What’s it like being a woman in music? Fucking awesome.
Hey dudes! We updated the etsy with more patches.
Thank you everyone for being so patient while we took our sweet ass time getting these up haha.<3 <3
Who’s in Richmond for United Blood? I didn’t get a ticket but hopefully I’ll see some of y’all around!
Hardcore Punk Against Domestic Violence
(Hey fuckyeahhardcoregirls, I’m a male hardcore fan— I wrote this blog post on my experiences of being at punk shows with my lover and best friend usesforroots.tumblr.com — anyway, it’s awesome to find your blog, power to ya)
I was hanging out with my ex-partner, who is a female-bodied Asian American woman, and we stopped by a show at the house next door. It was a sort of punk/pop-punk thing, and there was a mosh pit going on. She and I had been going through a lot of deconstruction of the effects of racism and patriarchy in our lives, including domestic violence.
We both jumped into the mosh pit and started the sacred ritual of beating the fuck out of ourselves. The music was kinda soft, but people were thrashing hard anyway.
My ex’s identity as a small Asian American woman frequently makes her a target of frat bros and sexist white men with “yellow fever”. Being part of radical/punk communities has helped her learn how to fight back, and more importantly, how to love herself.
After the show, her cheeks were flushed, her forehead was sweaty, and a wild grin broke onto her face as she panted “it’s so much fun to fight white guys!”
Mosh pits, especially around punk/hardcore scenes, are such an important part of our health as radical communities. In a society that removes our emotional agency and crushes our ability to fight back against oppression, a mosh pit is a safe space for rage and deconstruction of the dehumanizing effects of race, gender, capital, and the state.
Many have criticized mosh pits and hardcore as overly macho and anti-feminist, associating this open and communal expression of rage with patriarchy and male supremacy. I think that, while machismo and patriarchal arrogance are definitely problems around the punk community, as they around our society as a whole, this shallow analysis of mosh pits/punk spaces as inherently patriarchal is not only false, but silences the experience of empowerment that many women like my ex can feel in a mosh pit, when they are “fighting white guys.”
Mosh pits create spaces for dignified rage. The healthiest, most violent punk shows always make me think of Audre Lorde’s Uses of Anger:
“Everything can be used/except what is wasteful/(you will need/to remember this when you are accused of destruction”
I have been at shows where the rage was so thick and wild that it set me free. I have been at shows where white men have pushed me so hard that I was lifted off my feet and knocked onto the floor, only to be pulled back up onto my feet with a smile by those same strong white arms. I have seen women trading blows with the biggest men, their faces split open with the joy of rapture. I have seen entire mosh pits stop to help up tiny girls in pixie cuts and skintight shredded jeans.
For women like my ex, a mosh pit is a space where they can practice doing the unthinkable in a patriarchal society— throw down with white men and feel safe knowing that they will come out on the other side. There is a radical equality that exists in the best mosh pits.
I want to start a hardcore band to do music with an explicit opposition to machismo and domestic violence, as an extension to the stand against racism in antifa/straight edge hardcore circles.
My goal would be to take a militant stance against patriarchy and machismo in punk scenes as a Chicano male. I’m inspired by the anti-racist work done in the hardcore scene by Chican@/Latin@ bands like Los Crudos and Kontraattaque (Los Crudos was founded by Martin Sorrendeguy, a queer male Chicano who later formed “faggot straightedge” band Limp Wrist).
It’s important for me to do this explicitly feminist work as a male and Chicano in the radical/punk/anarchist scene, as part of my work to heal from the wounds of domestic violence in my life. I’m thinking it would sound like this:
Migra Violenta - Guerra Sobre Guerra
