The Crash of the Third Wave: A Review of Kathleen Hanna's Rebel Girl

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Memoirs by women rock stars have become a popular genre in the past several years, starting with Patti Smith’s Just Kids, which was aimed at the baby boomers and then moving onto the millennial scene with Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart. Generation X’s defining work recently came out with Kathleen Hanna’s Rebel Girl, which documents her experiences in Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. This latest memoir came out at a very opportune time when third-wave feminism is being reevaluated as overly accommodating to male criminality and women’s separatism is rising in popularity (online, where polarization and radicalism are more easily preached).

Rebel Girl combines first-hand information about the riot grrrl scene, its zines and music, grunge and gen x, and the roots of third-wave feminism. Growing up in the early 2000s, I idolized and admired all these “big sisters”: bands like Babes in Toyland, Bikini Kill, the Distillers, Hole. This epoch’s bands and zines were alternative, they had a large following while remaining niche, but they informed the movement that became known as third-wave feminism. Shared stories of growing up in a dysfunctional or unsupportive family, running away from home, entering abusive relationships or exploitative work situations highlighted the broken promises of the second-wave, which seemed to collapse due to infighting and stringent requirements that alienated too many women. “Bad” girls didn’t go unpunished – they were used and abused. However, they tried to fight back by showing that they could handle the punishment – they weren’t wilting violets, they would fight through it in order to reach their freedom.

Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory exists in this strain, as does Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick. Punk, outcasted, turning to stripping or online escort work to quickly get up on one’s feet and support oneself. Despite the relative prosperity of the time (in the rearview mirror of 2025, 1989 looks like a paradise), it has never been easy for a teenager to live on their own with dignity, in any time or place, so, in order to live independently, on a single income, exploitative sex work is always there. In this context, third-wave feminism was seen as overly accommodating of male exploitation and violence (they are the buyers, after all), focusing more on women’s toughness. But wasn’t that just recycling the female virtue of enduring suffering? Somehow, this concept of “girl power” was then exploited to justify simple abuse against women. These girls weren’t weak; they could take it. The sexual revolution was twisted into a normalization of teenage hedonism and promoted abuse. In this light, Virginie Despentes came to the conclusion that rape was the price of female freedom, and if that’s what it took to reach freedom, she’d endure it.

There’s been a revival in interest in the work of Andrea Dworkin, who took radical positions that are a bit hard to swallow upon first exposure. Books like Intercourse make arguments that all sex between men and women is rape due to the initial inequality between the two. Rebel Girl transports you back in time to when she was still alive and people were engaging with her ideas directly, by talking to her. Hanna attends one of her lectures, and she describes Dworkin’s attitude toward her sincere and thoughtful questions as a disrespectful, ad hominem dismissal, typical of the second wave. It is an important moment that can be seen as the third wave reaching out to the second wave before deciding that there is no room for them there, that they need to start from ground zero.

Recently, as a new generation matures and makes their voices heard, women in the United States have been gradually reckoning with the toothlessness of the liberal feminism of the 1990s to 2010s that definitively ended with the me too movement. Many have investigated its effects and what it promoted: “empowerment” through what amounted to sexual exploitation, hyper capitalism, the woman as both the means of production and its master in the sale of sex, woman as self-commodifier and supposed beneficiary of the objectified woman. What largely made the difference though was that the so-called feminism of the millennium branded itself as a cultural movement rather than a sociopolitical movement which had concrete and measurable goals to achieve. These years can be considered lost decades of the feminist movement in the US, where most people believed that all legal rights for women had already been won and that there was no longer a need for feminism as a political movement. Women were encouraged to enjoy the spoils of the gender wars. During this time, male violence continued and went largely unchallenged legally, while topics such as chore sharing in the home and mental loads dominated.

Hanna’s memoir is about how she surmounted the challenges in her way in order to work on her art and enhance her skills against the backdrop of a structurally violent society that preyed upon underage girls and women and in which legal recourse was only offered under conditions too strict for most victims to meet. Except for one incident in which the author’s roommate was assaulted by a complete stranger, the police or the legal system were never called upon to prosecute any of the described rapists or molesters. Whether that was due to a fear of not being taken seriously as a crime victim due to mitigating circumstances in favor of the criminal (I was drunk, I was in a compromising position, he was my boyfriend, etc.) or distaste for police involvement due to adherence to punk ethos, we see in this narrative that most perpetrators of sexual violence got away with it entirely.

It was the me too movement that put the spotlight back on the mass of unprosecuted, illegal activity of supposedly normal and respected men. In the third wave, it was believed that we had reached the end of all legal gains for women and only had to focus on changing the culture, a nebulous process that is impossible to measure. This was a wild goose chase, a waste of energy, and likely a product of backlash. It was a redefinition of “feminism” that did not benefit or increase the rights of women. The me too movement globally started the movement to put the emphasis back on legal and justice system reform.[1]

There is a point in Rebel Girl when Hanna sees that rebellion is no longer serving her own interests, and that is when she realizes that she needs the protections that stable employment and contracts provide, mainly health insurance. There is a point in a person’s life, probably adulthood, in which rebellion against the establishment no longer makes sense because you yourself have become a part of and responsible for building the contemporary establishment. As a child and a young person, you have no responsibility to it – you are shaped and controlled by it without being given a chance to influence it. In the past, a woman was akin to a legal minor, and had no formal opportunity to influence society, and in this context, only rejection and rebellion make sense. Once a person enters their majority, they become responsible for the “system” regardless of what their position is in or outside it, how high or low. During the third wave, women had entered their legal majority, but the focus was not on using their legal rights to make the concrete changes to end abuse (not to say that there were not important legal strides made in that time, but that wasn’t the focus). It’s one thing to fight against and protest authorities that prescribe a very narrow vision of womanhood, as a role that demands a great deal of corvee labor, but it’s another to forget to plan for any framework that ensures physical safety.

This book comes out at the right time to answer a lot of questions about why the third-wave of feminism occurred and under what circumstances, and what made any of it seem like a good idea? Giving us back the context of the time, Hanna makes it all make sense, and she also pinpoints the moments that the movement was perverted to serve power rather than challenge it. She returns to us the promise of the third wave to bring in renewed women’s solidarity after the internal strife of the second wave. Just read the Riot Grrrl Manifesto, and you’ll understand the infectious energy of the movement. It is also motivational, in showing how she built herself from the ground up. From outside of the music and entertainment industry, from a typical family, she self-funded art school, started her musical career without formal training and only later in life was able to take voice lessons, learned how to mix and produce her own albums, and can now pick and choose speaking engagements at prestigious universities and music festival appearances, has the respect and position to choose how she earns her income. Her story, which travels from industry outsider to established authority, is both an inspiring story of a woman who underwent many trials to build herself but also an important historical document of a time and movement that puzzles us with how misguided it seems to have been.

[1]Hawon Jung’s 2023 Flowers of Fire, documents important legal changes that took place in South Korea to protect women’s dignity and safety.