F 'em!

by Jennifer Baumgardner

  J: Let’s talk about the Obama and Clinton matchup in 2008. Did that affect you? I was very emotional.

  K: I remember being in Union Square and there were forty good-looking, young, hip people handing me Barack Obama literature, and then there was one older woman with a Hillary pamphlet. I couldn’t have conversations about it, because if you didn’t support Obama, you were deemed a racist. Which I thought was really stupid, because if you supported Obama, did that make you sexist?

  I’m not saying that we all didn’t grow up with racism and have to work and work to undo our biases, but “you are racist” is something that is used really unproductively towards white feminists sometimes. It’s a socially acceptable way to tell a white woman to shut up.

  J: Did you see that same issue with Riot Grrrl?

  K: Yes, the women of color who were involved are being erased in the histories. It wasn’t a white, middle-class movement. I was a figurehead in it, and I’m white and middle class, but there were many women of color who were involved and were pinnacle thinkers. The major thinker behind the whole Riot Grrrl movement is bell hooks. We were just trying to follow the mandate that she set out, which was taking feminist theory and antiracist theory and changing it into a language that could be absorbed in various places by people who weren’t going to college. That’s all we did. It wasn’t brain surgery.

  J: You also got inspiration from books about radical feminists, like Alice Echols’ Daring to Be Bad. Do you relate to what happened to them? For instance, the initial power of radical feminism was based on a kind of unity that couldn’t hold. People who were charismatic or were natural spokespeople weren’t allowed to be spokespeople because the whole enterprise was based on the idea of rejecting hierarchy—thus, everyone speaks or no one speaks.

  K: The women who took over Riot Grrrl after my band went on tour were the “identity politics gone wild” crew. It became a weird, competitive free-forall for who was the most depressed and beleaguered. Four years later, the new Riot Grrrls who had taken over wrote Mr. Lady [Records] and me this horrible hate mail. It was sent from my PO box that I’d started and had given the girls a key to. It was like getting hate mail from myself.

  I really regret not stepping up and saying, “You know, I am the leader of this thing.” I think I would have been really good at it. If I would have sought out the right mentors and read a couple books about how to run a meeting appropriately, I think I could have done a really fucking good job.

  I wish I could have stood up to some of these people who were using language that people had fought and died for about rape, about sexual assault, about racism, in ways that were just crowbars for their own personal power. I wish I had stood up and said, “You’re full of shit!” But you couldn’t do that back then. If you’re anti-hierarchy, how can you walk up to a woman who’s completely tearing everyone down and shaming everyone and say, “Get out.” Who gives me the authority to do that?

  J: Second Wave feminists struggled with how bad it felt to have more than another woman. Once you were conscious about feminism and how wonderful it felt to be connected to other women, it felt really bad to have more money, more attention, more stereotypical beauty—do you remember feeling these things?

  K: I did feel bad when we all organized a convention together but it would be written about as if I did it myself. I knew I wasn’t responsible for that, because I always gave people credit in interviews. I had my guilty-liberal phase, where I was like, “Yes, please dump a bucket of water all over my shine,” but I don’t have that much connection with that anymore. I’m charismatic. What am I going to do? At a certain point I realized I was just trying to be a good girl again, and it was exactly what I was trying to get out of before I became a feminist. Trying to say the right thing and do the right thing so that the other feminists would like me.

  J: Feminists have reamed me, especially people who are just starting in their careers. I used to be more hurt by it. And now I see it is an evolution of coming into your own and owning your ideas, and you start off by criticizing someone who maybe you see yourself becoming. And then when you achieve more success, suddenly you’re really sympathetic with them.

