaks in the name of justice, from the place of the law, but in the voice of power. The verbal assertion of girl dominance is not at all the same as the claim of boy dominance. For the same reason, I would contend that “Black Power” bears no resemblance to the slogan “White Power.” Until we can hear the difference, we’ll never be able to understand what women or what black people are saying when they are speaking about our shared history or about their own dreams. Their power is necessary because our power is unjust. They have to raise their voices because even our silence is deafening.

The idea that girls kick butt is subversive and violent. It expresses a wish to transform relations, overturn old concepts, and uproot biases. It may threaten with a boot, but it demands simply justice. Don’t you hear it at the door, louder and louder, that rude, joyful, triumphant kicking?

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on July 25, 2008
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