Jim McKay

I'll hazard that many of Bitch's core readership grew up during the 1990s, potentially influenced by the mainstream success of alternative rock. Based on the recent success of Sara Marcus' Girls to the Front: The True Story of Riot Grrrl Revolution and Marisa Meltzer's Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, as well as the possible relaunch of Sassy Magazine, it's clear that the merging of punk's DIY ethos and radical gender and sexual politics that helped define mainstream feminism in the first half of the decade still resonate for many feminists.



Jim McKay's 1996 feature Girls Town came out at an interesting time. It was released a few years after riot grrrl was co-opted by the mainstream and Sassy folded, but a year before Spin Magazine attempted to capitalize on a cultural moment with their problematic Girl Issue and Alex Sichel's coming-of-age drama All Over Me received a limited theatrical release. It made its stateside cinematic debut two days before Annette Haywood-Carter's Foxfire, an adaptation of Joyce Carrol Oates' novel that also focused on a teenage girl gang, which helped launch Angelina Jolie's career, attempted to do the same for Calvin Klein model Jenny Shimizu, and represented a liminal period for former child actress and Rilo Kiley frontwoman Jenny Lewis. While Foxfire is better-known, I'd argue that Girls Town evinces more progressive gender and racial politics.