Hi there, modern historian of political culture & national identity and lifelong punkrock fan here! I love this question, and I'm going to answer it to the best of my abilities, which are, admittedly somewhat limited. The overall disclaimer is that I'm 1) European and can hence only explain the European side of the matter, 2) not necessarily a cultural but a social (movenment) historian, and 3) am not particularly well-read in terms of gender- and LGBTQ + politics, so please bear with me.

In order to answer your question comprehensively it is firstly important to figure out how we define 'the punk scene'. This incredibly difficult, since 'punk' was neither a singular art form, nor a monolithic movement. You are quite correct in observing that 'it' was male-oriented and dominated, but this is in and of itself not necessarily an exclusive category, nor a concept we can start working with.

In my view 'punk' is a broad agglomeration of philosophical, musical, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical movements that occupy a category in modern cultural history. Not necessarily in that order, of course. The earliest vestiges of what we know as the musical component of punk started emerging around the late 1960s with garage-y bands like The Troggs developing key components of the ' fast + loud' sound that came to define the musical core of the genre. Groups like Iggy Pop & The Stooges developed on that, adding subversive performance art to it (which we'll come back to), and groups like The Ramones laid the groundwork for the weird mix of DIY/frugal aesthetic that is nowadays associated with early punks in the mid-1970s. The success of punkrock clubs like CBGB's in NYC helped punk travel across the pond, finding ground in the recession-wracked, subculture-riddled United Kingdom in 1974-75. At this time, the American roots of punk were already politicised, but not nearly as sectarian and hardline as it would become towards the 1980s.

The political climate in England was much more class-oriented, with various subcultures that included hippies, mods, rockers, and early (West Indian!!) skinheads dominating what one could call the 'scene' of youth expression and recalcitrance. In England, differently than in the US, these scenes crystallised primarily around forms of class consciousness/social strata consciousness. Early skinheads were initially mixed groups of black immigrants from the British Carribean and dockworkers from the poorest neighbourhoods in the major cities, with dress and music defining the core image of the movements (circa the late 1940s to the 1960s). Mods (circa 1950s-1960s), were similar, but were also middle class and entertained themselves with more expensive pastimes such as 'modding' mopeds, cars, and motorcycles. Hippies found friends across the spectrum, but with their Ur-countercultural thinking and acting pandered primarily to those that could afford their recalcitrance. Their overall similitary hides in the fact that they both viewed themselves in opposition to the dominant cultural norms of postwar England, and engaged in various forms of normative disruption in the name of individual freedom and/or enjoyment. Another overall similarity that these subcultures were all male-oriented, as the second wave of feminism had only gained momentum by the late 1960s in the practical sense, condemning many women to enduring limitations on their personal and societal sovereignty, except those of considerable wealth.

Enter punk in the UK, anno 1974-75. Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren managed to successfully hype and present several smaller 'punk' bands, before hitting the world stage with the Sex Pistols in 1975-76. The mayhem and uproar that the Sex Pistols caused is - for the European side of the Atlantic- definitive of punk's later history. Westwood's aesthetic for the Sex Pistols was based largely off of BDSM gear that she sold, and other sex-related materials and objects she dealt in out of her Clapham shop. When Iggy Pop & THe Stooges started making the news across the pond in 1971-74 she was impressed with the shock value of his performances. Iggy Pop jumped around on the stage a lot, wore androgynous clothing, or was naked from the waist up. The Pistols were similarly styled androgynously in terms of clothing, hair, and jewelry. The overall effect was one of cultural-normative shock in arch-conservative Britain. Between 1976 and 1978 a real sizable punk scene developed in the major cities, and the Sex Pistols, The Ramones, and Iggy Pop all brought their individual brand of 'punk' to continental Europe, leading to a wide variety of local strains, each with different tenets.

OK back to the UK to get back to the US. From the outset, UK punk had been a class-related affair, with working class youngsters flocking to the anti-banner, and using the cultural expressions associated with it to act out against authority in all its forms. Morality and social norms were first to come under attack, closely followed by the socioeconomic status quo, and the political leadership. Between 1975 and 1978 especially the latter two became the primary objects of recalcitrance, as socio-cultural norms adapted to the situation. The consequence of this was that punk in the UK started becoming increasingly working class, leftist, and used more as a tool of activism rather than an art form after 1979. The second wave of punk in the UK - 'UK-82' - espoused these notions especially (for reference, please check out the song of the same name by The Exploited). The fashionista-type punk of Iggy Pop & the Stooges, The Clash, and The Sex Pistols in terms of sound made way for faster + louder, with especially the vocal department 'suffering' and becoming virtually only shouting. 'Punk' around 1979-82 was hence a simple and extremely aggressive form of music, which echoed its social origins. The sound travelled back across the Atlantic as early as 1980, again to places like CBGB's, but found very different audiences in the US than in the UK. In the US - as well as in the UK, but to a lesser degree -- punk had started becoming commercialised, and with the absence of a true class-system had attracted a broad following, that hampered its countercultural status. With the lack of a central socially normative structure US punk had become a haven of countercultural activity ranging from drugs to art to dress to eating. All the small sub-movements that espoused countercultural views - be they catch-all, be they one-issue -- had small groups of often ideological hardliners. When in 1979 the louder + faster hit the eastern seaboard, some of these hardliners had found the sound that they could connect their politics or their ideas to; enter US Hardcore.

The most prolific bands in US Hardcore in my opinion are Minor Threat (D.C. area), Black Flag (on the West Coast), and Bad Brains (the last of which notably one of the very few African-American groups). Each of these bands is interesting and influential for their own reasons, but for the sake of understanding I'll stick with Minor Threat. Formed 1980 by Ian McKaye and Brian Baker, this band took an extremely different approach to the meaning of punk. They actively and strongly rejected the drug culture that was pervasive in punk up until then, more or less coining the term 'Straight Edge', which is essentially teetotalism mixed with vegetarian/vegan philosophies regarding food. Their music and the following of hardcore fans they gathered did a full 180 in terms of how they practiced counterculture. Rather than do drugs, fight for fun, destroy property and nihilistically reject/attack society for its ills, the Straight Edge movement focused on teetotalism, targeting rivalling subcultural movements (notably white power skinheads) in sporadic violent action, and utilising non-participation in consumerism as strategies to simultaneously fight against the system and practice a countercultural subculture. Their aesthetic can be described as minimalistic when compared to the androgynous flair of early punks, and was also a reaction to the glitz and glamour that rock music had adopted as its own during hte late 1970s. Between 1980 and the early 1990s hardcore punk became an interesting form of moral counterculture in the US, which was not really mirrored anywhere else to my knowledge. During much of the 1980s the widespreadness of punk - in all its musical waves -- saw its music and associated activities employed as agitation strategy, especially also in the part Europe behind the Iron Curtain, as a means to unload about social and economic ills.

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