20 Badass Kathleen Hanna Quotes That Reaffirm She Is The Poster Grrrl For Feminism
By Katie Mather
1. “I just didn’t want any male authorities telling people what good music was. I didn’t want men to validate me.”
2. “While sexism hurts women most intimately, it also damages men severely.”
3. “It’s unexpected for women’s issues to be brought up in places other than women’s centers on college campuses or crisis places.”
4. “Feminism rotates between backlash and interest. And the cool thing about the Internet is that it’s allowing women more access to their own history. Part of the problem before the Internet was that we didn’t know which books to read. Someone had to tell you.”
5. “I’m more interested in a feminism that ends discrimination for all people. It’s not just about a woman becoming the CEO of a company or something. It’s connected to racism and classism and gender issues that go beyond the binary. It can’t be pulled apart from those issues.”
6. “I think that the Internet is really cool because a lot of young feminists don’t feel like they have to reinvent the wheel…That one girl who’s in the class and says that something is sexist doesn’t have to feel alone.”
7. “There’s just as many different kinds of feminism as there are women in the world.”
8. “Facing sexism and racism and classism and transphobia, there are ways to choose to act in those situations, and there shouldn’t be a prescriptive list of things that you have to say.”
9. “While everyone’s experience of oppression is different and complicated and often overlapping, I really believe that if you have privilege, you need to learn as much as you can about the world beyond yourself.”
10. “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.”
11. “I’m not a goddess, for crying out loud. I’m a regular person who took feminism—which I have a deep connection to—and mixed it with music, which I really love to do.”
12. “Women didn’t want to be on the stage with other women because they didn’t want their bodies to be compared. They didn’t want another female act opening for them because of the weird, competitive, and tokenistic attitude.”
13. “In my 20’s, a lot of people were like, ‘She’s so confident, she’s such a strong feminist!’ But that wasn’t how I actually felt. I felt really freaked out and unsure of myself. And I’m sure that made for great shows, because it was like I was falling apart in front of people’s faces.”
14. “I was really freaked out that I discovered feminism at the same time as Time and Newsweek were saying that feminism was dead, and there was no need for it. I was talking about feminist issues, and people were saying, ‘We’re in a post-feminist society.’ That conversation was happening then, and it’s still happening now.”
15. “So many women have experienced horrific forms of male violence throughout their lives, and why isn’t there a song about how you get depressed because of it? And you don’t know what to do, and you don’t know how to talk to your friends and how weird it is to be a feminist in that situation, where there’s sort of the expectation that you’re super-strong superwoman but you’re just, like, eating pizza in your house avoiding talking about it.”
16. “People have always had these weird things about how you have to be really good looking to be a singer. I mean, it’s not like Stevie Nicks or Linda Ronstadt were dogs. It’s not like this is some new thing. But there was at one point a larger variety, but now the catchphrase is ‘the whole package,’ the ‘American Idol’ reality that you’re a model first and a singer second.”
17. “In terms of men being feminist allies, it’s just important to speak from your own place. I’d love to hear men singing about masculinity and the damage it does to them.”
18. “Sometimes, being a feminist artist, there are times where I’m in a position where I just want to feel like I’m saying all the right things politically, or I feel like I have to mention my own project over other people’s projects…I just want to be off the cuff and honest.”
19. “…When you first step into the Feminist 101 personality, you’re like, Get the fuck out of my face, men!’ I was just sick of it…But then I started getting more nuanced, pretty much because the writer Kathy Acker called me an idiot to my face…She said that sexism damages men as much as it damages women because it doesn’t allow them to be their full selves. It also keeps them away from all the cool girls if they’re being jerks.”
20. “…A lot of extra things get lumped on you as a feminist. If you step forward and say that something political is important to you, there are going to be so many doubters who come out of every fucking corner and call you a hypocrite. They’ll say, ‘She’s not really a feminist, because she had sex with this one guy who is a total jerk’…So I can totally understand why women don’t want to say, ‘I’m a feminist’… It’s hard to put that out there.”