There is a kind of story we like to tell about girlhood and resistance (it's white middle class teenage girl resistance, but resistance nonetheless), and Moxie sits squarely inside it: small town, bad boys, worse adults, one girl who finally has enough and starts to fight back. Reading it, though, what surfaced for me was not a catalogue of harms I had to survive, but the strange parallel universe I survived (and maybe thrived in) in as a young girl punk in Calgary, Alberta, in a school that (almost accidentally...but I see now probably on purpose judging from where many of my fellow 1999 grads are now) made a different ending possible.
Punk girl in a not-so-moxie school
My high school did not have a dress code, and I was never sexually harassed in the hallways. That does not mean it was a feminist utopia; it means the constraints were quieter, tucked into tracking, expectations, and the usual sorting of who mattered and who did not. What Moxie made me remember was how improbable it felt, even then, to be a teenage girl with spiked rainbow hair, fuzzy slippers, sometimes combat boots, many many piercings, and short back skirts and fishnet stockings, who was not constantly being told to shrink, to cover up, to smooth the edges. Or maybe I was too assertive to notice? I'm not sure anymore.
A zine, a photocopier, a possibility
When Vivian in Moxie sneaks into her bathroom to make that first zine, I could smell the warm toner and hear the slap of the photocopier lid from my own weekend trips to my dad's downtown office building to sneak making copies (and taking the Orange crush from the break room). I also wrote a zine back then, putting together ranty paragraphs and cut-up images, not because a football team was terrorizing the girls in my class, but because (I suppose) a riot grrrl and punk movement taught me that if the stories on offer did not fit, you could grab a sharpie, cut up your Sassy magazine, and make new ones. For Vivian, the zine is an emergency flare in hostile territory; for me, it was a way of naming a power I had already, tentatively, been granted.
The English teacher who held the door
The person who made that power feel legitimate was not a boy with a guitar or a cool older cousin; it was my grade 10 English teacher, Mrs. Payne. She quite obviously follow the curriculum, but also gave so much positive feedback to teenage me, existential crisis me. She took me seriously, asked questions that assumed I had ideas worth grappling with, and treated my weirdness like opportunity. In a different school, she might have been the lone adult ally in a Moxie-style uprising; in mine, she quietly expanded the space of what counted as “good student,” until there was room for a mouthy punk girl with a million safety pins in her backpack straps and opinions about everything.
Reading Moxie from the lucky side
This is why Moxie landed in my body the way it did: as a reminder that the fact I did not have to fight my school for the right to exist as I was is itself a kind of historical and geographic miracle of 1990s St. Mary's High School. What Jennifer Mathieu lays out in this books is that everyday sexism in schools is not a rite of passage but a policy choice, and it made me look back with sharper eyes at all the invisible decisions that kept my teenage self relatively empowering and not soul crushing: the absence of a dress code, the teachers who did not sexualize us, the adults who let girls be loud without punishing them, the people who did sports and were also in band and drama. Reading from that position is uncomfortable, because it exposes the gap between my own experience and that of so many girls for whom high school was exactly as dangerous and diminishing as Mathieu describes.
What we owe the next girls
The heartbreaking part of my reality is that I stopped being in high school in 1999 and Moxie takes place in 2017. If Moxie is, at its heart, a story about girls discovering that they do not have to suffer alone, then part of the work for those of us who were comparatively protected is to ask what we are going to do with that early safety. My zine is long gone (although also strangely old copies of it sit on my desk that I am typing this blog on), but the practice it represented, noticing, naming, refusing to let someone else narrate your life, is still the deepest through-line from that Calgary punk girl to the nurse, writer, and educator I am now. The invitation Moxie offers is not just to cheer for Vivian, but to look back at the teachers who quietly held the door open, the policies that did or did not constrain us, and then to step, deliberately, into the role of adult conspirator for the next generation of girls who are still trying to find a photocopier and a little courage.
Love,
Michelle D.
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