PlanetGrrl.com Has Been A Ghost Site for Seven Years

Back in the late 1990's, an esoteric, feminist-inspired meme broke loose on the Internet which manifested itself linguistically in the addition of several letter R's to the term "girl," resulting in the neologism "grrl" (or, in some cases, "grrl" and "grrrl."

The meme got traction because the term "grr" suggested the kind of growling made by wild, frequently feline animals, and when overlaid upon "girl," the combined meaning connoted a new kind of cyber-active female, fierce, growling, and self-assertive, thanks to the awesome actualization potential of the World Wide Web. Within a few months, the world welcomed a number of similarly-named properties such as the WebGrrls, CyberGrrl.com, Grrlgamer.com, and PlanetGrrl.com. Each in their own way was intended to serve as a bastion of femininity, a beacon of womanness, in a testosterone-drenched wasteland of male-dominated idiocy.

Several of these sites churn merrily on, but www.planetgrrl.com, a UK-based site whose mission was to "encourage, support, befriend, teach, respect and recognise other women and grrls online regardless of race, religion, political standpoint, age, orientation, employment status or anything else," has been lying in a state of complete quiescence since 2000. In Ghost Site Parlance, its present condition could be fairly described as "dead but well-preserved." Seven years is a long time for any site to remain so inert, and it suggests that for good or ill, the "grr" meme may have reached its apogee sometime in the distant, pre-Y2K past.