While recently reading GIRLS TO THE FRONT by Sara Marcus (a history of the Riot Girl movement) I was struck hard by an excerpt Marcus included from a zine. She was showing why so many girls were drawn to the movement, and to zine writing in particular. For me though, it spoke across time and space to nearly ever teenage girl:

"I'm so angry that I don't know what to write, I just want to write something, that I want to say something, that I want to scream something, something powerful and strong to make up for the helplessness that I feel now....I want to scream at the guy who told me that women should stop complaining because they already have all the rights that they need. I want to scream at my brothers who read the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and watch the Miss America pageant....I want to scream because I am just as much a human being as any man but I don't always get treated like one, I want to scream because no matter how much I scream, no one will listen."

When I was 15 I wanted to scream everyday, for a thousand reasons that ranged from my divorced father, remarried mother, my brother who was gone in the Marine Corps, and the totality of what I did not know and the certainty that I wanted to know everything. Frustration and outright anger fueled me. I was very good at pretending I was fine but I wasn't and those strong emotions are still with me even today. I realized when I read this paragraph that I was not alone in having those intense feelings and I wondered who else felt the same way.

So that was my question to the group: What made you want to scream as a teenage girl? The group has changed in the past month - some folks have dropped out and others have joined. I also asked a few friends if they could chime in and one agreed but asked that her answer run anonymously - I'm sure you'll understand when you read it. This was a tough go-round, but a worthy one and I'm so grateful to everyone who participated, and also to those who explained in very poignant emails why they could not.

None of us, it turns out, have forgotten the screaming girls we used to be. That's a good thing, I think - they had a right to all that yelling and they deserve to be remembered.

Beth Kephart: "I wanted to scream, I am somebody, too. Perhaps not beautiful. Perhaps not witty. But I have a soul, I have ideas, I write these poems, I am worth knowing. Stop looking past me. Stop looking ahead. Be here, right now, with me, and make this right now matter. Help me make me matter. Help me not need you to make me matter."

Laurel Snyder: "What didn't make me scream at fifteen? I screamed at rallies and I screamed at my mom. I screamed at my teachers (once threw a piece of liver at the biology teacher who wanted me to dissect). I screamed at my brother and (once I had one) my boyfriend. Maybe because I grew up in the kind of family where screaming was okay-- between therapy and rallies my parents had taken me to as a kid. I'd been taught to scream.

I've never really thought about this before, but maybe that made things worse... because as a result there was no real impact. I mean, sure I upset people (nobody likes being screamed at), but I never seemed to get anywhere with my screaming.

Or maybe that was the impact of my teens. I kind of screamed myself out, and learned to talk and write."

Anonymous: "What made me want to scream, as a teen girl? My breasts. When I got breasts, I lost everything else.

Parental trust, affection, respect, and the belief that I had a brain in my head – all of that went out the window, thanks to two largely useless overdeveloped glands.

I think it’s in the rules or something: Dads Must Freak When Their Daughters Mature. I was ten the first time my father left me this hideous velour bathrobe that zipped to my chin. I was instructed to wear it before bed and after showers.

Message received: Cover up. You are no longer free to wander around in shortie pajamas after your bath.

You are no longer free to wander.

You are no longer free.

I was eleven when I started getting the pregnancy books left on my bed by my Mom. That seemed normal enough – I was hitting puberty, and I was a B-cup already, but the combination of the robes plus the books was confusing for a geeklet with glasses who hid behind her mushroom-cap styled hair and rescued worms from the sidewalk when it rained. I could barely speak to adults, much less to boys my own age, and I’d already seen The Miracle of Life a hundred and eighteen times or so by the time I was eleven – my mother was a big believer in having us be prepared.

But the losses continued. In the seventh grade, my gymnastics coach refused to spot me anymore, as my breasts were by then a C cup, and he was “uncomfortable” with touching me. I had to sit out the rest of the year on the sidelines, and switch to general P.E. the next year. My Mom cut off an 8th grade friendship I had with a twenty-year-old guy from our church who’d sponsored one of our mission trips, sure that something untoward was going on. After all, why would he smile and wave at a mere thirteen year old? Message received: Nobody actually likes you. Any friendliness from guys is about your body.

As I got older, The Garments, as I called that zippered velour hideousness, came with lectures – about staying out of boys faces, about you-think-you’re –cute-don’t you, about who-do-you-think-you-are. I was disallowed from going on most school outings, as if just away from my father’s censorious gaze, I would immediately revert to the whore he apparently knew me to be. Message received: You cannot be trusted.

I was fifteen when our new principal, who was a young twenty-eight from Arkansas, invited me to his home to meet his sister, who was sixteen and a long, lonely way from home. The principal and his wife were friends of mine, but somehow, that relationship sent my mother into a panic. It wasn’t what she said so much as what she didn’t say – she never asked how the family was, or how the sister was settling in, when I spent time with them. Instead, she quizzed me about what we did, where I sat, and what Mr. K. said to me, listening critically for some behavioral infringement.

