Punk Feminist Quotes

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

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

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.

Joan was not only an actual human being but a most important one. A FEMINIST ICON WHO PROVED TO THE WORLD THAT WOMEN CAN ROCK EVEN HARDER THAN MEN. An innovator, an architect, a punk rock pioneer so powerful, she inspired generations of young women to pick up guitars and do the same.

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.

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

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.

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.

...politically charged punk that combined activism and art. Forged out of a meeting of friends who decided they wanted to start a “girl riot,” the women gave rise to bands like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, addressing rape and violence in their songs, publishing zines, popularizing “girl power"...

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But

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.

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.

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.

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.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.

I felt like no one was really looking out for me, that I was marginal and incidental. I compensated by being spongelike, impressionable, and available to whatever and whoever provided the most comfort, the most sense of belonging. I was learning two sets of skills simultaneously: adaptation - linguistic and aesthetic - in order to fit in, but also, how to survive on my own.

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.

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.

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.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling conventions. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerant. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.

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

In the middle of our set, the janitor started mopping the floor.

If not for male violence, would I have ever written anything at all?

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.

Running allowed me to learn about so many cities and towns I never would’ve known about otherwise.

My breasts to tempt inside my bra My face is painted like a movie star I’ve studied my flaws in your reflection And put them to rights with savage correction