  K: That’s exactly the process that happened. There were friends of mine who were like, “That’s bullshit, that person is full of shit.” I was never able to stand up to it, and I think part of it was from my childhood. The scary part to me is people who don’t have this super-strong sense of self and aren’t able to separate themselves from crazy people . . . does that mean we can’t be leaders? We have to show each other the way. I want people who had abusive childhoods to be leaders because they can be the empathetic people they are. I want people who are alcoholics to be leaders. Not George Bush. But I want people who have been through trials and tribulations in their lives to be able to be leaders, because no one had a perfect childhood.

  J: This is sort of a fuzzy question, but do you ever think that you were afraid of your own power?

  K: I’ve worried I was going to be assassinated. I was getting so much hate mail from creepy guys and so much anger from Riot Grrrl girls. I feel like the really interesting part of my story, or the story of Bikini Kill, is we were these fuck-ups who lived in a small town. I was addicted to crystal meth in high school. I was a drug dealer and a stripper to make my way through college, yet I ended up being on the cover of Index Magazine. That’s awesome. Anybody from any place can have a conviction and be really excited about art and work at it with their friends and then do something that will inspire others years later. That’s the story, more than “I am this powerful person.”

  J: Looking at the music industry and independent world today, did you actually make a difference for women—how they’re treated, how they’re perceived? Or opportunities?

  K: Things were definitely better in Le Tigre. The audience was different. There were far more women and queer people at our shows. I get emails from women who are in bands now who say thanks.

  I think that women now can decide whether they want to be overtly political or not. That is part of the choice we opened up. We were overtly political because no one else was doing that. Had I had the choice—were there ten bands that were already overtly political—I might not have done it, because I wouldn’t have had to.

  J: You just talked about the negative thing your childhood gave you, but you seem to be saying it also gave you something. What do you think it gave you?

  K: Empathy—and the rage that fueled a lot of my songs. I have never let myself take anything for granted, because I always felt so lucky. In college, I didn’t understand people who wouldn’t show up for classes. I felt so lucky to be there. Being grateful is a real gift. I have never been bored. I have friends who are like, “I’m bored.” I’ve never been bored.

  J: You’re planning on adopting a baby. Do you think about what becoming a parent might mean to your ability to do the work that’s so important to you?

  K: Yeah. I do.

  J: Not that you should psych yourself out. I say this from the other side and believe you have nothing to worry about, although I live in a perpetual state of shame and guilt about ignoring my children as well as my work.

  K: I just know that I want a child. I’ve waited for so long—perhaps for too long—because I kept thinking it wasn’t a good time; this record is coming out, or I’m dealing with a family thing. Now I don’t care what else is going on, as long as I get a healthy baby in my hands. It took me a long time to be able to trust my relationship, but when I think about the work thing, I know I can figure it out. My husband is awesome and I’m completely sure it will be fifty-fifty. I know that if I have something important that I need to do, he’ll take care of shit for me.

  J: You feel you have a relationship that’s egalitarian and mutually supportive?

  K: He has bent over backwards to support me in everything that I do. And I couldn’t do what I do without him.

  J: Was he raised by feminists?

  K: He was raised by a
single mom. And we’ve got money. That makes things a hell of a lot easier.

  J: Of your accomplishments so far, what makes you most proud?

  K: That’s such a good one. I guess the music. I’m not necessarily proud of how a lot of it sounds, but I’m proud that we kept going. I’m proud that Bikini Kill was a band for seven years. It’s weird how something that was really painful and not fun has created all these benefits for other people—and for me as well. I don’t know if anyone would have found Le Tigre if there wasn’t Bikini Kill. I’m proud we put those records out at that time, because it wasn’t a popular thing to do and we had the guts to do it. Just doing it even though everything was telling us not to has had a huge effect. We started this Bikini Kill archive blog, and all these kids who never saw us live, who are in their twenties, are like, “You saved my life” and, “You got me through this horrible situation” and all this stuff. [The songs are] recorded and they’re objects and people can access them till the end of time now. A lot of things came together at once to make that [scene] happen, and I’m just proud that I seized the moment and became part of it.

