Laura Synthesis has been editing Synthesis zine and running a zine distro under the same name since 1995, organized gigs for a couple of years as the XdotXcottonX girls crew, helped open the vegan cooperative Pogo Cafe in 2004, and has been involved in the London Social Centres Network and some of London’s anarchist women’s collectives. She lives in a veganXstraightedge fortress with her long-term boyfriend and their vegan dog, Coco. Her plans for the future include starting an eco village in South London including green roofs with guinea pigs and a screamo salon.
“How does it feel to be Queen of the PC Police?” an old friend said to me recently one late night in Paris, “and how does it feel to have lost?” He was referring to the 90s, of course—that era when the hardcore scene was a battleground and straightedge spanned the conflict. On one extreme were the orcs of machismo, violence, commercialism, patriarchal religion and occasional cigar-chomping poses. On the other extreme were anarchist/socialist, atheist, DIY, ‘PC’ peacepunk feminists against violent dancing. Both extremes shared a few things—veganism, a love of metal (typically, though not in my case), and a straightedge lifestyle. My friend was right in a way; we did lose. We were always in the minority. It would take a hugely popular band that was very explicitly critical of profiteering and machismo to get the majority of those mid-range kids to re-examine their values, and a Catharsis was always going to be outnumbered by the American bands backed by PR companies and hugely commercial non-stop tours through Europe.
Then again, how do we define winners and losers? 99 percent of those kids aren’t even into hardcore anymore, much less straightedge. The ones who were tripping off a macho fantasy had a superficial involvement and drifted through the scene and straight out again, carrying with them their ‘true ‘til death’ vegan sXe tattoos. A surprising number of my comrades are still around because our lifestyles, values and beliefs were an integrated whole and we could find more to talk about with each other than gigs and record-collecting. So, are the losers the ones who moved on or the ones who are still involved in a youth counterculture in their thirties?
What could be more ridiculous than sticking to a youth counterculture when you spend all day with proper grownups at a full-time job and can’t collect records because you have babies to support? In Europe, 92 percent of straightedgers drop out at by the age of twenty-six (I just made that up, but it’s not far off). Now in my mid-thirties, I can inform those edgebreakers that staying true would have gotten no easier at the age of twenty-seven.
I think we all know that most people who temporarily call themselves ‘straightedgers’ do so for self-esteem, peer pressure or social status reasons. These are also the main reasons people drop the edge and indeed leave the hardcore scene altogether. Social pressure in adulthood is more insidious than when we were youths. Life gets more complex and destructive life choices have more niches and cracks to insinuate themselves into. For those who feel tempted, it’s worth stepping back from time to time to examine the societal effects of intoxication and addiction. Speaking personally, peer pressure to drink has no effect on me whatsoever, but I do feel the social repercussions.
I live in the famously sozzled United Kingdom, a society so alcoholic that drink isn’t just the facilitator or basis of all social interaction, but its proxy.
“What are you doing this weekend?”
“I’m going out drinking/getting pissed.”
If you don’t drink, it can be assumed that you aren’t interested in socialising at all. I’ll present a couple of scenarios to demonstrate how difficult it can be to extract alcohol from everyday life.
The English way of starting a sexual relationship is to snog an acquaintance when both parties are drunk. There is simply no language for approaching the physical/emotional hurdle that people in this society are prepared to use.
People do notice, and comment, if one drinks non-alcohol at the pub or a party, no matter how low-key one is about it. Misery loves company and drinkers may feel anything from discomfort to anger around someone more sober than they are. They know it puts them at a disadvantage.
If anything, situations like these become more common after thirty as everyone’s lives become so boring they can’t do anything together but sullenly sip pints.
One of my sXe contemporaries is certain that by not drinking socially during one’s late teens and early twenties, one ends up a ‘cranky old loner’ with no friends. When I think of the straightedgers my age who do have tight bonds of friendship, it is with other straightedgers (whether or not they call themselves this). On the other hand, I just as often see straightedge adults who hate each other and have been talking shit since the 90s.
