A striking passage from Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, the recently published memoir by musician and political activist Kathleen Hanna offers some insight into why I think serious conservatives ought to shed their resistance to familiarizing themselves with happenings in our popular culture:

Did I want to go back to stripping? No, but it was something I was good at. My dad had taught me to emotionally play dead to deal with his creepy behavior, and in my own twisted, unhealthy game of “lemons to lemonade,” I turned his abuse into lunchboxes full of cash.

Rebel Girl is a fascinating and well-written book, but it’s also one that offers arguments conservatives may find both surprising and more compelling than they might expect. There are things in this book that will certainly make more sense to people on the right than they do to Hanna’s friends on the left.

Hanna, born in 1968, grew up in Maryland. When she was nine, her mother took her to a feminist rally. “My mom was a housewife and wasn’t somebody that people would think of as a feminist,” Hannah recalled in an interview,

and when Ms. magazine came out we were incredibly inspired by it. I used to cut pictures out of it and make posters that said ‘Girls can do anything’, and stuff like that, and my mom was inspired to work at a basement of a church doing anti-domestic violence work. Then she took me to the Solidarity Day thing, and it was the first time I had ever been in a big crowd of women yelling, and it really made me want to do it forever.

Hanna’s father was an abusive drunk. Her parents got divorced in the 1980s. Like many kids in dysfunctional homes, she reacted badly. She smoked pot, did acid, and moved to Portland, where in 1990 she formed Bikini Kill, the four-piece punk band. Bikini Kill (what a great band name!) spearheaded the Riot Grrrl movement, which used music, zines, and protests to fight what they claimed was misogyny.

At concerts Hanna was known for calling out, “Girls to the Front!” One of her friends was Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana, whose 1991 album Nevermind would be massively popular and usher in the “grunge” era of rock and roll. Hanna had actually given Cobain the title for the band’s iconic single “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It was a phrase she had written on a wall in Cobain’s apartment.

It’s easy for conservatives to mock someone like Hanna. It is an essential component of the right that we defend the Judeo-Christian ethic, the natural law, tradition, life, and common sense. We know that bad, abusive fathers often produce girls who become strippers, but we don’t want to excuse that behavior. We get, before she ever had to mention it, what was behind Hanna’s revelation on stage connecting her stripping to her terrible father and his lack of validation. But we still think she missed other options on the table. Furthermore, Hanna, like so many on the left, is obsessed with abortion and “women’s sovereignty over our own bodies” in a way that makes her distasteful to us. (I have no doubt that she would absolutely hate my book.) Like so many at the center of popular culture, she’s a zealot about the usual liberal causes.

Nevertheless, too many on the right seem also to lack the sense of creativity more commonly found on the left. Moreover, there is an element on the right—though in recent years it’s improving—that doesn’t always appreciate how much poor people have to struggle to get ahead. Yes, people can and should overcome their circumstances, but it’s a process that requires greater effort for some. Liberals form bands, make movies, and become writers. They are hungry and create art that changes the culture. Conservatives, especially “movement” conservatives, do things like found think tanks and tour colleges to “own” freshmen at lectures. 

Bands like Bikini Kill and Riot Grrrl became popular because they were addressing a genuine problem—male harassment of women—even though they didn’t address it in the way that got to the root of the problem. In Rebel Girl Hanna talks about the constant street harassment and come-ons she faced from the time she was a teenager. She was raped. Where I and others on the right might differ with Rebel Girl is in understanding that the flood of pornography and “free love” that flowed from 1960s at least partly explains why these things became so prevalent.

Indeed, the left has always tolerated some of the worst behavior toward women. The rock scene in the ’60s was full of it, many liberal writers practiced it, and to this day one of the most anti-woman films I’ve ever seen is M*A*S*H, a liberal touchstone. It’s disappointing that in Rebel Girl there is not a single mention of Monica Lewinsky, a woman who was savaged by Bill Clinton and the leftist media.

Some of the most interesting and (no pun intended) revealing parts of Rebel Girl have to do with Hanna’s discussions of her stripping. “Stripper time was like dog years,” she writes. “Every month felt like a year, every year felt like ten. It was just jam-packed with psychological minefields (the customer nicknamed ‘Daddy’ who wanted to pretend I was a runaway who was raped by my father) and so much competitiveness (the stripper who slashed my go-go boots in a fit of rage when I sat with her customer). Still, I became pretty popular at the Royal Palace.” Hanna, whose stage name was Sage, shows how stripping mainly worked to strip her of her dignity and kept her from becoming her authentic self. 

