from Bikini Kill: Girl Power (Issue #2) Being cool in our culture means being cold, stand-offish, uncaring (you're too cool to notice a lot of things) and self absorbed. You are attractive in a normal white way but have a little dirt on your chin. You are mysterious and lacking in real friends cuz being cool means being vulnerable with no one. (This increases the value that others place on the rare memories of you sharing anything with them... cool) For the most part, cool attributes have been claimed by our society as "male." This means that the only way a person is brought up GIRL (and thus the opposite of what is cool) can be "truly" cool is to assimilate into male culture via toughness. By claiming "dork" as cool we can confuse and disrupt this whole process. The idea is that not only have we decided that being a dork (not repressing our supposedly feminine qualities like niceness and telling people how we feel) is cool and thus, valuable to us BUT also that we are not willing to accept claims that how we are is wrong, undeveloped, bad, or.....uncool. Sure, I can still be sort of removed and aloof sometimes but I'm not gonna get mad at anyone if they ask me what's up... or use my aloofness as a way to avoid confrontations. Being a dork means that the air is clear to talk, even if that means just saying, "I can't talk right now cuz I'm too freaked out." Being a dork is about demystifying yourself, not fitting yourself into james dean tv pictureland (cuz it is alienating) and learning about sincerity via true corniness and soul love friendships. Dorks die when bullets hit them and dorks cry real tears. back to in print what is riot grrrl? | band biography | lyrics | discography images | did you know? | links | about the site home |