Kimberly Peirce -- Director, Boys Don't Cry
I was a tomboy, growing up, racing go-carts, building things and running around. I was told that I was a girl and I shouldn't swing from trees. In my teens, I photographed, drew a lot and got really academic, which was difficult because it wasn't so accepted where I was growing up, in Miami. It wasn't a very cultured place, so that created a kind of isolation. My friends were like the Falls City kids [from Boys Don't Cry]. We were skateboarders. I had a Gordon Smith skateboard and we used to surf and hang out, take the bus, go to the mall. We just had a kind of narcotized life.
Corin Tucker -- Sleater-Kinney
I wish there were songs that guys could sing about being hurt. But usually they sing really evil and angry things. Like on that Offspring song he sings, "My friend's got a girlfriend and he hates that bitch." People turn to misogyny because men are afraid of showing their feelings. Whereas, women just emote. It works for us, so I think that we're socialized to be able to tell the whole story.
In 1999, I got really angry about a lot of the sexism in rock. Bands like Limp Bizkit have really misogynist lyrics and then have a kind of cultural violence to them. And then they play Woodstock, and women are raped at that show. I think that is [a] really awful thing, and it's really frustrating to me. It almost seems like there's this backlash against any kind of forward thinking. Looking at the sexism in rock, people are doing it so deliberately, and men are grasping for any power they can in a really ugly way.
There's always pressure on a teenage girl to deal with sexuality. It's a really intense thing because girls go through puberty much earlier than boys, and their bodies change so fast. They are really faced with it earlier and have to come to terms with it very quickly -- especially because teenage girls are viewed so voyeuristically in our culture. They're seen as sexual objects by the time they're 14 or 15. They're ready for guys to be ogling them all the time. That's really fucked up -- to be viewed almost as a woman when you still have a child's mentality.