The Royal Palace is in D.C., the town to which Hanna had moved from Portland in the early 1990s. It was there her worlds began colliding. Bikini Kill was popular, and her friend Kurt Cobain’s band Nirvana had exploded, becoming global stars. While on stage stripping, Hanna sees the irony: “I was taking my clothes off to a song I’d written the title to. Kurt was on his way to being a multimillionaire while I was jiggling my ass in a broke-down strip club. Hahaha.”

She was living two lives: the defiant feminist leader of an important punk band and Sage the stripper. When Bikini Kill was featured in Newsweek, fans of Sage began coming to punk shows to see Hanna: “When the customer who liked to be called ‘Daddy’ showed up at a Bikini Kill show at a DC warehouse, I panicked. When I was dancing at the club, I was a character, but when I was onstage with Bikini Kill, I was an extra-confident version of me.”

Soon a friend of hers, Ian MacKaye, intervened. MacKaye is the legendary member of the D.C. punk band Fugazi. One day Hanna arrived home to find MacKaye there:

Ian wanted to have a conversation about the disconnect between stripping and being a feminist. Apparently, the DC scene did not think my working as a dancer was a good look. I told him that I didn’t need a lecture from him and that he wasn’t my dad. But secretly he was kind of being a dad in that moment. And I loved knowing that he cared enough to say something. Maybe I should’ve been offended that he was asking me to explain myself, but Ian MacKaye is one of the funniest, most interesting, most stand-up guys I’ve ever met, and I knew there was not an ounce of malice in his body. I wasn’t stripping as a statement, I just didn’t have a trust fund like so many DC punks did.

She goes on:

In the DC punk scene, almost all shows were benefits, which meant if you didn’t come from money, you couldn’t earn a living as a musician. Even when we were touring, we were often guilt-tripped for wanting to be paid … More than once, we’d sell out some space that didn’t usually sell out, and when I’d go to get our $300, I’d hear, ‘We’re a collective. This would be a lot of money for us.’ I always said no, because we were a band on tour and we needed to eat and pay for gas. 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.

Ouch! This is a direct hit on liberal hypocrisy—even if one doesn’t completely buy Hanna’s argument. I was born in D.C. and lived in the city in the 1980s and ’90s, the same time that Hanna did. (For what it’s worth, my favorite D.C. band from that era is Shudder to Think.) A girl didn’t have to strip to make good money. Less than a mile away from the Royal Palace where Hanna was taking off her clothes was Georgetown, which in the 1980s and ’90s was jumping with bars, jazz clubs, and restaurants. I had many friends, more than a few of them women, who were waitresses, bartenders, and restaurant owners and all of them could walk home on a weekend night with thousands of dollars in tips. It wasn’t hard to make money. This may be why Hanna was so stung when, later in the story, her boyfriend tells her that she strips because she “likes the attention.”

If Hanna’s pro-capitalist blasting of the pampered, socialist, rich-kid punk scene is not enough validation for conservatives of their ideas, one might notice that she also hates the media. They are always reporting false stories and bogus narratives, and she recounts many. The worst one is when Courtney Love, the bumptious wife of Kurt Cobain and a musician herself, slugs Hanna backstage at a show. According to Hanna, it was an unprovoked attack, and I believe her. She recalls the media reaction.

The ‘fight’ became national news and was mentioned everywhere from Rolling Stone to Entertainment Weekly to the Washington Post. The media was pushing the narrative that Courtney and I had been in a ‘catfight,’ which just reminded me that pitting women against one another sold magazines. When I handed in my rent check that month, the woman who opened the envelope read my name and said, ‘Aren’t you the girl who attacked Courtney Love?’

In 2006, Hanna married Adam Horowitz of the Beastie Boys. The two now have a 10-year-old son and Hanna, expressing the love she has for the boy she named Julius, can be quite touching. After one show where she says the band was not at their best, Hanna makes this observation: “All that mattered, though, was really feeling the hug Julius gave me as I walked offstage. ‘You were great!’ he said with his arms wrapped around my waist. And I believed him.”

Kids change lives as they help us to grow up. They changed John Lennon, they change rappers and actors, and they even change punk rock girls and strippers. Although Hanna doesn’t quite say it herself, as the book closes the discerning reader will recognize that her current situation makes her a kind of poster woman for family values. It reinforces what Christians have always said about the place of family in the order of things and the need to put others before yourself. In return, we learn, her son, helps her “stop sabotaging [her]self.” That’s what kids do.