Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk

by Kathleen Hanna

My war is between the me who has suffered trauma and is trying to deal with it and the me who wallows in self-pity as a way to not reckon with my own privilege.

I learned that day that adults were giving girls and boys entirely different instructions.

Just when I thought I didn’t have the desire or aptitude to write in a conventional way, I read Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, a brilliant novel with a bunch of different voices and a lot of violence.

She appraised me for a second and then said, “You should start a band. Most people go outside and smoke when someone gets up to do spoken word, but people wanna see bands.”

Before living off the grid was an environmentally friendly, small-footprint thing or something that right-wing Armageddon preppers did, battered women were already doing it. For them, the apocalypse was every day.

When we went into Albini’s mixing booth, I noticed a big sticker on one of his speakers. It said “RAPEMAN.” I asked him what “Rapeman” was, and he told me it was one of his bands. “Why is your band called Rapeman?” I asked. “We named it after a comic book where the superhero is a rapist,” he replied. I walked outside and sat on the stoop and held my hands over my ears, just like I used to when my dad and my sister fought. But this time I had my hands over my ears so I didn’t have to hear the shitty mix Steve Albini was doing of our songs. When I returned to Olympia, I threw the tape out of my apartment window.

It wasn’t just the dude masturbating or the guys calling me a bitch, it was the fact that these fuckers stole my ability to be friendly and then screamed at me for not being friendly.

He was the first feminist man I ever met who never thought being an ally meant you couldn’t defend a woman in bold strokes because she was supposed to do it all for herself. He never even flinched.

A few months after we’d started Bikini Kill, Kurt asked Tobi to be the drummer for Nirvana, and Tobi said no because she was convinced our band was going to change the landscape for women in music. I’m saying that again, for the people in the back: Tobi Vail could have been the drummer for Nirvana, but she chose to be in a feminist band instead.

I always wanted to yell at them, “I’m not your Rumspringa, dude!”

THE NEXT TIME I WENT TO LOLLAPALOOZA WAS A YEAR LATER IN 1995. It was at the Gorge Amphitheatre.

Adam had to pull our minivan over