  J: When you hear people calling themselves Riot Grrrl feminists now, what do you think?

  K: I’m psyched. I’m totally going off topic, but I feel like it. Do you remember the Fugazi song “Suggestion”? When I heard that song, I was like, “Oh my god, men are actually singing about sexual harassment.” It meant so much to me. Later, I started thinking, Wait, why is he singing like he is a woman? Then I started having all these questions about it. He couldn’t sing for me; I had to sing for me. Then I wrote songs about sexual harassment from my point of view. I was inspired by them, but I also saw that they couldn’t really do [the song justice], but I could. I’ve tried to sing about racism in a way that’s not always been that successful. Now the kids of today can take up that mantle and say, “The way Kathleen did it was kind of gross, so I’m gonna do it like this.” But you have to put your neck out, make mistakes, and start a conversation so that people have something to rebel against. You inspire them to write the song that they wish was there.

  J: I feel that talking back to texts by writers I respect—like Ariel Levy (Female Chauvinist Pigs) or certain pillars of Second Wave feminism—has given birth to some of the clearest writing and thinking I’ve done. I’m grateful for the chance to build on and respond to what other feminists, male or female, have to say. Okay, last question: What do you think about aging?

  K: It’s kind of a bummer, just in terms of health things being a bigger deal. The thing about aging is, I feel more in touch with when I was nineteen than ever. I have the same feeling of who gives a shit? When you start seeing your own mortality, you’re just like, Why would I want to walk around with my tail between my legs? Or why would I want to hide my ideas, even if they’re stupid? When I was nineteen, I acted like there’s only so much time. What are you going to do with it? Are you gonna fuck around and not say what you think, or are you gonna put yourself out there?

  —Interviewed on September 10, 2010

  FEMINISM IS A FAILURE, AND OTHER MYTHS

  Every few years, feminism gets kicked up to marquee status under the rubric of having failed, like a stain-remover that just didn’t do what it promised.

  The media story goes like this: Since feminism didn’t provide equality, happiness, or the perfect date, women are fleeing the feminist “lifestyle” in droves, taking their husbands’ names, kvetching about catching a man, or rushing to show their breasts in a Girls Gone Wild video.

  You hear about feminism’s futility from obvious antifeminists such as Ann Coulter, but you also hear it, more provocatively, from women who aren’t raving misogynists, such as Maureen Dowd, whose book of ambivalent observations on the liberated single girl’s life has launched some heated conversations. And most poignantly, you hear the feminism-is-a-failure mantra from New York Magazine writer Ariel Levy, in her 2005 polemic, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, in which she argues that today’s women have, in their thongs and stripper-wannabe antics, disappointed feminism.

  Full disclosure: Levy refers to me in the book, and dismissively. Still, I was sympathetic, especially at first, to her and Dowd’s feminist critiques. I can certainly relate to the fumblings of women as they negotiate their lives and relationships. Feminism has brought much coherence to my life, but in the complicated and often-awkward world of sex and desire, it has proved less useful. If pressed, I’d venture that at least half of my sexual experiences make me cringe when I think about them today. Taking top honors is the many times I made out with female friends in bars when I was in my early twenties, a rite of passage Levy much disdains throughout the book. I’m embarrassed about the kiss-around-the-circles, but if I didn’t have those moments, I’m not sure I ever would have found my way to the real long-term relationship I have today. If all my sexual behavior had to be evolved and reciprocal and totally revolutionary before I had it, I’d never have had sex.

  Still, Levy accurately points out the continued confusion around feminism and sex. Much as I fought it, though, there was a certain dissonance in my attempt to be a good, actualized feminist and my desire to still get the love and sexual attention I wanted. In college, I partied weekly at the same frats I would denounce in class as the center of date rape and misogyny.

  Levy swings hardest at this conflict in her book, arguing that the daughters of feminism’s Second Wave are eager to prove how beyond sexism they are, “making sex objects of other women—and of themselves.” These women, according to Levy, “think they are being brave . . . and funny” but Levy thinks “the joke is on them.”