Message received: I am watching for the evil that sleeps inside of you to erupt and ruin marriages.

And my mother despaired of my clothes when I went away to school. She complained when I wore knee-length sweaters, baggy jeans and long coats, all year ‘round. My mother always told me to stand up straight and didn’t understand why I didn’t make “more of an effort” in college.

Didn’t she understand that the message I’d already received was, disappear?

It is a difficult enough thing for a girl to claim her sexuality and be who she is, uninfluenced by pseudo-feminist ideas of girl power and equality given to us the media or the diet industry. When she doesn’t have the adults who are supposed to love and support her on her side, she wanders a long time in the dark, wondering what she did wrong, screaming inside, or making choices that are in themselves screams – for help, for acknowledgment, for something.

There’s not a good way to talk about powerlessness, as a teen girl. The world is supposed to be our oyster just then – we’re supposed to be living the best years of our lives. Why, then, did I feel so much like screaming?

Simmone Howell: "ARGHHHH! aka Ruminations on My Teenage Ugly

I wish that I could say that I had any kind of social conscience when I was fifteen but mostly, the thing that made me scream was myself. I had moved from a public secondary school to a private girls school and was hanging out with a group of girls who had all this freedom and money. I too wanted to go to nightclubs and drink Fra Angelico and master the art of flirting, but my parents were strict and we lived in the sticks. Also - I wasn't much to look at. I knew this even as I fought against it. And fifteen was the year it mattered most. I had stopped loving unavailable pop stars and was ready for real boys - not that I knew any. Then we started dancing classes with the brother school. I can still remember the awful awful moment when the boys selected their partners for the first time. It sounds totally Edwardian - but it wasn't so long ago.

What made me scream? Oblivious guys and ruthless girls. Friends who changed allegiances as often as they changed underwear. My face - I had pimples, constantly. My period - what was the point of it? Teachers and tram inspectors. My parents. Dad was involved in a pyramid selling and Mum was involved in the parish - and it seemed to me that no one ever told the truth. I remember in the career counselor's office there was a poster that said: GIRLS CAN DO ANYTHING! poster but no one ever said out loud that a girl's worth was tied to her looks. And here is my cultural cringe: I remember reading Priscilla Presley's Elvis and Me and being struck by the idea that a famous rock star might fall for a school girl. I also remember Vietnam, a mini-series set in the 1960s starring a young Nicole Kidman - she ends up having an affair (or maybe it's just an affair of the mind) with an older man (played by Graeme Blundell.) So really, my heroines were young girls who were sexually attractive to old men - which is pretty fucked. I didn't learn about Elvis's white underpants fetish until I was out of school. And by then Nicole Kidman had married Tom Cruise and was wearing flats. I didn't know about feminism until I was out of school either and it wasn't until much later that I realised that Hollywood and advertising and Barbie and Dolly magazine might have had something to do with my teenage ugly."

Cecil Castellucci: "The thing that made me the angriest as a teenager was the fact that adults would dismiss my opinion on things because I was young and underage. Like being young and underage meant that I didn’t have a brain. One time, I was on a field trip, and one of the parents started talking about the Soviet Union and how they were the enemy and blah blah blah, you know the drill. And I tried to engage this father of one of my classmates in a friendly discussion about how he was being a total bonehead. Here’s the thing, he was probably right, and I was probably right. We were both probably right. Also, we were both probably wrong. I probably didn’t have all my facts straight. And guess what, most likely, neither did he. When I suggested that we would just have to agree to disagree that nuclear bombs were wrong and that MAD (mutually assured destruction) was dumb, he didn’t say, “OK there kiddo, we’ll agree to disagree. What a pleasant and intriguing
conversation this has been.” He told me I was wrong. That I didn’t know what my own thoughts were about it because I was too young. That I was just parroting what my clearly liberal parents said. So,
he dismissed me. That enraged me. I mean, come on, just cause you're 15 years old it doesn’t mean that you don’t know what your own thoughts are. Or that you’ve been influenced or are parroting your
parents. Ask my dad. When I was a teenager, we got into debates and disagreed about stuff all the time. He still thinks that graffiti on the subways is not art. I still totally disagree with him and I am
now way older than 15. So, the thing that enraged me, made me want to scream and tear my hair out was being dismissed. About certain adults (not all adults, but a bunch of them) not thinking that I could be a thinking person just because I couldn’t vote. Or because I was considered a child. I wanted to scream, “Guess what people. A child! A teenager! They are also people! With brains! That can think for themselves!” In retrospect, I get that in that situation, that conversation with that stupid dad, that I was the more mature one there. Agreeing that we disagreed and that he had a right to his opinion, that was pretty cool of me. And it’s because I believed then, as I do now, that what Voltaire said, “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it.”

