The Riot Grrl Post-Feminism of Tank Girl

Tank Girl lives in post-apocalyptic Australia.  Her home is a tank and her (steady) partner is a mutant kangaroo named Booga. 

Which isn't to say that he's her only partner.  Tank Girl had sex with just about anything that moved - man, woman, beast, stuffed toys, reconditioned World War II armored vehicles...

She's female, so you'll want to know what she looks like by now. After all, a woman in the public eye is ALL about her body, isn't she?  And we'll just assume that there is no brain.

Take your pick.  Tank Girl changes outfits and aspect on a regular basis.  Often that was between panels in the same sequence, when there's no way that she could have actually moved.  Being too drunk or stoned.

Tank Girl's hair fell to her shoulders.  It was shaved, partially or wholly. It had a choir-girl's wave cut.  Then it was dread-locked.  A kaleidoscope of colors came and went. She looked like she'd been dragged through a hedge backwards.  She looked like a prom queen.

All without moving an inch.  It wasn't about what Tank Girl looked like, but, of course, it was.  Everyone could have identified Tank Girl in a comic strip.  She was the only Riot Grrl in cartoon form.  And the point was this - you can wear whatever you damn well want to.  You can do your hair however you please.  You can go naked if you want to.  You can cover up too. 

Tank Girl represented female empowerment.  She couldn't even be bothered to flash the birdie at what all of society thought that she should do.  They knew that they were dismissed.

These were my years and my generation, so forgive me my rose-tinted spectacles, as I tear us all to shreds.

Our grandmothers had achieved universal suffrage.  Women had the vote.  Our mothers had smashed through glass ceilings, demanded and secured gender equality in the workplace (and much more besides).  Now it was our turn.

How on Earth are you supposed to follow an act like that!?

We were all of an age when we could see open (and often casual) sexism scurrying into retreat. We had all experienced it, and occasionally still did from the older men, but it was shocking and unacceptable now.  We were allowed to rub their noses into the grime.

And we were all looking ahead, towards that seemingly clear avenue, when women would have the same opportunities as any man.  For the first time in history, females had choice.  We could be whatever we wanted to be.  We could do, act and say in whatever way we wanted.

So what was the response?  The initial one was the backlash.  Back in the 1980s, it became fashionable to disdain Feminism - they were all men-hating lesbians and ugly to boot - while embracing, as a choice, pretty much everything that the Women's Movement had sought to secure.

Rampant individualism actually looked very much like women rushing like frightened sheep back into the pen.  They flung the baton back out after them, and their bewildered younger sisters caught it.  My lot caught it.  And we didn't have a clue what to do with it.

Into the confusion of this pivotal moment stepped Tank Girl.  And HER message was 'sod the lot of them.'

If Tank Girl had appeared for the first time in 2012, instead of 1988, the viral catch-phrase that would have immediately applied is, 'And not a single f**k was given that day.'

She cut entirely from her roots.  The world was hers for the taking, so she took it.  She listened to nobody and never looked back.

If something got in her way, she blew it up. She lived in a tank; and she had an improbable amount of over-sized weaponry at her disposal.  This included atomic bombs as a bra, long before Madonna did the whole conical breasts thing.

In fact, the majority of the gags and scene sketches were simply excuses to blow stuff up. 

On the surface, it looked like the Riot Grrl generation had taken as their fictitious leader a psychotic, highly selfish bitch.  So what did it say about the third wave Post-Feminists?

Actually, not a lot.  Tank Girl was never mainstream.  The majority of females around at the time hadn't even heard of her until Hollywood's travesty of a movie. Even then, they may not have been aware that she'd stepped out of the pages of a comic. 

Many old school Feminists rejected Tank Girl out of hand.  She came from the drug-addled minds of two male art students.  Sorry, I should have made bold and underlined a certain word in the midst of that.  Male. Art students.

So what were we doing even reading such a thing to divine anything to do with how females should react?  That was surely handing back one patriarchy and replacing it with another, closer to our own ideals.  We'll take the pen next to our older sisters then, shall we?

Writers like Elyce Rae Helford have argued that we did do ourselves a disservice. In Post-feminism and the Female Action-Adventure Hero: Positioning Tank Girl (pdf), she pointed out all of the ways that Tank Girl was still objectifying women, primarily through a voyeuristic, male gaze upon a female body.  

It was all more about reinterpreting traditional roles for women, than reinventing them.

However, Helford was commenting upon the movie, not the comic.  She does make this point repeatedly, and she makes clear where the original cartoon would have deviated strongly from the film portrayal.  (As well as where the movie tips a wink to the wilder, more sexually free, more devil-may-care proper Tank Girl.)  That was a whole different scenario.

At the time, what I read in those Tank Girl comics was an extremely positive female role model.

She was blasting her anger into her surroundings, defending all parapets that the Women's Movement had achieved.  Taking it back from those too afraid of not gaining male approval to fully embrace the disdained Feminism.

In retrospect, it was more like two enlightened men (in the context) saying, 'Ladies, it's ok, go for it!  Freaking well go for it!"

And so we did.  Perhaps the older Feminists were right, but they missed the fact that they'd torn our roots from under us.  Unhealthy, undesirable and totally unwanted traditions had been ripped away for the first time in history.  But they were still traditions. 

Everyone gets roots and traditions upon which to build.  Our groups, societies, countries, tribes, species all get to stand on the shoulders of giants.

What the first and second Feminist waves did was smash through the gateways and let us pile through, but they were left holding the doors open. It was up to the third wave to start building on nothing much at all.

Is it little wonder that Tank Girl held the appeal that she did in those circumstances?

She was the Post-Feminist Punk way of saying, 'Yes, we want what you all fought to give us, but you're going to have to give us time to work out what we do next.  We have no precedents.'

So what we did was blow stuff up, wear what we wanted and have sex with mutant kangaroos.  At least we did in our heads.  But mostly we rode our metaphorical tanks out onto the road ahead and did our best to forge a worthy future.

And perhaps our failure is implicit in the fact that Tank Girl is back again.  Ah!  F**k it! I'm off to buy a talking toy koala.  You get the hand grenades.