It can be positive that many sorts of people are attracted to the sober lifestyle, or repelled by the drunk lifestyle, but it’s not much of a basis for friendship in itself. On the contrary, and I am guilty of this, one can be more annoyed by straightedgers who are, for example, anti-abortion/support profiteering in hardcore/evangelical christians/all of the above, than by non-sober hardcore folks with these beliefs. Nevertheless, I wish we could find more common ground. When a friend loses the edge, I don’t feel stabbed in the back. It’s when a straightedger is too cool to want to know me that I feel real betrayal. When I meet a straightedger who is also an anarchist and into screamo, I almost can’t believe my luck, though I know from experience that this is no guarantee of an ongoing relationship. Hardcore kids can be such social fuckups. Dammit people, shared understanding and values, even over something as superficial as straightedge, is a precious thing and these connections need nurturing and maintaining.
From reflecting on these things, I’ve gained a greater appreciation for the idea of ‘straightedge sisterhood’—a term that never has amounted to much and is pathetically rarely associated with feminism. I’ve had great experiences of fun, mutual support, friendship and empowerment with women through the punk/anarchist scene, but sometimes it seems the explicitly sXe corners of the scene bring out the worst in insecure girldom (eg. popularity competitions and shit-talking). Nevertheless, the phantom of an idea like a sisterhood based on soberness in a world infected by drunk/drugged male violence has potential.
Let’s have a posi, postmodern revival of the straightedge crew. Just because the ‘88 crew has the tinge of cultish, macho chauvinism about it, it’s not like we can’t reclaim and redefine it in the 21st century. Social solidarity is healthy—it gives us roots and comradeship in an atomised world and can be a base for building or co-operating for social change. When I meet a fellow punk, sober or otherwise, I’ll keep trying to build those bridges because we all need each other and the better world we can create together.
We have potential as a counterculture because when we grew up we brought the scene up with us, developing it well beyond a youth movement. The radical straightedgers, I’ll call us, saw that straightedge was a dead end for any progressive politics other than animal rights. Fortunately, by the end of the 90s, the punk/hardcore movement had evolved its activist aspects to such an extent that there were practical and exciting ways of putting punk values into practice—the direct action movement.
I’ll admit even I’m surprised to meet a fellow anarchist/anticapitalist who is also sXe. These beliefs never gained much of a foothold in the main currents of sXe for various complex reasons—perhaps vegan consumerism had a significant part to play. Nevertheless, we are out there. Some don’t use the term ‘straightedge’ in order to distance themselves (‘drug free adult’, anyone?). Some, like me, long ago stopped going to typical straightedge gigs since they had nothing to offer that one couldn’t get from a violent mugging by an anti-abortionist. Some have contributed to making the world a better place, and this points to one of my pet arguments for teetotalism—that it frees up our minds and bodies for more good works. Pace, all those drunk activists who do so much—I’d still like to see what you’d achieve if you were sober.
So we see from history that the hardcore scene developed a DIY strand and a commercial strand and a lot of blurriness in between. We neither succeeded in winning over the greedy bastards nor in kicking them out. On the contrary, various aspects of our beloved hardcore were sold to the highest bidder, at least for a few years until they went out of fad. Looking back though, doesn’t the DIY stuff look, sound, feel, and generally stand up better than all those lame copycat products cranked out by certain Belgians and Americans? That, my friends, is because it was sincere and deeply felt when it was created and distributed with love by a network of friends.
I won’t admit, therefore, that the ‘PC police’ lost. History always throws up the defeated as the moral victors and the Great Powers as deserving of scorn. Our strain of good works and good lives will shine through. And that’s just in the hardcore scene. The progressive punks, including an influential contingent of sXe folks, can claim a global movement for human liberation at least partially their own.
By the way, I wasn’t the most active womyn among radical straightedgers (stand up, the Emancypunx girls, among many others). I was perhaps just the one in Europe with the biggest mouth. Hardcore would have collapsed long ago without the unsung and unrecognised work of us wimmin behind the scene’s scenes. So there.