I can only imagine that it's the same today. Teenagers (and kids) who are smart as a whip still getting super peeved that their voice and thoughts about the world they live in is not being taken seriously.

Here’s what helped sooth my angst when I was 15: The Clash, War Games and Candide by Voltaire.

Sara Ryan: "In answering this question I have the dubious advantage of being able to refer to primary sources.

Yes, I still have all my high school journals.

This passage is from one I kept my junior year. I've changed two names to initials:

"She confided something in B. and specifically asked him not to tell me. God damn it, C., don't you think I care enough for you to tell me? I'm sorry if I've been too inquiring, but Jesus, you bitch, I CARE about you a hell of a lot, you're one of my best friends and it hurts me DEEPLY that you don't want me to know whatever this is. And you, B., say merely that "it was disturbing." I want to know!! I'm crying right now, do you know that? I'm going to fail my Chem quiz and my book report and my Spanish presentation and everything else I've got -- Phil wants us to put Theatre Guild before finals -- I'm driving myself over the edge. C., WHY??"

What made me want to scream? Not knowing secrets.

I always wanted to know everything that was going on with my friends. I wanted to discuss, dissect, and analyze the implications of everything, too.

I thought that kind of intense talk was a way to express intimacy, and it was.

But sometimes it was also what psychologists now call corumination: "excessively talking with friends about problems and concerns."

How do you know what's excessive, though?

Junior year, teachers were constantly telling me how seriously I needed to take the work I was doing -- how it would, as Gordon Gano declaimed in a song I listened to over and over, go down on my permanent record. It seemed only reasonable to take everything else in my life equally seriously, especially the friendships I valued so highly.

So what was it C. didn't want to tell me?

She'd thought about committing suicide.

"It happens to all of us," I wrote matter-of-factly after I found out. Who did I mean by "us"? Did I mean all my friends? All teens? I don't know.

Thankfully, she didn't. But classmates did. Once I found myself comforting a teacher who hadn't been briefed before the announcement of a student's suicide came over the PA system.

Sometimes in that journal I called myself melodramatic, and I was.

But sometimes the emotions that seemed disproportionately intense were, if anything, inadequate responses."

Neesha Meminger: "What made me want to scream? Oh gosh, where do I begin? Mostly it was my parents, I think. Together, they were the absolute symbol of everything that held me back. They were never on my side, it seemed. They were always on the side of religion, culture, tradition, institutional power. Their main concern was what People would think. This all-pervasive, all-powerful People who controlled my life, behavior, appearance, my future. My mother struggled to stand by me as often as she could, but she often lost her resolve when faced with tremendous pressure from my father and uncles. And I was not an easy gal to stand by, I'll give her that. I was headstrong, rebellious, and I wanted to do/say/be/think/want all the things a nice, Indian girl like me was strictly forbidden to do and say and be and think and want. I fought every step of the way, acquiescing only when I saw no other option, and even then, not acquiescing quietly.

But what made me want to scream the most was the double standard. How I couldn't cut my hair, but my brothers could. How I couldn't play sports, but my brothers could. How I couldn't go out and have friends, but my brothers could. It was the same double standard I saw with my parents - my father was engaged in discussions involving family decisions, but when my mother spoke up, she was told that no one asked for her opinion. She ran our home, but in public had to defer to my father. She made every important decision, but had to pretend that my father was the one "in charge." It was infuriating, not to mention an outright lie.

The double standard continued at school, of course, in all the ways we're familiar with. But school is where I began to learn of a racial double standard, as well. Where I became aware of stereotypes and pre-conceived notions. Ideas of who I was that preceded me when I walked into a room. People who had decided who I should be before they knew anything about me. I wasn't expected to want the same things my white contemporaries wanted. I was expected to be grateful, and satisfied with less. I was expected to be pliant, to be cooperative and not disruptive. To play by the rules, even when the rules clearly were not made with my best interests in mind.

I wanted to scream and pound and rage until I was seen. Until I could exist in the complexity and wholeness I was meant to. I wanted to live in my own comfort zone, instead of twisting and contorting myself into someone/everyone else's. I guess I haven't changed much in that regard (>grin<)--I'm still fighting, speaking up, and not quietly acquiescing. However, I suspect not much will change in the world, either, in the way/s I would like it to - at least in my lifetime. But my girls will see me fighting and challenging and raising my voice, and that is important. I saw my mother fight to the best of her ability, given her circumstances, and I'm who I am because of it. I will encourage my girls to rage and scream in productive, effective, channeled ways that create change. It's good to scream, I will tell them. Anger is the right emotion when someone is sitting on your neck. Just be smart and productive about how you express your rage - don't let it destroy *you*."

[Post pics are from PostSecret.]