When she started at Evergreen State College, Kathleen Hanna’s roommate Alle had a poster or the Crass’ Eve Libertine on the wall with some lyrics from “Bata Motel” (1981), a song that directly confronts society’s views of women and the stereotypical image that society projects upon women. The song begins with Libertine pointing out that at six or seven young girls gets asked, “What do they like to do?”; however, as they get older, the question gets changed to “What do little girls like to do?” This rewording of the question separates young girls from young boys and begins to instill differing spheres of existence in society.

Hanna, to that point, did not think about women performing in bands like Crass and specifically challenging society’s views on gender and sexuality in such a manner. Hanna writes, “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing — I had no idea female punk singers existed. I definitely didn’t knows bands like Crass had been mixing feminist rage with punk music since 1977.” Her introduction to Crass, other bands, feminist movements, and more, inspired her art and the creation of the Riot Grrrl scene, which, as Lisa Darms writes, served “as a challenge to the punk movement that, in many scenes, had become increasingly conformist.” The Riot Grrrl scene challenged conformist, sexist, racist, and xenophobic aspects of the punk scene and society at large.

According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), every 68 seconds and individual is sexually assaulted, and on average 463,634 victims, 12 years or older, are raped or sexually assaulted in the United States each year, with 69% of the victims being under the age of 34. During their lifetimes, 1 in 6 women will be the victim of attempted or completed rape. RAINN notes that measuring sexual violence is difficult, for many reasons, including the fact that, according to the National Sexual Violence Research Center, 63% of sexual assaults do not get reported to the police. Another study from the Journal of Interpersonal Violence argues that 1 in 4 women will experience sexual assault during their lifetimes and that less than 5% will get reported to law enforcement. The authors note that this number results from feminist research that notes the “pervasive systemic bias in institutional responses to sexual violence and established unequivocally that sexual violence is facilitated by victim-blaming, rape culture, and silence.” Punk bands, across the spectrum, have constantly confronted sexual violence and specifically victim blaming, the assumption that the victim asked for it due to their actions or dress.

While Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl” stands as a punk feminist anthem, the band’s “White Boy” can stand right alongside it. In “White Boy,” Hanna destroys the use of victim blaming to justify sexual assault and violence. The song starts with Hanna interviewing an unnamed white boy who tells her he doesn’t think “it’s a problem,” referring to sexual assault, because “most of the girls ask for it” with the way they dress. The boy’s assertion, here, is that the girls have no agency to express themselves as they want to and instead must, as Libertine sings, dress according to how others view them. Hanna attacks the idea that she and other women want to be dominated and sexually assaulted, singing at the end of the first verse, “It’s hard to talk with a dick in my mouth/ I will try to scream in pain a little nicer next time.” In the second verse, she points out that sbe doesn’t care if Bikini Kill’s music and the Riot Grrrl scene alienate the white boy because, as she tells him, “Your whole fucking culture alienates me.” Hanna turns the tables on the white boy, showing her agency, power, and individuality in the song and in the chorus where she tells him to “just die.”

Another song from this era that flips the script of victim blaming is Heavens to Betsy’s “Terrorist.” The song plays on the word terrorist, and Corin Tucker positions her assailant in the role of the victim and herself as the “terrorist.” The song begins with Tucker describing being followed by her interlocutor and how his actions make her “feel like a piece of meat.” At the end of the first verse, Tucker flips the script, confronting her attacker head on and proclaiming, “Now I’m the terrorist, see how it feels.” The word “terrorist,” here, of course has a duel meaning. On the one hand, the male whom Tucker speaks to terrorizes her by pursuing her against her will, policing her speech, and making her feel like an object, not a human being. However, Tucker then becomes the “terrorist,” terrorizing her attcaker. Like Hanna in “White Boy,” Tucker screams, “I’m not your prey I’ll make you die.”

While Crass, Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy, and countless other artists fought sexual violence and sexism head on through their music in the 1980s and 1990s, the fight continues, and bands such as Cheap Perfume, War on Women, The Muslims, and others use their music to confront sexual assault. Cheap Perfume’s “Dogs Against Dog Hollern’” flips the script, in much the same way that Heavens to Betsy’s “Terrorist” does. In the first first, singers Stephanie Byrne and Willow Welter appear to take on the voice of the white boy that Hanna sings about telling a woman at a bar to go down on him and because she’s “so drunk, don’t need consent.” Yet, like “Terrorist,” the speaker is a woman preying on men, thus pointing out the fact that the white boy’s aggressive behavior is not acceptable. Byrne and Welter as if the man’s beard matches the carpet and tells him not to “be such a frigid bitch.” They end the song by telling the white boy to “Choke on this! (On my motherfucking vagina).”

While the above bands do not focus on the intersections of race and gender, The Muslims, in songs like “Fuck the Cistem,” draw attention to the ways that we must think about the ways that these systems intersect to oppress individuals. Throughout the song, QADR points out the feeling of entitlement that some men have when it comes to sex and relationships, intoning in the first verse, “You chase the money to catch some ass.” Later, QADR asks the cisgender interlocutor, even though he considers himself “a good guy,” “Why don’t you admit that you hate women?” If they reject him, then he will harm them, or even murder them. QADR concludes the song by pointing out that they have to “prove that shit to you,” even in the midst of the Me Too Movement, thus taking on the role of educator. It is not, at any point, the victim’s job to educate the perpetrator. The perpetrator must want to educate themselves and change their behavior and perspective. Unless someone does that, then, as QADR sings, “Fuck these cisdudes. They are useless. It is proof that men are trash.”

The above is by no means an extensive list of punk songs and artists that confront sexual violence and assault. Rather, they are a microcosm of some of the artists that stand out to me in the ways that they confront these issues. For more, I would suggest checking out Hanna’s other bands The Julie Ruin and Le Tigre, Tucker’s other band Sleater-Kinney, L7, Babes in Toyland, Mecca Normal, Bratmobile, X-Ray Spex, Pleasure Venom, The Linda Lindas, THICK, Buggin’, and many others. What are some bands and songs you’d recommend? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.