Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk

by Kathleen Hanna

My mom had all sorts of cool sayings. She called vaginas and butts “front-bottoms” and “back-bottoms.”

My sister had long brown feathered hair and a mean smile. Her nickname in Laurel became “Goodtimes,” which made me, by default, “Li’l Goodtimes.” We had both taken to wearing wooden sandals with pantyhose socks and pastel-colored polyester suits like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

Volunteering at SafePlace was gratifying but super upsetting, so I started journaling and writing poetry to keep from losing it. Things I’d suppressed started coming out in my writing. Mostly bad things that had happened at the hands of uncles, neighborhood boys, and my dad. It terrified me, but I couldn’t stop writing it all down. Even though it felt like I was grating my face with a cheese grater, it also felt like I was coming alive for the first time.

I stood alone and watched Fugazi in shameless amazement. Guy Picciotto was jumping on everything, using a pole by the stage like he was Kevin Bacon, if Footloose were a punk fever dream. Toward the end they played a song called “Suggestion,” and the lyrics were clearly about street harassment and rape. I wondered if I was hearing an audio mirage. Men writing lyrics about sexism? WTF?

Nearly every crisis call I took involved a survivor telling me she shouldn’t take up my time because other women had way worse things happen to them. Many of the domestic violence survivors had to work jobs an hour away from where they lived to save money to buy generators. That way they could move into cabins in the middle of the woods and not have any bills so their exes couldn’t find them. 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.

“You’re not even a real band. You’re just a novelty band. The only reason you got this show is because you’re girls.”

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.

I talked a lot and was brash and overly theatrical, while she was observant and chose her words wisely.

As a white woman I could be both sides of that coin: ignored, belittled, and told I wasn’t “a real musician,” but also a privileged monster, holding on to stupid grudges while ignoring how much leeway I was given as a pretty white girl.

Because we were drunk. Because we were young and angry and broke. I scribbled endless shit above his bed with the Sharpie from my back pocket: “Kurt is the keeper of the kennel . . . Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.” Earlier in the day, Tobi and I had been at the local supermarket looking at deodorants, and we both laughed hysterically when we saw one called Teen Spirit. What the fuck does teen spirit smell like? we wondered. Capitalism apparently knew no bounds. After our rampage, I fell asleep fully clothed next to Kurt with the Sharpie marker still in my hand and woke up with the kind of hangover I can only describe as Did we kill someone last night? Luckily, as I walked to the kitchen, I saw Dave, still alive and sleeping on the couch.

Outside, after the show, a guy walked up to me and said he wanted to make a record with Bikini Kill. He said he loved the show and felt we needed to record something ASAP. I assumed he was a creep trying to get us to meet him somewhere so he could kill us. As I walked away, Kathi and Tobi said, “What did Ian MacKaye just say to you?” I was a big Fugazi fan but hadn’t recognized him as one of the lead singers. That may have been because I was distracted. A white girl with big brown eyes kept trying to push her way into our conversation. She said her name was Susan and that she wanted to hang out with me. Her eyes were glazed over and her energy was wild. She talked really fast about why Bikini Kill meant so much to her. She said she just knew we were going to save her life. I wasn’t so sure about that, but I was sure I wanted to stay in DC. I’d never felt so welcomed as I did that night.

When “Smells Like Teen Spirit” started to play, I twirled along to Dave’s drum intro with a fake smile plastered on my face, hiding a sense of humiliation too deep to describe. Shelby and her boyfriend were laughing. I’m sure it was hilarious. I was taking my clothes off to a song I’d written the title to. Kurt was on his way to being a multimillionaire while I was jiggling my ass in a broke-down strip club. Hahaha.

Unlearning Racism at the Riot Grrrl Convention in DC.

I realized that day that many BIPOC women were as disappointed in white punk feminists as I’d been by white male punks. I thought of all the times I’d dealt with men telling me it wasn’t fair to blame them for sexism and then I had created a workshop where white women blabbed on and on about how they had nothing to do with racism. So many clubs I’d walked into felt like they had invisible “White Men Only” signs on them, and now I’d asked BIPOC women to walk through a similar doorway—only this invisible sign said “White Grrrls Only.” I couldn’t imagine how devastating it would be to enter a supposedly safe space and be stabbed in the back like this. And that was the problem—I hadn’t imagined it. I hadn’t seen how so much of our punk feminism was really just white feminism. How could the WOC who showed up ever trust white female punks again? All the talk about intersectionality and the “isms” being connected was just lip service. At that point, I had numbed out so many bad things that had happened to me, from my dad to Darren, that I was a professional at suppressing abuse. What I didn’t realize was that I was also numbing out the ways in which I hurt others through neglect and denial.

Poly Styrene was in the audience and all the stupid media stuff melted away. Styrene’s band X-Ray Spex had written one of the most important punk albums of all time: Germfree Adolescents. Besides being a uniquely talented singer, Styrene’s lyrics were way ahead of their time. She wrote about how genetic engineering could lead to genocide, how consumerism mixed with sexism to destroy women’s self-esteem, and the never-ending cycle of exploitation between individuals and corporations.

Ian also inadvertently created the straight-edge movement (punks who are politically engaged, vegan, and don’t drink or do drugs), which eventually spawned scary offshoots like the homophobic, anti-abortion group Vegan Reich.

Tammy Rae and Tami Hart and a bunch of Durham friends sang backups on “Hot Topic,” yelling out the names of artists who inspired them at the end of the song. Mixing the record was all-consuming but the work was so collaborative and joyous that I didn’t want it to end. It was our first record, so we just called it Le Tigre.

In September of 2010, after being sick for five years, I finally got the correct diagnosis: Lyme disease.

Adam called my doctor from the minivan and the doctor said this was great news. I was having what is called a Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction, which is when new or exaggerated symptoms of Lyme disease come out as a result of a rapid bacterial die-off. Basically, it meant the treatment was working. I realized a few days later I felt like I had back in Lithuania because I’d been on antibiotics that whole tour. Unbeknownst to me, I’d been Herxing my way around the world! The constant sickness, insomnia, and difficulty speaking were all symptoms.

While I was ill, I got sent a YouTube link to a band that wrote a song making fun of my marriage. It was a terrible song by an even worse band about how I used to be a feminist until I married a Beastie Boy and became a total jerk. It hurt my feelings a little, because I was a jerk long before I met Adam, and I hated the dehumanizing idea that marrying him was “off brand” for me.

At the time, Adam and I were obsessed with cabaret singer and actress Bridget Everett. When I was sick and unable to sing, I’d found solace in Bridget’s voice, and Adam, needing to play music, had joined her band. We watched the movie Rudy at her suggestion and didn’t like it much, but we thought “Rudy” was a really cute name. (We never made the connection to Rudy Giuliani, or we never would have considered it.)