Zine Review: Yeastie Girlz Saved My Life (How Punk Made Me Less of an Asshole)

Yeastie Girlz Saved My Life is a pocket-sized zine written by Canadian journalist, podcaster, and antifascist Colin Burrowes. Published in April 2025 by the long-running Portland-based Microcosm Publishing, it’s part of their How Punk Made Me Less of an Asshole zine series. Each edition in the series recounts real-life moments where an intelligent punk song or band—at least anything smarter than GG Allin or the Sex Pistols—shakes you from your social conditioning, offering a glimpse of a better, less-asshole version of yourself.

This particular issue is dedicated to Ovary Action, the 1988 EP from California’s Yeastie Girlz, released by none other than Lookout! Records. I’ve never been particularly drawn to Lookout!’s back catalog, and this zine was my first encounter with Yeastie Girlz. Formed in 1987 at the Gilman Street Project in Berkeley by all singers Cammie Toloui, Jane Guskin, Joyce Jimenez, and Kate Rosenberger, Yeastie Girlz created their own lane with a style they dubbed “vaginacore a cappella rap”. The band says their formation was a “response to our male-dominated punk scene and the misogyny that we found everywhere in the culture and popular music,” and their music was an a cappella blend of punk, rap, and razor-sharp feminist lyrics, packed with sex-positive and pro-queer messages. And, worth noting, they were doing this before the Riot Grrrl movement even existed, predating the Olympia, WA scene of the early ’90s.

A few pages in, I was already intrigued. I closed the zine, searched out the record online, and ordered an old original copy. About a week later, the 7-inch landed in my mailbox. I gave it a few spins on my record player before picking the zine back up. Colin mentions he had the chance to interview the Yeastie Girlz in June 2023 for the Woodstein Media Podcast, marking 35 years since Ovary Action was recorded. This zine reads like a continuation of that conversation, with Colin tying it all back to his own discovery of the band as a rural, white, Canadian cis-boy. Someone who grew up with the usual hetero expectations but found himself slowly unlearning that toxic masculinity script, thanks in no small part to bands like Buzzcocks, Pansy Division, and the Yeastie Girlz.

As Colin puts it, Ovary Action was “100% ideas, zero music,” but it flipped his entire understanding of sexuality, pleasure, and feminism. The main part of the zine digs into the lyrics and the radical intent behind the tracks on this long-time overlooked 7-inch record from a well-known punk label. But don’t expect some overcooked lyrical dissection. Colin keeps it personal, grounding the songs in his own memories of small-town Listowel, Ontario, while also linking them to the broader struggles for queer liberation, gender equality, and resistance to far-right narratives that we keep fighting today.

In closing, Colin circles back to the core of the Microcosm series; that we’re all assholes from time to time, especially as cis-men raised with privilege, but that DIY punk continues to offer tools, voices, and models that push us to do better. Those, like Yeastie Girlz, who, through their music and message, help the rest of us suck a little bit less.

The zine is available from Microcosm Publishing, along with other titles by Colin Burrowes. The Yeastie Girlz now have an amazing website that collects their origin stories, music, photos, videos, interviews, gig fliers, and even some new band merch.