Pussy Power, Riot Grrrls, And The Legend Of Kathleen Hanna

Helen B. Holmes
NYU Local
Published in
3 min readNov 20, 2013

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By Helen Holmes

You know that feeling that you get sometimes where all you wanna do is rip off your clothes (save for Doc Martens), dump a bottle of Dove lotion over your head, and run through the streets of New York screaming MY VAGINA WILL KILL YOUR WHOLE FAMILY?

If you haven’t felt this feeling, Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill will make you feel it — they’ll lull you into a false sense of noise-rock security, and then the aching sensuality will suddenly crash over your head until you’re as wasted as you were last Saturday. You will feel simultaneously like Madeleine Albright and a porn star. You will feel ALIVE. Hanna, her band and her legacy are everywhere lately, in the just-released documentary The Punk Singer and in an inspired (if not overpriced) collaboration with the fashion collective VFILES. Hanna’s lyrics are most appropriate when turned back on herself: “That girl, she holds her head up so high / I think I wanna be her best friend.”

When I was 10, Joan Jett was everything to me — not only could she sing with a sneer that rivaled my sister’s after a particularly one-sided game of pickup soccer, she was the goddamn frontwoman. She shredded her guitar like American cheese, and her lusty voice inspired me to draw pictures of people making out that made my parents think I needed to see a therapist. Both Jett and Hanna wield their potent sexuality like poison-dipped spears, torching the male gaze with irrepressible stage presence and taunting glory (Hanna often rocked a fire-engine red dress on stage emblazoned with the words KILL ME). She’s also been part of a string of other dope bands worth checking out, from Le Tigre to The Julie Ruin. I dare you to watch the video for Deceptacon and not immediately want — no, need — to learn the dance.

While Jett was originally melting faces just as my mom was entering college, Hanna is a pioneer of the Riot grrrl movement, a retaliatory clash of clamoring female voices against the mistakes of second-wave feminism that originated in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s. NYU is even helping to archive the revolution! Bikini Kill helped to pioneer a new kind of empowerment; a cum-swallowing anti-media grungetastic conviction. Eventually, they crash landed in activist-friendly DC with a shirtless sonic boom. And yet, despite the gloom that comes with confronting the darkness of humanity head on, Bikini Kill preached survival and vital perseverance: “The Sylvia Plath story is told to girls who write / They want us to think that to be a girl poet means you have to die…I’ve another good one for you, we are turning cursive letters into knives.”

Thanks largely in part to the Internet and to the good folks at Rookie Magazine, feminism is (for better or for worse) more and more omnipresent in pop culture. There are many ways to assert your lady power: you can be the smartest girl in class, or you can yell back at the dudes who call you out on the street, or you can even bake cookies and clean your house if that’s what floats your boat. Kathleen Hanna screamed “I DON’T GIVE A FUCK” on Capitol Hill in her lilting alto shriek, and if that doesn’t bob your cherry, then fine, but we probably can’t hang out.

[Image via]

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