A large part of the joke, I think, is that no one was ever able to agree on what was and wasn’t “punk.” From what I understand, that was even the case in the 70s. In the Village and on the Lower East Side, the same argument was still going on twenty-five years later.

Some people thought it was fashion. They went out to be seen, after spending oodles of cash and hours of time on their clothes, shoes, and hair, getting that look right. How are people like this any different from the girl who spends whole mornings flat-ironing her hair, and whole afternoons dribbling away money on 57th Street?

There were the gutter punks who spared for change on St. Marks all day, allegedly living in squats in Alphabet City, but plenty of them actually went home to the suburbs at night and slept on clean sheets.

Probably my least favorite “punks” were the activists — NYU students, usually, who hung out at ABC No Rio and made a big show out of doing Food Not Bombs. This kind of thing looks great on paper. What could be bad about mass volunteering for social justice?

But what I found was, a lot of the people who get involved in social activism tend to be hateful, holier-than-thou snobs. They proselytize. They are smarter than you are. They are making the world a better place, and if you’re not doing it the same way they are, then you are helping to destroy it. They are as bad as Born Again Christians — worse, maybe, because you expect Born Again Christians to be smug one-trackers.

I will never forget the time I offered to volunteer at the now defunct “anarchist” bookstore Blackout Books, and was told my help would not be needed. The other volunteers didn’t want to include me because I hadn’t read enough Karl Marx or Emma Goldman to be able to spout off quotes, in place of my own thoughts, during our conversation. If I sound bitter here, it’s because these kind of people wind me up. I can’t help it. I value the ability to think for myself, as opposed to rattling off someone else’s long dead rhetoric. What kind of anarchist enforces a secret handshake?

I deplore the hypocrisy of a movement that bills itself as a safe haven for outsiders, but is instead an exclusive clique with the same undercurrent of expected proprieties you’d find at any debutante ball.

You’ll notice that I haven’t even mentioned music yet. Neither did most of these people.

To Be Continued.

I’m not the slightest bit squeamish about my age, so here’s another giveaway. When I was in high school, “indie rock” — a term which has long since become meaningless — equaled independent or alternative music. Music which was eventually co-opted by major labels for repackaging, and force fed back to us as “grunge.”

The timing of “grunge” coincided with a mass interest in punk’s roots. See some works by Greil Marcus, a man with terrific and original ideas but whose unfortunate lofty writing style mitigates the relevance of much of what he has to say. In the 90s, many last-gasp Gen-Xers professed to love their punk. (The bulk of whom went on to become hipsters and yuppies, naturally.)

I can’t listen to Nirvana these days. It was never my favorite then, and it sure as fuck doesn’t stand up now. If Cobain hadn’t killed himself, Nirvana would have remained the cultural flash in the pan it was meant to be. Do you know anyone who still listens to Pearl Jam? Really? (Which, incidentally, was always a much better band.)

In New York, punk rock is considered, overall, an aesthetic. It’s the music, sure. But it’s also an “attitude,” and purists would have raucous debates with you about punk rock’s origins.

“Punk rock: the Sex Pistols. The Clash.” “No way, man! CBGB’s! That pussy Malcolm McLaren nicked the New York Dolls’ sound and Richard Hell’s look.” “They stole their shit from Detroit! MC5, the Stooges, hell you better believe it, Iggy Pop!”

Et cetera. Ad nauseum. Yeah. And I used to live for those debates.

I was a misfit. I bought the whole rigmarole: I was supposed to enjoy what misfits enjoyed. Plus I had the added bonus of getting to watch it all disappear just as I was arriving, which made it all just so poignant. A counter-cultural death rattle! Right here in plain view! Tatty (and affordable) New York goes up in smoke to make way for soulless gentrification. What else is a young outsider to do but rally “Punks not dead!” at the top of her lungs, making sure all and sundry can hear the missing apostrophe in the battle cry.

Oh, I was a good little soldier, all right.

To Be Continued.

I enjoy reading about other people’s experiences, and the more honest the writer is, the better I like it. Marin uses gallows humor in the best way possible. She says:

“Ok, let’s cut the shit here. Working in the ’sex industry’ fucking blows. Suicide Girls get to have hairy armpits, and it’s fun to put your picture up on onlyundiesclub.com, but that’s playacting. Real sex work is about showing up at a millionaire crackhead’s house with a big box of Wet Ones, letting him bang the shit out of you for three days (even though he pulled a gun on you for sitting on the left-hand side of his bed), and then leaving with $1,900. No matter what the empowered academics in San Francisco pretend to believe, whoring—in any form—is hell, and the only reason women do it is to get money for coke NOW! If you want to try it out, be prepared to have nothing to show for years of suffering but a blown-out septum and some lumpy fake tits. It’s like extreme waitressing. You make hundreds of dollars a night licking ass and then you immediately spend it on drugs just to feel normal again.

“If you’re really, truly still interested, please at least do us a kindness and read this A–Z before your first day on the job.”

Yeah. I’m sorry she’s had a lousy time of it. But man! can she write.

For the record, I am not “anti-porn.” Neither am I full-on “pro-porn” — although many activists would have you believe you have to either love porn or hate it, I find the truth about anything is never that simple.

I feel like there’s a lot of pressure these days to be “sex-positive.” And at its roots, that’s a class issue. To say that no one who does sex work has a choice, that we are all trafficked and pimped and owned, well, that’s both ignorant and condescending.

On the other hand, to claim that Belle de Jour / Dr. Brooke Magnanti (an amazing woman, by the way) is the sex worker norm is naïve, and in its way, equally condescending.

The truth is somewhere in between, and everyone’s truth is slightly different.

Hope you all enjoy the essay.

Please, Google. I’m begging you. You and I were having such a healthy relationship. Don’t turn into Facebook.