Kathleen Hanna Quotes

You learn that the only way to get rock-star power as a girl is to be a groupie and bare your breasts and get chosen for the night. We learn that the only way to get anywhere is through men. And it's a lie.

I would much rather be the 'obnoxious feminist girl' than be complicit in my own dehumanization

It can be really painful to have to face how fucked up shit is and how scared people are…of being alive. Scared of things that are amazing. Scared of things that aren’t like television or aren’t dead. A lot of people can’t deal with three-dimensional human beings, they only know how to deal with other products — they see themselves as other products. When the world only treats you like a dot on a marketing scheme, you can learn to treat yourself and other people like that.

From puberty on, I felt like me and my friends were always running. From abusive dads, men on the streets, abusive boyfriends, or even from mean things men would say to us that got stuck in our heads. But running meant we thought we were worth saving for the right one.

I am friends with Kathleen Hanna and Adam Horovitz, aka Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys. I can’t believe I am friends with them. I love Kathleen’s music and I am in awe of her social activism and general awesomeness. I asked her to interview me for Interview magazine when I was just a sketch performer whom nobody knew. She said yes because she supports young women. This is the artist who pulled women to the front at her rock shows. She shows up and does the work and is the real deal. Now she is my friend.

In general, though, women aren’t really allowed to be kick-ass. It’s like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft, and control, and polish, is for women. Culturally we don’t allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy. Female singers who push too much, and too hard, don’t tend to last very long. They’re jags, bolts, comets: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday. But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That’s why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. The term girl power was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. Girl power: a phrase that would later be co-opted by the Spice Girls, a group put together by men, each Spice Girl branded with a different personality, polished and stylized to be made marketable as a faux female type. Coco was one of the few girls on the playground who had never heard of them, and that’s its own form of girl power, saying no to female marketing!

I like to think that while ADROCK was shouting about gratitude in the desert, his future wife, Kathleen Hanna, was singing "Suck My Left One" in a small club many miles away. And then their vocal particles travelled across land and sea until it became a giant love cloud ready to rain awesomeness on them for years to come." - Amy Poehler

I thought those were pretty big words coming from a guy who covered AC/DC songs.

I opened my mouth and said, “Because no one has listened to me my whole life and I really want to be heard.

Charlotte Caffey played lead guitar like it was a totally normal thing for a girl to do, which made it a totally normal thing for a girl to do. It didn’t seem shocking or revolutionary to me—they were just a fucking great band.

Advice. Who’s the coolest, toughest, hottest rocker girl you can think of?” “Debbie Harry,” Mom said. “Tha—” “Not finished,” Mom interrupted. “You can’t ask me to pick only one. That’s so Sophie’s Choice. Kathleen Hanna. Patti Smith. Joan Jett. Courtney Love, in her demented destructionist way. Lucinda Williams, even though she’s country she’s tough as nails. Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth, pushing fifty and still at it. That Cat Power woman. Joan Armatrading.

If you’re someone who hasn’t been heard your whole life, it makes sense that when you’re newly radicalized you could be overzealous and tear people down needlessly. It also makes sense that if you don’t process your own traumas, you may dump them onto others.

Sit down and ask yourself, ‘What is the most important thing to me?’ What grosses me out the most? What makes me the most upset—is it healthcare? Is it so many people being hungry in our culture? Is it sexual abuse? Mix that with doing something you love, something you could keep doing forever and ever. For me, it was ending violence against women, and I mixed it with music. And I’ve had a 25-year career. So that’s my advice: Find something you really care about and mix that with something you love doing.

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.

Is a woman a building you enter? Is a woman a wall you can paint your name on?

I don’t feel much like a “rebel girl”—most of the time I feel more like a dirty napkin. But Dirty Napkin is a terrible title for a book. It’s also not who I am.

I wasn’t going to let him step on the gas pedal of my empathy till he drove me off a cliff.

Up till then, I'd dated people by default, because I either needed help paying rent or was afraid of what would happen if I rejected them-but Luke was different. I chose him. I ended up going home with him after a party a few nights Inter and woke up so deeply in love that there aren't enough poems or songs or words to ever explain it.

I realized that night that there was something really powerful about counseling women at places where they already hung out instead of at a crisis center.

I realized that sexism was telling me to stay home and not par pate in the larger world. "Dance to records by yourself in your room would say. "Stay at home and read alone!" it would yell. I decided I gonna do everything in my power to make Bikini Kill shows a brief prieve from sexism, even if it was imperfect and fleeting.

She was the only woman on the whole record and hearing her gave me the first thought that someday I could be in a band.

Before I found out about Olympia's punk scene, I thought that everyone making music was untouchable and magical. But when I saw Tobi from the Go Team at the Smithfield Café, I realized, She's in the Go Team and she goes to the same coffee shop I do. If she could be in a band, maybe I can too.

I'd always dismissed "transcendence" as an experience that divorced music from activism, but I walked away from that show a changed woman. I didn't have to choose between being a socially conscious person and being a singer who could connect with magic onstage.

I cannot explain to you how utterly crazy these comments by my "punk family" made me feel. I had just seen the most important band in the world. All I wanted to do was to get their information so I could invite them to play at Reko Muse, All I wanted was to be near them. They were everything. I'd seen God and she was three women playing songs in a shack in the middle of nowhere.

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.

I thought it was interesting, but selfishly I just wanted to relive my own childhood and win this time.

The first time Amy Carter played live I felt like I was gonna puke all over the microphone. But by our third song, the feeling I had being Annie in grade school and the feeling I had opening for Acker morphed into one thing. We performed a couple of times at Reko Muse and then the band fizzled out when senior year started, which was fine. I knew who I was now. I was a singer in a band.

I am still so grateful that a guy we'd never met put his time and energy into what most people considered a shitty opening band. It made me see myself as worthy in the underground scene. It also undid a lot of shit other men doled out to me on that tour.

Poetic lyrics were important, but it felt like women sometimes hid behind poetry as a way to say something without actually saying it. I was on a mission to just fucking say it.

I yelled "Revolution girl style now!" before "Double Dare Ya" like I'd been doing live and reassured myself that the session was meant to take a snapshot of our songs, not to make them sound perfect. Maybe being sloppy would inspire other girls to start bands.

Was it really so bad that a working-class guy who couldn't afford to play five-dollar shows for the rest of his life had signed to a major label? Was it really so bad that his band wanted to reach an audience that didn't have access to labels like K or Dischord? The indie-vs.-major labels thing started to seem like a silly hill to die on.

But if you ever wonder why so many well-off kids were in nineties punk bands, that's why. They could afford to not get paid. They could also afford to look generous by donating their services more than we could.

I was finally ready to mourn the girl who was excited to show everyone our new zine, the girl who was amped to go on tour and move to DC. She was gone and I was exhausted trying to pretend she wasn't. But now some new person was in her place, and maybe letting her exist would let me feel some of the joy I used to feel.