  The book opens with a Girls Gone Wild video shoot, which is every bit as awful as you’d imagine. The formula for this reality video cash cow is to station a film crew at spring break locales where the alcohol is plentiful and the girls young, then egg the women on to show their breasts or thong-clad buns or to make out with female friends.

  Levy then lists her compendium of raunch: female Olympic athletes posing nude for Playboy, the rise in breast implants and “vaginoplasty,” and a spate of porn star memoirs, including Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. Levy argues that women embracing raunch means women accepting misogyny—a premise that is powerful and, in a way, true. But in exposing the permeation of porn in responsible society, she squashes all public displays of female sexuality into the box marked “objectification.”

  Female-run “Cake” parties are written off as cheesy fake lesbian performances for men in suits. Young trans men are portrayed as wildly emulating the most crass and immature high school guys. She finds some depressing examples—teen girls using the Internet to post photos of themselves fellating a Swiffer. And while Dowd’s assumption is that feminism just isn’t sexy, Levy’s message seems to be that sex and sexiness can’t be used by women—only against them.

  Levy is actually taking a strong stance in an old debate for feminists—and her side is what was once called the anti-porn side. One famed example of this debate: On April 24, 1982, Barnard’s Center for Research on Women hosted a sexuality conference that soon became infamous within the women’s movement.

  The radical feminist movement (the women that brought us the word “sexism,” protests of Miss America, and changed the culture rapidly between 1968 and 1975) had succumbed to several splits (black-white, gay-straight, etc.) and purges (Gloria Steinem accused of being in the CIA; any good public speaker accused of seeking “male privilege”). A new burning issue had emerged—porn—and feminist thinkers like Andrea Dworkin and Susan Brownmiller had created an organization to oppose it: Women Against Pornography. At the conference, women who believed the anti-porn feminists were censoring sexual freedom clashed with the women who believed we will never know what free female sexuality is as long as there is a base trade in women’s flesh. Carol Vance, one of the initiators of the conference, wrote, “As individuals, our personal experience with and attitudes toward sexuality were div
erse, but we all felt that this sort of feminist sexual politics was problematic: first because sexuality confronted women with opportunities for pleasure as well as potential for danger.”

  The battles at this conference—which by all accounts devolved—set the stage for transgenderism, pro-sex feminism, and ongoing fights around whether women can be participants in public sexuality without being victims of it. But Levy doesn’t refer to this decades-old conflict. Instead, she writes as if there was once a good, clear feminism, and now there is an army of women who wax every hair on their nether regions in order to take cardio-striptease classes.

  Levy writes: “Imagine how Susan Brownmiller must have felt. She had become engaged in the women’s liberation movement when it was a unified, sure-footed quest for change, and suddenly she was in a maze of contradictions.”

  Not exactly true. Brownmiller entered as a writer when the movement was dominated by activists and generated much controversy herself; she was accused of trying to rip off the movement for personal gain. Part of the reason it appeared unified to her is that several of the earliest leaders (notably Shulamith Firestone, the author of The Dialectic of Sex and founder of several radical feminist groups) abandoned the movement when latecomers like Brownmiller joined and challenged some of the hegemony.

  Unlike Susan Faludi or Naomi Wolf, who critique the way society has dealt with feminism, Levy places most of her blame on women, especially young women. Levy is particularly critical of Cake founders Emily Kramer and Melinda Gallagher, who host women-only parties in attempt to create a space for women to “explore, express, and define sexuality for themselves.” Levy writes: “If the whole point is change and redefinition, then I wonder why the Cake imagery is so utterly of a piece with every other bimbo pictorial I’ve seen in my life.” Levy uses the same mudflapgirl imagery on her cover—without any ironic flourish—which leads me to believe that she may suffer from the same conflicts she is so troubled by in others.