Guys, it was a rough weekend, what with the coverage of the Steubenville rape verdict, and all the rape apologists and all. Very disheartening. But then I caught this little gem of a video — Bikini Kill legends Kathleen Hanna and Kathi Wilcox playing “The Friendship Game” — and I felt a little bit better. It’s hard to believe that Bikini Kill is more than 20 years old now; the band’s music is still as vibrant and prescient as ever. [Huffington Post]
I’m totally into Taylor Swift. I think she has super-clever lyrics, and I love that she writes her own music. Some of the themes she writes about are stuff I wish was there for me when I was in high school, and I’m so happy she really cares about her female fans. She’s not catering to a male audience and is writing music for other girls. I don’t care if she calls herself a feminist or not. There is something that she’s doing that feels feminist to me in that she really seems to have a lot of control over what her career is doing. She’s 23. People say she’s dating all these guys. Well, yeah, she’s a young person and is dating all these people ’cause that’s what you do when you’re young. John Mayer can fuck 84 people in one day and nobody calls him a slut. I think that’s the subtext of some of the things she’s said recently.
– Kathleen Hanna, patron saint of all things feminist and formerly of the bands Le Tigre and Bikini Kill, dips her toe in the most pressing social issue of our time: Is Taylor Swift a feminist? In an interview with The Daily Beast, Hanna makes a point that I hadn’t considered before: Taylor Swift definitely isn’t catering to a male audience — posing nearly naked in lad mags, performing sexually provocative dance numbers, tweeting scantily glad pictures of herself — in the same way that Katy Perry, Rihanna or Britney Spears do. That alone does not make Swift a feminist, of course. The content of the messages she’s sending to her female audiences are important. But I suspect part of the reason that Swift gets so much shit for being a girly-girl making music for girls is because she doesn’t necessarily have a legion of straight male fans wanking off to/supporting her. (And FWIW, Kathleen Hanna is also a fan of Beyoncé, so I think we can agree she’s more of a lover than a hater.) [The Daily Beast] [Photo: Getty]
“I wanted to be a part of a family. I wanted to be someone who helped girls who’d been abused feel less alone because I’d been one of those girls. How is it that the world is half women, so many of us have experienced rape, battering, and verbal abuse, yet there were very few songs about these issues? I also wanted to make sure young women knew that feminism wasn’t dead just ’cause that’s what all the books and magazines were saying. … Keep reading »
“I feel like there’s this weird thing that as a feminist band you get put in this role as ambassadors. Certain people are like ‘Oh, here come the Feminazis!’ You end up acting 10 times nicer than you even need to be, to be the opposite of the stereotype like ‘You’re the man haters!’ We’re always bending over backwards being extra nice. And I don’t know if being nice is my legacy. Johanna [Fateman, my Le Tigre bandmate] and I talked about it a lot. Both of us wish that we would have broken out of the mold sometimes and just be jerks more often.”
—Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre on giving interviews as a feminist musician. While I’m not sure I’d ever condone being a “jerk” — the world has enough jerks! — I can also relate to feeling responsible for ‘making feminism look good,’ so to speak. The “feminazi” stereotype is so pervasive that lots of people don’t understand what feminism actually is. Thanks a pantsful, Rush Limbaugh. But proving that we don’t hate men — which is completely untrue, obviously — is a waste of our valuable time and energy. [Spinner] Keep reading »
